Don Pendleton: Unified Action

“Did you do the reprimanding yourself, then?” Klaus asked. His face was so close beside Skell that the question was a whisper in the man’s ear. Cigarette smoke enveloped his head in a cloud, forcing Skell to cough slightly.

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

“Good,” Klaus whispered. Abruptly the German turned and walked back across the room toward his desk, where he ground out the cigarette. “Was there a compromise?”

“We believe so.”

“And?”

“And I think the two know enough to make them curious, to realize there’s a bigger picture, but not enough to make them go to the authorities—yet.”

“Fine. You know what to do, then, correct?”

“I’m putting it into motion right now.”

Klaus walked back over to the windows and clasped his hands behind his back. He stared out at the ocean now roiling under the windstorm hammering the shore.

“That’ll be all.”

HALF AN HOUR LATER Skell sat in the back of a plush company limousine. He swallowed a fistful of antacid tablets, two aspirin and a Xanax and washed them down with a swig of bottled water. His hands were clammy from his perspiration, and when the two men got into the back of the limo with him he didn’t offer to shake hands.

The first man wore a closely shaved haircut and a shrapnel scar that ran along one jawline. His name was Haight and he’d been a sergeant in the French Foreign Legion for ten years before opting to work freelance.

Haight was tall but lean, whipcord thin and possessing the build of an endurance hunting animal like a greyhound or a cheetah. In contrast, the onyx-skinned man who got in behind him was built like a bear.

Robert Skah Lemis had come up on the hard streets of Santo Domingo the rough way. From gang member to police officer to political assassin, he had excelled in making useful connections. He turned chaotic masses of violent, unorganized individuals into functioning syndicates. Money. Guns. Lawyers. In the Caribbean, Lemis controlled and coordinated these things. It had made him very important to Mr. Skell because it allowed the sweating pedophile to look good for his boss, the unforgiving Mr. Klaus.

Skell blinked behind his glasses, his eyes as beady as they were myopic. Haight smelled like aftershave and Lemis smelled like marijuana. The tip of his tongue looked pink and vaguely sluglike against the fat cupid bow of his pursed lips. A sheen of sweat covered him, casting an unhealthy aurora.

“Here,” he said briskly.

He opened a titanium briefcase covered in a thin layer of calfskin and set with gold fixtures. From inside he pulled out two flash drives and handed them to the mercenaries sitting across from him. Both men took great pains to ensure their hands didn’t touch Skell’s.

As the two middle managers placed the flash drives inside their coat pockets Skell gave them a brief rundown.

“Each flash drive contains information on men we want captured, interrogated and disposed of. Ironically, but unimportant to you, the men are brothers named Smith. One is currently an FBI agent on liaison in the Dominican Republic, and the other is a private military contractor flying unmanned aerial vehicles on surveillance missions in Kyrgyzstan. They learned something they shouldn’t have. The details will be provided in the digital briefings.

“Once we’ve figured out how much they discovered, we won’t need them anymore. Put together your teams, arrange transportation, perform the captures, conduct the interrogations, dispose of the bodies. We need this done fast and we are willing to provide you a fifteen percent bonus over and above our normal understandings.”

Lemis grinned. His mouth was huge and his white teeth lit up his face like lights on a Christmas tree. “That’s good stuff. I’ll have the motherfucker wrapped up like candy in a day.”

Haight frowned. “My end isn’t going to be so tidy. A job like this I’m going to have to use ex-Soviet troops. Bulgarians for the interviews, Russians for the shock troops. I go open market, I can’t promise they won’t run their mouths off about doing an American to inflate their rep. I go with quiet professionals, I run the risk of getting boys tied in closely with the intelligence services or the syndicates.” He leaned back in his seat and shrugged his shoulders. “If we were doing this in Africa it might be a different story…but Kyrgyzstan?”

Skell drew his lips together, forming his mouth into a pout. “Total unit closure?” he suggested.

Haight shook his head. “Too large a crew on this one. I recruit twenty shooters and one or two spooks, then they all turn up missing, I’m fucking done.”

“Fine. Use people who can keep their mouth shut. We have ways of dampening down the exposure on the intelligence front.” Mentally he adjusted the cost expenditure for the operation. He frowned slightly, then decided it was obviously still cost-effective given the alternative.

Once the American dollar had been devalued the resulting profit margin from Mr. Klaus’s currency speculation would be so considerable that a few million-dollar bribes to Russian generals at the old Kremlin would hardly be missed.

Southern Caribbean

The NA-265—60 Saberliner Jet cut through the air at well over 500 mph. Below the forty-four-foot wingspan wisps of clouds obscured the view of the Caribbean Ocean. To the west the sun was setting in an explosion of reddish-yellow light.

The civilian jet was flown by a skeleton crew of three pilots from the Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine service, while in the passenger area the three operators of Able Team lounged after being picked up after a mission in the Uruguay capital of Montevideo.

Big, blond and built like a nightclub bouncer, Carl Lyons reclined in one of the plush seats and stared out the window. Wearing civilian clothes and tan, thick-soled hiking boots, he looked rumpled, dirty and tired. One knee of his jeans was stained with blood splatter and his hands smelled like cordite. He set down his can of soda and crossed one size-twelve boot over his knee.

He noticed absentmindedly that the toe and tread of his boot were flecked with brain matter. He turned to look at the mustached, sandy-haired man sprawled in the seat across the narrow aisle from him.

“You think you used enough Semtex in that last satchel charge?” Lyons asked, voice dry.

Hermann Schwarz shrugged as he opened a can of soda. He took a long drink, then shrugged again.

“Don’t know,” he admitted. “I mean, the door came open. Right?”

“Every ass clown in that FARC hit squad came out the opening looking like fruit in a blender,” Rosario Blancanales pointed out.

“Did I tell ’em to carry a suitcase full of grenades?” Schwarz countered.

“Barb’s going to be pissed we didn’t recover any intelligence artifacts,” Lyons pointed out. The leader of Able Team referred to Barbara Price, the mission controller at their organizational headquarters, Stony Man Farm.

“I’m really more of an engineer and less of an archaeologist,” Schwarz answered.

“Who said anything about archaeologists?” Lyons demanded.

“It was a play on the dual use of the term ‘artifact’ you mentioned,” Blancanales explained.

“Thank you,” Schwarz said.

“It was also stupid and obvious,” Blancanales continued.

“Thank you,” Lyons said.

The digital speakers of the Saberliner’s PA system cut on and the pilot’s voice, sounding well modulated and distant, cut in. “I got an alert from HQ,” the woman said. “You have a fragmentation order. Please access the communications display in your table.”

“Speaking of Mama Bear…” Blancanales grinned.

Reaching out a single blunt finger, Lyons jabbed it into the console button. A section of the desktop slid back to reveal a recessed screen and keyboard. A red light next to a digital camera blinked on and the blank image on the screen snapped into resolution, revealing the attractive features of the honey-blond Stony Man mission controller, Barbara Price.