Don Pendleton - Close Quarters

Lyons handed her enough cash to cover the entire tab plus a tip that was generous enough to imply they wouldn’t need her again.

Once she’d left, Harland continued. “I barely managed to escape with my life. Those bastards are holding my friends hostage, including a woman I care about.”

“What do they want with your team?” Blancanales asked.

Lyons eyed Harland. “And especially why would they keep the others and release just you?”

Harland pulled off his sunglasses to expose a fresh black eye. Something in his expression seemed hardened, more mature and empowered than the average twenty-eight-year-old college grad. His expression bore witness to untold brutalities and hardships, and Lyons felt a measure of regret.

“I didn’t make any deals, if that’s what you think,” Harland said.

Lyons leaned close. “Hey, asshole, take it easy. We’re on your side.”

Blancanales quickly intervened in a way that had earned him the “Politician” nickname. “Listen, Christopher, we’re not trying to give you a hard time. You can relax with us. Our job’s to keep you alive, but in order to do that we need to know everything. You shoot straight with us and we’ll do the same, no bull. Just tell us everything you can remember about these men.”

Able Team had, of course, already been thoroughly briefed by Stony Man Farm. As soon as word came from channels—specifically a SIGINT analyst from the American embassy in the Paraguayan capital of Asunción—mission controller Barbara Price had called the Stony Man teams into action. The situation, as Harland had laid it out, was that seventeen members from a U.S. Peace Corps contingent along with three missionaries had been brutally assaulted and taken hostage by parties unknown. After they razed the camp and brutalized several of the women, they took them all except Harland. He’d been fortunate or maybe unfortunate enough to get the crap beaten out of him and sent to Asunción with a message: don’t attempt to interfere or the hostages would be slaughtered.

“What were you doing there exactly?” Schwarz asked.

“I was there on a Peace Corps mission,” Harland said.

Lyons said, “We understand that, but what kind of mission? Humanitarian aid, education, what?”

“Take your pick. After I left Rutgers I got selected to go down there and help try to bring modern facilities to their indigenous tribal populations. In some respects, these people have chosen a self-imposed exile. Mostly it’s a social and cultural isolationism but there’s a political play to it, too.”

“What kind of play?” Blancanales asked.

Harland took a long swallow from his bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “More than sixty percent of the population of Paraguay is urbanized. The rest are content to retire to farming life, particularly since they have the sixth largest soy production in the world. A very small percentage have made their homes deeper in the jungle, traveling to the farms like sharecroppers and then back again at the end of the workday. It’s almost a migratory existence. It’s those people we were sent there to help.”

“So these military men,” Lyons said. “What can you tell us about them specifically?”

“Nothing. I was told that if I so much as breathed a word about what I saw they’d kill my friends. I took a risk just leaving the country. I’m sure they’ll figure I’ve talked.” Harland’s voice cracked when he added, “They’re probably all dead by now and I killed them.”

“You can’t think like that, man,” Schwarz said.

“That’s right, Christopher,” Blancanales added in a gentle tone, squeezing Harland’s shoulder. “We’re not going to let anything happen to you. And if we can help it, we’re not going to let anything happen to your friends, either.”

“Get real, dude,” Harland said as he wiped his bloodshot, swollen eyes. “You don’t have any control over what’s going on down there.”

“We have more control than you might think,” Lyons said.

Indeed, even as Harland’s tough facade melted, the Able Team warriors knew something perhaps less than a dozen people in the world knew. Five of the toughest and bravest men alive were touching down in Paraguay at that moment. Few knew their names or places of origin, but the exploits of Phoenix Force were no less mythical than the fiery bird from which they drew their namesake.

“You haven’t seen what these men are capable of,” Harland said.

Blancanales smiled. “They haven’t seen what we’re capable of.”

“Why don’t you go ahead and drink up,” Lyons said. “Sitting here with our derrieres hanging out for just anybody to take a shot at is starting to make me nervous.”

“Remember,” Schwarz quipped. “We were going to try to look at this as a vacation?”

Lyons’s cold blue eyes glinted wickedly in the sunlight as he expressed alert like a terrier on a rabbit’s scent. “I think it just got cut short.”

Even as Schwarz and Blancanales turned to see what had Lyons’s attention, the Able Team warrior was rolling out of his seat and grabbing hold of Harland’s shirtsleeve. He yanked backward as he warned his two companions to take cover, although it seemed pointless since Blancanales and Schwarz were already in motion with the practiced reaction of combat veterans. The four men ate the decorative tile of the patio as young Arab types exited a black sedan, leveled SMGs and opened up on their position.

The report from the weapons drowned a shout of pain from Harland, who got slammed onto his shoulder with some significant force. He wouldn’t realize until later it was a small price to pay in consideration that Lyons had kept his promise to save Harland’s ass. Lyons ordered his charge to stay where he was, then whirled on one knee and reached beneath his loose-fitting shirt. In his fist rode a 6-inch Colt Anaconda, its silver finish brilliant in the afternoon sun. A successor to Lyons’s .357 Colt Python, the pistol had been qualified by Lyons with six rounds in a one-inch shot grouping using 240-grain XTPs at 30 yards—a champion marksman’s score. The Anaconda was deadly in the hands of the Able Team leader.

Lyons snap-aimed the pistol, going for the opponent who had experienced a gun jam, and squeezed the trigger twice. A pair of 300-grain jacketed hollowpoints crossed the gap in milliseconds and caught the intended target as if Lyons had fired point-blank. The first busted the gunner’s chest open and exploded his heart, while the second ripped out a good portion of the left side of his neck. The man did a pirouette as the jammed SMG fell from his fingers and then he toppled to the pavement, bright blood springing from his neck in a geyser.

Lyons went low and pressed his back to the waist-high brick wall lining the dining patio even as a fresh maelstrom of rounds buzzed the air around them. The street and sidewalks had erupted in complete pandemonium, and the few diners who’d been sitting outside had either hit the ground and crawled for cover into the restaurant or simply beaten feet out of there.

Schwarz and Blancanales had produced their own sidearms, a Beretta 92-DS and a SIG-Sauer P-239, respectively. The pair found relatively decent concealment behind a set of potted rubber trees just ahead of the patio wall to the left of where they’d been seated. They took up positions and began dishing out some of what they’d been served.

Lyons took the moment to inspect Harland and make sure the young man was still alive, and then risked breaking cover to assist his companions.

Two of the remaining gunners made a beeline for the cover of an old, beat-up SUV while a third apparently thought he was Superman and tried to take out his quarry single-handedly. For his troubles he got three of Schwarz’s 9 mm slugs to the belly, followed by a head shot courtesy of Blancanales.