Suddenly a voice blurted in DeSilva's headset.
'Wait a minute. We see something.' It was Luis, excited exertion obvious in his voice.
'What is your position?' demanded DeSilva.
'He's seen us!' cried Abelardo across the communications frequency.
There was no more.
DeSilva felt a clammy sweat form beneath the second skin of his diving suit.
A heartbeat later, he felt another concussion.
DeSilva swam cautiously in the direction of the forward deck. He avoided the lights amidships. He continued to scan the deep with the IR as he propelled himself along.
'Everyone turn off your diving lights,' he instructed his team of divers. 'Seal off entranceways into the vessel. We've been infiltrated, but we can isolate them. Work together.'
Jesus DeSilva had liked nothing about this mission from its inception.
He and his team had diligently searched the passageways of the sunken ship, which were decorated with ghastly, water-rotted corpses of sailors.
And DeSilva's team had not yet found the nuclear device!
The divers had just completed sectoring off another portion of the ship when the rumbling explosions had alerted DeSilva of this penetration.
Jesus DeSilva wondered how many of his men were already dead. He wondered if the mother ship above was attacked.
Who was attacking? he wondered.
The terrorist diver swam on with extreme caution, scanning the murky depths with the IR. He knew he held a slight advantage over whoever was trying to get into this death ship.
DeSilva's antagonists would not be carrying the IR, he knew. Such instruments were bulky and would hinder the swiftness of their attack.
Yet there was no sign of diving lights since he had ordered his men to black out.
Then he realized the penetrators were attacking blind, relying on the high-intensity lamps to guide them!
DeSilva curtly ordered the lights extinguished. The undersea world became black as pitch.
DeSilva grinned to himself.
Now the attackers would be easy marks for him, with the infrared scanner.
It was time to kill or die.
3
Grimaldi held the big Harrier at a sustained hover thirty feet above the choppy ocean where Mack Bolan had disappeared, almost a half hour before.
The pilot tried to ignore a nagging worry that plagued him.
He and Bolan had survived plenty of action together, on lots of hot missions in both Bolan's old Mafia war and in the Executioner's hits out of Stony Man. He had seen the Mafia-busting Bolan 'die,' then to be reborn as Colonel John Phoenix, under full White House sanction.
Yet through all those battles, the man born Mack Samuel Bolan had never changed.
No way.
Grimaldi knew the blitzing guy better than just about anyone, maybe even better than April Rose, because Jack had seen so much more of the real, unleashed fury of this incredible fighter. Shared combat forged strong bonds of friendship.
The pilot had faith in the big warrior's ability underwater.
But the ace flier had sensed that something was troubling Mack. Grimaldi had seen it plain enough before the communications screwup with the Farm.
He had noticed it during their last mission, too. Of course Bolan was too much of a pro to let it affect his performance. When he fought, he fought. But something was on Bolan's mind.
The pilot was hoping like hell that it would not interfere with this mission.
What the hell was going on with Stony Man?
Where the hell was Phoenix Force?
And all Grimaldi could do was wait, bucking the rowdy air currents of the Atlantic.
He kept trying to reach Stony Man Farm on the radio, alternating the mission red priority frequencies.
Nothing.
Grimaldi itched for action.
He got it.
Three beeps appeared on the radar-scan map console, approaching rapidly from the southeast.
Grimaldi tried to establish radio contact.
There was no response.
Those three fast-approaching beeps could be Phoenix Force, but Grimaldi quickly dismissed that thought.
Phoenix Force was scrambling to this rendezvous at sea from their last Stony Man assignment. Since the five-man combat team was heading here from one point, it didn't make sense to Jack Grimaldi that they would split up in transit. But he couldn't be sure until visual contact was made.
Grimaldi bristled in the Harrier's cockpit.
Phoenix Force should have responded to Grimaldi's attempt at radio contact, but there was the communications foul-up with Stony Man to consider. It might somehow be affecting a linkup between Grimaldi and Phoenix Force.
Three choppers suddenly emerged from the low thunderheads.
Grimaldi's doubts were confirmed as they immediately opened fire on the Harrier.
He was ready for it. He tugged the jet fighter into a sharp evasive maneuver the instant he recognized gunflashes from the three approaching aircraft. He heard a line of bullets thud into his plane's body somewhere behind him.
Grimaldi recognized the approaching gunships as Cobras, probably surplus from the Vietnam War.
They'd been hanging back beyond the Harrier's radar range and were probably carrying replacements for the divers Bolan was now fighting underwater.
The Cobras were equipped with rockets, 40mm cannons and miniguns.
Grimaldi left the hammering of those weapons far behind. The best chopper pilot alive was no match for the Harrier's jet-action capabilities. The Stony pilot could easily have outrun the three helicopters, but he could not desert the area in case Mack surfaced. He had to get the Cobras away from there somehow.
The Harrier screamed into a hard fast bank. He faced the enemy.
The three choppers started to break formation, fanning out to opposite sides. The Cobra in the middle was sailing in to engage the Harrier. The chopper's miniguns blazed twin streams of lead tracers that sailed wide of Grimaldi's plane.
Grimaldi triggered a sidewinding heatseeker that blasted the approaching enemy copter. The chopper exploded into a fireball before plummeting into the ocean.
One down, two to go.
Goddamn, Phoenix Force, where are you? Grimaldi wondered.
He arced the big bird back from the four streams of upcoming fire and rockets from the two remaining aircraft.
Grimaldi caught himself shredding his lower lip between his teeth.
It was time to face the two wild Cobras.
But the two gunships had maneuvered themselves for a run at the Harrier from two directions. Even the
