Soon the knots gave and she was free. The next problem was to arm herself.

She opened the door a crack. No one was in the hall outside. She went back and picked up the wooden chair to which she had been tied. She smashed it against the cement floor again and again. Finally, she had a piece of the back of the chair that made a fairly passable club.

She was reasonably certain that her purse was still on the main floor, in Cain's office. Her objective was the purse for inside was a weapon and the walkie-talkie.

She met a terrorist-in-training running along the hall, M-16 in one hand and a sandwich in the other. She stepped in front of him and brought the club up into the goon's groin. As he bent forward, Toni grabbed a fistful of his grimy hair and yanked. The would-be terrorist crashed into the wall headfirst. Two hard blows with the club kept him on the floor.

Toni grabbed the M-16 and patted her victim down for spare clips. He carried only one. She jammed that in her belt and took off, checking the load and cocking the assault rifle as she ran.

The rest was easy. There was no one in the office. The walkie-talkie was still in her purse. So was the Heckler & Koch VP-70 that Pol insisted she carry. She sat down in the desk chair facing the door. She placed the automatic in her waistband, and the magazine for the M-16 on the desk. Then the M-16 was set down carefully, still cocked and ready to roar, pointing at the door, ready to be grabbed in an instant. Only then did she get out the walkie-talkie and start to call for Able Team.

The backup men who were meant to cover the retreat of those in the ambush went first. Able Team knew what they were looking for and they found them. The barely concealed automatic handguns left no mistake about the terrorists' identities. Politician removed one man with a garrote, so quickly and so savagely that the thin wire went right through the neck. The goon's dying kick booted his own head into the gutter.

Gadgets used his Gerber to efficiently sever the top of a spine. The killer collapsed without a sound. Lyons silently removed two more with his lethal fists.

The ambushers waited patiently, strung out along the tops of two buildings. They were still waiting when silenced .45 and 9mm slugs smashed heads .Able Team left them slumped over their guns and started back down a flimsy fire escape. Suddenly, Gadgets's walkie-talkie let out its discreet buzz.

Gadgets stopped so abruptly that Pol ran into him. Lyons noticed he was no longer being tagged by the rest of his team and carefully retreated. His eyes skimmed the territory for more enemy.

"Don't stop on the exposed escape," he hissed.

"That you, Toni?" Gadgets said.

"You were expecting someone else?" she replied.

The relief was too much to contain. Both Gadgets and Pol started to laugh.

"Where are you?" Toni's voice asked.

"Just ready to move in on the building. We had to take out an ambush first. Where are you?"

"Right here waiting, but you better try cutting out. Most of the force is in cars waiting for you to show signs of being in the area. The only thing that's stopping them from scooping you is that they're expecting a larger force."

"I wonder what gave them that notion?" Gadgets said.

"I wonder. I figured since I was foolish enough to get caught, it might as well serve some purpose."

Gadgets looked at Lyons who nodded.

"Sit tight. Here we come," he told Toni.

"Don't. It's a well-planned trap."

"You say they're all mobile?"

"Right."

"Great. Here we come. Out."

With the ambush out of the way, Lyons led his team right in the front door of the HIT headquarters. As they walked in, the first of the troop trucks could be seen turning a corner at the end of the block. Without warning from the ambushers, the reserves did not get tipped off until someone from the building saw Able Team walking up to the front door.

Lyons had the assault shotgun rigged with a 30-round drum. Pol carried his usual M-79 and a large supply of frag grenades for the launcher. Gadgets kept his Ingram at the ready.

Pol stayed at the door while Lyons and Gadgets investigated the reception area. Pol watched as two light trucks and a carload of troops stopped in front of the building. As soon as he saw weapons, he opened fire.

The fragmentation and white phosphorous grenades were carefully spread at his feet. He fired as quickly as he could reload. The first frag landed in the back of the truck, stunning those few it did not kill. The second went through the window of the car, taking out the unit commander and radioman. The next two grenades were phosphorous. They sprayed the men in the second car with fire that burned as it penetrated their bodies. In less than five seconds the street was a fiery hell, filled with the screams of the dying.

The only terrorists left inside the building were raw recruits. They were grouped around the communications room on the top floor.

When Able Team found Toni she smiled, picked up the M-16 and joined them. Gadgets found another contingent of mobile troops were covering the other entrance to the building.

He radioed Lyons who moved to the back of the second floor. Half of a 30-round drum of heavy pellets fired from the second-floor window reduced the backup terrorists to a mixture of gore and auto parts.

J. Courtney Cain was a man who loved to talk. At this moment he would have preferred that others talk to him. First, he had lost contact with the sniping party. So, he had called the mobile troops and told them to move in cautiously. Both troops had reported moving right into the building. Then he had lost radio contact with both halves of his mobile pincers.

"Get me the interior patrol," he told the radio operator.

But firing burst out outside the door. He knew that the interior patrol would not answer either. He leveled his Colt Commander at the door and waited.

"Let head office know what's happening," he ordered the radioman.

Before the radio operator could respond, the knob of the door began to turn. Cain put a half clip through the door from bottom to top.

Politician saw the bullets stitch the terrorist who had tried to retreat into the room he was supposed to be guarding. Two shots from Lyons's assault shotgun cleared away the last of the guards on the top floor.

Politician and Toni approached the room together. Pol picked up an assault rifle and threw it against the door. Another hail of angry bullets flew out through the wood. Pol then booted the door. It split up the middle to reveal a small man in perfectly pressed fatigues, desperately trying to change clips with shaking hands. Behind him a radio operator frantically tried to raise someone to come to his aid.

Toni walked to the shattered door. "Goodbye, Commander," she said.

She emptied the clip into the small communications room. She spared one shot for the radio man. The rest of the bullets were used to perforate the carefully pressed fatigues.