Don Pendleton - Extreme Arsenal

“Sorry. Underestimated the muzzle-flash,” McCarter replied. It sounded as if he was trying to speak through a pillow. Reasoner reached up and found that his right ear was still there, burned and tender from the nearby muzzle-flash that clamped his right eye shut, but he came away with fresh blood.

“What…”

“I think I blew the eardrum. Sorry, mate,” McCarter answered.

Reasoner shuddered. “You’re insane.”

“I just don’t have any patience for smugglers,” McCarter responded. “Or the bastards who make it easy for them.”

“Listen…” Reasoner began.

“You were kicked out of the regiment for selling off our equipment,” McCarter said. “Your lawyer kept you from becoming some bloke’s boyfriend in prison, but if it were up to me, you’d be lucky to take a long drop off a short rope.”

“I didn’t sell to the Provos,” Reasoner answered. “And it was old gear…back stock.”

McCarter was unmoved. “What berth?”

“They’re setting sail in five minutes. You’ll never catch them,” Reasoner replied.

“Leave it to me,” McCarter said. “What berth?”

“Thirteen,” Reasoner answered.

“Close your eyes, Chris,” McCarter ordered.

The official closed his good eye. “You’re not going to shoot me, are you?”

Silence.

It took Reasoner nearly five minutes for him to get up the courage to see if McCarter was still there.

MCCARTER KNEW that he was going to be cutting it close. Not only was he armed with only a pair of pistols that weren’t ones he was familiar with, and Reasoner’s .357 Magnum revolver, but he was all alone. A takedown of a ship would need at least two more people, as Able Team had proved several times. He’d have preferred to have all four of his Phoenix Force teammates on hand to throw in against the smugglers on the Kobiyashi.

It would have to do. The Phoenix Force leader didn’t want to lose track of the boat. Already the sailors were undoing the moorings. The bow’s rope, big and fat, was being hauled up over the railing while two sailors unwound the stern cable. Crewmen jogged up the gangplank.

“All aboard!” came the call from the deck.

It was now or never.

One more thing slowed the Phoenix Force leader. There was a possibility that the entire crew on the ship wasn’t implicated in the transport of a team of assassins. McCarter was audacious and ruthless, but he wasn’t a cold-blooded murderer and when he fought, he fought against those he knew were killers and had deadly intent. He’d fall back to the handguns as a means of last resort, which meant that he was even further behind the curve.

“Hey! We’re casting off,” a Filipino sailor called to him. The round-faced seaman was stocky, his shoulders betraying a burly strength. “You can’t come aboard.”

“Official business, no time for a chin-wag,” McCarter said as he barely slowed, sidestepping the Filipino.

The stocky sailor grabbed McCarter’s arm and pulled open his jacket to reveal a revolver. The former SAS commando pivoted and broke the Filipino’s nose with the point of his elbow, then plucked the revolver from the man’s waistband. “I told you, no time to talk, mate.”

A second sailor rushed up, but instead of helping out his stunned shipmate, he reached for his own weapon. McCarter sighed and pistol-whipped the man across the jaw with the barrel of the Filipino’s revolver, twisting the newcomer’s handgun out of his grasp. A sweep of his feet across the man’s ankles, and the Briton dumped the man to the ground. With a quick flip, he had a revolver in each fist.

“Anyone else want to slow me down?” McCarter growled.

The other sailors who were handling the moorings looked at the armed man, dressed in black and packing a brace of handguns after three quick strikes. They didn’t want to see what he could do with bullets and took off running. McCarter let them flee and continued up the gangplank.

A figure rushed to the railing and McCarter spotted a submachine gun in his grasp. Uzis weren’t standard issue for security forces on a ship, so he threw himself flat on the slanted walkway. Both revolvers spoke with thunderous reports. Twin .38-caliber slugs chopped into the gunner and threw him onto his back before he could aim. Autofire ripped from the dead man’s assault weapon into the night sky.

“Good news and bad news,” McCarter muttered to himself as he leaped to his feet and raced to the deck. “Good news, now I know who the bad guys are. Bad news, they got bigger guns than I do.”

On deck, he looked both ways and watched as another pair of gunmen burst from the wheelhouse. Their weapons were an odd mix, one carrying a battered AK-47, the other packing another of the compact Bofors CBJs. McCarter took the CBJ gunner in the face with two slugs from his right-hand weapon, and put a bullet from the other revolver through the wrist of the AK man’s trigger hand. The rifleman screamed as he clutched his ruined limb to his chest, his weapon forgotten as it tumbled over the rail.

McCarter rushed toward the wheelhouse and discarded the partially spent revolvers. He skidded to a halt, scooped up the fallen assault rifle, shouldered it and looked for more targets. The wounded gunman above pulled his sidearm and leaned over the railing. The Phoenix Force commander sidestepped before a bullet exploded on the metal at his feet. Then he pulled the AK’s trigger.

Nothing. He racked the bolt and chambered a new round, the old case spinning from the breech. He tried to shoot again, but there was still nothing. The injured guard fired again, twice, but upside down and using the wrong hand, his accuracy was off, not that McCarter left himself as a stationary target. He popped the magazine and saw that the casings were green and rusted from too many years at sea.

As another shot chased him, the Phoenix Force veteran dived behind the bulkhead, leaving the AK-47 behind. Poor weapons maintenance would have gotten him killed. He reached for the alloy-framed Glock G-34 and drew it, the safety snicked off reflexively. McCarter suddenly felt very comfortable with the new handgun. It was blockier than his sleek Browning, but the muzzle thickness helped add to the heft that made the balance feel almost like his confiscated pistol.

The door crashed open and a fat thug with a shotgun burst onto the deck. McCarter didn’t wait for the newcomer to aim, triggering the G-34 twice. High-velocity 127-grain hollowpoint rounds slammed into the big guard, and it was as if the man had hit an invisible force field. The shotgunner collapsed to the walkway with a sigh and a thud. McCarter leaped over the dead man and cut into the door he’d exited.

A black-armored phantom with the same gleaming helmet as he’d encountered the night before loomed at the top of the stairs. McCarter dived into a hallway as armor-piercing slugs smashed the floor where he’d stood instants before. Tucked into a shoulder roll, he somersaulted another few feet and came up facing the stairwell. He let the Glock hang in his left hand, yanked out Chris Reasoner’s .357 Magnum revolver and thumbed back the hammer.

The armored assassin stepped into view and received a hot blast of 125-grain lead, screaming along at nearly 1500 feet per second. The 9 mm might not have penetrated the goon’s armor, and the hollowpoint round didn’t do much better, but the high-powered bullet did flatten the machine gunner. McCarter snapped up the Glock and punched a single 127-grain bullet into the gun of the attacker, wrenching the Bofors autoweapon from the killer’s grasp.

McCarter followed up with a solid kick to the helmeted man’s chin. A sickening crunch sounded and the gunman was stilled. The Stony Man commando’s gamble had paid off. There was no way the automatic weapons and body armor would have gotten through aircraft or train customs, but the bribery at the docks and the nature of boat smuggling would have made it all but impossible for someone to truly check out the ship. Security was tight in the post 9/11 era, but short of dismantling the freighter, there would have been no way to find everything.