Stony Man - Triple Strike Part 20

"You guys are completely nuts!" Hammer exploded. "You've got a terrorist hit team coming, and you're acting like they're invited houseguests."

"But they are, Major Hammer, they are," Katz said soothingly. "Lyons and the gang have been looking for them for a long time now. And since they've decided to come to us, they've saved us a trip to see them later and we should be properly grateful."

"Jesus, save me from these people."

"You can sit this one out if you want," Lyons offered. "I don't think we'll be very long."

"Oh, no, you don't," the pilot replied as he turned to dig his AK out from under his bunk. "My mama always told me never to let people shoot at me unless I had something to shoot back with."

"Smart mom," Schwarz said. "It's a good thing that you listened to her."

"Obviously I didn't listen to her well enough or I wouldn't be here with you maniacs."

Just then, a thundering explosion shook their small frame building.

"Show time," Lyons said, smiling. The second blast only emphasized the obvious.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN.

Aviano Air Base

Ali Nadal repressed a smile as a roiling fireball rose over what had been the pilots' ready room at the Aviano base's main hangar. More unbelievers had just been sent to h.e.l.l, and before the hour was out even more would join them. Despite the air base's security having been so dramatically increased, it had been almost child's play to get the bombs in. Not even a highly motivated security guard wanted to search a reeking sewage-pumping track too closely.

Since the terrorist's contacts included several key men in the companies that provided facility maintenance for the base's buildings, it had been easy for Nadal to arrange for the track to come in. He didn't even have to forge the work order or pa.s.s that explained the presence of the vehicle to the gate guards. The smell of the contents of the tank on the truck had done all the rest.

When a second explosion sounded by the base vehicle-dispatch office, it was time for Nadal to make his move. After making sure that his medic's white coat was b.u.t.toned over the blocks of explosives strapped to his body, he started his vehicle and pulled out of the parking lot. With the ambulance's sirens walling and lights flashing, he drove up to the air base's main gate and screeched to a stop in front of the barricade.

"Do you need medical help?" he asked the Italian sergeant in charge of the security detail at the gate.

"You guys sure got here fast enough," the sergeant said when he saw the Aviano hospital logo on the ambulance.

"We were just driving by empty when we saw the explosion." Nadal shrugged. "It was just good luck."

"Not for those poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds in the hangar," the sergeant answered as he hit the b.u.t.ton to raise the barrier. "Go on in and see if you can help."

"Will do."

As soon as the barrier was out of the way, Nadal stomped on the gas pedal and the ambulance shot forward. Once he was out of sight of the main gate, he killed the lights and siren and turned down the street leading to the building housing the American special unit. He knew G.o.d was guiding his footsteps today and nothing could go wrong.

Reaching behind his head, he slid open the win-dow that opened into the rear of the ambulance. "Get ready to go," he told the eight men sitting in the back. "We are almost there. When I crash the truck into the fence, get out and go to the glory that awaits you."

"G.o.d is great." One of the men raised his fist in a defiant salute.

The other suicide bombers weren't dressed as medics. Instead, they wore battle dress and carried AKs, as well as the bundles of explosives strapped around their waists. Even a man willing to die a mar-tyr's death liked to have a little something in his hands when he went out.

"G.o.d is great," Nadal answered, and he was surprised at how calm he felt.

LYONS, BLANCa.n.a.lES, Schwarz and Hammer had all taken cover around the windows and door on the front side of the building. The thin walls wouldn't provide much protection, but it was better than nothing. Katz had his Uzi coveting the two windows in back.

Over the wailing of the alert sirens and the clamor of emergency vehicles rushing to aid the wounded, they heard the roar of an engine rapidly approaching. "Company's coming," Lyons called out.

Schwarz flicked his M-16/M-203 combo off safe and prepared to open the party with a little long-range fire. The M-20Ys 40 mm round was antipersonnel, but it also did wonders against thin-skinned vehicles. If the terrorists showed up in an armored car, though, they'd be in trouble.

When a red-and-white vehicle rounded the comer a hundred yards away, he smiled as he drew down on it.

"For Christ's sake," Hammer shouted, "don't shoot. It's an ambulance!"

Schwarz ignored him and triggered the M-203 anyway. They hadn't requested medical a.s.sistance, and there was no reason for an ambulance to be rac-ing toward them. If it did turn out to be legitimate, the U.S. government could always buy the hospital a new one. Right now, though, ambulance or not, he didn't feel like taking any chances with it.

The 40 mm grenade arched out and connected with the middle of the vehicle's grille. The explosion blasted the radiator to fragments and blew the hood up, covering the windshield. Though unable to see, the driver kept on coming.

Sliding the breech of his grenade launcher open, Schwarz loaded another round, snapped it shut and had the weapon raised in an instant. This time, he sent the grenade into the right front tire.

The explosion shredded the tire. The robber rem-nants rolled off the tim and dropped the vehicle down onto the steel wheel. This jerked the ambulance to the right, and the wheel smashed into the curb, bending it and dropping the vehicle onto its frame. The ambulance came to a skidding halt well short of the chain-link fence.

Before the vehicle stopped rolling, the back doors were flung open and half a dozen men stormed out, AKs and Beretta subguns blazing in their hands as they charged the fence.

As Schwarz ducked to escape the storm of fire, he thumbed the selector switch on his M-16 back to full-auto and sent a short burst into the center body ma.s.s of the lead gunman. To his complete surprise, the terrorist vanished in a blinding flash and a puff of dirty black smoke and red spray.

Schwarz instinctively ducked, and the shrapnel pa.s.sed over his head. "They're suicide bombers!" he shouted.

Hearing the warning, Lyons shifted his point of aim to send his .357 Magnum slug into his target's belly. The best way to stop bombers was to detonate their explosive packages far enough away to keep out of the blast radius.

Lyons's heavy slug connected, and the gunman disappeared. Unfortunately a large section of the chain-link fence diasappeared along with him as one of the fence posts was blown over. Seeing the gap in the fence, the remaining terrorists raced toward it.

From his window position, Hammer was snapping out 3-round bursts from his captured AK. Right after one of his bursts cut the legs out from under one of the terrorists, the bolt of his AK locked back on an empty magazine. When he ducked to change magazines, the man escaped by crawling for cover behind the team's Lancia sedan.

When the Air Force major got into his firing position, he found himself trading bursts with the man behind the car. when neither one of them could score on the other from cover, the terrorist struggled up to get a better shot. Hammer hit him with a long burst that ended with another detonation. Fortunately, most of the shrapnel was absorbed by the Lancia.

A frustrated Nadal watched his a.s.sault quickly falling apart. He had expected the Yankees to run for their lives from his human bombs. But that wasn't what they were doing. They were fighting like men possessed and not quailing like the cowards he knew them to be.

To make things worse, since the ambulance hadn't~ been able to crash through the fence, his men were being forced to try to fight their way into the compound through only two entrances-the gate and the one hole that had been blown in the wire.

Only two of his men were on their feet when Na-dal made his decision that the time had come for him to kill the Yankees himself. Yelling for the two gun-men to rush the hole in the fence, he jumped out from behind the fender of the ambulance and dashed for the gate.

With his left hand holding the detonator and his right wrapped around the pistol grip of his Beretta subgun, he raced across the open ground screaming "G.o.d is great!"

As he ran, he saw a big blond man step out into the open door of the building with a pistol in his hand. The Yankee showed no fear as he sighted the pistol. The calmness of his enemy infuriated Nadal, and he screamed his defiance right as the Yankee fired.

The .357 round took him in the face, on the right side of his nose, and blew his brains out the back of his skull. A twitch of dying nerves pressed his hand against the detonator and the ten pounds of RDX detonated with a bright pink-tinged flash.

Nadal hadn't even made it to the gate, and he didn't hear the other two explosions that marked the deaths of the last of his suicide squad.

"Is EVERYONE OKAY?" Katz asked.

"Nothing major," Lyons said as he examined a couple of minor shrapnel hits. Even slowed by the fence, some of the fragments had still had the power to cut.

"I hope we've seen the last of these guys," Schwarz said as he looked over at the wreckage of the team's Lancia. "Look what they did to our car. I was really beginning to like that thing. We'll have to see if we can get another one."

"We've seen the last of them in human form at least," Lyons declared. "Bits and chunks of meat and things aren't likely to cause us much more trouble."

"Unless they don't get this mess cleaned up quickly enough," Blanca.n.a.les added. "It gets a little too warm around here for this to lay in the sun very long."

Hammer looked a little green around the gills.

Shooting people was one thing; seeing them explode was another. "Can I be excused now, guys?" he asked plaintively. "I think I've enjoyed just about all of this that I can stand. I feel a distinct urge to vomit."

"Go ahead." Biancahales sounded sincerely sym-pathetic. "We understand. It happens to all of us at first. You'll get used to it."

"Jesus, I sure hope not."

"Heads up, guys!" Schwarz shouted when he caught the sound of more vehicles racing toward them.

Rounding the comer came three jeeps of Air Po-Lice, their weapons at the ready.

"Not those clowns again," Schwarz moaned when he recognized who they were. "I'm in no mood to sit in their jail again until the Farm can spring me."

"That's not going to be a problem this time." Katzenelenbogen sounded determined. "Ground your weapons, and I'll talk to whoever's in charge."

Katz walked out through the blasted hole in the chain-link fence and stepped over the remains of a suicide bomber to meet the security vehicles. As he had expected, the officer in charge was none other than Colonel Waters, the senior U.S. officer at Avi-ano. As a professional chair-borne warrior, the Air Force colonel wasn't well prepared to deal with the realities of combat he was facing.

The ground in front of the CP building looked like someone had driven a couple of cows into a spinning airplane propeller. Most of the bleeding chunks of meat weren't even recognizable as having ever been human. The odd dismembered arm with a hand still attached to it was a dead giveaway, however.

"I see that they hit you, too," Waters said, his eyes avoiding the pool of blood at his feet. "Obviously this was a diversion attack designed to keep us from-"

"We were the real target," Katz cut him off abruptly. "Not the air base. The bombs at your hangars were a diversion so your security force would let the ambulance inside the perimeter without searching it."

The colonel realized where this conversation was going and tried to recover. "But it was a real emergency," he bleated. "We had causalities that needed immediate medical a.s.sistance. No one ever thought that the terrorists would use an ambulance to get through the gate."

"Did you think that they were going to drive up in armored vehicles flying the Palestinian flag?"

"But," Waters repeated, "they were in an ambulance."

"You might want to have a talk with your chief security officer about your vehicle-admission proce-dures before someone from the White House does."

The colonel blanched. "Yes, sir," he said.

"And now, if you're through here, Colonel, I need to file my report on this incident."

"Of course, sir."

On the way back to his vehicle, Colonel Waters was very careful about where he put his feet.

Stony Man Farm FOR A CHANGE, the entire staff of the computer room was on duty when Katzenelenbogen called in to re-port the suicide attack on the CP. They had all caught up on their sleep and wanted to be in on what they hoped would be the final hours of the mission.

"Are you all okay?" Barbara Price asked after Katz gave his report.

"The Ironman and Pol picked up a few shrapnel nicks," Katz reported, "but nothing serious, and we can take care of it here." "That's good news."

"The best news," Katz said, "is that I think that's the end of the Lebanese's operation. If he had to resort to using suicide bombers, that tells me that he didn't have anything left to use against us. Now we can devote all of our energy to supporting the Stony Man team." "Are you still functional, then?" Price asked. "We've got a bunch of new holes in the walls, and the windows will never be the same, but it appears that none of our comm gear was damaged. We can still coordinate the operation from here."

Knowing that the CP was still in operation, Price switched subjects. The second Aviano attack had just become old business. "What's the status on the air option?"

Katz glanced at his watch. "Jack's approaching the LZ, and the guys should be on board within the next ten minutes or so."

"Good," she said. "Hunt has a new location where the Iranians have stopped, and they should get on it as soon as they can."

"Great," Katz replied. 'Tll pa.s.s that on as soon as they're in the air. Maybe we can actually get this thing wrapped up today." "Cross your fingers."

'Tve got everything but my ears crossed."

"Just as long as it's not your wires that you have crossed."

"Never happen." Katz laughed at her pun. Laughs had been hard to come by lately and he liked how it felt.

Bosnia AFFER A GROUND-HUGGING, tree-hopping flight across half of Bosnia, Grimaldi was vectored into the landing zone by radio. The pilot spotted Hawkins standing in a clearing beside a road and clicked in his throat mike. "Got your Lima Zulu," he radioed. "Bring it on down," McCarter answered.

Grimaldi flared out and brought the chopper down, but kept the rotors spinning. "Come on, guys, come on!" he radioed. "We don't have all day."

"Keep calm, Flyboy," McCarter sent back. "We have to grab our gear."

"Katz is on the horn for you." Grimaldi held out a headset when Bolan entered the c.o.c.kpit.

"Hunt has come up with a location you need to check out," Katz said. "The satellite shows that the target trucks have been parked there for some time now."

"Send it."

Bolan marked the coordinates on his map and pa.s.sed it over to Grimaldi. "Here's the target this time."

McCarter slid into the copilot's seat and entered the coordinates into the navigation computer. "Let's do it."

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT.

Spivak, Bosnia