Excerpt from Special Ops by W.E.B. Griffin, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Then there was fire directed at them.

The pickup screeched to a stop in the middle of the street. Jack felt himself going, tried valiantly to stop himself, and then, bouncing off the fender, fell onto the pavement, on his face.

He felt his eyes water, and then they lost focus.

Jesus Christ! I've been shot!

He shook his head, then put his hand to his face. There was something warm on it.

Blood! I've been shot in the face!

He sat up. Someone rushed up to him. Indistinctly, he made out one of the paratroopers leaning over him, felt his fingers on his face.

And then the sonofabitch laughed.

"You're all right," he said. "All you've got is a bloody nose."

He slapped Jack on the back and ran ahead of him.

Jack's eyes came back into focus. He looked at his lap and saw blood dripping into it.

He looked around and saw his assault rifle on the street, six feet from where he was sitting. He scurried on his knees to it, picked it up, fired a burst in the air to make sure it was still functioning, and then looked around again, this time at the Immoquateur. There were bodies on the lawn between the street and the shops on the ground floor. Simba and European. He got to his feet and ran toward the Immoquateur.

Jack recognized one of the more than a dozen bodies on the lawn before the Immoquateur. It was the Stanleyville station manager of the Congo River Steamship Company. He had met him when they had shipped in a truck. He had been shot in the neck, probably, from the size of the wound, with a shotgun. The stout, gray-haired woman lying beside him, an inch-wide hole in her forehead, was almost certainly his wife.

Jack ran into the building itself. There were two dead Simbas in the narrow elevator corridor. One of them had most of his head blown away. The other, shot as he came out of the elevator, had taken a burst in the chest. It had literally blown a hole through his body. Parts of his ribs, or his spine, some kind of bone, were sticking at awkward angles out his back.

He was lying in the open elevator door. The door of the elevator tried to close on his body, encountered it, reopened, and then tried to close again.

Jack laid his FN assault rifle against the wall, put his hands on the dead man's neck, and dragged him free. The elevator door closed, a melodious chime bonged, and the elevator started up.

"Shit!"

Jack went to the call button for the other elevator and pushed it. It did not illuminate. He ran farther down the corridor and pushed the service elevator call button. It lit up, but there was no sound of elevator machinery. He went back to wait for the first elevator.

One of the Belgian paratroopers from the pickup truck came into the corridor, in a crouch, his rifle ready.

"The sergeant said you are to come back to the truck," he said.

"Fuck him, my mother's upstairs," Jack said.

The Belgian paratrooper ran back out of the building. The elevator indicator showed that it was on the ninth floor. Then it started to come down.

The Belgian paratrooper came running back into the building. Jack wondered if he was going to give him any trouble.

"I got a radio," the Belgian said. "They are leaving us."

Jack felt something warm on his hand, looked down and saw blood.

The elevator mechanism chimed pleasantly, and the door opened. Jack stepped over the dead Simba. The Belgian paratrooper followed him inside and crossed himself as Jack pushed the floor button.

The door closed and the elevator started to rise.

It stopped at the fourth floor.

A Simba in parts of a Belgian officer's uniform did not have time to raise his pistol before a burst from Jack's assault rifle smashed into his midsection.

The noise in the closed confines of the elevator was painful and dazzling. Jack's ears rang to the point where he knew he would not be able to hear anything but the loudest of sounds for a long time. The paratrooper with Jack jumped, in a crouch, into the corridor and let loose a burst down the corridor. It was empty.

Reprinted from Special Ops by W.E.B. Griffin by permission of Putnam Books, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright (c) 2000 by W.E.B. Griffin. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.