Target Acquisition by Don Pendleton

Author:Don Pendleton [Pendleton, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Worldwide Library
Published: 2010-06-04T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Blood splashed hot in his mouth as McCarter’s bottom lip was impaled by his own teeth. Again he used the energy to roll with the blow and disengage. He gagged on his blood and his pain, flipping over backward and coming to his feet.

He swooned and fell back. He landed hard on his butt with a jar that seemed to loosen the teeth in his head. He blinked in surprise. He was sitting up higher than the floor. He reached questioningly behind him and was rewarded. He was on a flight of stairs.

McCarter turned and scrambled up them, racing so fast that his head butted against the door. With trembling fingers he yanked at the knob.

It was locked.

McCarter felt around the walls, found what he was looking for and the lights came on as he flicked the switch. McCarter blinked in the sudden illumination and looked behind him. Abdulla was at the bottom of the staircase, a jagged-ended broom handle in his fists. The left side of his face was a long purple bruise where McCarter had struck him with his own club, swelling the eye shut.

Abdulla began to slowly climb the steps. His eyes never left McCarter’s for an instant. “You’re mine now, infidel,” he growled. “I’m gonna jam this stick up your ass.”

“I don’t speak Arabic,” McCarter replied. “But that didn’t sound good.”

Abdulla raced up the last few steps and jabbed the splintered end of the stick forward in an attempt to stab McCarter. McCarter dodged to the side and kicked Abdulla in the face. Weakened, the man tumbled down the stairs rolling end over end.

The man bounced once at a wrong angle and McCarter heard the snap of the Saudi’s neck as it broke. The terrorist lieutenant plopped into an unceremonious pile of tangled limbs at the bottom of the stairs.

McCarter blinked in surprise. The kill had been almost accidental; it was anticlimactic after the struggle he had endured. Sometimes death wasn’t cinematic, he realized; sometimes you were just glad the son of a bitch was dead.

He turned and scrambled for the door. The clock was ticking fast now with his soft probe turned deadly. McCarter and the rest of Phoenix Force had an appointment on a Caribbean island.

Sudanese border, Libya

THE SUN WAS GOING DOWN on the brutal badlands. Pockets of rubble and bomb craters stretched from the bounty hunter’s position toward the horizon. They stank from waiting in the heat and their sweat made them feel sticky and cranky.

Stony Man had followed one of the emir’s intelligence leads to the home of a notorious al Qaeda cell. Now T. J. Hawkins and Stony Man pilot Charlie Mott wore Kevlar hauberks with ceramic plate inserts, making waiting in the blistering heat a hot, itchy hell. Hawkins looked around, sucking water from a clear plastic tube extending from a bladder on his back. The Kevlar was good stuff, police not military, but good enough.

Instead of the cut-down VTOL gunship JSOC had promised, however, they were sitting in a shitty little piece of history dating back to the first counterinsurgency actions.

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