Don Pendleton - Unified Action

“Fine. Keep me up to date and I’ll try to shake something loose on these two brothers for you.”

“Thanks, Hal,” she said, and hung up.

Price looked down at the cell in her hand and frowned. Both Phoenix Force and Able Team had been scrambled at the last minute on these operations, a situation ripe for intervention by that bastard Murphy and his immutable law. There had been no time for advance homework or advance preparations, and she prayed to heaven it wasn’t going to cost her the lives of her men in the field.

Dominican Republic

LYONS STEPPED THROUGH the black mouth of the open door and into the darkened interior of the building. He shuffled smoothly to one side and sank into a tight crouch, pistol up. Blancanales stepped through and let the door swing shut behind him. Lyons quickly scanned the hall in both directions. It was empty. Rising, he began moving down the corridor toward the rear of the building. Covering their rear, Blancanales followed.

The sawmill was oppressively still and quiet around them. The perimeter hallway ran the length of the structure, with doors leading to the building’s interior spaced at intervals along the inside wall. At the far end of the hallway Lyons could make out the heavy steel of a fire door that would open up onto stairs.

The intelligence of the building layout had been spotty. Aaron Kurtzman had been unable to pull up engineer blueprints during his rushed info search. All Lyons knew was that according to Smith’s contact the FBI agent was supposed to tag along with a minor street crook and the man’s bodyguards to a meet in an office suite on the second floor.

The sound of his breath loud in his own ears, Lyons entered the stairwell. He craned his neck, looking upward. Nothing moved on the stairs or crouched in the gloomy landings. He tracked his scanning vision with the muzzle of the Glock 17. The hair on the back of Lyons’s neck stood up like the hackles of a dog.

Blancanales put his shoulder at a right angle to the big ex-cop’s back, his own weapon up.

There was a smell of dust and disuse hanging heavy in the air. Faintly beneath that was the slight odor of machine oil coming up from the sawmill floor. Lyons’s straining ears detected only the beating of his own heart. He placed the reinforced soles of his boots carefully on the first metal rung of the building’s skeletal framed staircase and began to climb.

He edged around the curve of the stair, Blancanales right behind him. The raised grip of the pistol’s butt tight in his palm, he kept his Weaver stance tight, ready to react to the slightest motion. Smith’s contact was an established veteran of life as a hunted man. Security this apparently lax was inexplicable in such a man.

Reaching the second-floor landing, Lyons snuggled up tight against the fire door on that level as Blancanales took a position. He pressed his back against wall beside the door handle. The seal of the landing door was too tight for him to use a fiber optics surveillance cable bore scope. The heavy steel door effectively muted any potential sound coming from the second-floor hallway.

Gritting his teeth, Lyons nodded once and Blancanales pulled open the door. The ex-cop darted his head around the edge. He was met with silence and darkness. The hallway ran for several yards, office doors on one side, dark windows facing the parking lot on the other. The hall turned in a L-break at the far end toward the front of the building.

Lyons moved down the center of the hallway, ready to drop prone or respond with deadly fire at the slightest threat. Behind him Blancanales edged into the hallway, weapon up.

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