Don Pendleton - Unified Action

There was a harsh metallic click as he racked the bolt and chambered the first round on his belt. “Terrorist surprise package hot,” he declared in a soft self-satisfied voice.

McCarter grunted in response and slid home a high-explosive 40 mm grenade into his M-203 launcher. Once he was locked and loaded he pulled his Combat Personal Data Assistant out from a Cordura and Kevlar pouch. The CPDA had a commercial housing that on initial inspection hid the electronic upgrades provided by Stony Man’s technical section.

McCarter turned his head away from the bite of the omnipresent and icy breeze, bringing his finger up to key his mic. “Stony, you have eyes over target?”

“Affirmative,” Price replied.

“Send signal to my hand unit for final confirmation,” McCarter instructed.

Having given his instructions, McCarter held up the CPDA and opened the screen to the digital feed. So far every aspect of their intelligence had been correct, but he wanted to have absolute confirmation that he wasn’t accidentally taking down a civilian caravan before he turned Phoenix Force loose on the line of vehicles below.

On his screen the satellite feed appeared, the line of vehicles appearing as white outlines against the cold dark of the Kyrgyzstan geography. The hoods of the trucks glowed slightly from the reflected heat of the hardworking engines and the headlights flashed in hard shards of illuminations. With all the reflected light McCarter was able to clearly pick out the six vehicles of the convoy.

Two commercial four-wheel-drive pickups ran at the front of the vehicle line, followed by three Russian army five-ton trucks with canvas sheaths over the rear storage compartments. The final big truck was uncovered, leaving the several men of the gun crew exposed. Four men in loose turban-style headgear manned a 20 mm antiaircraft gun.

McCarter felt like purring as he clicked his push-to-talk button on the com uplink. “I have visual confirmation of target,” he told Stony Man.

“You are cleared to engage,” Barbara Price informed him.

Dominican Republic

Able Team was a direct-action unit that identified its targets and went forward until enemy combatants had been neutralized in one fashion or another. Capable of stealth and subterfuge, the team was a trio of extremely fit, extremely confident special operators used to sizing up all manner of opposition—soldiers, police, criminals and spies. It wasn’t hard to identify the hard-eyed Carl Lyons and more laconic features of Rosario Blancanales and Hermann Schwarz as experienced ass kickers.

The sun was low in the sky, radiating heat like a flamethrower, and the humidity was so thick it felt like a hanging curtain as Able Team approached the customs police in a loose triangle with Lyons at the front.

Recognizing the potential for trouble, the four guards dropped hands to the grips of weapons and stiffened their posture. The leader of the group, an extremely dark-skinned islander with a seemingly fleshless skull, threw a half-smoked cigarette to the ground and let it smolder.

As the three Stony Man operatives approached, Blancanales and Schwarz drifted out a few steps to the side, turning their approach wedge in a softly enveloping semicircle that kept the bodies of the customs officers trapped between themselves and the frame of their vehicle.

Sensing trouble but seeing no weapons, the officer took a step forward and opened his mouth to bark an order.

Lyons lifted up a meaty fist and snapped it forward down his center line in an old-school karate punch. The first two knuckles of his fist slammed into the custom officer’s chin, his jaw hanging loose as he prepared to speak. The hinge joint where the jawbone joined the skull was rammed backward, mauling the nerves centered there. The officer went down like a pole-axed steer in a Chicago stockyard, instantly unconscious.

Hermann Schwarz moved in close to his target, his limbs tracing predetermined combative patterns. His left hand slapped the barrel of his man’s weapon to one side, his right hand snapping once in a short jab to the man’s solar plexus that doubled him over, followed by a hook that took the man flush along his temple and dropped him instantly.

On the opposite side of Lyons from Schwarz, ex–Special Forces soldier Rosario Blancanales hammered into his own opponent. The Puerto Rican commando slammed his left hand against the forestock of the man’s rifle, pushing it hard into the startled Dominican’s chest and trapping it against the torso.

Caught by surprise, the man’s first instinct was to clutch his weapon even more tightly, slowing his response to the attack. Immediately, Blancanales snapped the edge of his right hand into the side of the Dominican’s neck, striking the officer along his carotid sinus. The man’s eyes rolled upward until only whites showed and he crumpled to the ground at his feet.

The final officer had time to swing a clumsy over-hand buttstroke toward Lyons, who deflected it with the palm of his hand before catching the overmatched soldier on the angle of his chin with a powerful boxer’s hook that dropped him.

“Let’s go,” Lyons snapped, jumping to work.

Quickly they used the downed men’s own handcuffs to secure them before stripping weapons, a cell phone, vehicle ignition keys and an ancient Motorola handheld walkie-talkie from the checkpoint officers.

“Do you think three white dudes in a government-marked jeep will be suspicious?” Schwarz asked, voice wry, as he fired up the vehicle.

“Speak for yourself, Mr. White Guy,” Blancanales said as he jumped in the back seat and pushed the police weapons out of obvious sight.

“Just try to look official until we can get a different ride,” Lyons said.

Schwarz pushed the accelerator down and gunned the jeep down the asphalt service road running behind the airport and toward Santo Domingo. Beside him Lyons was using thick fingers to triangulate a GPS-guided route on the screen of his CPDA.

Ahead of them a line of aluminum-and-clapboard shanties formed a labyrinthine barrier on the outskirts of the town. Beyond this ramshackle slum in the more built-up areas of the city, columns of brown-and-black smoke rose and the wail of sirens could be easily picked out, punctuated by the sharp reports of gunfire. Forming a backdrop to this was an audible sound of the rioting mobs forming a sort of human white noise that underlined and overlaid everything else.

Santo Domingo was a city on fire.

Working on his navigational program, Lyons snarled in disgust and shoved the CPDA away. “The damn thing only wants to give me obvious thoroughfare,” he explained, voice terse with frustration. “We roll down main avenues and we’re going to hit crowds and riot police every fifty fucking yards.”

“Oh, now you don’t want to be obvious?” Blancanales called out from the back seat.

Schwarz reached the end of the service lane and swerved off onto a side road to avoid running into any official traffic working checkpoints or coming from the opposite direction.

He swerved to avoid a stray dog and ran the vehicle through a rut into a long shallow puddle of polluted ditch water. They entered a winding street of the shanty slum and were immediately forced to slow because of the people milling around. Though not rioting, this group of citizens was clearly anxious about the situation and crowded the sides of the street.

A sea of dark faces turned in surprise toward the three men in the jeep. Dogs barked as bystanders pointed with open curiosity at the sight. Other vehicles, freight trucks, minibikes and taxis, began to clog the road, slowing Schwarz’s speed.

Lyons mulled over his situation as Schwarz expertly guided the vehicle through the narrow twisting lanes. Groups of young males, some openly carrying machetes, began to appear on street corners.