Don Pendleton: Extermination

“Let ’em have it,” McCarter said in a stage whisper to James, and the Phoenix Force medic brought up the stubby shotgun, working the slide and trigger of the weapon as fast as he could, spearing the trio of ferret rounds toward the fourth and top floor of the building. Thick, cottony white smoke roiled from their points of impact, immediately followed by a fit of coughing and wheezing.

A figure stumbled into the open, his head wrapped in dark cloth, a machine pistol locked in both of his fists. McCarter reacted to the man’s sudden appearance with well-honed, lightning-fast reflexes. A snarl of 5.8 mm rounds tore into the gunman just before the tear-gas-resistant foe could pull the trigger. While the FN P-90 didn’t throw fat or heavy slugs, its lightweight projectiles moved at 850 meters per second and carried 540 joules per bullet. When McCarter opened up at 800 rounds per minute, ripping five shots into the gunman, ribs shattered and flesh parted as the high-velocity projectiles created havoc. With his lungs and aorta reduced to ribbons of slashed tissue, the only thing that the would-be killer was able to do was to tumble headfirst over the railing.

McCarter hoped that the hardman was instantly dead; otherwise the crushing impacts against the rails of the spiral staircase would have been additionally agonizing, limbs folded with ugly crunches as his mass and velocity vectors proved far too much for his skeleton to withstand. Forty feet down, Bezoar’s hired gun stopped violently, his corpse accordioning against the floor, spine compressing, discs sliding off to the side from each other in their effort to accept gravity’s loving embrace.

“It’s not the fall—it’s the sudden stop,” McCarter mused to himself.

Other defenders had donned some manner of clothing to shield their nostrils and eyes from the brutal effects of the tear gas, but none had been so quick and efficient as to be able to charge out with their guns ready to blaze like their recently departed comrade.

As he took the steps three at a time, McCarter bounded to finish this encounter with the enemy shooters before the Parisian gendarmes arrived with a few heavily armed assault teams. While Phoenix Force proved that it was able to fight its way out of some of the most hostile environments in the world, getting into a direct conflict with lawmen only doing their job was something that the Stony Man warriors wanted to avoid at all costs. Shooting a soldier on the same side was a moral choice that each had taken. While that moral choice was made flexible in dealing with corrupt and crooked lawmen or troops, the French counterterrorism police were allies in the same cause.

With that in mind, McCarter let the P-90 drop to the end of its sling, withdrawing a collapsible ASP baton. He flicked his wrist, and the high-tensile steel tubes telescoped to their full length with an ominous snap. The sound caught the attention of one of the masked thugs, and he turned, drawing up his Steyr TMP machine pistol to deal with the sudden attack. McCarter batted aside the enemy gunman’s barrel with one swipe of the locked baton, using the rebound off the gun’s polymer frame to guide his next strike, a jaw-shattering stroke that whipped the cloth from his face.

McCarter could see that the enemy had East Asian features in the brief flutter of freed-up cloth, but he kicked the stunned or unconscious foe out of the way, whipping the point of the ASP down on the juncture between another gunman’s neck and shoulder. Nerves overloaded under the assault, bringing a wail of pain from his target. A third gunner with a pistol was bowled over by a neoprene slug from James’s shotgun, the three-quarter-inch cylinder of hard rubber breaking bones as the Phoenix medic hit the man right in the sternum.

James didn’t wait to see if his target would stay down because the pistol hadn’t fallen from nerveless fingers. The less-lethal shotgun proved quite deadly as James put another rubber baton round into the defender’s face, blood squirting from his eye sockets.

McCarter had no time to comment on the gruesome demise as he was dealing with the fourth enemy soldier, lashing this one under his arm to make him drop his firearm. Instead of bringing the ASP around to administer a coup de grâce, the Briton jammed the heel of his palm under his opponent’s chin, whipping his head back violently. The last of the defenders in this doorway were littering the walkway, their battered forms providing grim testimony to the efficiency of Phoenix Force.

McCarter let the baton drop to the floor, swinging his P-90 back into his grasp.

Lifeless bodies were strewed around the room, only one man still sitting upright. His white shirt was a bloody mess, and while at first blush he would have resembled Bezoar, a mouth full of mangled and busted false teeth yawned from the gaping gash of his lips. Bezoar’s file read that he had perfect teeth and no dental work done to improve them.

This guy was a fake, and he was holding on to an unmistakable D-shaped object.

A dead man’s switch equipped with a trigger that its wielder held down. Upon death and the relaxation of his fingers, whatever charge it was connected to would detonate.

The bloody, cap-filled smile broadened with the sight of McCarter and James. “And so…Paris dies.”

A second later he was a corpse, head flopping forward, the dead man’s switch tumbling to the cold tile floor….

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.