Stony Man Farm.
Under attack.
Mack Bolan.
Out there in the night, and if the Executioner did not obey an order from the Man there would damn well be a liquidation order issued on Phoenix by his own government.
The men of Able Team.
Lyons, Schwarz and Blancanales had already bought it, or soon would, because Stony Man could not warn them of a trap set by The Dragon.
And Hal Brognola.
Who could not help.
He had to get to Stony Man Farm as quickly as possible. He used a White House phone to call April Rose.
'April, it's Hal. I'm coming in.' That was all he said before he hung up.
Able Team had trudged their way across the unforgiving Himalayan rocks for five hard days, following the directions of a source they were not sure they could trust in the Pakistani frontier settlement of Peshawar.
Now Able Team was ready to hit.
The Dragon's lair continued the straight rise of a deep gorge that widened into a craggy valley on either side of the Stony warriors. The men crouched against slablike rock at the base of the gorge several hundred feet below the castle.
It was midmorning but an earlier reconnaissance gave the three men reason to believe that this place, the wall above the gorge, was the enemy's weakest point since they expected no attack up the face of the gorge.
The enemy did not know that Carl Lyons had been an avid climber in the Sierra Nevadas. Rosario 'Politician' Blancanales and Hermann 'Gadgets' Schwarz, the Bolan sidekicks from Nam, had undergone intensive mountain-climbing training during the early days of the Stony Man program.
And all three men were in excellent physical condition.
Able Team's scouting trip of The Dragon's castle and terrain also convinced them of the urgency to strike
There had been no sign of activity in or around the castle.
It was as if The Dragon, whoever the hell he was, had been alerted or had for some other reason pulled his forces out of the area.
The ancient castle had originally been owned by some long-forgotten warlord. His legacy had found use today at the hands of someone called The Dragon, who trafficked in mass death and destruction for blood money.
The Dragon had to be taken out. The action was authorized by Stony Man.
Able Team must penetrate the castle, but they had to confirm that the enemy had fled. If they had pulled out, Able Team would scramble damn fast to pick up any trail The Dragon might have left.
Each team member was armed with a shoulder-holstered MAC-10 submachine gun and had an M-16 strapped across his back. They were each equipped with climbing picks, ropes and accessories that they unpacked.
'Wonder why you couldn't reach the contact in New Delhi on that radio,' Lyons whispered with a nod to the shortwave set Schwarz was carrying.
'Something is going down,' said Gadgets. 'Our contact has the jitters.''
'He'd answer if Stony Man had any messages for us,' said Blancanales.
'What an optimist,' grunted Lyons. 'All right, men. Let's do it and do it right.'
Mack Bolan's Able Team broke off all conversation.
They commenced climbing the face of the gorge.
Not knowing what they would find.
19
Grimaldi brought the Hughes chopper through the low cloud cover. The clouds would mute sounds of the helicopter's approach.
Bolan and Grimaldi had donned infrared Nite-finder eye shields.
In a night action, the Executioner always tried to think like the enemy.
What was the only conceivably vulnerable point on the Farm, near the perimeter?
'Come in low over the airfield from the north,' Bolan instructed the pilot.
Grimaldi tugged the stick to bring the copter in at a low banking approach.
The night suddenly boomed.
The sky lit up briefly as a blast erupted below.
As Grimaldi sailed in, Bolan heard the crackle of automatic-weapons fire and claps from two more HEs.
The chopper emerged from the clouds. Grimaldi piloted them in low enough for the Nitefinders to reveal that the assault had just begun.
The airfield shimmered in an eerie golden glow from the flaming pile of junk that had moments earlier been a helicopter on the runway.
The firelight inadvertently cast flickering illumination on two squads of commandos Bolan could see advancing on the hangars in a wedgelike formation. Two of the commandos were in the process of reloading portable grenade launchers. The six infiltrators charged across the clearing separating the tree line from the hangars.
The illumination was enough for a dozen security troops, waiting behind the hangars, to more clearly see the infiltrators and open up with M-16s.
Bolan made out two members of Phoenix Force, Keio Ohara and Gary Manning, flanking off to either side of the Farm security forces, opening fire with their automatic weapons to catch the commando infiltrators from two new angles of fire.
The commando squads hastily fanned away from each other as the barrage cut down the two point- men.
One of the invaders triggered his grenade launcher.
The side of one hangar disintegrated into a sheet of flame as bodies of soldiers rained to the ground.
Ohara and Manning directed fierce streams of automatic fire at the source of the HE. Another commando spun every which way at once as his head and guts exploded.
The three surviving infiltrators fell back to regroup.
The Hughes chopper zipped overhead with Bolan bracing himself in the open door of the bubble front.
The Executioner unleashed a rain of death from the M-16 Grimaldi always kept in the chopper.
Two of the darting commandos kept on moving, even after the stream of 5.56mm fire decapitated them, sending chunks of their skulls and brains splashing into the air ahead of them.
The third commando had time to turn and look up at the Hughes zooming by, twenty feet above his head. He had time to start tracking the Uzi upward.
But he had time to do nothing else. The downdraft from the rotors made standing unsteady.
Bolan fired another burst from the M-16, and the guy was poleaxed backward off his feet with a shocked expression and no chest.
The troops around the hangars held their fire as the Hughes climbed and pulled away.
'Swing us around the southwest perimeter and back along the eastern side,' Bolan instructed the ace pilot.
Grimaldi did that. It took all of thirty seconds for the sweep, for Bolan to analyze Al Miller's strategy.
The infiltrators on the ground simply froze in place amid the shadowy shapes of trees, shrubs and changes in the terrain as the Hughes skimmed by overhead. They had no way of knowing the chopper's occupants were
