Don Pendleton - Unified Action

Wethers made connections, he found links, he built bridges one binary bit at a time between data streams until scrambled mosaics became crystal-clear pictures. In his usual understated way, he had made another connection.

“Bear?” Wethers asked over one bony shoulder.

From beside the bubbling coffeepot where he was assembling a table of organizational equipment for the field teams Kurtzman looked up. “Go ahead, Hunt,” he growled. “You got something?”

“I have a rather odd connection between what our teams are doing,” Wethers answered.

Curiosity piqued, Kurtzman maneuvered his wheelchair out from behind his desk and toward the former college professor. “Between the Caribbean and central Asia? A connection? Do tell.”

“Could be a fluke,” Wethers warned. “One of those odd coincidences people use to justify a belief in fate.”

Kurtzman rolled up next to him and grunted. “No such thing as coincidences in our world. What do you have?”

“Our missing FBI agent in Santo Domingo and our missing contractor in Kyrgyzstan?”

“Okay?”

“They’re brothers.”

Carmen Delahunt burst into the room through the door leading to the communications center. “We’ve got a problem,” she said without preamble. “We just lost our uplink with Phoenix.”

“Weather?” Kurtzman asked.

“Weather shouldn’t have been a problem. I ran a forensic diagnostic on the signal and I got shadow chatter in the low-end megahertz range.”

“Crap,” Kurtzman swore.

“High-end jammers,” Wethers agreed.

Kyrgyzstan

MCCARTER MOVED IN a crouch through the graveyard. Behind him three other members of Phoenix Force were spread out in a loose wedge formation, weapons up. Above them, hidden on the ridge, Hawkins tracked their progress from a sniper overwatch position.

McCarter dodged in and out of headstones, skirting graves torn open by artillery rounds. He averted his gaze from mummified husks of old corpses and tried not step on any of the skeletal remains that lay scattered like children’s toys. Rafael Encizo muttered something low and in Spanish under his breath as his foot came down in a spot of a decomposing corpse.

In five minutes everything had gone to shit.

The high-altitude wind had stacked eastern storm clouds up on the elevated geography behind them and a cold rain had begun to fall. In the same instant contact with their communication satellite had vanished. Then as they made their initial approach into the village they had realized a battle had just occurred within the small populated area.

They were now operating blindly in an extremely hazardous environment. The thought of abandoning the mission had never been discussed. There was still a hostage out there in the middle of this mess.

The falling rain was a blanket of white noise. The Phoenix Force warriors remained ghostly figures as they traversed the cemetery. The weight of their weapons were reassuring in their hands. They breathed in the humid air, feeding their bodies through the exertion.

The first rifle crack was muted and distant. McCarter went down to one knee behind a headstone. Instantly, James did the same, followed by Manning and Encizo.

The Briton strained his ears against the muffling effect of the heavy rain. He heard another single shot of rifle caliber. A burst of submachine gun fire answered it, and McCarter saw the flash of muzzle fire flare out of the dark rectangle of a window in the second story of a compound ahead of them.

McCarter quickly ascertained that none of the fire was being directed toward their position.

“What the hell is going on?”

“Internal coup for command?” James offered in a whisper. “Could be a blood feud, I guess. Everything is tribal politics this far up in the mountains.”

McCarter nodded. “Let’s try to use the chaos to our advantage.”

They were about fifty yards from the edge of the settlement where thatch and mud hovels surrounded the more built-up areas in a loose ring broken by animal pens. McCarter wiped rain water out of his eyes and looked toward the irrigation ditch that had been his original infiltration route.

He scowled. He wasn’t bursting with anticipation to slide into the muddy, waist-deep water of the ditch. Another burst of submachine gun fire came from the compound’s second story and was answered by two controlled single shots.

He rose from behind the headstone and began moving toward the village proper. Behind him his teammates rose and followed, keeping their formation loose and broken but still maintaining overlapping fields of fire.

The team dodged the open graves, artillery craters and headstones like runners navigating hurdles on the quarter-mile track. The soaked ground swallowed up the impact of their footsteps, spraying water with every step they took.

McCarter reached the round wall of a mud hovel and went around one side of it. He peeked out and saw an unpaved alley running deeper into the village. Bullet holes riddled the wall of one long, low, mud-brick building. A mongrel lay, shot dead, in the weeds beside it.

“I’m going to move forward then wave you up once it’s clear,” he instructed James. The ex-SEAL nodded as Encizo and Manning took up defensive positions to secure the Briton’s infiltration.

McCarter pushed forward. The alley ran past the back of the compound several blocks up. Trash bins lay overturned in the muddy street and rubbish was heaped everywhere. McCarter stayed close to one side of the building and edged his way carefully into the street. His eyes squinted against the rain, searching windows and doorways for any sign of movement.

There was no more gunfire. The rain was even louder adjacent to the structures of the village. It hammered onto shanty roofs of corrugated tin and ran off into makeshift gutters, forming rushing waterfalls that splashed out into the street every few yards. McCarter wiped water from his eyes and stalked farther into the tangle of dank and twisting streets.

He crossed an open area between two one-story buildings and sensed motion. He spun, bringing up his carbine. A black-and-white goat on the end of a frayed rope looked up and bleated at him. The little animal’s fur was matted down with exposure to the rain. There was a little hutch built behind the staked goat. From the doorway of the hutch a slender arm and hand sprawled in the mud. There was a bracelet of hammered metal around the delicate wrist and the fingers had frozen in rigor mortis.

McCarter looked up the street in both directions but saw nothing. He crouched and reached across with his left hand to his right boot and pulled a Gerber Guardian straight blade from his boot sheath. He stepped into the pen, ignoring the squish of mud and shit in the straw under his feet.

The animal bleated again and McCarter shushed it reflexively. He reached down and slid the double-edged blade into the loop of twine around the animal’s neck. He flicked his wrist and severed the rope. The goat walked to the edge of the pen and began munching on the straw that had been out of its reach before.

McCarter slowly sank to one knee. He slid the Gerber back into its boot sheath and bent forward, looking into the hutch. The shadows were deep in the tiny space. He saw the arm running back into the dark. McCarter blinked and the shadow resolved into the shape of a woman.

She was young and dead, with opaque eyes staring out at him. There was a bloody open gash in her forehead where a bullet had punched in. He looked away.

McCarter rose slowly out of his crouch. He heard a man call out several streets over and he froze. The language was French. Someone farther out from that answered him in the same language. Anger made McCarter grit his teeth. He swallowed a lump of bile that had formed like a rock in his throat.