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  Cyrus ceased firing, raised the rifle to his shoulder and triggered two short bursts. The first set missed but on the second—jam! Cyrus cursed and moved immediately to field procedure for clearing the jam. At one point, he risked a glance and realized that the man was aiming at him but nothing was happening. Cyrus returned to clearing the jam, got his weapon back into action and raised the rifle to his shoulder once more. He took careful aim and just as he squeezed the trigger he realized his body was on fire. A moment later he could no longer see and then his brain boiled in its own fluids. His body imploded at the cellular level as his blood boiled. Flesh was irradiated from his bones in the blink of an eye.

  But by that time Jack Cyrus was no longer aware any of it was happening.

  * * *

  THE WEAPON THAT killed Cyrus also killed the terrorist who fired it.

  Lyons saw the death of the mercenary leader, a grisly sight to be sure, but he also saw the results of whatever went terribly wrong with the EMP prototype that had been fired at him. The weapon seemed to explode in the terrorist’s hands and the liquid helium was immediately converted to gas with the temperature change. The inhalation of the gas ruptured the terrorist’s lungs, depriving his body of oxygen, and he immediately slumped to ground.

  “Did you see that?” Lyons shouted to Blancanales and Schwarz as he dropped another terrorist with a fresh salvo from his M-16.

  “Hard to miss!” Blancanales replied.

  “Look out!” Schwarz shouted.

  His teammates looked in the direction he was pointing and noticed that one of the terrorists had turned the last working EMP weapon in their direction. They scrambled to their feet and for a brief moment Lyons thought he felt the air around his body heat up.

  The Able Team warriors managed to get clear of the beam before it struck Black Betty. The gasoline engine erupted under exposure of the electromagnetic pulse and few seconds later the gas tank ignited. The blast was powerful enough to lift the van off the ground. Tires melted, the undercarriage split from front axle to back, and all the glass in the front seemed to dissolve to gritty, shiny shards.

  Able Team reached the wood line and crashed through the brush to obscure their movements. Lyons verified they were all right before he led them along the line of trees to come up on the right flank. Fortunately, mercenaries were now emerging from the barracks with weapons in hand and putting up a hell of a fight against the intruders. The Libyan terrorists now seemed disoriented, their ranks falling quickly under the marksmanship of the Cyclops combatants.

  Lyons turned to Blancanales. “Hey, Pol, that one remaining man with the EMP is hiding behind one of those trucks.”

  “Probably waiting for his weapon to recharge,” Schwarz remarked.

  “Let’s help out the Cyclops boys and take out those trucks,” Lyons said.

  Blancanales nodded. “Agreed.”

  The pair knelt in unison and brought their grenade launchers to bear. The wanted to hit the trucks simultaneously, so once Lyons verified they had target acquisition he counted it down from three. The twin 40 mm HE grenades arced through the air so fast they weren’t visible to the naked eye. They struck at nearly the same time and blew the trucks apart. Superheated fragments of metal and plastic were transformed into shrapnel that performed grisly work on the terrorists, some large enough to shear limbs from bodies while others penetrated vital organs with the effectiveness of bullets.

  Able Team followed up with a barrage of sustained fire from their weapons, sending the surviving entourage into complete disarray. Combined with the charging Cyclops defenders, their weapons held low and sweeping the terrorists in a merciless crossfire, the stance of the attackers was short-lived indeed.

  Eventually the onslaught ceased and left only the stench of burned gunpowder and scorched flesh and blood in its wake. For a long while Lyons and his teammates remained in place. The Cyclops mercenaries would be on high alert and trigger-happy, most likely ready to shoot at anything that moved.

  Finally, Lyons cupped his mouth to be heard and said, “This is Irons! Is Major Braden with you?”

  A man in camouflage battle dress and toting an MP-5 stepped from the assemblage. “I’m Braden.”

  “We’re done here, and we’re coming out with weapons at neutral position.”

  The Able Team leader knew that, while they had neutralized the threat to Cyrus, they still had to locate Dratshev, and they were running out of time.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Washington, D.C.

  Ishaq Madari stared through the night-vision binoculars and studied the grounds of the DCDI facilities. He’d come here for only one purpose—destroy everything important to David Steinham. He smiled as he thought about how the pristine buildings with their tall, clean lines, room-size windows and penthouse gardens would look when his team had finished with them. The most titillating thing about that thought was that Steinham had financed the very devices that would ultimately bring about his destruction.

  Madari congratulated himself on his ingenuity. Splitting his teams into two units, one to take out the main source of defense in Norfolk while the other came here, had been a stroke of sheer brilliance. He wondered for a moment if he was turning into some sort of egomaniac but he quickly dispelled the thought. Even now, as he lowered the binoculars and checked the dash clock on the panel truck, Madari realized the attack against Steinham’s mercenaries was well under way.

  In fact, it’s probably already over, he mused.

  Madari looked in the side mirror but he saw no vehicles. The street was completely deserted. Odd—he would have thought there’d be some traffic on a Friday night. It was then that Madari remembered Steinham was at a conference and probably so were a lot of his staff.

  It hadn’t been enough to just kill Steinham in Madari’s mind. He had to humiliate the man, turn his technology and his facilities—the only real source of Steinham’s wealth and power—into smoldering ashes. This strategy had a far more powerful effect than just pointing a gun at a man’s head and pulling the trigger. Any ape could do that. No, this was much better because it would strip Steinham of the things that were really important to him, ripping away the facade and exposing him for the weak and pathetic fool he was. In a way, Madari viewed this as a way to utterly emasculate the defense contractor. This was a just recompense for what Steinham had done to Libya.

  A good many of Madari’s men had sacrificed, some even paying the ultimate price, to defend the cause. Madari would make sure each and every sacrifice hadn’t been in vain. He would crush Steinham beneath his foot like a cockroach. That would not only teach Steinham but anyone else that to interfere with the affairs of the Libyan revolution and the goals of its sons was futile and foolish.

  Madari now had in his possession the ultimate power in advanced military technology and he planned to use it.

  He looked at his watch and ordered the panel truck driver to wait. Madari then opened the door, dropped to the sidewalk and moved to the back. He rapped twice on the panel door and stepped back as it swung out. Ten men emerged from the truck, half of whom had prototypes in hand. The rest carried conventional weapons, mostly sub-guns, and those with EMP small arms had similar weaponry strapped to their backs in case they had to abandon their primary arsenal.

  Madari didn’t care about how much human life he took. He wasn’t a murderer, anyway; he was a freedom fighter and liberator of his people. All he wanted to do was to make sure these weapons could pass the ultimate test. If Dratshev’s genius proved out, he didn’t see any problem in taking down the powers in Libya. He would burn the palaces and buildings of the elite to the ground, destroying the symbols of tyranny and oppression and replacing the dictatorship with a democratic system of government. Then and only then would he be able to rest and enjoy a long and happy life with Mishka.

  Madari shook himself from his
daydreaming as the last of the troops unloaded. He closed the doors of the panel van and then gestured for them to spread out. They did exactly as they had been drilling for months, one of the men under the watchful eye of the team leader, breaching the fifteen-foot chain-link fence with insulated wire cutters. As it turned out, the fence wasn’t electrified but Madari saw no reason to take chances.

  Once they had a large enough hole, the men began to push through and cross the perimeter, forming a skirmish line and walking across the manicured grounds on approach to the first building. They had nearly reached it and were about to concentrate their fire at very specific points on the ground floor when shots rang out to their left. From a copse of trees on a nearby hill, Madari could make out muzzle-flashes. He recalled from the blueprints that this specific area served as sort of park for the employees.

  Someone had transformed it into a defensive position and with good reason. It provided high ground and adequate cover from conventional weapons fire. It was too bad for whoever had planned the defense that they weren’t up against conventional weapons. Madari shouted at his men to concentrate their firepower on that hill and destroy the defenders. Their efforts were wasted. Madari still had the upper hand.

  The battle with his enemies would end abruptly for them before it really started.

  * * *

  MADARI HAD APPARENTLY forgotten one of the cardinal rules of warfare: never underestimate your enemy.

  The warriors of Phoenix Force were about to hammer that fact home, an especially pleasurable task for Gary Manning. The “guns” firing at the terrorists were actually a series of dummy barrels Manning painstakingly implemented as soon as they arrived at the DCDI facilities. The idea had been to get Madari to turn any EMP weaponry on a relatively benign target. Stony Man Farm had assisted in clearing the area by a radius of several blocks in every direction once the vehicle in which Madari departed the airport in Norfolk had been identified by ICE agents.

  In all likelihood, Madari had thought he would be able to destroy the DCDI facilities unchallenged—he’d completely miscalculated both his capabilities and the resolve of his enemy. Phoenix Force had arrived more than an hour ahead of schedule. Minutes before, Able Team had advised them of their victory at the Cyclops base and the capabilities of the weapons, as well as the exploit that caused the devices to blow apart if fired without sufficient time to recharge.

  Not that it mattered. McCarter’s plan had originally been to not give them the opportunity to use them but Hawkins had come up with the brilliant idea to create a decoy. By setting the terrorists up with something to direct the EMP fire at—a park with trees on a remote area of the grounds totally devoid of human occupation—they could mitigate damage and force Madari’s hand sooner than he’d planned.

  Unfortunately for the terrorists who were now focused on nonexistent threat from the private park, their blind obedience to Madari would nail the lids on their respective coffins. The air shimmered around the barrels of the five weapons, these much smaller than the ones Madari had left with the Norfolk team. The trees ignited and their trunks were instantly charred by weapons, one even being ripped from the ground by the combined force of two beams.

  It was the moment Phoenix Force had awaited and as soon as McCarter gave his signal, the five warriors broke from their various points of concealment and charged the Libyan terror group. They moved as one fluid strike unit—all but James toting MP-5s they held high and at the ready—as they approached the group. The terrorists were so focused on the damage they had done, relishing in what they assumed to be their first victory, they took no notice of the approaching threat.

  Madari was the first to see the oncoming commandos and he waved at his men, screaming for them to do something. They whirled; a few confused, a few with enough awareness to bring their weapons to bear, most taken utterly by surprise. Whatever the reaction of each man, they all hesitated and Phoenix Force seized the advantage. All the death and destruction they had faced the past few days, the utter frustrations of being outwitted at every turn, were channeled into the marksmanship of these five men.

  Hawkins was first to draw blood, sighting on a terrorist holding an EMP and triggering a 3-round burst. The 9 mm Parabellum rounds connected with the terrorist’s chest, punching and lifting him off his feet. He triggered his EMP prototype reflexively and true to Lyons’s claim, the thing burst apart in a cloud of helium gas. Hawkins was already tracking on a new target, getting this one with a double-tap to the head. The man’s face appeared to split vertically, the pressure of the air built up from the path of the bullets cracking bone before the soft lead noses actually struck brain matter.

  As the man crumpled to the slick grass, damp with a recent rain, Hawkins saw the first man he’d shot take a knee and bring a weapon to bear. He couldn’t get there in time so Hawkins did the only thing he could and threw his body to the ground. Rounds from the terrorist’s SMG burned the air so close above him he could hear the reports from their passing.

  Manning, who had just taken another of the terrorists toting an EMP weapon, saw his friend’s plight and broke from his next target to assist Hawkins. The Canadian was a crack shot with a rifle and at this distance he couldn’t miss. He fired two 3-round bursts, the first striking the terrorist in the chest. Just as with Hawkins, the impact seemed to drive the man back but not bring him down permanently.

  Manning swore and went prone before keying up his transmitter. “Body armor! They’re wearing body armor!”

  * * *

  CALVIN JAMES GRIMACED on hearing Manning’s announcement. Body armor was definitely not something on which they’d counted. He wondered a moment why Able Team hadn’t told them about that, but then his reflexes took over and he went to ground. He looked over his right shoulder where he expected to see McCarter on his flank but the Phoenix Force leader was no longer visible.

  James concentrated on the trouble ahead as he disengaged the safety of the M-203 grenade launcher attached to his Colt M-16 Commando. A carbine variant of the standard assault rifle, James preferred the weapon to more conventional hardware like the FN FNC, since he could carry heavy ordnance. In this case, his preference would save the lives of his friends. He snap-aimed through the leaf sight and triggered the M-203. He followed that by ejecting the smoking shell and loading a second. Ten yards estimated to the left and he stroked the trigger a second time.

  The grenades blew on impact. The first HE fell a bit short but it was enough to cause the terrorists to pause for thought. That proved to James’s advantage because the second blast landed amid a cluster of three terrorists who were lost for cover and apparently disoriented by the proximity of the first HE grenade that was still raining grass, mud and other detritus upon them when the second one went up. The force of the blast lifted each of the terrorists from his feet as flame and superheated shrapnel cut through flesh with effect.

  James grinned as he slammed home another shell and prepared to deliver more punishment on the enemies of peace.

  * * *

  ENCIZO AND MCCARTER had both obviously been thinking the same thing and acted in concert on that hunch.

  They broke from the straight approach and crossed roughly parallel to the terrorist position so that the remainder of the team members was out of the line of fire. When they were in suitable range, the pair checked each other with nods and then yanked smokers from their web gear harnesses. The smoke was white and thick as they tossed the canisters with all the force they could muster. It was proving difficult enough for the terrorists to take Phoenix Force in the dark, especially since they didn’t have an equal advantage with night-vision equipment. The blanket of smoke that poured from those canisters only made the situation worse for them.

  As the smoke began to thicken, Encizo and McCarter opened full-auto with their MP-5s. The goal at this point was to keep heads down long enough to give the other three time to beat a hasty
retreat, which they didn’t hesitate to do once they spotted the smoke. By this time the terrorists were utterly disoriented and McCarter knew the time to implement their backup plan was now.

  “Leader to Eagle One,” McCarter said.

  Grimaldi’s voice came back immediately and steady. “Go, Leader.”

  “You have the ball. Repeat, you have the ball.”

  “Roger. I copy. I have the ball.”

  That exchange rang as sweet relief in the ears of the five Phoenix Force warriors who now turned and beat a very hasty retreat from the battleground. The smoke had started to dissipate and the surviving terrorists were about to understand the error of their ways in a most permanent fashion. The next sounds were the blades of the Boeing AH-64D Longbow Apache helicopter as Grimaldi rocketed over the buildings and made a true course toward the massive smoke screen.

  * * *

  THE SIGNATURES OF the terrorists materialized in the APG-78 radar, a modern marvel of targeting technology not fooled by smoke or weather. With verification from McCarter that his team was clear, Grimaldi let loose.

  “Hell hath no fury like 70 mm rockets,” Grimaldi said.

  Half of the dozen Hydra 70 rockets blasted from the M-261 launcher configured with WDU-4A/A APERS warheads. Each rocket weighed almost ten pounds and contained more than two thousand fléchettes weighing in at 20 grains each. The terrorists could provide no defense against such awesome power. When the rockets hit, they blew in a sight nothing less than spectacular to behold. Sparks, flame, mud and bodies were blown apart as more than twelve thousand pieces of shrapnel heated to greater than five hundred degrees burned and tore their way through tender flesh. Not even the body armor they wore could suppress the effects of that power, and especially not when Grimaldi followed with five hundred rounds from the 30 mm cannon.