Don Pendleton - Extermination

Hawkins ripped into the remaining Syrian escape car, his P-90 hammering at 800 rounds per minute, turning its windshield into a gaping hole and the driver into a mushy figure that resembled a deflating humanoid balloon.

“I hope to hell no one heard that crash,” Hawkins said.

“With David and the rest inside, I doubt they’d hear the sky crashing around them,” Manning answered.

RAFAEL ENCIZO WINCED, leaning back from the sudden slash of shotgun shells vomiting swarms of pellets like hungry, flesh-eating hornets. Bezoar’s defenders had carefully chosen their place to make their stand, and with a stubby set of 12-gauge scatterguns, they were able to dominate the row of windows where Encizo saw an additional team of Syrians collapsed. Only one of the Damascus assault squad was still alive, but his cheek had been torn off his face, one eye leaking down into the gaping flesh.

The Syrian saw Encizo and reached for his sidearm, his main weapon lost in the initial conflagration that left him facially mutilated. The Cuban was not a man to take chances, but he couldn’t bring himself to gun down a man, especially at such close quarters, and when he’d received terrible injuries already. With a kick, he disarmed the man and leaned his weight into the Syrian’s chest.

“I’m not here to kill you,” Encizo stated, pressing his forearm against the man’s throat. “In fact, we’re probably both here after the same man. Bezoar.”

With lacerations down the right side of his face, the Syrian’s grimace was hideous. “That…animal. He’s out of…control.”

Encizo could tell the genuine rage underneath the other man’s words. “Where else are you hurt?”

The man tugged open his shirt, looking down at the glimmering copper discs embedded in dark blue nylon beneath. “Armor stopped the bullets.”

Encizo let go of the man’s arm and loosened his forearm from the Syrian’s throat. “We’re on the same side.”

“Gunfire dropped off drastically,” the agent said.

“I’m not sure that’s a good thing,” Encizo said. He handed over a small, prepacked wound dressing kit. The maimed Syrian wasted no time, stuffing his pistol back into its holster and pressing a pad of gauze firmly against his torn socket. He’d never be able to save the eye. The best he could hope for was to keep out infection and prevent losing more blood. Micropore cloth tape held the dressing in place, especially one long strip wound three times around his head.

He’d live, but he didn’t look strong enough to get back on his feet. He’d been rattled too hard by the blast that had laid open his face. However, there was one chance that Encizo could take by recruiting the man as a friendly intelligence asset. The Syrians and Phoenix Force had clashed on several occasions, but this wouldn’t be the first time that the five-man team would work alongside traditional national enemies, especially in the face of a full-on crisis.

Whatever had caused Bezoar to become so instantly important to warrant not one but two attempts by the Syrian commando team, as well as garner the interest of Western intelligence, must have been big enough for Encizo not to regret the decision to rescue and aid a foe.

The Syrian commando took a fist full of Encizo’s sleeve. “He’s gone rogue.”

“You told me,” the Cuban replied.

“You don’t know how bad it is,” the injured man urged. “This is worse than anything your side could imagine. Even we didn’t want it to exist.”

“Exist?” Encizo asked.

“When Bezoar showed his test, it was too terrible,” the one-eyed commando continued. “It’s a deadly enzyme…some kind of infectious protein.”

“We figured as much,” Encizo returned. He didn’t want to betray his knowledge of one of Bezoar’s prior experiments, just in case the Syrians had a long enough memory to remember the destruction of a project that would otherwise have created a harvest hell throughout the Mediterranean.

“He improved on it,” the Syrian told him. “But we missed.”

“So you went after him again,” Encizo answered. He kept his attention only peripherally on the wounded man; his main job was to provide security for the back door.

“No, we missed now!” the Syrian hissed. “He’s gone.”

Encizo looked down at the wounded man.

“This was a trap, and both of our teams walked right into it,” the injured man croaked weakly.

Encizo felt his stomach twist at the news. “David, can you read me?”

No answer over the radio, nothing but a blanket of static that knocked out the radio network he was plugged into.

“David!” Encizo bellowed, hoping that his old friend could hear him.

Gunfire rose to a crescendo once more in a far part of the building.

DAVID MCCARTER GRIMACED as he realized that the tactical network that tied him to the rest of the team had gone silent. He waved to Calvin James, and the former SEAL nodded, acknowledging that his radio was out of commission, as well.

“We’re in for a rough one,” McCarter muttered as the gunfire suddenly died out. “Or maybe not…”

“One side’s run out of targets,” James commented. “We’re never lucky enough for both sides to finish each other off.”

“There’s always a first time,” McCarter mused.

“Yeah, right. I don’t see you running out willy-nilly,” James returned.

The Phoenix leader nodded, but he still took the lead as he moved toward the stairs. The old apartment building was pre-elevator technology, so its center was a spiral staircase decorated with black wrought iron that twisted from the ground to the upper floors. McCarter’s ears were peeled for the sound of movement above, and he checked the steps. They were made of stone, so they wouldn’t bend and creak like wooden slat stairs, meaning that they simply had to keep their footsteps soft and careful.

He moved up with catlike grace, James following several steps behind, preventing the pair from bunching up to be caught in the same burst or pattern of buckshot. McCarter, in the lead, knew he’d get most of the enemy attention, but despite his earlier assessment of how he’d matured in terms of no longer being impatient and addicted to action, he still was a man who led from the front, taking even more risks than those he assigned his own men. He had no illusions that he was bulletproof or immortal, but he knew his skills, equipment and reflexes. McCarter wasn’t the kind of man to boast, yet he knew his odds of surviving a close combat situation were among the best of anyone on the planet.

Calvin James hung back for another reason: he’d supplemented his P-90 subgun with a sawed-off shotgun with a dull orange stock. The coloration wasn’t a matter of fashion, but rather a means of telling this particular weapon from a live, fully-lethal 12-gauge. The orange-stocked weapon had a tube magazine, and its threaded sling was loaded with less-lethal munitions, specifically designed for the purpose of rendering opponents incapable of fighting while still leaving them available for subsequent questioning. Less lethal was not a guarantee, and if James had to kill in his defense, he’d be able to end a foe’s existence with a direct hit to the face. Still, the majority of the loads were high-intensity neoprene slugs, flexible enough to yield when they struck flesh without penetration, but possessing all the horsepower of a regular slug. James had taken hits to the chest with one as part of his familiarization with the round’s effects, and even through body armor, his chest was blackened with bruises.

Right now, however, the first three rounds were “ferrets,” or compact capsicum suspension dispersal shells that could punch through a windshield or a door and vomit out several dozen cubic feet of tear gas. Capsicum was another effective tool in taking foes off guard, denying them their sight and smell, as well as limiting their ability to speak as their mucus membranes inflamed at the touch of the raw, powerful pepper extract. Bezoar needed to be taken down, and it would be beneficial to Stony Man to figure out who had spirited the mad scientist out of Syria and into Europe.