They made quick work of three of the four Zenith conspirators, and Calvin James left Rushti and his ops to finish what was a brief run and gun through the deep northeast quad of the sprawling control room.
James ignored the blistering autofire, the shouts and curses slashing the air, the sparks leaping in his face, the smoke belching from demolished computer consoles and clinging to his nose, but spared the litter of murdered technicians—maybe twenty-plus—another angry look. Judging from the expressions of shock and outrage they wore as death masks, they never knew what hit them, and most likely never dared suspect the base commander was nothing other than a treacherous viper.
The monitor that framed the action under way in the shuttle hangar grabbing his eye, the black ex-SEAL was one step ahead of Manning and Encizo as he halted in front of the bank of security screens. James felt the rising fury and grim concern, as the three of them watched McCarter and Hawkins leapfrog toward the shuttle’s on-ramp ladder, their assault rifles blazing on the silent screen. A pall of smoke drifting over two bodies down and a dozen or so yards beyond the elevator indicated a grenade had paved the way for the two-man juggernaut. It was something of a miracle—or good old-fashion audacious warrior spirit, he suspected—that had seen them even make it off the elevator, which could have just as easily proved their coffin. Guts aside, gaining access, though, to the crew hatch and whatever they intended to do beyond that, was another matter altogether.
One armed figure, he saw, was spraying autofire from the platform, feet away from the open crew hatch, but looked to be taking hits as he lurched upright, his face contorted in a snarl of pain and rage, then he went back to full-auto sweep of the hangar. Hawkins grabbed cover behind a steel bin, thrust his weapon around the corner, just beneath the fireflies of ricochets sparking overhead, and tagged another Russian hard-man with a precision burst to the chest, kicked him off his feet as if he’d been poleaxed.
They needed to get to that hangar, ASAP, James knew. But how? One look at a larger screen that seemed to swell in front of his eyes with roiling clouds of multicolored fire, and he knew it would be minutes before all that rocket fuel burned itself out, wreckage stopped flying around like razoring asteroids, and other rockets and small arms blew and found someplace to bury themselves. And even after the firestorm died down, what was to say there would be any decent supply of oxygen left to breathe the whole stretch for the three of them to even charge for the elevator bank that would take them straight to their teammate’s six?
As James couldn’t decide if that conflagration on the screen looked like the big bang that had created the universe or the end of the world, two things tore his attention. The shooter was getting the final full touches of a converging stream of autofire from McCarter and Hawkins, spiraling now across the platform before he pitched forward and tumbled down the steps, when the turbofan engines on the delta-winged orbiter ignited.
Turbofan engines? Orbiter? James looked to stern—catching a bitter eyeful of the American flag and United States emblazoned on the fuselage in the process—and, sure enough, he made out the cone-shaped main and maneuvering engines, the aft control thrusters. It sure looked like a space shuttle, the wings slightly different from any American space plane, though, more tapered, something like an F-117, he thought, or maybe not.
Then the black ex-SEAL remembered this was not only Russia—where a lot of the country’s hardware was either borrowed, copied or outright stolen—but the craft was, after all, a so-called reusable launch vehicle. A space truck, actually, in terms of cold, hard reality, but which was designed to fly both as airplane and rocket, takeoff and land—vertical and/or horizontal, only in this case he gathered it would be horizontal—everything to be used again and again. Simply refuel, basic ground maintenance, and off it went. There would be ailerons, rudder, high-octane jet fuel—not sure where to look for that—but which it was a safe bet the craft was topped out, with reserve tanks probably fitted somewhere. The sum total of which was all factored in to get the flying martyrs to wherever the target destination before redlining. Or maybe the missiles were programmed for long-range delivery, but without close-up inspection, without solid intel…
There would also be cutting-edge, on-board navigational computer avionics for autopilot, from radar altimeter to GPS to probably up-to-the-minute Doppler for oncoming frontal patterns, five on-board computers in all for data processing. But that, he recalled, was for the American shuttle. There was no telling what the Russian version carried as far as sophisticated electronics, supercomputers and such. Then, for the enemy’s purposes, he suspected there were stolen coded access programs for its payload, and which, most likely, could be delivered to near bull’s-eye precision in this day and age and where every major power on the global block was looking to shoot light-years ahead of the next competitor. No, this RLV was not fully finished to spec, he guessed, but this particular but bastardized version of a space bus with its twenty-megaton payload was set to fly. As Encizo pointed out, the hangar doors were wide open.
“If you are thinking what I think you are, there is only one way to help your friends.”
Rushti, James saw, held his ground at the end of the aisle.
“That shuttle—or RLV or whatever you call it—can’t be allowed to take off,” Manning said.
“But you state the obvious, comrade.”
James bared his teeth. “You got solutions, let’s hear it and skip the clever-sounding crap.”
“Look carefully at the fifth monitor down to your right and you will find we may have some trouble before—if—we reach the RLV in time.”
James looked and found the problem. About ten armed problems, maybe more, depending on how many shooters were waiting in the other hangar, as small groups of four to six ran to join the main group, which was heading toward an entourage of figures in white labcoats. And the surviving work detail was surrounded by a force of five soldiers.
Long odds, James knew, and big problems.
“Just get us up top,” James barked at Rushti, and fell in between his teammates.
IT WAS A STRANGE SENSATION, wading into the kill zone, armored in the spirit of Carl Lyons.
Hermann Schwarz still wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He knew the Able Team leader wasn’t tagged Ironman just because it sounded tough, like some Hollywood punk claiming false hero status and hanging his name up on the marquee.
Carl Lyons was the real deal.
And, even as he rolled down the opposite side of his partner’s firepoint, Schwarz stole a second to admire the big man’s brazen in-their-face moves, steeled and ready to imitate the Able Team leader’s show of merciless force.
It looked like six savages were left to ring up. They were bobbing and weaving between shouts and growled curses down the line of vehicles, throwing Uzi subgun, pistol and machine pistol fire Lyons’s way. But they were too hasty and either too angry and too fearful of losing their worlds to do anything other than annoy the Able Team leader with rounds that flew so high and wide all of one or two bullets slashed off the man’s cover.
Lyons, though, was a whirlwind of thundering wrath, pounding out the double-fisted barrage of Magnum hell. The hand cannons blasted away at the pack, blowing out windows and windshields and gouging nasty swaths over pricey engine hoods, then Lyons hurled himself around the edge on the far side of the statue and resumed the wild gunslinger routine in what seemed the very next breath.
Time to rock and rumble!
Schwarz trained the assault rifle on the blindside of two goons who were both rising to their full height, madmen now hollering and blazing away with subguns in what looked utter defiance of death and ruin. They were stationary long enough for Lyons to catch one full in the chest and launch him back and several feet over the drive, then Schwarz cut loose with autofire. As he nailed one, then another hardman two vehicles farther downrange, hit another shooter whirling his way and flinging him into a shredded pirouette down the side of a stretch Mercedes limo, he discovered only the big boss men were left standing.
Or rather, one was seeking cover, bellowing out something about a deal. It was hard to tell who was who, what with fiery matériel showering the area and flames dancing shadows down the line, but Schwarz thought that was Yoravky offering Lyons the world to spare his life.
“Five million in cash, if you let us walk out of here!”
“Only five mil?”
“How much do you want?”
“You don’t have enough money.”
The Able Team leader stepped away from the statue, followed up the taunting and unloaded both massive handguns, as Yoravky lurched up between the space in the vehicles. The Russian Don’s machine pistol flamed for a heartbeat or two as he was launched into the open.
One giant jackal down.
One to go.
Franjo Balayko was equally caught in the open air, but torn for a split second as to which threat to turn his Uzi on. He went for Lyons, and Schwarz stitched him with a rising burst up the ribs.
After a long three-sixty sweep, Schwarz decided the dead had gone to meet their eternal judge. He jogged forward to meet Lyons over the body of Balayko.