Don Pendleton - Doom Prophecy

Berserkers didn’t care who they hurt. Lyons took his rampage of revenge and laid every ounce of seething anger and hatred on top of the guilty. And he washed it away completely in his torrent of action. He never let it stick with him, and after every battle, he cleansed his mind. No lingering bitterness stayed, nothing to harden his mind and soul against the suffering of those he put his life on the line for. Everything gouted out of him like a stream of napalm, immolating his foes.

He looked at Cash’s face, keeping his conscious mind clear, analytical. She was racked with fear and sorrow. Her bulging eyes and furrowed brow showed that she watched most, if not all, of her friends, partners and co-workers slaughtered by the three-man wrecking crew. The freak who strangled her wanted her to watch, wanted her to feel that loss. It wasn’t enough for her to suffer only an instant with a 9 mm bullet in her head. It wasn’t enough to live through the agony of being strangled to death. Lyons knew that the killer wanted her to watch shock after horror after atrocity. The murderer probably fired over her shoulder and allowed her see where every one of his bullets stuck home.

It had to have been the thin man, the one who was like a snake. He may have looked scrawny, but it took a hundred pounds of force to shatter bone. To do that with one arm, it took strength that could only be surpassed by the giant, who waded into the cubicles after tossing a human being like a missile. But the snake, he was a constrictor. He loved the feel of a squirming victim against his chest. If he hadn’t been a killer for hire, he’d have become a serial killer.

That left the giant. The man-mountain had waded in, and that told Lyons two things. One, he trusted the dwarf’s aim. Two, he was like Lyons in that he preferred his violence at point-blank range. That was where their similarities ended, however. The mammoth who stampeded through the cubicle farm was a beast who unleashed a murderous rage upon unarmed, helpless victims. He reveled in being splattered with blood from contact-range shotgun blasts, and enjoyed the feel of bodies crushed in his massive fists.

Amanda Cash was just one of five victims who didn’t die of gunshot wounds, but as opposed to the pretty redhead, the others died swiftly. Smashed to pieces by being hurled through office equipment or having their necks broken by savage twists or brutal punches. The titanic killer was a professional, and thorough, shooting his victims in the head to make sure they were down, but there was a lethal fury at work in this killer, a desire to crush and pulp those smaller and weaker than he was.

Lyons got an imprint off the linking ring, and the 5.7 mm casing before he left. The papers would be faxed to Stony Man Farm in an effort to trace the ammunition lots that the murderers used. It would provide some kind of clue, but looking at the trio’s work, the Able Team leader had figured out the identities of the murderers.

Linn “Gremlin” Keller, a miniature master designer of weapons, embittered by shady business practices. He sold his skills as not only a gunsmith and arms supplier, but also as a killer.

David Lee Haggar was called The Mammoth when he was in the underground fight circuit. He reveled in killing with his hands, but also enjoyed the splash of gore present when a shotgun exploded in a victim’s face. After being wanted for several deaths in the ring, he decided to make his living as an assassin, hooking up with the tiny Keller, who designed weapons for the titan’s massive paws.

And the thin man was Jacob “The Snake” Cannon. Exbiker, meth dealer, with a rap sheet that pointed toward him being a serial rapist and an unashamed cop killer. The wild-card madman had to have hooked up with the other two, feeling a kinship with them.

Lyons had figured out who they were, but he didn’t know where they were or where they would strike next.

The only thing he knew for sure was that he was going to lead Able Team against them, and bring them down hard.

He owed the San Francisco Police Department, and Carmen Delahunt, that much.

Calvin James and Rafael Encizo stood on the prow of the small launch as it chugged through the junks moored in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour. The sprawl of floating boats was as much a city as the landlocked skyscrapers and shantytowns that gleamed like a blaze of diamonds on the shore. James and Encizo had both ridden in the passenger seats of F-14 fighters, ferried from Langley airfield to Japan, where they met up with the Tokyo headquarters of the U.S. Homeland Security task force.

There, State Department, CIA and other agency personnel gathered under one roof to coordinate their overseas Southeast Asia efforts. While the “Axis of Evil” focus was on the Middle East, there were still threats from China, North Korea and the Asian heroin trade that kept the Pacific branch of Homeland Security busy on a daily basis. As well, in the Philippines and Indonesia, offshoots of Muslim extremist groups engaged in bombing and murder campaigns against the allies of the United States.

It was just more evidence that terrorism wasn’t simply a matter of a simple skin color or religious creed. Madness and carnage festered like a cancer in the hearts of enough people that there would always be a need for men like Phoenix Force, Able Team and their counterparts in thousands of law-enforcement agencies around the world. That gave James a small pause as they continued navigating the maze of anchored junks in the harbor. What started for the slim black man in a Navy recruitment center years ago as a chance to join the military to escape the thugs running rampant through the streets of Chicago, to get a medical degree and make something of himself, became a different kind of surgery. Instead of closing wounds, James found himself on a crusade, cutting away the tumorous infestations of violent, hate- and greed-driven murderers who unleashed their illness upon the world. Instead of healing the sick, James was engaging in preventative medicine, hunting killers and terrorists before they could slaughter or maim innocents.

However, the one weakness in the Stony Man crusade was that they had to know where the symptoms of terror and crime were evident. People had to suffer and die for the men of Phoenix Force to spring into action to protect further victims.

It was a form of triage, James thought, making sure his FN P-90 hung under his coat, out of view to prevent the harbor residents from panicking at the sight of men with guns. He didn’t like the fact that with that form of triage, he had to wait for people to be hurt, to die.

Every loss still hurt, but James was glad for that hurt. It meant he still cared. The day he stopped sympathizing with the victims of terrorism and crime was the day he knew his career was over. He knew deep down that it was a very real possibility, drummed into him by his deceased mentor and former commander, Yakov Katzenelenbogen. The reason Phoenix Force, and by extension their counterparts in Able Team, were so much better than any other special operations unit, was that they had been chosen because they believed in a cause. They had a passion to protect the innocent that drove them to fight impossible odds on a daily basis. Sure, they received government paychecks, but they were only employees in the sense that they were given the opportunity to engage in a crusade to protect America, and the whole world, from the barbarian hordes laying siege and preying off its suffering.

Now, the sky dark, stars rendered invisible by the fierce glow of Hong Kong’s city lights, James and Encizo were finishing their trek to hook up with a defector from AJAX who had approached the Homeland Security task force.

Her name was Terremota, an Argentinian woman who was known to be a demolitions expert. The nomme du guerre she worked under literally meant “Earthquake” in Spanish. Terremota promised to divulge the secrets of AJAX’s worldwide terror network, if only she could be granted asylum from her partner.