Terror Descending. Don Pendleton
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cinder-block building; streamers of light escaped from the canvas sheet blocking the wide front door. More fifty-five-gallon drums were situated under a canvas awning, along with a small electric generator. The Stony Man commandos marked it as the garage. Then they spotted another canvas lump and identified it as the proper size and shape for a heavy machine gun, or maybe an auto-mortar. However, there was no way of telling where they were.
A small wooden shack was set off by itself, clearly identifying it as the outhouse. Several yards distant was a bare metal flagpole, the tattered remains of a windsock dangling limply. Even though it was reduced to rags, the old cloth could still give an incoming plane vital information on wind direction.
Just past the flagpole, cutting across the cleared area, was a wide strip of concrete, as incongruous a sight as a buffalo in a ballet. Smooth and flat, the disguised airstrip reached out of sight, and the members of Phoenix Force nodded in admiration at the sight of pictures of more plants and rocks painted onto the landing strip. Clever. More protection from visual tracking. The team could only see the concrete because of the angle and the silvery moonlight. Otherwise, it would have been nearly invisible.
“Hidden in plain sight,” Hawkins muttered, shifting his grip on the MP-5 to screw on an acoustic sound suppressor. “Same as the Airwolves.”
“How come so many criminals are smart enough to make more money honestly, than they ever would as crooks?” Encizo asked softly, attaching a suppressor to his own machine gun.
“Irony?” Manning replied coolly, now moving the crosshairs to mark his targets.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” James replied, sliding a fat 40 mm shell into the launcher attached under the main barrel of his MP-5 weapon. His heart was beating hard in his chest, and the soldier tried his best to regain a professional calm.
“Gary, get me a number on the runway,” McCarter asked, tucking his monocular into a cushioned pouch on his web belt.
“In a second,” Manning replied. Focusing the telescopic sights of the Barrett on the extreme end of the clear strip of land, the tiny digital display on the bottom of the scope gave him the precise distance. Now sweeping the crosshairs to the other end, he added the two readings.
“Ten thousand four hundred and nine feet,” Manning replied grimly, lowering the sniper rifle. “More than enough for a B-52 to land.”
“Or anything else this side of a NASA space shuttle,” Encizo agreed, leveling his MP-5. “Doesn’t mean they’re the terrorists, though. Might just be some drug smugglers.”
“David, want me to put a 40 mm shell into the fuel drums and set the place on fire?” Hawkins asked, resting a finger on the trigger of the grenade launcher.
“Think they’re stupid enough to store the fuel by itself,” McCarter asked skeptically, “and not mixed with the water supply to retard any fires?”
Lowering the weapon, Encizo almost smiled. “Maybe. We’ve seen it done before.”
Reluctantly, McCarter had to concede the point. A few years ago, Phoenix Force had encountered a splinter group of the Libyan Army of God and had put a warning shot into the fuel depot merely to start a blaze as a distraction. However, the previously unknown stockpile of ten thousand gallons of high-octane aviation fuel ignited, blowing the whole base off the map in a writhing fireball of gargantuan size. A genuine one-shot battle. It was a freak event, but the team members remembered it fondly.
The soft purr of a single-engine plane suddenly came from the north.
“That sounds like a Cessna,” Hawkins announced.
“From the sound of those two engines it can’t be much larger than a Skywagon or a Crusader,” James said with a scowl.
“Check the hills to the west,” McCarter brusquely ordered over the throat mike.
“Yep, good call, David. There’s activity in those foothills,” Encizo said, dialing for maximum computer augmentation on the monocular.
“Reinforcements?” Manning asked, swinging the ungainly Barrett in that direction and looking through the nightscope.
“No, just one guy…and he’s looking through Zeist field glasses at the airfield.”
Field glasses? Those were oversize binoculars much too heavy to carry into combat. They were only for a fixed observation point. “Think he’s Mexican Intelligence or CIA?” James asked tersely, his face lost in the cathedral of shadows caused by the moonlight through the tall sage plants.
“There’s no camera and no radio, and he’s got what looks like a…yes, that’s a Barrett Fifty slung across his back,” Encizo declared. “And there’s a Victory motorcycle parked nearby.”
“That’s no cop,” Hawkins stated.
“Not unless he recently won the lottery,” McCarter agreed with conviction. The Victory motorcycle was an expensive bike, mostly because it was one of the best in the world, which made it highly unlikely the man was a law-enforcement agent. However, the presence of the deadly Barrett was the clincher. There was no reason at all for any cop to be carrying a sniper rifle on a stakeout. The man had to be a guard, set to watch the airfield. And the only logical reason for that was to see who arrived to look for the Airwolves and to strike them down from above like Zeus, which might be to the Stony Man team’s advantage.
“Want me to take him out?” Manning asked coolly, lifting the Barrett into a firing stance.
“Not yet, we’re going to burn the rope,” McCarter said, activating the transceiver on his belt. “Rock House, this is Firebird, come in.”
“Roger, Firebird, this is Speed Racer,” a familiar voice replied. “Read you loud and clear. Ten-four.”
“Speed Racer, we need a blanket and right now,” McCarter stated roughly. “We’ve got incoming, and don’t want any outgoing. You savvy?”
There was a brief moment of static.
“Confirm, Firebird,” Kurtzman answered. “I see your Zeus on my Nasty sky eye.”
Nasty. That was this month’s code for the NSA. “Keep him safe and secure in case he rabbits. Confirm?”
“Roger wilco. Consider him deadlocked. Blanket ready to go. Duration?”
“Two should do. Repeat, two is fine.” Saying it twice, meant to hold the blanket for only half the time. If anybody was listening in, that would keep them off the air for two hours, while Phoenix Force could use the radio again in an hour. Every little bit helped.
“Confirm, Firebird. When do you want it delivered?”
“At your earliest convenience, Speed Racer,” McCarter said, but instantly a howling began to wail from his earbuds, and every member of the team involuntarily flinched, their hands racing to kill the com link.
Across the entire peninsula, no radio signals were going anywhere, every transmission killed by the powerful jamming field broadcast by Kurtzman from the equipment on board the Hercules. Not even cell phones would operate due to the additional interference of the Stony Man satellite in high Earth orbit.
Just then, a sleek Cessna Skywagon flew past the airfield, the pilot tripping the engines as identification. Down on the concrete airstrip, a bearded man waved a halogen flashlight and suddenly a double string of red lights appeared, edging both sides of the concrete to give the pilot a visual reference for a landing.
Swinging around, the Skywagon soon returned and touched down lightly, rolling to a stop near the rusty metal pole and bedraggled windsock.
Immediately a trio of armed men exited the cinder-block building. One of them was morbidly obese, while the other two resembled weightlifters, their short-sleeved shirts deliberately cut to give their bulging arms some much needed room. The pilot climbed down from the cockpit of the plane, obviously dressed for comfort in a loud Hawaiian shirt, clam-digger shorts and white deck shoes.
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