could hear the murmur of voices in casual conversation. James watched as a pockmarked Iraqi in the back took a final drag of his cigarette and then flicked it away.
The still smoking butt arced up and landed next to the prone Phoenix Force sniper with a small shower of sparks that stung his exposed face. The cigarette bounced and rolled down the incline to come to rest against McCarter’s leg.
A gunman in the back of the vehicle said something and the others laughed as the pickup cruised past the two hidden men headed toward the fighting. Playing a hunch, James risked moving to scan the burned-out building across the street with his scope. His gamble paid off as a man armed with a SVD Soviet-era Dragunov sniper rifle appeared briefly in a third-story window to acknowledge the patrol rolling past his position.
James grinned. The pickup reached the end of the street and disappeared around a corner. “Got you, asshole,” he whispered. “I got a security element on the third floor,” he told McCarter.
“Does he interfere with movement?” McCarter scooped loose dirt over the burning cigarette, extinguishing it.
“He’s back in the shadow now. I might have a shot with IR,” Hawkins explained. “But he’s definitely doing overwatch on this street.”
“He the only one?”
“Only one I saw,” James said. “But he could have a spotter or radio guy sitting next to him who’ll sound the alarm if I put the sniper down.”
“What’s our other option?”
“I guess send the team across and hope he doesn’t notice until we can be sure of how many we’re dealing with.”
“The clock is ticking,” McCarter pointed out.
“Then I say let me take him.”
“Encizo and I will cross the street and try to secure the ground floor before the rest of you come over.”
“It’s your call,” James said simply. He clicked over the amplifier apparatus on his night scope and scanned the windows. A red silhouette appeared in the gloom of the third-story window. “I got him. No other figures present themselves from this angle.”
“That’ll have to do,” McCarter said.
James held down on his target as McCarter called Encizo up and the two men slowly climbed into position. Encizo had left his Hawk MM-1 behind with Hawkins and held his silenced H&K MP-7 at the ready. McCarter slid his M-4/M-203 around to hang from his back and had pulled his own sound-suppressed weapon, the Browning Hi-Power, from its holster.
James settled snugly into his position as Phoenix Force gathered around him. His finger took up the slack on the curve of his trigger and he settled the fiber-optic crosshairs on the silhouette in the window.
The Mk 11 sniper rifle discharged smoothly, the muzzle lifting slightly with the recoil and pushing back into the hollow of James’s shoulder. The report was muted in the hot desert air and the subsonic round cut across the space and tore through the open window.
In his scope James saw the figure’s head jerk like a boxer taking an inside uppercut. There was an instant of red smear in his sight as blood splashed, then the enemy sniper spun in a half circle and fell over.
“Go,” James said.
McCarter was instantly up and sprinting. Behind him Encizo scrambled over the edge of the hole and raced after him. Both men crossed the street in a dead run, weapons up and ready as James began shifting his weapon back and forth in tight vectors to cover the building front.
McCarter crossed the open street and spun to throw his back into the wall beside the front door of the building. Half a second later Encizo repeated the motion, his MP-7 pointed down the street.
McCarter checked once before proceeding through the gaping doorway. He charged into the room, turning left and trying to move along the wall. Encizo came in and peeled right, coming to one knee and checking the room with his muzzle leading the way. Both men scanned the darkened chamber through their low-light goggles.
The front doors to the building had been blown out during the Iraqi raid and the room saturated with grenades and automatic-weapons fire. The two Phoenix warriors found themselves in a small lobby with a cracked and collapsed desk, a line of busted and dented mailboxes, a pitted and pocked elevator and two fire-scarred doorways. One of the interior doors had been blown off its hinges, revealing a staircase leading upward. The second sagged in place, as perforated as a cheese grater.
McCarter carefully moved forward and checked both doorways before turning and giving Encizo the thumbs-up signal. The combat swimmer turned and went to the doorway so that James could see him. He lifted a finger and spoke into his throat mike.
“Come across,” he said. “We’ll clear upward.”
“Acknowledged,” James replied.
Encizo turned back into the room just as he heard footsteps on the staircase. Booted feet pounded the wooden steps as someone jogged downward making no effort to conceal his movement. Encizo blinked and McCarter disappeared, moving smoothly to rematerialize next to the stairway access, back to the wall and sound-suppressed Browning pistol up.
Wearing a headscarf and American Army chocolate-chip-pattern camouflage uniform, a Shiite militia member with an AKM came out of the stairway and strolled casually into the room. On one knee Encizo centered his machine pistol on the irregular.
Oblivious to the shadows in the room, the man started walking across the floor toward the street. McCarter straightened his arm out. The Browning was a bulky silhouette in his hand, the cylinder of the suppressor a blunt oval in the gloom.
There was a whispered thwat-thwat and the front of the Iraqi’s forehead came away in jigsaw chunks. The man dropped straight down to his knees, then tumbled forward onto his face with a wet sound.
Encizo kept the muzzle of his machine pistol trained on the doorway in case the man wasn’t alone, but there was no sign of motion from the staircase as McCarter shifted his aim and cleared the second door.
Behind Encizo, Hawkins entered the room and peeled off to the left to take cover, followed closely by Manning and then Calvin James. Each member of the unit looked down at the dead Iraqi, his spilling blood clearly visible.
“We take the stairs,” McCarter said in a low voice. “There’s no way to clear a building this size with our manpower so it’s hey-diddle-diddle, right-up-the-middle till we reach the roof, then over and in. Stay with silenced weapons for as long as we can.”
The ex-SAS trooper swept up his Browning Hi-Power and advanced through the doorway as the rest of Phoenix Force fell into line behind him in an impromptu entry file. Hawkins took up the final position with his silenced Mk 11, replacing Gary Manning as rear security.
Weapons up, Phoenix Force continued infiltrating Baghdad.
RAFAEL ENCIZO opened his hand.
Greasy hair slid through his loosened fingers as he plucked the blade of his Cold Steel Tanto from the Iraqi militia member’s neck. Blood gushed down the front of the man’s chest in a hot, slick rush, and the gunman gurgled wetly in his throat.
Standing beside Encizo Calvin James snatched the man’s rifle up as it started to fall. The eyepieces of the two commandos’ night optics shone a dull, nonreflective green as they watched the man fall to his knees. Encizo lifted his foot and used the thick tread of his combat boot to push the dying Iraqi over.
The final Shiite soldier on the building roof struck the tarpaper and gravel as the last beats of his pounding heart pushed a gallon of blood out across the ground. As James set the scoped SVD sniper rifle down, Encizo knelt and cleaned his blade off on the man’s jeans before sliding it home in its belt sheath.
Seeing the sentry down, McCarter led the rest of the team out of the stairwell and onto the roof. Phoenix Force crouched next to a 60 mm mortar position beside the parapet and overlooked the cluster of buildings in the Baghdad slum. Below them,