Don Pendleton - Hostile Dawn

“If it were us, they’d probably just gun us down and be done with it,” McCarter guessed. “Can’t see doing it, though. We’ll just leave ’em.”

James stared at the prisoners. They were all young, some in their teens. They looked back at him, some still fearful while others had turned sullen, their eyes filled with hate. It sickened James to think that these men would no doubt quickly regroup with others and resume their training, possibly even more determined than ever to turn themselves into killing machines for the Hezbollah cause. But he knew McCarter was right; they couldn’t in good conscience just massacre the whole lot of them. To do so would be to drag Phoenix Force down to the enemy’s level. It was bad enough that the Stony Man commandos had to regularly navigate their way through moral gray areas to carry out their assignments; if they were to succumb completely to the dark side, they would have betrayed not only their country, but also themselves. Still, the matter didn’t sit well with James.

“Gotta say,” he finally murmured, “giving them a free pass sucks, big time.”

“Tell me about it,” McCarter said. “Sometimes war is more than just hell.”

Leystra Hot Springs, California

Leystra Hot Springs was a once prominent New Age retreat located eighty miles east of Los Angeles in the heart of a heavily wooded forest blackened by the 2007 fires that had turned Southern California into hell on Earth. The twenty-one-acre retreat had fallen on hard times even before the fire, and when flames had ravaged most of the outbuildings and neighboring establishments, the facility’s owners had filed for bankruptcy and closed its doors. The grounds had been fenced off haphazardly with posted caveats against trespassing, but the low-bidding rent-a-cops hired to back up the warnings rarely so much as drove past the isolated property, much less searched it for intruders.

As such, the haven had become a retreat, not for the pampered and well-to-do, but rather a succession of downtrodden squatters, some hardbound transients, others former area residents left homeless in the wake of the fires. However, judging from the aerial surveillance that had prompted Able Team’s early morning arrival, it appeared that the hot springs’ latest uninvited guests were of a far more sinister nature.

Grimaldi and his Stony Man confederates weren’t the only ones targeting the isolated facility. The California Highway Patrol was in the process of barricading the access road in both directions, and SWAT teams had already spilled out of two armored Humvees and begun to venture into the dense brush surrounding the hot springs. To the north, another pair of helicopters—one a CHP H-20, the other a refurbished SWAT Huey—hovered low over the mountainous terrain that stretched behind the retreat. The heavy show of force was in response to word that more than one person had been seen on the grounds. Kouri Ahmet apparently wasn’t alone.

“Whatever happened to the good old days when we took care of these things ourselves?” Carl Lyons muttered as he eyeballed the backup forces. The Able Team commander was sitting beside Grimaldi up front in the Bell’s cockpit; Blancanales and Schwarz were in back, feeding ammo cartridges into their M-16s.

“Everybody’s gotta feel important, I guess,” Blancanales said.

Grimaldi eased the chopper over the leafy oak trees surrounding the retreat, then hovered in place above one of the hot springs. The pool had once been enclosed, but fire had claimed the surrounding structure, reducing it to charred ruins. Half submerged in the murky, steaming water was the missing Forest Service pickup. Floating facedown nearby amid scattered leaves and debris were two bodies, one stripped to its shorts, the other still uniformed.

“That’s gotta be the rangers,” Lyons said, peering down at the corpses. “Let’s see if we can’t give those poor bastards some justice.”

“Closest I can get is the parking lot,” Grimaldi said.

“Close enough.”

Grimaldi pulled away from the spring, then backtracked to a large, cracked patch of asphalt thirty yards downhill. As the pilot lowered the chopper, Lyons turned to his colleagues.

“You and I’ll handle the ground search,” he told Blancanales. “Gadgets, stay aboard and keep the fly open in case we need air support.”

“Got it,” Schwarz said, throwing open the side door of the passenger compartment. Blancanales eased past him. Once Grimaldi had brought the chopper to within a few feet of the tarmac, he bounded out. Lyons followed. Both men crouched low, fanned by the copter’s rotor wash as it pulled back up into the air.

Of the retreat’s eight buildings, only three remained standing. The nearest was a graffiti-festooned, garage-size bungalow set off a flagstone pathway linking the parking lot to the hot spring where the pickup had been spotted.

“I got this one,” Lyons told Blancanales. “You take the one over there. We’ll hit the main building last.”

Blancanales nodded and cautiously advanced toward a half-scorched two-story outbuilding with two large bay openings. A late-model Dodge Caravan had been backed into one bay; the other contained the rusted-out remains of a tractor and large riding lawn mower. The van had a layer of road dust but Blancanales could see that the windshield wipers had been used recently, likely by the al Qaeda sleeper cell Able Team had been trying to track down in Barstow. It now seemed certain that Kouri Ahmet’s aborted attempt to secure portable rocket launchers had been on behalf of the Iraqi terrorist squad. Obviously the fugitive’s parachute jump from the highjacked Gulfstream had been orchestrated to bring him within range of the Iraqis. The enemy had last been spotted in Barstow, but Blancanales’s gut told him that this was their primary hideout, the one from which they were planning whatever violence they hoped to unleash on Los Angeles. If Blancanales and his fellow commandos had anything to say about it, that plan would never be carried out.

Both large-framed picture windows on the second floor of the outbuilding had been vandalized, and Blancanales was startled when several pigeons suddenly fluttered out through a break in the glass. He doubted that it was his approach that had spooked the birds, and when he glanced up he detected further movement behind the broken glass. Acting on instinct, the East L.A. native veered sharply to his right, avoiding the stream of gunfire that rained down from one of the windows, tearing up the asphalt where he’d been standing a moment before.

“Got a live one over here!” Blancanales shouted to Lyons as he rolled behind an overturned litter barrel. Bringing his M-16 into play, he returned fire, shattering what little glass remained in the window frame and perforating the wooden slats below it. He’d missed his target, however, and more rounds blitzed his way, chewing the tarmac and glancing off the trash bin. When Lyons doubled back and fired at his assailant, Blancanales welcomed the diversion and rolled clear. Once back on his feet, he zigzagged toward the building. Nearing the bay where the Dodge was parked, he peered in and spotted a gunman bounding down a back stairway leading from the second story.

Blancanales drew up and strafed the staircase, taking the gunman out at the knees. The Iraqi pitched forward, dropping his rifle and somersaulting down the steps before landing in a sprawl near the Caravan. He was still alive and crawled toward his weapon, managing to close his fingers around the stock before Blancanales finished him off with another burst from his M-16.

There was at least one other al Qaeda operative still up on the second floor, however, and after forcing Lyons to cover with an autoburst, the gunner moved to the top of the stairs and shifted his aim toward Blancanales. By then the Able Team commando had reached the building and dived forward, eluding the blasts sent his way. Scrambling past the parked van, he helped himself to the slain attacker’s carbine, a Chinese-made QBZ-95. He took aim at the ceiling and quickly emptied the weapon. Above the loud din of gunfire, he heard the unmistakable sound of a body dropping to the floor above him.