Don Pendleton - Unified Action

The night was silent except for the wind through the pines. Nothing moved out beyond their perimeter. McCarter lifted his weapon and utilized his night scope in precise patterns, covering vectors in a methodical manner. He could detect no sign of obvious human presence.

James leaned in close and whispered into the Briton’s ear. “You see the driver door is open?”

McCarter nodded. A bar of shadow separated the gloomy metal gray of the door from the body of the cab. The hair on the back of the ex–SAS commando’s neck began to rise in almost preternatural warning.

“Feeling hinky,” he muttered.

“Big time,” James agreed.

Encizo shifted his weight and leaned in toward the other men. “I’ll slide up and check it out.”

McCarter frowned as he realized the exposure the man was vulnerable to, but then nodded. If the plan was going to unfold, they needed the truck. Giving up on the truck at this juncture meant giving up on the hostage. He wasn’t willing to do that until he had exhausted every possibility.

Encizo carefully rotated his Soviet-era submachine gun around on its sling until it hung muzzle down across his back. He pulled his silenced pistol from a shoulder holster on his web gear and silently disappeared into the dark.

McCarter waited patiently, James at his side. The two men scanned the darkness as clouds began to gather overhead, further obscuring the terrain. Long, tense minutes later James quietly nudged McCarter with his elbow.

The Phoenix Force leader turned away from his survey of the far side of the roads and watched the dark shadow of Rafael Encizo slide out of the ditch next to the back of the truck. Both men gripped their weapons tightly.

Encizo moved like water flowing over the ground, staying low to present a subdued silhouette as he edged toward the front of the big truck. Carefully using his free hand to peel back the canvas tarp covering the cargo bed of the five-ton vehicle, he held his position, peering inside. Satisfied, he gently lowered the edge of the tarp back into place and crept forward.

Moving in silent increments he approached the open door to the vehicle cab. The blunt muzzle of his pistol silencer led the way like a hunting dog on point. He reached up with his free hand and made contact with the truck, checking for trip wires or other obvious booby traps.

Suddenly he put a combat foot on the running board and stepped up, swinging the door open and leveling the pistol. Behind him McCarter and James tensed, mentally prepared for a sudden hellstorm of gunfire.

Encizo froze for a moment in the open doorway, his broad-shouldered back orientated toward his teammates, making it impossible for them to see past him. After a long, pregnant pause, the Cuban turned and hauled something out of the truck before jumping down.

McCarter swore silently as he saw the limp body strike the hard-packed dirt road like a sack of loose meat. His eyes ran over the corpse with an expert forensic eye. The head was obviously concave on one side, either from a point-blank firearm shot or some blunt instrument.

If the ambush was going to come it was going to come now, he realized. His finger took up the slack on the smooth metal curve of his trigger. Beside him he felt James stiffen in readiness. Across the little clearing Encizo had taken a knee with his back to the truck. His pistol was back in its holster and his submachine gun was now up and ready in his hands.

Nothing happened.

Slowly, McCarter felt his adrenaline begin to bleed off as they weren’t hit. After a minute he tapped James. When the ex-SEAL turned toward him he gave the man the hand-and-arm signal for a perimeter sweep. Instantly, James stepped backward into the tree at the bottom of the defilade and began a 360-degree search of the rendezvous zone.

McCarter rose into a crouch and jogged over to where Encizo waited by the corpse. The bulk of the ancient five-ton truck loomed above them. As he drew closer he saw the bloody hole that filled the left side of their contact’s face.

If a bullet had entered through the driver’s window it would have struck the truck occupant in just such a fashion, he realized.

“Is this our guy?” Encizo asked him.

“Don’t know,” McCarter whispered back. “We had location, time and code exchanges.”

Both men turned at the same time, weapons ready. Calvin James appeared in front of them, then squatted. “It’s clear out to seventy-five yards in these woods. Beyond that anyone watching us would either be down the road or up in elevation.”

Encizo got up and investigated the vehicle cab as McCarter shook the corpse down for any useful information. James, a trained medic and forensic investigator, performed a cursory inspection of the major head wound.

“Low velocity, larger caliber.”

“Pistol?”

“Almost certainly. Maybe one of your favorites—a Browning Hi-Power or even a .45 with a silencer.”

“How can you tell a silencer?” McCarter asked as he pulled several items out of the dead man’s clothes.

“Can’t be one hundred percent sure,” James admitted. “But the entrance wound was pretty damn traumatic for there to be no exit wound. That suggests a soft-nosed slug with a subsonic load.”

“High-end electronic jammers and silencer kills?” McCarter grumbled. “We stepping on someone else’s toes?”

“Chinese?” James offered.

“Chinese gear beating Bear’s electronics?” McCarter shook his head. “Not a chance.”

“Curioser and curioser,” James replied.

“Hey, guys,” Encizo said from the cab. “Get a load of this.”

Dominican Republic

THE WOMAN SPUN in the chair, obviously surprised by Schwarz’s revelation.

The Stony Man operative smirked back at her. “Let’s keep it simple,” the Able Team electronics genius said. “Skip your transient codes and go right to your mother parole.” He paused, then said, “India Delta Six.”

The woman, tension draining from her limbs, frowned and sighed. “Delta India Nine,” she replied.

“I was almost shot by one of our own stringers?” Lyons demanded. “Christ, that happens too often. Fine. Where the hell’s Smith?”

The woman turned back and looked at him. “I don’t know. He never showed up to our meet. I went to the secondary rendezvous and he didn’t show for that, either. I began to suspect the security service for the government had realized he was more than a law-enforcement liaison and did away with him.”

“So you broke into this place?” Schwarz asked.

“I’ve been here before,” she replied. “It seemed the most obvious place he would have kept information about me. I wanted to erase my trail before internal security followed up on me.”

“What was the last thing he was working on?” Lyons demanded.

“A meet for tonight with a middleman for some third party. Maybe about drugs, maybe weapons. Either way he thought it would get him a lead into which elements within this regime were working both sides of the street.”

Lyons frowned, locked eyes with Schwarz over the top of the woman’s head. “I guess we know where we go next,” he said. Schwarz nodded.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

INSIDE THE computer center, Professor Huntington Wethers let out a long, low whistle and set his cold pipe down on the desktop next to his keyboard. A tall, laconic black man with almost gaunt features and salt-and-pepper hair, he was the ultimate academic.

He preformed his tasks of research, logistics and information networking with methodical, almost mechanical efficiency. He was not an artist making wild leaps of intuition like his younger counterpart on the cyberteam, Akira Tokaido. Rather he crossed his t’s and dotted his i’s like a probate lawyer until every fact or isolated bit of information was accounted for and placed neatly into its appropriate box before being checked off.