Don Pendleton - Hostile Dawn

Two of the terrorists were standing guard outside the greenhouse, one posted near the main doorway, the other up on a raised catwalk spanning the length of the glass enclosure’s arched roof. The nursery was located in the flight path of a small airfield less than a mile to the north, and while casing out the grounds in preparation for their attack, Phoenix Force had noticed that whenever a plane or tourist chopper ventured past, the ground sentry would duck inside the greenhouse while his counterpart on the catwalk retreated from view beneath the cover of a large acacia tree whose leafy branches extended over the glass structure. The U.S. covert op team had also determined that one of the sightseeing copters flew by the nursery at the same time every two hours. Locking in that time frame, the five-man crew had hastily sketched a battle plan.

Now, with the chopper due to make its next scheduled run past the terrorists’ hideout in less than a minute, it was time to put the plan into motion.

Gary Manning had already made it to a toolshed at the far end of the greenhouse. He knew that Calvin James and T. J. Hawkins were somewhere out on the grounds, closing in. Once they were in position, they would use their earbud transceivers to give the green light to Rafael Encizo, who lay prone on a raised knoll less than fifty yards away, his M-110, suppressor-equipped sniper rifle trained on a hazy pane of glass through which he could see Hamas agents pacing around their chair-bound hostage. As for Phoenix’s team leader, David McCarter had tracked down the Damascus Sky Tours office at the nearby airport and arranged for them to divert their next scheduled chopper tour from its usual course. Peering over the slanted roof of the toolshed, Manning could see one of the company’s Eurocopter EC-135 helicopters headed toward the nursery, but he knew McCarter was the only one aboard.

This is it, Manning thought to himself, unsheathing a Heckler & Koch USP Tactical gun from his web holster. The drone of the approaching chopper grew louder as he rigged the handgun with a suppressor. Once the weapon was ready, the Canadian operative crept from behind the toolshed. The rear of the greenhouse faced south, and its glass panels had been covered with an opaque layer of reflective insulation: no one inside could see him as he clasped an upper rung of the mounted ladder leading up to the catwalk. Overhead, McCarter had just guided the Eurocopter over the nursery and was hovering in place above the acacia, flying low enough that Manning could feel the greenhouse shudder from the noise as well as the chopper’s downdraft. The ladder vibrated, as well, masking Manning’s weight as he began to climb up. Already he could see the sentry, back turned to him, staring up through the wavering tree branches. Manning climbed another rung higher, then raised his pistol, taking aim at the gap between the other man’s shoulder blades. Once he heard the tinkling of glass to indicate that Encizo had fired the opening volley, he would pull the trigger.

H AMAS FIELD LEADER Riri Sahn had just clipped Walter Ferris in the jaw with the stock of his Kalashnikov AK-47.

“Lies!” Sahn roared at the hostage. “We want the truth!”

Dazed, Ferris spit blood as he sagged against the restraints binding him to the chair. He fought to remain conscious and glared at his abductors.

“I just told you!” he retorted, shouting to be heard above the helicopter that had just cast a shadow over the inside of the greenhouse. “I’m a travel reporter! I have no interest in terrorist issues!”

Two other Hamas agents stood near Sahn. A third had just come in from his post outside the main door.

“The helicopter didn’t just fly past like the other times,” he reported.

“You think I haven’t noticed!” Sahn yelled. He glanced up, trying to catch a glimpse of the chopper through the bougainvillea blanketing the glass-paneled roof. He was about to order the other men to investigate when one of the glass panes to his right shattered. A nanosecond later Sahn crumpled to the floor, his heart turned to chowder by a 7.62 mm NATO round.

The remaining three terrorists were still trying to process what had just happened when, over the drone of the Eurocopter, they heard a thud up on the catwalk transversing the greenhouse roof. As they glanced up, trying to pinpoint the sound, the greenhouse was suddenly rocked by the concussive force of two MK-3A-2 hand grenades landing on the north and south sides of the structure. Shock waves shattered the glass panels, leaving the surviving Hamas agents in clear view of their attackers.

The sentry who’d just entered the building reeled as he was strafed across the midsection by a fusillade from Hawkins’s M-16. The remaining two terrorists were grabbing for their AK-47s when Manning dropped through one of the shattered roof panels. He landed hard on the dirt ground near the chair Walter Ferris was bound to.

Manning sprang forward the moment he landed, tackling Ferris to the ground. In the process, the Stony Man commando rammed his shoulder into a nearby plant stand. Several large terra-cotta containers crashed down on the Canadian, one striking his hip while another clipped the back of his head, rendering him unconscious. Before the surviving Hamas agents could have a go at him, both Hawkins and James raked the nursery interior with bursts from their M-16s. The terrorists went down, landing on their unfired assault rifles.

In all, less than eight seconds had passed from the time Rafael Encizo had slain Riri Sahn. In those eight seconds, Walter Ferris’s fate had gone through a complete turnaround. Instead of facing certain torture and death, the reporter would now have a chance to complete the investigatory news story he’d spent the past four months working on.

Phoenix Force’s mission was accomplished.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

“Phoenix pulled it off,” Barbara Price reported to her colleagues gathered inside the Annex Computer Room. She’d just finished speaking long-distance with David McCarter. “Ferris is safe and the Hamas squad was neutralized.”

“Chalk another one up for the good guys,” said Aaron Kurtzman, the wheelchair-bound head of SOG’s crack team of cyberanalysts. He was seated at a workstation situated on the west side of the large subterranean chamber. Poised in front of their computers at other stations were Akira Tokaido, Carmen Delahunt and Huntington Wethers. Price stood in their midst, while Hal Brognola was off to one side, clicking away at a laptop as he wrapped up a long-distance call of his own, this one to Able Team commander Carl Lyons.

“Are the guys okay?” asked Delahunt, a fiery-spirited redhead in her late forties who’d come to Stony Man by way of a long, heralded tenure with the FBI.

“All but Gary,” Price replied. “He’s being looked at for a possible concussion and shoulder separation.”

“By ‘neutralized,’ I take it there were no prisoners,” Huntington Wethers said. The somber-faced African American was the same age as Delahunt, but he looked years older, his close-cropped hair having turned silver at the temples within a few years of taking an extended leave from his professorial chair at UC Berkeley. To explore the cutting edge of cybernetic intel gathering on behalf of his country was, for Wethers, not only a challenge but an honor, and if it had cost him his once youthful good looks, he considered it a small price to pay.

“It would have been nice to have someone to interrogate, but no,” Price said. “David says their only option was to go in for the kill. He’s flown Gary and Ferris to the hospital, but the others stayed behind and are combing the nursery for intel. Hopefully we’ll have something to work with.”