Oceans Of Fire

CHAPTER SEVEN

Panji Poyan, Tajikistan

“Forbes.” The voice on the secure phone was cold, clipped and spoke with a heavy, non-Russian accent. Forbes was fluent in four languages, but the man on the other end of the line chose to speak English. “Report.”

“Sharkov’s dead.” Forbes sat in a safehouse on the Tajikistan-Afghan border and held an ice pack to his head. “Zhol’s in custody.”

“And the packages?”

Forbes’s finger absently tapped the suitcase-size device next to him on the bed. “I have one.”

The voice on the other end waited for moment. “And the other?”

Forbes glanced at his lumped face in the mirror and shook his head. “I have one,” he repeated.

“And who has the other one?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do not…know?” the voice repeated.

Forbes scowled. “These guys who hit us, they were—”

“Were what?”

The ex-SEAL thought back on the battle. “Unorthodox. Throwing antitank grenades from motorcycles, ramming attacks, and their equipment was like they had their own candy store, whatever the job required. No budget constraints.”

“So who are they?”

“They ain’t SOCOM, that’s for damn sure. All I know is one of them—”

“Used to be a Navy SEAL, like yourself, Mr. Forbes.” The man on the other end of the line paused significantly. “This man you hired.”

“Mr. Zhol hired him.”

“On your glowing recommendation, as I recall.”

“Yeah.”

“I want the device back.”

“Yeah.”

“You wish payback.”

“Yeah.”

“What do you intend to do about this?”

“The only possible connection they have left is Sharkov. They’ll have to go after the boys in Moscow, and they’ll get information on them out of Zhol.” Forbes began jacking truncated-cone, Teflon-coated, armor-piercing bullets into his .357 Magnum.

“What do you intend?”

“I intend go north.” Forbes continued to feed slugs into his pistol. “And kill Calvin James’s Judas ass.”

“They will indeed most likely head to Moscow, but I think I have a better idea.”

Forbes slid in the sixth round. “I’m listening.”

The man on the other end spent several moments outlining his plan. “You concur, Mr. Forbes?”

“Yeah.” Forbes grinned from ear to ear as he snapped shut the cylinder of the Smith & Wesson N-Frame. “Oh, hell, yeah.”

U.S. Embassy, Moscow

“WE’RE LOOKING for a Russian general in bed with the Russian mafiya,” Kurztman said.

The question would be finding the right one, and the team was pretty banged up. It had been a hard flight north with little time for rest or medical attention.

“One thing’s been bugging me,” James said. “Down in the garage, Forbes was talking to some guy on his cell, and he was speaking German.”

“German?” Hawkin’s eyes widened out of the purple raccoon mask of bruising. “You sure?”

“Oh, yeah. And he was talking respectful, like he was talking to his superior.”

“I don’t see the German angle, particularly if Forbes was muscle for a Tajik gangster.” Encizo shook his head. “But then again I think there’s a lot of things on this one we don’t see yet.”

“Let’s stick with what we can see.” McCarter turned to Calvin James. “What about Zhol?”

James leaned back in his chair. “We have him illegally detained downstairs. I spent the morning with him, and he isn’t responding to interrogation.” He looked pointedly at McCarter. “Question is, do we hit him with chemicals, or cut him loose and see where he goes?”

McCarter steepled his fingers in thought. “I say we cut him loose here in Moscow and see who comes to claim him.”

“Or see who comes to kill him.” Manning frowned. “Aidar Zhol is flesh-peddling scum, but right now he’s scum under our protection and he’s damaged goods. We cut him loose and someone is more than likely going to come and punch his ticket.”

“Good.” Hawkins had a light concussion and wasn’t in a particularly merciful mood. “I say he cooperates with us or we let him and his damaged-goods-status ass go play with the Moscow boys.”

“All right.” McCarter nodded. “Cal, give him the choice, flat-out.”

“I did.”

“And?”

Calvin James sighed. “He used a number of politically incorrect words, but the gist of it was f—off.”

Hawkins grunted. “Then he’s made his choice.”

McCarter had to agree. “Jack, we’re going to need a chopper and permission to fly over Moscow airspace. Work it out with the CIA station chief.”

“You got it.”

“Cal, I want Zhol bugged so deep that even he doesn’t know he’s wearing a wire.”

James scratched his chin. “Then let’s set him free in the morning. I’ll put something in his food tonight so he sleeps soundly and we’ll rig him for sound and trace.”

“All right, then.” McCarter stood. “We set our pigeon free at dawn and see which way he flies.”

Kremlin Square

“GET OUT.” Aidar Zhol blinked as the hood was pulled off his head. He had never seen Jack Grimaldi before. Grimaldi popped the lock on the passenger door of the still-moving Mercedes 350SL. He grinned maniacally as he leaned across Zhol’s bound wrists and opened the door for him. “I said out.”

The gangster gaped around in himself in disorientation. “But—”

“See ya!” Grimaldi shoved Zhol out the door without coming to a complete stop. The gangster hit the paving stones, and the Stony Man pilot threw the key to his handcuffs after him. The pilot closed the door and pulled back into traffic. “Houston, the pigeon has landed.”

“I have target in sight.” Hawkins sat ten yards away on a motorcycle eating a sausage he’d bought from a vendor. He was dressed as a business messenger with a bag across his shoulder and a box bungee-corded to the luggage rack. “He’s heading straight for the pay phone.”

Zhol limped toward a pay phone, shoved in some change and began to speak immediately.

Gary Manning was deployed across the square on a second motorcycle. The rest of Phoenix was in a ZIL panel van loaded with surveillance gear courtesy of the CIA Moscow station chief. Encizo sat in the back of the van listening intently into a pair of earphones. He was connected with a translator in the U.S. Embassy’s secure communications room. “Translator, do you read?”

The night before Aidor Zhol had slept extremely soundly. During that time they had put a tracer in the stacked leather heal of his Italian dress shoe and a second one in his watch. A microphone had been emplaced in the tooled silver gather that held his shoulder-length black hair in a ponytail. The cape of his leather duster had been broadly painted with infrared luminescent paint.

CIA Linguist Judith Tarko responded. “Target has not mentioned any names. He has identified himself, his location and demanded pickup. Your audio picked up the key tones of the phone. I have a man here running the tone tape to establish the number.” Tarko paused as another voice spoke in Russian. “They have told him to sit tight where he is and they will bring him in.”

The line suddenly clicked dead. Zhol hung up the phone and glanced around himself suspiciously.

Tarko sighed. “That’s it, sorry we couldn’t be more help. Give us thirty seconds to establish his destination number.”

“Excellent work, Translator.” McCarter watched Zhol through his binoculars. “Let us know when you have the number.”

Tarko came back almost instantly. “I hate to say this, but it’s a cell phone, belonging to one Zoya Krinkova, fifty-two-year-old housewife, and that isn’t Zoya on the other end with Zhol.”

It was a cutout phone. Either stolen or else some street level thug had given Mrs. Krinkova a small sum of money to start the account under her own name and keep it up while the phone itself had been distributed to parties unknown. The phone would be used once, in an emergency, and thrown away. Tracking the end user through her would be a monumental if not impossible task without the aid of half the Moscow police, and the Russian mafiya owned well over half of them.

“Thanks, Translator. We’ll keep you posted.” McCarter addressed his team. “It’s a waiting game now. We wear Zhol like underwear and see where he goes. If he gets capped, we go in hard for the gunmen.”

Phoenix Force came back in the affirmative.

Zhol sat on a bench and checked his watch. Hawkins leisurely strode by him and bought another sausage. McCarter drank three bottles of Coca-Cola while Encizo and James went through a thermos of coffee.

After forty-five minutes, a bottle-green panel van pulled up to the curb near Zhol.

“Phoenix, we are go!”

Hawkins and Manning both threw a leg over their bikes.

Zhol rose and looked around himself. The sliding door of the van opened, and a black-gloved hand reached out to Zhol to help him inside. Zhol took the hand and put a foot into the van.

“Shit!” Hawkins warned. “We have trouble!”

The twin barrels of a sawed-off shotgun extended out the door at Aidar Zhol’s face. The Tajikistani mobster’s satanic eyebrows rose in horror and his eyes went wide. He jerked at the hand holding his, but he wasn’t going anywhere.

“All units converge!” McCarter commanded.

Manning’s bike burned rubber across the square as he tore toward the green van. The tires on the surveillance van screamed as James peeled out. Hawkins’s SIG-Sauer P-226 pistol ripped free of its holster. Flame blasted from both barrels of the shotgun. Tourists and sightseers screamed at the twin detonations. Zhol’s face disappeared in a red haze. His assassin let go of his hand and Zhol collapsed to the curb like a puppet with its strings cut.

The sliding door of the van slammed shut, and the vehicle roared away from the curb.

Hawkins’s pistol trip-hammered in his hands. The rear tires of the old van exploded as he pumped a double tap into each one, and its back end dropped as it sank onto its wheels. The bumper showered sparks as it dragged along the pavement. Hawkins raised his aim and fired the remaining twelve rounds in his magazine into the back of the vehicle. Brakes screeched and horns blared as the stricken vehicle fishtailed crazily into traffic.

Hawk slammed a fresh mag into his SIG and gunned the engine of his Ural. “What about Zhol!”

“Forget him!” McCarter ordered. “Let Moscow police take him! We have a contact! Take the van!”

Hawkins shot into traffic. Manning had already crossed the square and was weaving between cars in pursuit. The van wasn’t hard to spot. It had ripped away the shreds of its tires and was showering sparks off the back bumper and out of both wheel wells.

Traffic parted around it like it had the plague.

The driver of the van leaned out of his window. The small blue-steel shape of a Makarov pistol began popping off rounds at Manning in rapid fire. Manning’s .40-caliber weapon filled his hand and boomed back. The driver jerked back inside as his side mirror exploded inches from his abdomen.

Sirens began wailing in the distance.

McCarter’s voice came across the radio. “We have to wrap this up fast. It’s broad daylight and we don’t have a hunting license.”

“Affirmative, Phoenix One.” Manning pointed as Hawkins pulled up into the wingman position. “Front tires! I’ll take the passenger side!”

“Affirmative!” Hawkins split off into the left lane as Manning went right. The former Ranger pulled in a few yards back from the driver’s door and extended his pistol. The Swiss pistol barked three times and the van slumped into a left-leaning tilt. The driver nearly lost control as he overcorrected the wheel.

Manning raised his .40 to take the van’s last leg from underneath it.

The driver violently spun his wheel to the right. Manning went full-throttle and leaped his bike up onto the sidewalk to avoid being crushed. Civilians screamed and dived out of the way as the big Canadian roared down the pavement. Manning jammed on his brakes to avoid running over an immense woman walking her dog. The woman stood screaming in place and the little dog jumped and barked between her legs. Between the cars parked on the curb and the storefronts girding the narrow sidewalk there was nowhere to go but through the woman and her dog.

Manning yanked his bike to the right, popped a wheelie and went through the display window of a flower shop instead.

His front tire erupted through the window; his rear tire hit the brick beneath it. The rear end of the bike bucked Manning off like a mechanical mule as it flipped nosedown through the display case. He flew through space in a cloud of sunflowers, daisies, marigolds and broken vases.

He came to a violent halt as he flew headfirst through double glass doors of the cold case. Manning smashed the shelving holding the displays and bounced off the solid wall behind them, then collapsed with the upper half of his body in the refrigerated case and his legs sprawled out on the floor. He lay stunned for a moment with sprays of roses and shattered arrangements heaped upon him like accolades upon the body of a fallen hero.

Manning pushed himself out of the case and fell back on the sea of broken glass covering the floor. His helmet and riding leathers had prevented him from being sliced to pieces. He waited for the telltale nausea that signaled broken bones.

“Phoenix Four!” McCarter yelled across the radio. “Phoenix Four!”

“Phoenix Four…down.” Manning groaned. “I need extraction.”

“Sit tight! We’re on our way! Phoenix Five! What is your status?”

Hawkins had continued to follow the van. After trying to crush Manning it had gone one more block and come to a halt behind a parked truck in a space marked off by orange traffic cones.

“Target has stopped. No movement.” Hawkins dismounted but his muzzle never left the vehicle. He ripped off his helmet and shouted in Russian, “Police!” He waved his hand violently and the few bystanders on the side street scattered. He stared at the parked truck and cones framing the van in the parking spot.

“I don’t like it,” Hawkins said as his instincts spoke to him. “I think this is their final destination—Shit!”

He dived over the hood of a parked sedan as a grenade spiraled out of the shattered back window of the van and bounced near him and his bike. The grenade detonated with a whip-cracking yellow flash and shrapnel rattled against Hawkins’s cover like hail. He rose over the hood of the sedan and emptied his pistol into the van, firing low to catch anyone hugging the floorboards. He reloaded and ran to the passenger window. Hawkins snaked his pistol inside and emptied eight rounds into the interior before ripping the door open.

James brought the surveillance van to a screeching halt at the top of the street and Encizo and McCarter leaped out. Hawkins glared at the interior of the bullet-riddled van. A trapdoor had been cut in the floor. In the street beneath a gaping circular hole emptied into blackness below. The heavy iron disk of the manhole cover lay in the back of the van. McCarter ran up beside Hawkins while Encizo stayed back to cover. “What have you got?”

“They’ve extracted into the sewer sys—” Hawkins jumped back as something metallic rattled against concrete below. He grabbed McCarter’s jacket and yanked him back with him. “Fire in the hole!”

Streamers of winking yellow fireflies fountained up out of the manhole borne on a geyser of superheated smoke. McCarter and Hawkins sprinted down the street as the smoke blasted out of the broken windows, sending its streamers of molten phosphorous in all directions. Seconds later the van’s gas tank caught and van went up like a metal balloon.

McCarter watched the van burn out of control. Besides Zhol’s body back in Kremlin Square there wasn’t going to be much in the way of forensic evidence. The Briton felt his temper begin to boil. It wasn’t that the mission had gone FUBAR. That was part of the game.

What galled him was that he and Phoenix Force had gotten played.

Payback was owed.

“We’re out of here.”

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.