Don Pendleton - Critical Effect

The torque nauseated Blythe, made him dizzy and threatened him with total blackout.

The landing ended suddenly with a bone-crushing stop as the aft section of the plane came into contact with something hard and unyielding. The impact slammed the flight crew against their harnesses and back into their seats. One of the navigators emitted a short yelp, and Blythe saw something sail past his shoulder and strike the main panel. The object performed a flip-flop dance down the front of the instrument panel with wet, smacking sounds, and in the half light of a gauge Blythe could see it was part of a human tongue.

For a minute or two Blythe didn’t want to move. He didn’t want to deal with the whimpers of a nearly tongue-less navigator, the hushed reassurances of the other men for his friend. Blythe looked slowly to his right and averted his eyes when he saw the gross dangle of Little’s head against a restraint. Blythe reached out slowly. Bile rose in his throat when he touched his fingers to the soft cleft of Little’s throat where it met with his jawline. No pulse.

Sanity took hold quickly then—almost as if Little’s demise had confirmed Blythe’s continued existence—and after a wiggle of fingers and toes to verify all his body parts were still attached, Blythe disengaged the restraint harness and squeezed out of his seat. He watched as the navigator held his injured comrade’s head against his shoulder. Blood ran freely from the other man’s mouth onto the sleeve of his friend, but the navigator didn’t seem to notice.

“Get the first-aid kit and see if you can stop that bleeding,” Blythe instructed. “I’m going to check on the hold.”

The navigator nodded. “Aye, sir. How is Little?”

“Dead,” Blythe reported plainly. He could see the pain in the navigator’s expression and softened the tone in his voice. “Friend?”

“School chum, sir.”

“I’m sorry.”

With that, Blythe continued to the rear hold before the navigator could see the tears well in his eyes. He had to use all his body weight to open the door enough that he could squeeze through it. Stacks of boxes, some of them containing survival gear, had dislodged from their bins and wedged open the door. Blythe managed to get to the hold.

At first glance in the damp, red-orange glow of emergency lights, he assessed the special titanium-alloy containers that contained their ultrasecret cargo that appeared intact. Miraculously, they had somehow maintained their position in the center of the hold, held in place by thick canvas moorings, a testament to the skill of the loading crews. Blythe moved around them to the passenger bench on the starboard side of the craft and stopped abruptly.

Bodies were strewed everywhere. It appeared that a large part of the jump bench had completely dislodged from its moorings and been tossed every which way. Acting as a lever, it had obviously tossed around the SAS team members secured to it like so many rag dolls. The unforgiving metal edges had dismembered a couple of the men, the impact had been so great, and something that flew through the hold had even decapitated one man. Only two of the nine men who had been seated there even moved, and on closer inspection Blythe could tell one man was on his way out just by the way he breathed.

Blythe stepped past the grisly scene and moved rapidly toward the back, hopeful at least some of his loading crew survived. He found he could not squeeze past the last container in line. The entire rear of the Starlifter C-141 had folded into itself, crushed by some unseen force, the same force that had stopped the cargo ship cold. Blythe ducked to see if he could detect movement, cupped his hand to his mouth and called out, but only the echo of his voice in the cavernous hold returned—it seemed almost as if the echo answered of its own life to mock him.

Blythe turned and started toward the fore section when he heard the clang of metal followed a moment later by a hissing noise. Blythe turned his eyes for the ceiling, attempted to determine the source of the noise, but he couldn’t pinpoint it. It grew more pronounced and familiar, and Blythe stood still for several minutes as if bound in some sort of suspended animation. He felt tired, more tired than he ever had before in his life, and he couldn’t imagine how this whole situation could become worse.

Blythe shook off the weariness and marched toward the front of his plane with renewed purpose. As he reached the section beyond the foremost cargo container, he saw the remainder of sparks spitting through the wall of the fuselage just a moment before an entire section of wall fell inward. Men dressed in camouflage, weapons held at the ready, charged through the glowing rim of that gaping hole.

Blythe didn’t bother to try reaching for his sidearm. He knew how it would end if he attempted to resist the shadowy figures. They continued to pour through the hole, one upon the other, like locusts invading the harvest.

Somewhere in that outpouring a man stepped through the opening who possessed the regality of a monarch and wore a presence of exclamatory command authority. Blythe guessed the man’s height at about six and a half feet. Muscles rippled across his abdomen, for all intents appearing they might tear through his black T-shirt. Equally sculpted pectorals, biceps and triceps formed mountainous lines that reached to a bulging neck and strong, chiseled face. Shoulder-length brown hair and a trimmed beard framed that face. A patrician nose jutted from jade-colored eyes masked behind the yellowish tint of bifocals. The man rested his sledgehammer-size fists on a narrow waist that veed straight to hips and legs in camouflage fatigue pants. The man wore midcalf paratrooper boots with steel toes polished to a mirrorlike glisten. A military web belt encircled his hips, and he wore a sidearm in quick-draw fashion on his left thigh.

“You are now a prisoner of the Germanic Freedom Railroad,” the man announced. “Your life, as your cargo, is now forfeit at my discretion.”

Blythe could barely contain a squeal of outrage. “Now look here, I don’t give a goddamn who you are! You have seized an aircraft belonging to Her Majesty’s Royal Air Force under the command of NATO forces. And I can guarantee they’ll come quickly looking for us! You would be best to leave things be!”

The man stepped forward and leaned close to Blythe’s ear, his breath hot on the officer’s neck as he whispered, “I know exactly what I have seized, Group Captain. In fact, we’ve been expecting you.”

David McCarter sat on a large rock, a Player’s cigarette in one hand and a sweating can of Coca-Cola in the other.

The Phoenix Force leader chewed absently at his lower lip while he studied the lush foliage that ran along the base of Monti Sirino, about twenty miles from the Golfo di Policastro, Italy. A mission from Stony Man, the ultracovert operations unit of the United States government, had brought them here less than forty-eight hours earlier. With their mission complete in record time, McCarter and the other members of Phoenix Force could look forward to a long-needed week of R & R.

McCarter glanced over his shoulder as the turbofans on the twin Rolls-Royce engines of the C-20 Gulfstream whined into preflight action. The time had come for them to get the hell out of there. He took a last, long drag before he crushed the cherry against a rock, field stripped the remainder and dropped the butt in his pocket. It wouldn’t do to have someone find the thing and extract his DNA.

The fox-faced Briton’s boots crunched on the refined gravel of the makeshift airstrip. The running lights glowed faintly in the half light of dawn, most of the sunlight peeking over the horizon still obscured by trees and tall grasses at the base of the mountain. McCarter glanced at his watch before rushing up the narrow steps and into the plane. He looked toward the cockpit, wishing he would see the familiar figure of Jack Grimaldi there, although he knew he wouldn’t. Grimaldi, Stony Man’s top gun and usual pilot for Phoenix, was back in Washington recovering from a hell-raising mission in Afghanistan.