Don Pendleton - Extreme Arsenal

The stunned, armored assassin struggled to get up, but McCarter stooped and pulled the helmet off the killer. “Who’re you working for?”

The hit man looked down the muzzle of the 9 mm Glock. “I’m not going to talk.”

McCarter growled and pistol-whipped the armored killer into nerveless unconsciousness. Boots pounded on the metal grating that made up the steps, and he shifted his aim back to the stairwell.

The first gunman into the open caught a .357 Magnum slug in the groin. Pelvis shattered, his legs stopped working and he plopped into a heap in the hallway. Two more guards tripped over the fallen seaman, their weapons clattering as they struggled to stay up. McCarter caught one of the pair as he bent to grab his assault rifle and punched a 9 mm round through the joint of his shoulder and neck. Bone and muscle were destroyed instantly as the hollowpoint tunneled deep and stopped in the sentry’s left lung. The body smashed face-first into the floor and flopped to one side.

“Don’t do it!” McCarter ordered the other gunman as he reached for a revolver under his sweater.

The guard paused for a moment, but a slamming door behind the Briton spun his attention away. He dropped to the ground as another of the thugs cut loose with a charge of buckshot. Pellets zipped over McCarter’s head and crashed into the paralyzed gunner, a salvo of shot blowing him off his feet.

The Phoenix Force leader took out the shotgunner with two shots from the thundering Magnum revolver, then turned to look at the carnage.

“I’m dying, man,” the wounded gunman whispered, blood rasping in his lungs.

McCarter looked helplessly at the bloody chest of the seaman. He was skilled enough in battlefield medicine to stop lethal blood loss from a single bullet wound, but the chopped hamburger that remained in the path of the 12-gauge’s violence was larger than the Briton’s fully spread hand. He tore a wad of cloth from a corpse’s shirt, but by the time he made a compress out of it, the wounded sailor had expired.

McCarter frowned in frustration. He’d come onto this ship to get answers, not to leave behind total carnage. He shook his head in disgust and checked the load on Reasoner’s revolver. Three shots remained in the cylinder, so he stuffed it away as a backup weapon. He checked the load in the Glock and the 17-shot reservoir was still more than half full. He pocketed the partially depleted magazine and fed it a fresh stick.

McCarter holstered the Glock and picked up the Bofors, but cast it aside when he found that the receiver had been smashed by the 9 mm slug he’d punched into it. Instead, he picked up an old battered Sterling. Remembering his encounter with the rotten ammo in the AK-47, he pointed at a wooden crate marked “shoes” and pulled the trigger for a short burst, using the cargo to absorb any ricocheting rounds. The submachine gun burped to the SAS veteran’s satisfaction and he frisked the dead man for spare magazines. He found two more curved 32-round sticks for the Sterling and pocketed them.

He moved to where the latest gunmen had entered the superstructure on the freighter, and saw an assembly of figures heave something long over the side. McCarter shouldered the Sterling.

“Don’t move!” he warned.

A pair of black-clad assassins dived over the railing as another man spun. McCarter triggered a burst into the gunman. Bullets sparked against ceramic trauma plating and the gunman’s helmet, and the Phoenix Force pro rolled back through the door to escape a salvo of 6.5 mm armor-piercing rounds. As it was, only falling to the deck had saved him as the Bofors bullets punched through the steel bulkhead above him.

The torrent of withering fire kept McCarter pinned long enough for whomever was on the deck to escape. When there was a lull in the shooting, he swung out and saw that the railing was clear. Only the churning white water produced by the Zodiac boat’s engines gave any indication where the enemy had gone, and by the time he rushed to the bow of the ship, they were out of range for the machine pistol he carried. Even though he’d fired on the run, there was no sign that the Sterling had done anything. He let the submachine gun hang on its sling and let out a sigh of frustration.

He had prisoners, though.

It was a beginning.

Not a satisfying beginning, but it would have to do.

MCCARTER LIT a cigarette, then took a pull from his can of Coca-Cola Classic. He replayed the interrogation of the armored assassin, mind reeling from the implications of the man’s answers. He tried to push aside what he’d had to do to get those answers.

Phoenix Force had a long career of capturing and interrogating prisoners. While they used mostly psychological trickery to get their answers, bad cop/good cop scenarios and such before they had acquired Calvin James’s medical expertise and the use of drugs, there had been a few times when McCarter had had to bloody his hands.

Combat against armed and capable opponents was one thing. Torture, though, was something that disgusted him. But without a trained medic to monitor heart rate and examine the prisoner for heart defects, the Phoenix Force commander had to do things the old-fashioned way.

“Torture is inefficient,” his predecessor and mentor, Yakov Katzenelenbogen, used to say. “People will say anything to stop the pain, and it’s too time-consuming a process.”

McCarter winced inwardly. He felt like he’d let the old man down, but he’d needed what answers he could get.

Not only was the mission at stake, but now that he understood what was going on, all of Central America was threatened. He closed his eyes and fought down guilt for doing horrible things to vulnerable, defenseless flesh. It was one thing to pop Reasoner’s eardrum and to smash his face into a tabletop a couple of times. A little roughhousing was needed to convince the traitorous scumbag that it was in his best interests to spill information.

The assassin, however, required work. McCarter did what had to be done. Unease bubbled and roiled inside of him as he sifted through the memories of pleading cries for mercy to get to the information about the designated mission of the assassins.

Roberto DaCosta had been assassinated by a hired crew of killers. While the assassin hadn’t known much about who had hired them, he had known that after they left the port, they were to rendezvous with a sea plane several miles offshore to return to Central America for further sweeps.

Whatever happened, someone was going to have to back up the mastermind’s play. Denied his cadre of nearly invulnerable murderers, or most of them, there would be a mad scramble to refill the ranks to continue the operation. McCarter thought about those who had escaped on the Zodiac boat. The motorized raft would have the speed and range to make the rendezvous with time to spare. There would be no way to intercept them, and they would report back to their boss that they were no longer working in secrecy.

McCarter realized that instead of flushing his targets, he might have driven them back underground, deeper into hiding.

The flight would keep him in the chase, but Phoenix Force and Able Team would be busy elsewhere, hunting down leads. He’d contacted the Farm via cell phone, and that would give them a head start. Maybe they would be able to intercept the escaping assassins, though it was doubtful.

It had been pure luck that allowed McCarter to stumble on this operation, and Barbara Price made noises that there was another emergency in the works that would occupy Able Team’s concentration. She didn’t give details over the cell phone. Even though their communications were over secure lines, operational procedure was that she didn’t share information that the Phoenix Force leader didn’t need to know. If Able Team pulled off their mission in time, maybe they could assist afterward.