Don Pendleton - Extreme Instinct

“And the way you play poker,” Blancanales added, “that’s all there will be—tags and a rock.”

“Bitch, bitch, bitch, that inside straight paid for your new plasma screen, didn’t it?”

“For which I thank you, in high definition and Dolby stereo.”

“You’re welcome, old buddy.” Schwarz chuckled, patting the other man on the shoulder, then his face tightened. “Oh, shit, this is a trap.”

“Yeah, I know,” Lyons growled, slipping a hand inside his windbreaker to loosen the Colt Python in his shoulder holster. “I just spotted it a second ago.”

The other men needed no further encouragement to ready their weapons for combat. The van was filled with the soft metallic clicks of working arming bolts and safeties disengaging. Every car in the parking lot was dusty, and badly needed to be washed, as if they had been there for days without moving. This was exactly the sort of detail that a street cop looked for to spot an abandoned vehicle parked along a busy downtown street. Now, a grieving family might leave a car here for a few hours, or even overnight, but certainly no longer than that, and not ten of them. That was way beyond the limits of probability. These cars were merely window decorations to make the place look more inviting and less empty. Which meant the entire cemetery was a trap. But was it for them or somebody else? Did the enemy know Able Team had arrived, or were they still waiting for a target? Only one way to find out, and that was to go ask them, face-to-face.

The loose gravel of the parking lot crunched under the tires of the cargo van as Lyons casually headed into the far corner and stopped well away from the other cars.

“Get hard, people,” Lyons said, pretending to adjust his collar to activate the throat mike hidden underneath. “If this is not for us, they will not want to damage the van and give away the show. Whoever this is, they’ll wait until we step outside and then take us down hard.”

“Blood on the gravel being a lot easier to disguise than a burning car wreck,” Blancanales added, adjusting the flesh-colored radio bud in his ear. Unless the entire cemetery was mined to blow, any snipers would have to wait for the Stony Man operatives to reveal themselves to become targets. The soft recon had just gone hard.

“Especially this one,” Lyons said, brushing away the top of the flower box to extract a massive Atchisson autoshotgun.

“Confirmed,” Schwarz stated, looking through a scope of the new XM-8 rifle. “We’re already painted with a UV laser from somebody in those trees on top of the hill. I can see it sweeping back and forth, waiting for us to step outside and say welcome.”

Tugging on a dark baseball cap to cover his blond hair, Lyons started to reach for the hand mike, but stopped just in time. Even if the sniper was scanning the EM bands, he’d never be able to decipher the encoded transmission, but the mere fact that there had been a transmission would tell him far too much. The last thing they could do was call for help, because it would literally be the last thing they ever did. Their pilot, Jack Grimaldi, was on his own.

“The numbers are falling, brothers,” Blancanales stated, draping a bandolier of clips and shells around his neck. “If we take too much longer, the sniper will know we’re wise, and then all hell breaks loose.”

“For him,” Lyons whispered menacingly, easing open the driver’s side door and slipping quietly outside.

Crawling on their bellies into the flowering shrubbery, the three men snaked along the wood chips covering the dark soil. The smells of nature surrounded them, but their focus was on the copse of oak trees on top of the distant hill.

Entering a thick growth of laurel, Schwarz swung up the XM-8 and looked through the built-in telescopic sights to try to find the source of the UV laser. The beam entered the shadows in the crown of the tree and vanished. He knew where the sniper was located, but could not get a clear view.

“This could be a friendly,” Schwarz whispered, shifting position in the greenery. “The Feds or even Homeland.”

“Unlikely,” Lyons began as a flash of light came from within the oaks and a fiery dart raced down the hill to violently explode on the side of the van.

The strident concussion seemed to shake the world, it was so loud, and the car alarms on the other vehicles in the parking lot began hooting, whooping and blaring.

Swirling around, a thick cloud of smoke masked the van as a soft rain of shrapnel sprinkled the gravel. But as the dark fumes cleared, the cargo van was still there. A side panel had been burned completely clean from the explosion, and the bare armor underneath now exposed.

“Well, he knows who we are now. Go, go, go!” Lyons commanded.

The Stony Man operatives broke cover to charge across the open field of gravel and dive for safety behind some granite headstones.

Almost instantly, there came the hard chatter of a powerful machine gun, and the headstone shook from the arrival of hot lead, sharp chips flying off from the hammering impacts.

Recognizing the sound of a FN Mini-Mi, called a M-249 SAW by U.S. troops, the Stony Man team waited until the 200-round belt cycled empty, then they moved again, fast and in different directions. Only a suicide gave an opponent a group target.

As the SAW lurched back into operation, Blancanales and Schwarz took refuge behind a tall hedge, only to recoil from a pungent reek. Looking around, they spotted the tattered body of an old man in work clothes next to a lawn mower, his dried blood splattered over the machine. The hedge had hidden the corpse from them in the parking lot. Filled with a cold certainty, the Stony Man operatives knew in their guts there would be more corpses scattered around the beautiful cemetery.

Carefully aiming between the body of an angel and her outstretched wings, Lyons cut loose with a long burst from the Atchisson, the sustained discharge briefly sounding louder than the rocket attack. The leaves in the copse of trees shook wildly from the arrival of the steel buckshot, but there was no answering cry of pain or spray of blood.

Chattering away once more, the SAW probed the hedges randomly, and Lyons responded with another barrage, letting Blancanales and Schwarz jump ahead several rows. Racing behind a hedge, they fired short bursts from their own weapons into the air. Both of the grenade launchers could reach the trees by now, but the team wanted the man alive. This mission was still basically a recon, and hard intel was the goal, not revenge.

Slapping in a clip of rubber-tipped stun bullets, Schwarz angled a long burst at another obelisk near the top of the hill, and he managed to get some of them to ricochet into the trees. The SAW stopped firing, but only for a moment. Blancanales tried the same tactic from a different direction, but the results were sadly the same.

“Hollywood to Sky King,” Lyons subvocalized into his throat mike, firing a short burst into the trees. “We have a guests at the party. Repeat—” A strident squeal erupted in his earbuds, and the man bit back a curse as he turned down the volume. The radio signal was being jammed.

As if focusing on the brief transmission, the SAW rattled the headstones around the man, the 5.56 mm rounds annihilating more flowers and bushes. Blancanales and Schwarz answered on full automatic as Lyons sprinted for the protection of a granite bench. He made it just in time, a single round plowing through his shirt to glance off the body armor underneath.

Once more the M-249 roared into life, spent brass tumbling from the crown of the tree like hot autumn leaves. The billiard-table-smooth field of grass churned from the arrival of the hollowpoint rounds, and several headstones were knocked over, leaving a large gap in the neatly trimmed hedges.