Don Pendleton - Extermination

Either way, they wanted nothing to do with that fight, disappearing between buildings or scurrying down the street past Hawkins. They studiously ignored him as the glass of the storefront diner disappeared in a solid wave of lead. Anyone who had been inside would have been shredded, and from what Hawkins had seen, there were a couple of men nursing cold coffee mugs as they cast anxious glares into the darkened street.

The Syrians weren’t holding back. The unmistakable thump of a 40 mm grenade launcher echoed down toward Hawkins’s doorway, its high-explosive message shaking the ground at his feet.

“Dave, the Syrians are going nuclear,” Hawkins said into his throat mike.

“Heard that,” McCarter replied. “Bide your time.”

Hawkins grimaced, hating the wait, but the Briton had given his orders, and he had pulled the team through countless confrontations.

The Syrians piled out of their vehicles, a dozen strong, as their trucks idled, drivers and shotgun riders waiting behind them to secure their getaway transportation. A quick glance told Hawkins that he was smart to have brought along a 50-round magazine full of armor-piercing ammunition. The SUVs were solidly built, and the way the lights of the skinny road reflected off their windshields let him know that they were armored. He reminded himself that Phoenix had wrung the compact machine pistols out, and their 5.8 mm rounds could punch through a titanium plate backed by twenty layers of Kevlar out to two hundred meters and go through 9 mm of steel plate at fifty. He was barely fifteen meters from the lead SUV, meaning that no matter how resistant the glass, he’d be able to put rounds into the interior without much effort.

One of the men in the lead truck poked his head and weapon out of the window. This guy had a submachine gun, as well, and he’d noticed Hawkins’s quick peek at the clogged road. Hawkins couldn’t make out what the gunner was packing, but it sure as hell wasn’t a folded newspaper and a cup of coffee. The roar of autofire filled the air as the doorjamb suddenly came alive with bullet impacts. Hawkins held his ground, enduring splinters of brick and old paint peppering his exposed face.

Whatever they were carrying, it was only a 9 mm, and for that he was grateful. Still, just because it couldn’t penetrate into his cubbyhole didn’t mean that Hawkins was free and clear to ignore the incoming fire. Once the barrage let up, Hawkins ducked low, rolled into the middle of the narrow road and opened up on a spot just above the SUV’s headlights.

The sleek, hypervelocity rounds from Hawkins’s PDW went to where he couldn’t see them above the glare of the lamps, but the clatter of a machine pistol on cobblestones rewarded the American Phoenix pro. He pumped out two more bursts, sweeping the headlights and blowing them out so that his night vision could recover from their bright flare. The engine snarled to life, and he could hear the vehicle jolt into gear.

Hawkins knew that the enemy was going to try to ram a half ton of truck down his throat, so he leveled the muzzle at the driver and cut loose. The last half of the P-90’s 50-round magazine elicited the crash and shatter of armored Plexiglas, but after a brief surge, the SUV no longer had pressure on the gas. The truck was idling forward, but its driver was dead.

Of course, that didn’t mean anything to the trailing SUVs. The gunners for each had clambered out behind partially open armored doors, scanning for Hawkins in the darkened street. Without the blaze of the headlights, he was just a shadow, flat on the ground.

That wouldn’t last for long, though.

He reloaded the machine pistol swiftly, all the while scrambling toward the idling, driverless SUV, keeping in the shadows from where the other vehicles’ lamps blazed down the narrow road. Hawkins rested against the bumper.

“Gary, leave anything for me?” Hawkins asked, knowing that such a question was moot when it came to the Canadian sniper.

TO MAINTAIN a low profile on this operation, the members of Phoenix Force opted for a set of tools that would help them look as if they were French special operations. This meant that their gear was typical police or military equipment. It allowed them use of familiar gear such as the PAMAS G1—a license-built Beretta 92-F—the FN P-90 and the suppressed rifle Gary Manning was currently riding, a PGM Ultima Ratio “Integral Silencieux” rifle in 7.62 x 51 mm NATO.

The Commando was a shortened version designed especially for urban operations teams. It was affixed with a 15.7-inch, integrally silenced barrel as opposed to the standard 24-inch tube, meaning that inside a crowded city, the Commando was handy and quick. Manning liked the name Ultima Ratio because it was Latin for “the last resort,” a term that went with Phoenix Force hand-in-hand, and it was derived from the original term ultima ratio regum, which was “the final argument of kings.” Since Phoenix Force had adapted their code names to variants of “king” and the phrase was a flowery synonym for “war”, Manning felt it was tailor-made for his cover identity of Gary Roy.

As soon as T. J. Hawkins started to take fire from the three SUVs in the street, he swung the muzzle of the suppressed Commando toward the convoy. Only one gunner was actively shooting, and as soon as he stopped his fusillade, Hawkins was in action. Through the optics of the rifle, he could see the muzzle-flashes of the P-90 through the end of its blunt silencer.

The headlights went out and the SUV lurched into action, but more autofire erupted from Hawkins’s position. Manning turned his attention to the other vehicles and saw that their gunners who had waited outside on security for the Syrian assault force were now looking for the source of the sudden, fierce combat that had erupted in front of them. The two gunmen were wary, but their attention was focused ahead of them, not behind and above.

Manning had complete surprise against them as he milked the precision trigger of the skeletonized combat sniper. The rubber recoil pad and suppressor made the lightweight weapon’s kick feel like a tender caress against his brawny shoulder as he punched a hole through the neck of one of the Syrians. The rearmost man’s death was instantaneous, spine severed and lower brain destroyed. He didn’t even shudder, falling to the ground as if he were a marionette with its strings cut.

Only the chatter of metal on cobblestones alerted the second gunman, who whirled to see his friend lying facedown in a sprawl of loose limbs.

Manning worked the bolt on the Ultima Ratio swiftly, the finely polished steel gliding noiselessly as it stripped another .308 Winchester subsonic round off the top of the 10-round box magazine. The time between the first and second shots, which struck the remaining Syrian gunner in the bridge of his nose, was less than a second. The noise made by the subsequent rifle shot was softer than a polite cough, but on the receiving end, the armed commando’s head burst like a melon.

“Gary, leave anything for me?” Hawkins asked.

“Get the middle SUV,” Manning instructed as the rearmost vehicle ground into Reverse. He didn’t have a good angle to see the driver of the truck, but Manning knew that a frightened driver would be a threat, not only communicating to the main assault team that they were under fire, but also tearing through the streets of Paris to escape pursuit. People could be run over.

Manning worked the rifle’s action as fast as he could, firing round after round into the roof of the SUV, adjusting his aim so that his fire would lance down into the driver’s seat. On his fourth shot, the escaping vehicle slammed its rear bumper into a storefront, glass shattering violently, metal crumpling as it met unyielding stone.