Wildfire (54 page)

"How the hell do you think you're gonna take him on with only one good hand?" Paxton demanded. "You saw those tapes from that training center. Surgery or not, that bastard's got reflexes like a goddamned cat."

"Not a problem." Lighthouse smiled with a calm expression in his eyes as he turned to face Maas. "I picked up a couple of new tricks from Snoopy."

"Snoopy!? What're you talking about? Takahara can't fight worth shit," Paxton rasped, glaring furiously at Maas as he tried to pull the arrow out of the cast, and nearly fainted from the resulting pain.

'Yeah, I know." Lightstone nodded. "That's why he cheats."

"And the radio,
Herr
Lightstone," Maas added in a cheerful, anticipatory voice, having moved closer to the two agents so that he was now less than twenty feet away, his cold blue eyes focused intently on the movements of his chosen adversary.

Lightstone picked up the radio and tossed it in the German counter-terrorist's direction. Then he walked over and picked up Alex Chareaux's knife, and started toward Maas, when he spotted the movement. He turned back with a gentle and pleasant smile on his face.

"Hold it a minute, Maas," he said over his shoulder, "we've got a non-combatant in the way."

Reaching down, Henry Lightstone scooped up the small Cat Island turtle, walked over, and handed it to Paxton.

"My lucky turtle," he said. "Keep your eyes on it." And then, saying each word slowly and distinctly: "I mean it,
keep your eyes on it."

Paxton's eyes were barely focusing, but he could see enough to understand what his wild-card agent friend was up to. 'You really think it'll work?"

"We didn't exactly
run
ten miles." Lightstone shrugged. "But I figure it all amounts to pretty much the same thing."

"Hey, Maas, you asshole," Paxton called out in a slurred voice, keeping his eyes focused as best he could on the approaching counter-terrorist, "whadda you think about a guy wants to pay off a debt with an endangered turtle he stole from a priest's tomb? That the kind of hero you want to fight?"

"I think you Americans are much too soft when it comes to animals," the German said indifferently as he tossed aside the bow and arrows, quickly disassembled and discarded his pistol, and then drew a deadly sharp fighting knife from his belt sheath. He held the blade up so that the sun glittered off its sharpened edge. "It is a failing,
Herr
Paxton. And in your case, a fatal one. After I kill
Herr
Lightstone, I will kill you and the turtle also, to prove that it is not such a good thing to be soft and weak."

"You hear that, buddy?" Paxton mumbled down at the struggling turtle. "Now we're both on the endangered list." Then he looked up at Lightstone again.

"Okay, Henry," Paxton rasped, his eyes glassy, "the turtle and I are both rooting for you. Tear the bastard's heart out."

Henry Lightstone walked forward until he was about ten feet away from the grinning ICER assault team leader.

"You ready for this, Maas?"

"Ja,
I am ready. I have waited for this moment for a long time."

"Good." Lightstone nodded as he squatted down and casually tossed Chareaux's knife aside. "Then I hope you enjoy it."

Gerd Maas blinked in momentary confusion.

"Stand up and pick up the knife," he ordered.

"No, I don't think so." Lightstone smiled, looking up into the cold blue eyes of the now furious counterterrorist.

"What is this? Are you hurt so bad you cannot fight?"

"No, I can fight just fine."

"What is it then? You are a coward?" Maas demanded accusingly.

"No, not really."

"Then you must get up and pick up the knife, or I will kill your friend."

"No, Maas, I don't think you're going to do that either. You see, Paxton and I made us a little deal a while back. The deal is, he and I have to chase the bad guys though ten miles of swamp land, or whatever." Lightstone waved his hand to indicate that the scrub brush of Cat Island would be an acceptable substitute. "And then, after we do that, he and I get to sit down and pop a beer—only, see, we forgot to bring the beer—"

"Get up,
Herr
Lightstone, or I kill you now," Maas warned in a hoarse voice, his blue eyes deadly cold.

"—while Stoner finishes the job."

"Ah, but your big friend Stoner is no longer—" Maas started to say. But then a sudden sense of understanding flashed in his eyes, and he twisted away just in time to avoid a lunging tackle by the singed, bloodied, and barely conscious ex-Raider.

"Ha! You think . . ." Maas started to laugh, but then whirled back around with inhumanly quick reflexes, bringing the knife around into an upward thrust as he sensed Lightstone coming in fast.

The knife blade was only inches from Henry Lightstone's exposed stomach when the agent drove the open palm of his already injured left hand forward in a tightly focused defensive move.

Gerd Maas felt the jarring block all the way up his arm, and thought he'd missed. But then he saw the bloody blade sticking out the back of Lightstone's hand. Grinning widely, Maas started to jerk the blade upward in a cruel slicing motion, and then his eyes opened wide when he felt the fingers of Lightstone's impaled hand close around the hilt of the knife.

Recognizing the danger immediately, Maas tightened his grip and started to pull back when he suddenly understood that Henry Lightstone's deliberate act of discarding Chareaux's knife had caused him to pay less attention to the agent's right hand—a mental error that Henry Lightstone capitalized on by driving the heel of his right hand hard into the lower edge of the German counterterrorist's rib cage.

Had he been able to twist clear, Gerd Maas would have recovered from the punishing blow in a matter of moments. But the superbly conditioned hunter of death
couldn't
twist clear, because Lightstone still had a tight grip on the hilt of his knife
and
his hand. And by the time that Maas comprehended the magnitude of his error, it was too late. The German counterterrorist screamed and cursed in pain as the edge of Lightstone's slashing shoe tore into his surgically reconstructed left knee.

Desperately trying to recover, Gerd Maas twisted the knife handle sharply in a vicious attempt to distract or disable his unyielding opponent, drawing a wide-eyed scream out of Henry Lightstone. But it didn't stop the furiously fighting agent from driving the lethally extended fingers of his free right hand deep into Maas's throat, just missing his larynx.

Stunned, severely injured, and down on his hands and knees, Gerd Maas had no intention of quitting. He was lunging toward Lightstone once more, going for the eyes of the dazed agent—who was down on his own knees, working to pull the twisted knife blade out of the palm of his hand—when Maas suddenly found his left foot caught in the muscular grip of Dwight Stoner.

Snarling with rage, Maas whipped around and drove the heel of his right shoe square into the face of the burned, bleeding, and nearly unconscious ex-Raider . . . and then had to strike out a second time before he was able to pull his severely damaged leg loose from Stoner's clenched hand.

Coming up to his feet, Maas hobbled forward into the beginning of a savage kick that would have easily broken Stoner's neck. But then he gasped in agonized disbelief when Lightstone suddenly lunged forward, caught him by the left arm, wrenched him back around so that they were face to face, drove Chareaux's fighting knife deep into his lower abdomen, and then—in one furious motion—yanked the razor-edged knife upward.

For a brief moment the two men stared into each other's eyes. Then, just as Gerd Maas's lips began to form a bloodied smile, his blue eyes glazed over and he collapsed to the ground in a lifeless heap.

Dazed and nauseous from the pain in his horribly cut hand, Henry Lightstone had to crawl from Stoner to Woeshack on his knees and one hand to confirm that both severely injured and now unconscious agents were still alive.

It then took him almost a full minute before he could get his hand rewrapped in the handkerchief, pick up the discarded pack-set radio, call for help, and then get up on his feet and stagger over to where a barely conscious Larry Paxton was still sprawled on the ground, trying with very little success to reassemble his pistol. There were faint sounds of automatic-weapons fire in the distance, but neither agent paid it any attention.

"Thought I told you to watch that turtle," Lightstone whispered heavily as he knelt next to the fumbling and glassy-eyed Paxton.

"Too busy picking up after mah team—gawddamned people leave their shit all over the place," Paxton mumbled. Then he tried to focus his eyes on the blood-covered form of his partner. "You get him, or he get you?"

"I got him . . . thanks to Stoner."

Paxton blinked and then stared out across the sloping ground, trying unsuccessfully to focus his blurred eyes on the smoldering plane and the three unmoving figures.

"They alive?"

"Who, Stoner and Woeshack? Yeah, I think so," Lightstone said groggily, trying not to bump his agonizingly painful hand against anything solid. "Both of them are out cold, but they're breathing okay. Probably got internal injuries from the crash. Gotta get some help out here, get them to a hospital soon as we can."

Paxton smiled a glassy smile.

"Ol' Stoner ain't got none o' your fancy moves, Henry, but you gotta admire the man's style."

"Yeah, we'd be in deep shit if we didn't have—" Lightstone started to agree, when the still air was suddenly ruptured by a distant, echoing explosion.

Staggering painfully to their feet, the two agents stared out toward the distant airport and watched in silence as the pieces of a shattered Blackhawk helicopter tumbled and fluttered to the ground like bloodied and broken leaves.

Chapter Thirty-seven

SAC Hal Owens, the commander of the FBI airborne raid team, had been directing the air search of the Fernandez Bay airstrip property from the small surveillance helicopter when the firefight began.

He had sent the larger and slower Blackhawk up high, to monitor the situation with its cargo-door-mounted M-60 machine guns (while Jim Whittman and his hostage rescue team in the other assault helicopter were recovering the occupants from the downed fixed wing), when a concussive rifle shot from the airstrip office doorway blew out the armored glass right next to the Blackhawk pilot's shoulder, killing him instantly.

As the stunned and blood-splattered copilot sent the chopper skyward in a desperate effort to avoid any more of the armor-piercing slugs—and thereby causing the cursing door gunner to miss the small airstrip terminal building completely with a sustained burst of 7.65mm rounds—a second 1900-grain slug tore through the armored engine cowling and ruptured a fuel line. Seconds later, to the horror of all aboard the command chopper, the still-climbing Blackhawk disintegrated into a ball of flame and tumbling debris.

Owens got on the radio immediately.

"May-day! May-day! Air Unit Two, disengage and respond immediately! Air Three is down! Repeat, Air Three is down! Suspect is located in the Fernandez Bay airstrip building. Move it, now!"

Unarmed, and otherwise helpless against a weapon as lethal as Riser's four-bore rifle, Owens ordered the lightly armored surveillance helicopter to stay high out of range, waiting for the second Blackhawk to disengage from the rescue effort and respond.

Less than three minutes later, having left a dazed Sam Tisbury and two FBI agents floating in a quickly inflated life raft, the second of the raid team's military assault helicopters made a roaring pass across the airstrip terminal building with an M-60 machine gun and seven M-16 assault rifles blazing—punching hundreds of holes through the glass windows and thin wood and metal walls.

At Owen's direction, the Blackhawk made two more similar passes with almost identical results.

"Want me to insert the team in now?" the pilot of the Blackhawk asked Owens over the radio, and got a confirming "ten-four" from the raid commander.

The assault helicopter was starting to come around again for a final pass when a pair of explosions erupted from a small garage next to the main airport building. One of the massive slugs streaked through the open cargo doorway, causing the machine gunner and the seven agents— including Whittman—to duck reflexively. The second slug ricocheted harmlessly off the Blackhawk's body armor.

Smiling grimly to himself, the chopper pilot quickly whipped his helicopter around in a looping half-circle, presenting its opposite side to the garage—but now a good hundred yards farther away.

"Okay, guys." The pilot spoke over the intercom system. "We should be out of his range now. Let him have it!"

At that moment a stream of 7.65mm bullets ripped across the side of the hovering aircraft, badly wounding three of the agents—including Whittman and the machine gunner—and starring the armored glass next to the copilot. Continuing to use the M-60 that he had taken from illicit arms dealer George Hoffsteadler weeks earlier, Riser sent a second stream of bullets into the assault chopper's engine, causing the churning aircraft to shudder and start billowing smoke, and then a third burst in the direction of the rapidly departing surveillance helicopter.

The second pilot was a combat veteran who immediately disengaged and shut off the engine, triggered the fire extinguisher, and then auto-rotated the crippled aircraft down into an emergency landing that looked a lot more like a barely controlled crash, about three hundred yards from the airstrip building.

As soon as the helicopter hit the ground, Riser started firing again. Using short, controlled bursts, he emptied one full disintegrating-link belt of ammo—and then half of another—at the grounded Blackhawk as Whittman and the surviving members of the air assault team pulled themselves out of the wreckage. Working desperately to put the downed helicopter at a safe distance between them and the deadly machine-gun fire, the agents dragged each other to a defensive position about seventy-five yards behind the still smoking Blackhawk, and then began to tend to their wounded comrades.