Don Pendleton: Seismic Surge

“Brought two spools, in case you found the tenth body,” Blancanales called down.

Lyons nodded. “Toss down that rope first, then anchor it. I’ll help with bearing that weight.”

“We’ll need a tarp. He’s been down there for thirty days,” Schwarz mused.

“It’s not pretty,” Lyons said. He held something up. It was small, metallic and red. “Got a present for you.”

“Think it’ll work after a month in the drink?” Blancanales asked. “In salt water?”

“Depending on how secure the SIM card was, I could recover data from it,” Schwarz returned. “All depending. I’ve got a reader in my Combat PDA. We all do.”

Lyons surfaced once more, and both men could see that he’d tied an x-harness around the shoulders of a dead man, his skin shriveled, body seeming like a mummified prune. He then waved for the next rope.

With that, Lyons was back up after a minute of climbing the knotted line.

“How did you know you’d be all right down there?” Blancanales asked, helping their drenched partner to the top of the gangplank.

“I had my combat boots on. Reinforced ankles designed for parachuting, so I figured that if I hit anything feetfirst, the boots would at least keep my feet and shins from exploding before I flexed,” Lyons answered. “Wouldn’t have been something a dive crew leader would authorize...”

“You do realize that your health insurance, in that case, would have been a 9 mm slug through the head, right?” Schwarz asked.

Lyons shrugged, then produced the cell phone from his pocket. “Here you go, Gadgets.”

Blancanales set off to obtain a tarp for the body of the OSHA agent.

Blancanales’s jog slowed, though. A sudden deceleration that was all the warning Schwarz and Lyons would need.

An instant later the two men hurled themselves down the gangplank, diving for cover as a stream of automatic gunfire ripped the side of the incinerated hulk.

Able Team had arrived and had only incidentally recovered potential evidence of what had happened during the firebombing here at the boatyard. But now, when a shadowy group of assassins opened fire, their original plan had succeeded. Acting as nosy investigators, they had drawn conspirators out of the woodwork, conspirators who might actually have information about the deadly group who had seized control of an entire island.

Now all they had to do was to survive the hard contact.

* * *

CARL LYONS DIVED INTO a shoulder roll, bullets zipping past him. The assassins were firing high because they’d started shooting when he and Hermann Schwarz were at the very top of the gangplank, and never got a chance to catch up. As it was summer, he and his allies had been clad for the warm Virginia weather, alleviated slightly by being on the Norfolk waterfront where boatyards caught the cool breezes off the Atlantic.

Unfortunately such warmth restricted the amount of firepower each could carry beneath their windbreakers that had been emblazoned with the letters DOJ in deference to their cover as Justice Department deputies following up on an arson investigation. The size of their weaponry was limited to enticing whatever death squad was on hand into believing they had the upper hand, an overwhelming advantage.

It was a Hail Mary strategy, a blind toss accompanied by a wild prayer, and it was one that Able Team had not only grown used to, but had also perfected. As such, they had come fully prepared for a war.

As much as the trio would have loved to have kept full-blown assault rifles and rocket launchers on hand, they needed to lull the conspirators behind the Norfolk arson into believing that they were ripe and easy targets, armed with nothing more than the standard Glock 22s

issued to federal service deputies. The choices in that regard could be limited, if Able Team hadn’t had the services of John “Cowboy” Kissinger, one of the world’s best weapon smiths.

As Lyons, Schwarz and Blancanales reached their cover, the three partners made a quick visual verification that the team was whole and unharmed.

“No hits?” Lyons asked.

“Nope,” Blancanales returned. Schwarz simply grunted agreement.

“Not even on the body armor, not that we’d have been able to handle it. Those are five-five-six they’re pumping out,” Schwarz added. “They missed, but now they know how quick we are.”

“So we go sneaky,” Lyons returned, unleathering the machine pistol stored in a shoulder holster under his windbreaker. Long ago, Able Team had learned the benefits of carrying fully automatic handguns with folding foregrips for better control and utility. In the early days, these had been Beretta 93-R machine pistols. Now they opted for the Heckler and Koch MP-7. The bonus of the compact machine pistol was the fact that it not only had a vertical foregrip that could be folded to fit in a shoulder holster, but it also had an extendable stock to give it riflelike stability. Lyons wasn’t much of a fan of the MP-7’s 4.6 mm projectiles, but they moved at a blistering, Kevlar-defeating velocity and were still bigger than the rounds of a Heckler and Koch G-11 autorifle, which was much larger and bulkier

The three Stony Man warriors snapped out the collapsing shoulder stocks, folding down the forward grips. The folding iron sights were propped into place so that they resembled the precision sights of the M-4s and M-16s they normally utilized. As they did so, the team shifted among the wreckage of the arson-gutted boatyard, seeking better cover and concealment, even as enemy rifles crackled, trying to pin them down.

“These bastards are getting on my nerves,” Blancanales snarled as a spray of debris splashed against him from the impact of a dozen 5.56 mm rounds. “Especially since this seems like amateur hour.”

Lyons and Schwarz heard their partner over the hands-free communicators that they wore. Lyons spoke into his throat mike. “Confirm...low training?”

“I’m still here, and I’ve given them two clean shots at me,” Blancanales replied. “Do the math.”

“No fair, Pol,” Schwarz interrupted. “Ironman can barely do math in a classroom, let alone when he’s getting shot at.”

Lyons flipped off Schwarz. “All right. New plan.”

“Fall back and kill?” Blancanales asked over the headset.

“No. Just cover me,” Lyons said. He handed his machine pistol over to Schwarz.

“Bluejay,” Schwarz muttered.

Lyons pulled out one of his handguns, a Smith and Wesson .45, and held it between his thumb and forefinger. “Stop! Stop shooting!”

His voice was shrill, terrified. It was a completely alien sound compared to all that the other two members of Able Team had heard before, but this was completely new to the men trying to shoot at them.

“I’m just an accountant! Stop shooting!”

“Throw your gun out!” one of the shooters shouted in response.

“Paper jockey!” Schwarz snarled out loud. He waylaid his MP-7 and fired his pistol, intentionally missing Lyons, but that elicited a wave of precision covering fire immediately.

Lyons tossed the Smith and Wesson on the ground, without a care, just like an inept desk worker would. He stumbled out into the open, arms wavering in the air, his eyes cast downward.

The Bluejay ploy was a simple one. One member of the team would feign injury or incompetence to call the attention of the enemy away from the others. So far, the three of them were aware that their opponents were only pretending incompetence on their own. Lyons’s use of himself as bait had not drawn enemy fire because they had some other agenda. When the prisoner that offered himself had come under fire from Schwarz, their precision shot up to deadly levels of effect.

Whoever these conspirators were, they were sharp and alert, but they were also curious about the trio of men who stumbled around the boatyard in Norfolk. That meant that they wanted and needed answers. If Lyons could get close, he might have a chance to take one while they were still in prisoner-acquisition mode.