Boxes and bales stacked on steel racks formed thick walls twelve feet high. Aisles as wide as a fork lift ran the length and width of the building. A dim exit light revealed a dead man near the door to the alley. He had taken a shotgun blast in the face. Most of his head was gone.
"Hector!" Lyons called out. "Where are you? Who's on your side? Which ones are the enemy?"
"Here!" Hector shouted from the far side of the warehouse. Shots echoed, the heavy blast of the shotgun, the ripping sound of the M-16. There were the pops of pistols. Then the blast of the shotgun again.
Hector ran toward them. He half carried a young Latino, about twenty years old. Blancanales braced his pistol hand with his other hand, fired round after round over their heads, into the shadows behind them.
Lyons saw someone move in another aisle. He saw the silhouette of an M-16 in a man's hand.
"Freeze!" Lyons shouted.
The man spun, but before he could aim the M-16, a stream of slugs ripped through his chest, spraying blood behind him. He was dead before he fell.
Hector gave the shotgun to Blancanales, eased his son to the floor. The boy's clothes were drenched with blood from two superficial wounds.
"I killed one of them. My son says there is only one other..."
"With the M-16? He's dead."
"And there is a friend of my son's back there, wounded very badly."
"A doctor's on the way," Lyons told him. "Now the answers."
In minutes, the alley and filthy streets around the warehouse looked like an FBI parking lot. But by that time, Able Team already had information that was to send them out of Miami, and far to the North.
2
Through the Starlite scope, its electronics turning the moonless night into day, Lyons watched them unload explosives.
Two men standing in the motor launch lifted each case by its rope handles, swung it onto the floating dock. The cases were wide and flat, too heavy for the man on the dock to carry. He dragged the cases one after another into the boathouse, then ran back for the next one. At the far end of the boathouse, a fourth man crouched against the wall, his M-16 pointed at the silent fields and marshes of the North Carolina coast. In the distance, more than a mile from the stagnant inlet, were brush-covered foothills, then forest. There were no lights, no highways, only the dirt road cutting through the salt marshes.
Lyons checked the safety on his rifle. He wanted no accident. This was not an ambush. If it had been, the four men would have been dead the moment the boat touched the dock. Quick as counting one, two, three, four. But Lyons was well aware that killing these four would not stop the terrorists in New York City.
He took his eye from the eyepiece, half turned to glance behind him. No headlights approaching. At some time during the night, however, a truck would come for those crates.
On the launch, the men stopped. Lyons watched one of them light a cigarette. Through the scope, the match flare looked like a spotlight on the man's face. The muffled engine started, and the launch chugged away. Only the man on the dock and the guard with the M-16 remained.
His radio hand-set clicked twice. Lyons acknowledged Blancanales' signal with a single click. He couldn't chance any words. Blancanales hid somewhere near the dock, his night-suited and black-faced form invisible in the tall weeds. The clicks to Lyons meant he was ready and waiting. And with luck...
Forget luck, Lyons told himself. Organization, discipline and patience: Lyons repeated the words as he searched the night for headlights. It wasn't luck that got us to this boathouse.
Back in Miami, Hector and his son Alfonso had confessed in the aftermath of the firefight that they had sold a rusting freighter to a smuggler running dope from the Caribbean to the United States. But the smuggler was unknown to the international drug gangs. Until the deal blew up in his face, Hector had thought the operation was a Federal scam to trap big-time dealers. Alfonso told him he had overheard a crewman say "Carolina."
This information had prompted Gadgets to focus his wizardry on the part of the Carolina coast where they were now encamped. He had electronically located a high-powered transmitter in this area, which was in communication with both New York City and a freighter off the coast, presumably the smugglers'.
In pinpointing the location of the transmitter, he had intercepted a coded message from the freighter to the boathouse. Though they couldn't break the code, the Able Team hoped it meant a delivery.
Lyons and Blancanales had waited near the coastline until dark, then hiked two miles through the marshes and fields, crawling the last few hundred yards. Gadgets stayed at the motel command' center to monitor the frequencies for any communications.
In the field, Lyons took a position on a sandbank where he could watch both the boathouse and the road. Blancanales took a forward position where he would have cover from gunfire, but still be within a few steps of the dock. When the truck came to carry those crates of explosives to New York City, they would try to take the terrorists alive for interrogation. At least one of them.
Assuming the men in the boathousewere members of the terrorist group, Lyons thought. Assuming therewas plastic explosive in the crates. If we've gone to all this trouble just to grab some dopers...
The blast stunned him like a hammer-blow to his head. Lyons instinctively covered himself as the rising fireball spewed bits and pieces of debris into the sky. It took him only a second to realize that the boathouse was gone.
"Rosario!" Lyons shouted. He ran to where the boathouse had been, thrashed through the tall weeds. "Rosario! You still here? You alive?"
The weeds burned in a dozen places, smoke swirling around Lyons as he searched for his friend. He found Blancanales sprawled behind a low mound near the water's edge. He was only semi-conscious, bleeding from a scalp wound.
Lyons dragged him a hundred yards along the edge of the inlet. It had been a big explosion, maybe a hundred pounds of C-4, but that accounted for only one of the crates the men had unloaded. He found an embankment that would protect them if any more of the explosives went off. He gently put Blancanales down.
"Hey, Rosario. Can you hear me?"
Blancanales looked at him, grinned. He ran his hand across his forehead, gauging the amount of blood, and said nothing.
"Don't sweat it, Politician. Your brains are still in your head. Can you hear?"
"Sort of." Blancanales tried to sit up, groaned, lay back. "Ohhhh, do I hurt." He closed his eyes, then very slowly sat up. "Something went wrong, didn't it?"
Flames lit the sky. "Yeah, and now we know what they had in those boxes, don't we?" smiled Lyons. "I've heard of high-powered dope, but this is ridiculous."
Blancanales glanced over the top of the embankment and surveyed the scene. "We get one good break, and now it's back to zero."
"Don't knock our luck, Rosario. At least you're alive."
An FBI helicopter shuttled them back to the ocean-front motel on the outskirts of a small town, hovering for a moment while Lyons and Blancanales carefully jumped the few feet to the sand on the dark beach. Then the chopper roared up and away, returning to the scene of the blast where teams of Federal agents searched the ashes.
They crossed the deserted beach to Mitch Anders' improvised office. His Emergency Task Force had commandeered the motel's twenty rooms.
"What happened out there?" Anders asked sternly. At two-thirty in the morning, he was freshly shaved and cologned and wore a three-piece suit.
Mud from the inlet's banks caked both Lyons and Blancanales. The blood from Blancanales' forehead ran down his face, mixing with the mud. They didn't answer immediately. Lyons eased himself into the cushions of the motel-modern chair, closed his eyes. He hadn't slept in three days.