“I CAN IMAGINE THAT YOUR TEAMS ARE SPREAD PRETTY THIN,” THE PRESIDENT SAID

“Law enforcement agencies in eight nations are running themselves ragged dealing with riots orchestrated by this group, the Fist of Heaven,” Brognola explained. “If anything, our boys are right where they need to be.”

“And you’ve confirmed that this is an international amalgamation of white-supremacist groups?”

“There’s a violent Christian identity organization in the U.S. called the United Legion of Messianic America,” Brognola answered. “We have also encountered elements of ODESSA, the Jakkhammer Legacy, the Justice Coalition of Argentina and a Japanese pseudo-Christian cult called Masa Minori.”

The President sighed. “All those crazies would have to come out of the woodwork on my watch.”

Brognola managed a weak smile. “They say the caliber of a man is judged by the scope of his enemies.”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing with all these psychotic bigots?” the President asked.

Brognola looked out the window of the office, his gaze settling on the map of the world. The President waited a moment before the big Fed heaved his shoulders with a sigh, returning his attention to the conversation. “Ask me after this is over, sir.”

Brognola left the President alone in his office to contemplate the worldwide crisis.

Orbital Velocity

Stony Man

America’s Ultra-Covert Intelligence Agancy®

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Orbital Velocity

Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

In the jungles of the Congo, in the border region between the Republic of the Congo—ROC—and the Democratic Republic of the Congo—DRC—life was especially cheap. In the ROC, slavery was still a very real and modern threat, while the Kiva conflict in the DRC continued to claim lives the way only an ethnically charged civil war could. Right now, though, an African American man tried to move as fast as he could without aggravating the injury of his companion, also American but several shades lighter than his friend and growing more wan by the moment. The Latino’s normally tan features were now clammy, his black hair stuck to his forehead.

John Carmichael struggled to keep David Arcado moving, one hand hooked under his armpit with Arcado’s limb drawn across Carmichael’s shoulders. Arcado’s face was pale, his eyes sunken, his forehead soaked with sweat. Carmichael looked down at the bullet wound in Arcado’s side, his hand clamped around the injury. Blood painted the hand bright red, meaning that he was losing oxygenated blood. No wonder Arcado was wheezing.

“Let me sit,” Arcado rasped. “You can get the hell out a lot faster alone than lugging me along.”

“Fuck that shit,” Carmichael replied. “We don’t leave soldiers behind.”

Carmichael glanced back at the game trail they’d tromped along. He could see where dark, drying blood had smeared on leaves, which meant that the guards of the illegitimate launch facility wouldn’t have too much trouble following them. “If we stop now, there’ll be all manner of arrows aimed at you.”

Arcado swallowed hard, eyeing the bloody trail he’d left behind. “Which is why you need to dump me.”

“No,” Carmichael growled. “We ride together, we die together.”

“Not with the information in your head,” Arcado told him, trying to wrestle his arm away from the black man. “You’ve got to get moving.”

“Stop fighting me,” Carmichael complained. Suddenly he felt something hard jammed into his ribs. Carmichael looked at the snub-nosed .357 Magnum locked in Arcado’s fist. “You shoot me, you’re defeating your own purpose.”

Arcado gritted his teeth, then lowered the .357. “You see that streak rising from the ground?”

Carmichael didn’t want to look, but through the gap in the forest canopy roof, he could see it: the cottony column of smoke that spiraled up into the clear blue skies above. His shoulders fell as he knew what was at the top of that pillar of expended liquid oxygen fuel. He didn’t know the payload atop, but it was an orbital launch missile, akin to an Atlas IV, reverse engineered from old American designs. Whatever was riding into the heavens on millions of pounds of concentrated thrust, it was nothing good, not when it was being rocketed out of Earth’s atmosphere from a forsaken, hidden corner of the world.

“I see it,” Carmichael answered. He took a deep breath.

“And what was that shit you kept telling me? Your country before everything else?” Arcado told him, gripping a fistful of Carmichael’s BDU shirt, twisting it to bring Carmichael’s ear closer to his mouth.

“If you stay here, then we need to give you as much of a chance as you can get,” Carmichael whispered harshly. “Give me a spare bullet.”

Arcado nodded as Carmichael withdrew his folding multitool. “Want mine, too?”

“Yeah,” Carmichael answered. Taking the .357 Magnum round between the two folding pliers, the black agent pried the bullet from its casing. With a shell full of fast-burning, high-intensity powder, he had what he needed. “Move your hand.”

Arcado grit his teeth. “This is going to suck.”

Carmichael poured the powder into the wound, then pulled his stainless-steel lighter. It fired on the first flick, and when the flame touched the gunpowder, it flared. Arcado’s fingers dug into Carmichael’s biceps, his eyes clenched tightly shut as the bullet-torn flesh cauterized under the flashing heat. The pain was horrendous, if the muscle-squeezing grip Arcado inflicted on him was any indication. When the wound was seared closed as the powder burned out, Arcado finally loosened his clawlike clutches on Carmichael.

“I was right,” the Latino gasped.

“You usually are, damn it,” Carmichael replied. “Even when you say I need to leave you behind.”

Arcado nodded. “You left me a round short.”

“So you’re not looking to die nobly?” Carmichael asked.

“Fuck that noise,” Arcado answered. He leaned back, gulping down a fresh breath. Carmichael sorted through his gear, pulling four extra magazines from his reserve for his partner. Arcado reached out weakly to add them to his stash. With shaky hands, the Latino drew his Beretta and worked the slide to make certain it had a round in the breech.

Carmichael tried to ignore how physically weakened his partner was. The two men had a duty to get information to the outside world, and one man could travel more quickly through the heavy jungle than one healthy man escorting an injured companion. Arcado was far from suicidal, but he knew that here in the jungle, without medical attention and a bullet lodged in his abdomen, he was only going to be engaged in a delaying action. Arcado’s real role was to give Carmichael space, wiggle room to get to civilization.

It wasn’t going to be a short journey, either. Carmichael was on foot, without high-tech communications and only a small amount of ammunition. Arcado was going to stem the tide of a small army, from the looks of the launch facility. They didn’t know who had been sent out after the two, and Carmichael couldn’t give his friend any odds that were worthwhile.

“You’ll be all right here?” Carmichael asked, the words catching in his throat.

“If I say no, you still ain’t sticking around,” Arcado growled. He leaned on his rifle and pushed to his feet. Carmichael reached out to brace his friend, but the Latino shook him off.

“You’ll need all your strength to do your job,” Carmichael told him. “Being a stubborn asshole isn’t going to help you with anything. Or do you want a bunch of gunmen to run my ass down?”

Arcado grimaced, then held out his hand. “Me, me, me. That’s all you ever whine about. Don’t you ever think of anyone else?”

Carmichael held him up, but held his tongue. Arcado was joking, trying to cut through his worries. “Shut up.”

“Don’t get serious on me now,” Arcado whispered. “I need a few laughs.”

Carmichael kept quiet, not wanting to demoralize his friend any further. He helped Arcado into a position that allowed for decent cover and concealment along their trail. The spy settled into a nest.

“Get running, John,” Arcado whispered. “I don’t know how much time I’ll buy you, but I’ll pay for as much as I can.”

Carmichael nodded, giving his friend’s shoulder a squeeze.

He turned, cursing himself for doing his duty at the expense of a friend.

ILYA SORYENKOV LOOKED at the threat matrix list on his desk. He was the Moscow bureau chief for the federal security service, or FSB. Though he had to deal with the FSB’s rivalry with the CSR, which was the central intelligence service, he was fairly certain that he wasn’t cheated out of any information from the daily threat matrix. Details of the CSR’s operations would be kept from the FSB, but if there were rumors of trouble, the agency that held back information about an impending crisis would be scalped in the press. Soryenkov dropped into his chair and picked up the file of accumulated data.

For all the problems that had been going on for years, through a particularly corrupt administration that pounced at any chance for a return to the bad old days, Soryenkov had felt a little hope. The new president was willing to make some deals to alleviate some of the tensions that were threatening to draw Russia and her sister states into civil war, Chechnya especially. Soryenkov’s work was never really going to be done. Since the collapse of the KGB, lots of old grudges were being settled, and trouble in the form of organized crime was steadily worsening with the addition of trained espionage and special operations veterans flooding the ranks of the Russian mafiya.

He looked at the top sheet in the file. The envoys to the latest G8 conference were returning home today. Soryenkov had spent the past couple of days coordinating the Moscow police and FSB in setting up security for their return. It had been a fairly sedate conference, protestors more peaceful than usual. The Russian was glad for that. The Iraq war was winding down, and Chechnya was no longer being used as a tool to reinforce the need for the old, harsh methods by a would-be hardline revivalist.

Soryenkov looked at a printout of a recently received bit of chatter. Several Moscow news sources had received an ominous yet anonymous threat. Conventional radio and television had received the same line, as well as several Moscow-area blogs. The message was short and to the point.

“For failure to humanity, the Fist of Heaven smites thee.”

Soryenkov rubbed his forehead as he read it. He had operatives looking for any prior indications of a group called the Fist of Heaven. There were only half-whispered rumors regarding the Fist, but there had been mention of a similarly named group, the Celestial Hammer, which had threatened the whole world with satellite-launched dirty bombs. However, that group had threatened far more than just Russia, causing damage in Cuba with a weapon that had triggered a deadly tidal wave. The man-made tsunami had destroyed a fishing village near the U.S. Marine base at Guantanamo Bay.

Soryenkov looked over his notes about potential missing nuclear waste, then thought the better of it. If one organization had experienced a catastrophic failure of agenda by bombarding the Earth from low orbit, he didn’t feel that it was likely another group would try such a tactic so soon afterward. That kind of a mistake would set their plot back even before it began due to the nature of the international response. The now-defunct terrorist group’s example would make it unlikely that someone would utilize crude, improvised dirty bombs as their primary form of governmental influence.

The FSB chief rubbed his chin. The Celestial Hammer may have been a failure, but it was only because they didn’t have a properly dedicated orbital weapons platform. Certainly they had the potential to cause millions of deaths, but their system of attack was a jury-rigged design that utilized easily available, low-profile technology, or insiders allowing them access to China’s space program. Soryenkov hated to think what would have happened with a more dedicated system, like the proposed kinetic bombardment satellites controlled by various nations with space programs. The thought of a twenty-foot-long, one-foot-in-diameter chunk of high-density metal being “thrown” at a city at a velocity of 36,000 feet per second…

There wouldn’t be any radioactive fallout, but the impact would be comparable to a ground-penetrating nuclear device. That was merely the calculations for a “crowbar” of tungsten of those dimensions. Basically, from low orbit, a projectile would carry thirty-two megajoules per kilogram of mass, a figure that was between six and seven times the equivalent power of a kilogram of TNT.

He looked out the window at the Moscow skyline. The U.S. military had a “smart” missile, essentially an artillery tube with steering stabilizer fins, a two-ton hunk of metal that could be dropped by a ground-attack fighter with enough force to penetrate one hundred feet of concrete. On a whim, he picked up his calculator and came to a figure of sixty thousand megajoules of energy. From what he remembered of World War II conventional weaponry, a ten-thousand-pound bomb only put out twelve thousand megajoules of energy. One of the proposed “Rods from God” had five times the punch of a weapon that destroyed entire city blocks in the air war between the RAF and the Luftwaffe.

“That technology is years off,” he whispered, as if to dispel the sudden dread that overwhelmed him. Out the window, he saw a puff of smoke. Soryenkov wondered if it had been a car bomb, but it was too far away and had kicked up too much debris. Something else blurred through the air and struck the ground. While the shock wave of the distant impact finally rumbled through the floor, the windowpanes cracked as the building flexed.

“I said that technology is—” There was a third, fourth and fifth impact, all occurring more or less at the same instant. Soryenkov’s window shattered an instant later, but by then, he’d already thrown his arms across his face to keep the broken glass from carving him apart.

There were no more spears cast down from heaven, no more buildings vaporized into dust by two-ton hunks of steel striking them at terminal velocity. But when Soryenkov next looked through the broken window of his office, he saw a city rocked to its core. Columns of dust rose lazily skyward as alarms wailed across the city.

Damnation had rained down on Moscow in the form of a weapon that wasn’t supposed to exist.

CHAPTER ONE

London, forty-five minutes after the Moscow incident

“Oy, lads, fancy a couple Britneys?” the bartender asked Gary Manning and David McCarter as they focused on the LCD-screen television hanging over the bar. The TV news was dominated by the aftermath of the disaster in Russia. The bartender’s question pulled Manning’s attention away from the pad of paper where he’d been scribbling angles he’d guessed at from video footage and the oblique shapes of the impact craters.

McCarter looked at the bartender. Though he’d lost most of his accent, McCarter still could hear a touch of Polish in his speech.

Manning’s look was quizzical in response to the pub man’s comment. He turned to his friend for an explanation. “Britneys?”

“Rhyming slang,” McCarter explained. “Britney Sp—”

“Her name rhymes with beers,” Manning cut him off. “How’d she get across the pond to influence London barkeeps?”

“Sitting naked in music videos does a lot to improve international popularity,” McCarter answered. He looked at the bartender. “Two more pints, mate.”

“The Babel concept,” Manning muttered. “Languages are far from immutable, more like living creatures. Viruses actually.”

“Language is a virus?” McCarter asked.

“More appropriately, an information virus,” Manning told him. “Viruses are a part of this planet. The first transfer of information was in the form of a virus, one simple organism transmitting DNA code to another in the creation of life. All data is viral in nature, be it a new word in a language or a catchy set of lyrics in a song. Every bit of information is a single permutation of that first virus.”

McCarter looked at the pad on which the Canadian demolitions expert had been calculating trajectories. “What about those angles? Did someone put a satellite in orbit right over Moscow?”

Manning tapped the end of his pen against his chin. McCarter could see a brilliant light working behind the Canadian’s eyes. “We don’t have footage of their whole approach. All I can tell is that they came in off of a supra orbital arc. Whether it was akin to the supergun or a satellite-mounted kinetic weapons system I couldn’t tell without proper examination of their approach vectors. Even then we’d be dealing with over-the-horizon launches.”

“You know, maybe the Farm picked up something,” McCarter offered.

Manning shook his head. “Unlikely. A release of kinetic darts would have a minimal thermal profile. There’s no indication of any rocket thrusters so they would be untrackable except when they hit the atmosphere. Then the friction of their passage through the air would provide for infrared tracking, but we’re looking at trailing a projectile at thousands of feet per second…”

“Terminal velocity. We experienced that kind of speed ourselves,” McCarter replied.

“A little too closely,” Manning returned. He smiled. “I bet you had the time of your life playing bumper cars with space shuttles.”

McCarter held up his thumb and forefinger to indicate a small amount. “A bit, mate.”

Manning chuckled, and McCarter looked away from him, his eye catching something going on in the corner. He’d come to the pub to watch the two booths full of young men wearing football jerseys. He counted twelve of them, all shaved-headed, with faces that looked as if they’d taken multiple punches over the years. These were soccer hooligans if they were anything, a breed of troublemaker with whom McCarter was quite familiar. A couple of them were looking at their cell phones, the brightly glowing LCD screens reflecting in their eyes lending them a haunting, soulless appearance.

“Gary, you know all about technology. What’s it called when groups assemble due to instant messages?” McCarter asked.

“Flash mobs,” Manning answered immediately. “Given a proper network of like-minded people, flash mobs are hard, almost impossible to anticipate and difficult to track. Why?”

McCarter nodded toward the hooligans who were assembled at the two booths. Manning narrowed his eyes, studying the group as the two men with the cell phones pocketed them and gestured to the other jersey-clad men. The group threw down their money on the table for the waitress to scoop up as she took their order for the current round. In a London pub, you paid before you got your alcohol. She returned with a tray of lager bottles, which the hoodlums grabbed off her tray. Where they had been garrulous moments before, now they had fallen into silence.

“As always, good instincts,” Manning noted. “There’s no game on tonight, and these guys are in a hurry for something.”

“We’ve got a little bit of time before we’re called in. Let’s see where they’re headed,” McCarter suggested.

Manning nodded. He left a tip for the bartender and the two men exited the pub, staying back but still within sight of the small mob of ruffians. Both Manning and McCarter were members of Phoenix Force, the foreign-operations strike team of Stony Man Farm. McCarter had summoned Manning to London to assist him in checking out rumors that someone had been organizing the roughhousing young men of the hooligan scene. There had already been plenty of arrests of more enterprising hooligan gangs doing muscle work for organized crime and street-corner drug dealing. This had been part of a disturbing trend from London to Vladivostok. The clique mentality of the thuggish sports fans had given the roughnecks an impetus to organize, and they had found plenty of opportunity to make money from mayhem and destruction.

McCarter frowned. “Viruses tend to spread in patterns, right?”

Manning nodded. “Especially social constructs.”

McCarter’s frown deepened. “This isn’t the normal kind of sport fan. These are ruffians who have taken their social ostracism and turned it into gang mentality. In the U.S., street gangs are nothing like the Crips and Bloods who developed in the 1970s into gun-wielding thugs. But right here, we’re seeing the same kind of evolutionary changes occurring among the hooligans.”

“In order to fund their lifestyle, they commit robberies or they sell drugs,” Manning agreed. “And they could increase their level of violence—”

“As if they aren’t savage enough in hand-to-hand,” McCarter interrupted.

“Then you don’t want to imagine them with shotguns or rifles,” Manning said.

McCarter nodded. He kept his eye on the group. He’d kept watch over them all morning. The soccer thugs had been on a pub crawl all night long, and it was close to nine now. So far, he had Stony Man’s cybernetics teams studying Twitter notification streams and other text message hubs to look for signs of organized communication networks. The young men were now on the move soon after a near apocalyptic event in Moscow. McCarter couldn’t believe that this was a coincidence.

He pulled his phone and sent a secure text to the Farm, hoping to catch someone’s attention.

“Hooligans in motion. Copy?”

There was no response, and the Briton wrinkled his nose. Of course the Farm wasn’t going to take the electronic organization of London street gangs as a priority over a high-powered strike on a major international capital. He looked over at Manning, who gripped the strap of his backpack. Both McCarter and his Canadian partner were well-armed with handguns and knives, but the satchel contained more potent equipment.

McCarter was someone who had a predisposition to action and had developed a level of lethal ruthlessness when dealing with opponents who had no qualms about murder. However, the thought of opening fire on unarmed foes was something that the Special Air Service veteran found abhorrent. Manning’s backpack had a pair of shotguns, but the twelve-gauge weapons were filled with nonlethal shells. The initial loads inside the pistol-gripped pumps were tear-gas-spewing ferret rounds, but there were bandoliers filled with mixed gas and spongy baton rounds. While the ammunition wasn’t intended to be deadly, they could kill if Manning or McCarter chose their shots carefully.

McCarter felt that if he was going to drop an assailant permanently, he’d use either his beloved 9 mm Browning Hi-Power or his new backup pistol, a Springfield Armory Enhanced Micro Pistol. The EMP was also a 9 mm pistol, and it also shared the same mechanism that allowed him to carry the Browning locked and cocked; the EMP was simply a resized version of the Hi-Power’s cousin, the John Moses Browning–designed 1911 pistol. The flat EMP fit easily into an ankle holster. Manning had his choice of sidearms, as well. The big Canadian had opted for a .357 Magnum Colt Python with a 9 mm Walther P5 for backup. For quiet but bloody work, the two carried chisel-bladed knives in sheaths around their necks.

“No response from the Farm?” Manning asked.

McCarter confirmed Manning’s query. “On the bright side, they might have had the kind of data you couldn’t access over a TV news screen.”

“And far superior physics simulation programming to allow for air current effects upon objects in motion,” Manning replied.

“Would that make it easier to determine what the weapon was?” McCarter asked.

“Slightly,” Manning answered. “They’d also know if a radioactive element was utilized in the kinetic darts.”

“Radioactive metal? You think we’d have to deal with that again?” McCarter asked.

Manning shrugged his brawny shoulders. “I always assume the worst, but even with the rod assault being made of conventional materials, it carries enough kinetic energy to obliterate entire city blocks and infrastructure. You noted the flames.”

“Gas mains and electrical lines disrupted,” McCarter agreed. “They haven’t confirmed the dead, but if just one of those rods hit a crowded tube, er, subway…”

Manning grimaced at that thought. “It wouldn’t have to hit dead-on. If my calculations of the mass of the orbital impact objects are correct, we’re looking at a landing within a quarter mile of a subway tunnel. According to the map I was working from, we’re looking at between four and seven tunnels collapsed, as well as at least three transit platforms. The death toll underground can reach over two thousand, independent of above-surface structural collapse.”

McCarter’s mood matched the expression on Manning’s face. Since the Canadian was a demolitions expert, the Briton had little cause to doubt his friend’s calculations. McCarter returned his attention to the hooligans, whose numbers had tripled as they met up with more groups of their comrades. He felt a moment of uncertainty, judging the superior numbers he and Manning would face if their quarry decided to turn en masse and confront them. The Phoenix Force veterans were survivors of multiple riots, having fought off dozens of crazed opponents alongside their other three Phoenix Force partners, but in those situations, they had terrain and training advantages. The hooligans were something different from what they would be used to—men who used their strength of numbers as a lethal weapon against foes unlucky to get into their path.

McCarter spotted hammers and sharpened shanks of steel in some of the hooligans’ hands, and the football fans were uniformly buzzed on beer, drunk enough to surrender their individuality to the madness of the mob but not so inebriated that they couldn’t concentrate on targets of rage and opportunity. With weapons in hand, these men were a threat to anyone they encountered, and even though the group had tripled in size, they still hadn’t reached their final destination. Manning slipped his backpack off his shoulder, allowing McCarter to reach in surreptitiously and withdraw the stubby shotgun and transfer it under his windbreaker. Suddenly the ex-SAS commando was wishing that he had his preferred Cobray submachine gun, a well-tuned little chatterbox that could spit out its deadly 9 mm kisses at 800 hits per minute.

“It’s not going to be much if they turn on us,” Manning noted.

McCarter managed a smirk. “As long as they don’t have guns, we can at least use the shotguns as clubs.”

Manning nodded at the suggestion. “Sometimes your optimism can be contagious.”

McCarter snorted. “But this isn’t one of those times.”

“You read my mind,” Manning replied with a chuckle.

McCarter’s cell phone beeped, letting the Briton know that he’d received a text message from Stony Man Farm. He fished out the phone.

“Message received. Network shows thugs assembling at Piccadilly Circus,” the text read. From the use of full words, but terse wording, McCarter could tell that it had been Carmen Delahunt who had sent the message. Akira Tokaido would have used abbreviated terms, while Huntington Wethers would have written out entire sentences, including prepositions.

McCarter quickly typed a reply. “Alert locals, incl Flying Squad.”

The growing mass, headed to one of the most famous shopping districts in the free world, would turn into a rampaging stampede of bulls in a proverbial china shop. The sight of hammers and shivs in various hands showed a capacity for violence. He checked his watch. At 10:00 a.m. there would be hundreds if not thousands of shoppers on hand for the buzzed, hostile hooligans to menace. The mention of the Flying Squad, London Metropolitan Police’s premier emergency response team, was one of McCarter’s hopes for evening the odds, as well as limiting the chances of fatalities. The Met’s Flying Squads were made up of rough-and-ready men, many of them veterans of the SAS like McCarter himself, or of the Royal Marines. But they were more than just gun-toting civil servants. The warriors in the “Sweeney” units, named for the Flying Squad’s rhyme of Sweeney Todd, were also trained in emergency first aid, as well as riot suppression. If the Flying Squad wasn’t on hand to immediately squelch the hooligans’ violence, they could provide vital life-saving assistance to their victims.

“Notified,” Delahunt’s message returned.

McCarter ran his thumbs across his phone’s minikeyboard. “Moscow news?”

“Situation remains fluid,” Delahunt told him.

“Fluid,” Manning grumbled. “Moscow’s football gangs are of a slightly more violent level of hostility than London’s.”

“Not by much,” McCarter said. He typed a quick question to send to the Farm. “Riots in Moscow?”

“Confirmed,” Delahunt answered. “Moscow police overwhelmed.”

McCarter and Manning looked to the sky. If London was going to be the site of flash mob violence, there was the possibility that the city on the Thames would receive a hammering from the same weapon that had scarred the Russian capital. The Briton typed in another question. “We expecting rain?”

“Wish we could tell,” Delahunt answered.

McCarter grit his teeth. “So while we’re looking at these berks, someone could be targeting my city?”

“Berks?” Manning asked.

“Berkshire Hunts,” McCarter explained. It was more rhyming slang, and Manning shook his head as he figured out the curse that his term stood in for.

“It’s unlikely that our opposition could stage a second orbital weapon launch, nor probable that they would assault this city without a declaration of intent,” Manning said. “According to the news, Moscow broadcast sources received a threat a few hours before the attack.”

“And Carmen would have told us if there was something for London,” McCarter said. He texted again. “No warnings?”

“None. Yet,” was the response.

McCarter’s brow wrinkled in concern. “Get C, R and T.J. on deck.”

“Already done.”

McCarter pocketed his phone. They were already on Haymarket Road, and in the distance, even in the morning daylight, he could see the bright, glowing signs of the Piccadilly Circus. McCarter could tell that they were on Haymarket due to the presence of four rearing horses off to one side. They were carved in black marble, and were beautifully polished. This statue, nestled in a semicurved corner over a small fountain, was one of McCarter’s favorite pieces of art in London, a visage of natural beauty and power. Its fame would always be in the shadow of Eros at the center of Piccadilly Circus, the massive cherub that was poised on one foot, aiming its bow at some distant lover’s heart, surrounded by the blazing neon of Piccadilly’s shops. McCarter squinted and he could barely make out the tall form in the distance over the heads of the massing hooligans.

The throng they trailed had swelled even further in size. Four more groups had hooked up to form a mob of potential rioters that seemed like an army. Throughout the crowd, he and Manning took note of dozens of glass bottles held up like torches of liberty. A more ominous sight along the edges of the crowd were the black handles of knives poking out of waistbands here and there. A couple of men carried gym bags, signaling that they were devotees of the Manchester Blacks. McCarter was too aware that those satchels could easily conceal firearms, as he and Phoenix Force had managed to disguise their arsenal that way in the past.

“I see four men with those bags on this end of the throng,” Manning stated.

“Who knows how many are mixed in with that lot,” McCarter grumbled. “I’ll need a distraction.”

Manning nodded, knowing that McCarter would need to ambush one of the bag carriers to see what he had hidden in a nylon sack. The Briton slipped closer to a hooligan he’d picked since he was the rearmost of the group. This particular soccer thug looked sober and too well groomed to be in with this lot, despite the fact that he wore team colors.

It was a simple prisoner snatch, something he had done in both service to Britain and to the Sensitive Operations Group. Off to the side, a sudden crackle of a dozen firecrackers popping drew all eyes. That was Manning’s distraction, utilizing a small portion of explosives that the demolitions genius always kept on his person. McCarter slipped his forearm around the bagman’s throat and brought up his free fist, driving the bottom edge of it hard against his target’s ear. The hooligan was paralyzed with agony as his eardrum was ruptured by the boxing of his ear, and luckily the man’s nerves were frozen, maintaining the death grip on the nylon web straps of his bag. McCarter swiftly backed into a small nook between shopfronts, sliding down the narrow entryway.

The prisoner struggled to speak, but McCarter cut him off with a sharp blow that landed just above his navel, driving the wind from his lungs. He was unable to cry out for assistance in the dark and narrow walkway down which McCarter and his captive had disappeared. The thug reached up with one hand, fingers hooked like claws, but the Briton grabbed his wrist and burst his knuckles on the brick wall. McCarter was more concerned with what his opponent’s other hand was doing, and he yanked on the hooligan’s collar, pulling him off balance.

The man’s hand rose, a snub-nosed revolver locked in it, but it was pointed toward the alley, not at the Phoenix Force commander. With a hard chop, McCarter jarred the thug’s neck with enough force that he dropped the weapon, his knees buckling.

“Not nice. Don’t you know they have laws against that shit here?” McCarter asked, yanking the hooligan’s wrists down to the small of his back. He slipped a plastic cable tie out of his pocket and bound his prisoner’s hands behind his back.

“Fuck off, Nancy,” the goon snarled.

McCarter whacked him again, this time in the temple, sending him into unconsciousness. With the bagman out cold, he was able to look inside the nylon gym bag. He saw dozens of canisters that he recognized as grenades, their pin-laden tops ominously looking back at him. A shadow fell across the entryway opening and McCarter turned to see who it was. Manning was there, keeping watch.

McCarter pulled out one canister and saw that it was chemical smoke. There were three different kinds of hand-thrown bombs inside, none of them purely explosive, but there were plenty of tear gas and stun grenades on hand to sow terror in Piccadilly Circus.

“Four that we saw, maybe three more groups,” McCarter mused.

“Whatever the amount, there are plenty of grenades to start a wild riot,” Manning replied.

McCarter grimaced. He could hear sirens in the distance. The Metropolitan police were on their way, alerted to action by Stony Man Farm. He didn’t know if that would be enough, however. He hoisted the confiscated bag, holding it out to Manning. “Forget about the shotgun rounds. We’ll need this.”

“How will we track where these came from?” Manning asked.

“Bugger that,” McCarter grumbled. “You’ve got hundreds of hooligans ready to go crazy amid thousands of innocents.”

Manning held out his backpack and McCarter gave him half a dozen flash-bangs. “We could just start the violence early if we throw these around.”

“Or we could throw them off their timing—and pull their attention our way,” McCarter answered.

Manning nodded. It was a standard bit of strategy on the part of the action-oriented Phoenix Force leader. If there was the potential for mayhem, McCarter chose to make himself a target to pull trouble away from those he’d sworn to protect. “I’ll give us some room.”

McCarter saw the brawny Canadian draw his Colt Python. The powerful revolver would make plenty of noise, being heard more clearly than any mere 9 mm pistol with its Magnum level loads. There was one thing that the Phoenix pair could count on—the reactions of everyday people to gunfire. They wouldn’t be certain how the crowd of hooligans would react, but luckily the shoppers had thinned out at the sight of a mob of rowdy drunks.

“Let fly,” McCarter said, and Manning aimed at a facade of a building, triggering three rapid, bellowing shots at the brick. The Magnum’s hollowpoints were easily stopped by the stone and mortar, preventing dangerous ricochets or rounds cutting through a wall to harm a second-floor resident.

People scattered, running away from the heart of Piccadilly Circus while the throng clogging Haymarket whirled at the sudden burst of new violence. The Python was far more authoritative than the firecrackers Manning had dropped. The rioters glared at the two men who stood defiantly in the middle of the road.

Manning and McCarter were both the same height, six foot one, but Manning was broad-shouldered and barrel-chested while McCarter was leaner.

“Who do you berks think you are?” one of the bagmen grunted. He had noticed McCarter’s bag full of tricks.

“The Peace Corps,” McCarter replied.

“Why don’t we promote you berks from corps to corpses?” the spokesman said. He turned to his mates. “Fuck ’em up!”

The wall of thugs surged, taking one step forward, but McCarter and Manning had been cooking their flash-bangs from the moment the loudmouthed bagman snarled his response to McCarter. The Phoenix pros hurled their flash-bangs in underhanded tosses, both canister grenades rolling between the crowd’s feet.

Detonating, the distraction devices unleashed twin stunning pulses through the crowd of drunken thugs. The unified surge that they had attempted transformed into a snarl of limbs as dozens folded over with painful deafness. Those who were farther back in the riot crowd tripped over those who had been halted by the blasts. McCarter and Manning had produced a dam of humanity against the flood tide of rage that would have overwhelmed them, but the grenades were only the beginning of what they needed.

The bagman had pulled a pistol from his waistband. McCarter, a British Olympic pistol champion, saw him start his quick draw and hauled out his Browning Hi-Power, triggering a quick shot faster than the gunman. The hooligan jerked violently as the bridge of his nose exploded with a precision-placed shot straight to the brain.

Not being a dedicated handgunner like his British friend, Manning whipped out his shotgun and fired the .12-gauge ferret rounds into the knees of three rioting hooligans. The tear gas shells weren’t designed to be fired directly at someone, but with the numbers they were facing, Manning erred on the side of injury rather than shooting someone in the chest.

Legs knocked out from under them, the thugs tumbled, providing a break that their allies, unhindered by flash-grenade deafness, had trouble passing. The tumble of stunned bodies created by the explosions snarled their path. It was a brief reprieve, and both Manning and McCarter were facing down a dozen angry hooligans whom they weren’t willing to gun down in cold blood.

Conversely, the surging rioters were out for Phoenix Force blood and outnumbered the merciful warriors six to one.

CHAPTER TWO

Normally, Gary Manning did not rely on melee weapons when it came to close-quarters combat. He preferred to utilize his great strength and skill to deal with opponents, but now he was faced with a less than optimal situation. The London roughneck charging at him had a brain-smashing weapon locked in his fist.

Manning quickly reversed the pistol-grip pump in his big hands and brought the weapon up to bat aside the whistling steel of a ball-peen hammer targeting his skull. Metal struck metal with a loud clang and a spark, and the Canadian knew that although his weapon would not be reliable anymore, it had saved him from a traumatic head injury. He knotted his left hand into a ham-size fist and brought it up hard under the chin of the hammer-wielding rioter. The uppercut literally lifted Manning’s target off his feet and hurled him against another soccer hooligan behind him.

Manning didn’t have time to celebrate his victory. Instead he whirled and jammed his shoulder against the chest of a third rioter, getting inside of the arc of the young man’s scything knife. The shoulder block turned the blade-wielding hooligan into a plow, which allowed the powerful Canadian to run over four of the surging rioters. He reached up and snared the improvised battering ram by his football jersey and whipped him around as a living club, bowling over more of the rowdy maniacs.

Manning glanced quickly to one side and saw that McCarter had trapped one of his foes in an armlock and was utilizing the hooligan as a fulcrum and a shield. The big Canadian returned his attention to the combat at hand in time to hear his captive howl from the stab of a sharpened strip of metal into his shoulder. Manning hurled his charge aside, away from where he’d encounter more rioter weapons, and snapped down a judo chop on the forearm that held the bloody shank. Bones cracked under the assault, and the ruffian stumbled backward.

The dam of stunned figures wasn’t holding angry rioters back as well as it had before, but Manning was aware of the impermanence of a stun grenade’s effects on crowds. With a surge, the big Canadian whipped one muscular arm out and clotheslined it across the throat of a charging hooligan. The London gang member’s feet kicked out from under him and he toppled backward into his compatriots. Manning knew that his only hope was to exploit the number of bodies pitted against him. He was not facing a unified group, moving in perfect synchronicity, despite the singular mind the mob possessed. As such, he was able to trip up one attacker with one of his fellow rioters, limbs entangling each other as one hand was clueless about what the other was doing.

Even so, Manning realized that he could only maintain this frenetic pace for so long. He kept his body in tip-top condition, maintaining a level of endurance that could carry him across deserts or up the highest mountainsides. Combat, however, sapped that kind of energy far faster than simple cross-country traveling. Manning was directing his muscles with precision and speed, as well as exploiting their phenomenal strength. Such fine manipulation required more intensive use of endurance, and he knew that he didn’t have the kind of power to hold out against the entirety of this roiling throng.

If Manning’s seemingly bottomless reserves were beginning to run dry, he wondered how his partner was faring as the hooligan horde surged forward.

FISTS AND FEET FLEW, trying to track the SAS-trained brawler, but they struck McCarter’s prisoner, not the man himself. In the meantime, McCarter lashed out with his long, powerful legs, kicking rioters in the knees or groin. The low blows weren’t pretty and were far from fair, but they were the swiftest and least harmful means of knocking down ruffians without causing undue death.

The maneuvers reminded McCarter of his favorite American slapstick comedians, who often repeated a gag where they ensnarled themselves against an enemy and utilized the momentum of that foe to spin them around, whirling out of harm’s way while their opponents ended up battling each other. The weight of the man McCarter had hooked himself to was providing sufficient energy for McCarter to spear snap-kicks into abdomens and get enough height to break more than a few jaws. The SAS veteran was tempted to lose himself in the brawl, but his sense of responsibility kept him from full surrender. He pulled his punches and kicks, knowing that he didn’t require that much force to hold his enemies at bay.

Somewhere in the course of the initial melee, the rest of the crowd that had been halted by the stun grenades had recovered their senses. They started to move in, surrounding both Manning and McCarter, a wall of bodies separating the Phoenix pros. McCarter released his fulcrum, putting plenty of muscle into a hip toss so that when he struck his compatriots, a dozen bodies tumbled together.

Dozens of hands clawed at McCarter as he back-pedaled. There were too many of them, and he didn’t have the sheer muscle required to hurl rioters against each other. Fortunately, McCarter had a bag of heavy grenades, and he swung them hard. Their mass added to the strength of his swing, and the hard metal canisters for the smoke and tear gas dispensers proved to be unyielding as they struck hands, wrists, arms and shoulders.

Several of the hooligans stopped short, clutching shattered limbs. The rioting thugs didn’t have much time to comfort their injured body parts as others behind them shoved them to the ground to be trampled underfoot by the surging tide of madness. McCarter whipped the bag of grenades around again and again, feeling the impact of his improvised mace against their bodies, scattering them in a wide arc. Each slashing stroke of the flailing nylon bag was testing the strength of the synthetic fabric, however. His weapon wasn’t going to last forever, and the football hooligans had spread out, encircling the Phoenix Force commander.

McCarter grimaced, realizing that he was going to have to try something drastic. He hauled the bag back to his chest, reached into its zipper and came away with three or four pins. The roughhousing throng paused as they saw the cotter rings fall away from his fingers, and McCarter lobbed the satchel into the waiting arms of one of the rioters. Before the grenades could detonate, McCarter equalized the pressure in his ears with a loud roar that further worked at slowing the madness-inflicted mob.

Sympathetic detonations accompanied the lone stun grenade’s explosion, extreme pressure knocking loose safety mechanisms to extend the shattering blast, even as powerful jets of smoke and tear gas erupted from the bag of doom. Hooligans wailed as chemical smoke and concentrated capsicum solution blasted dozens of faces. McCarter was used to working in the clouds created by the smoker canisters, and he had also built up an immunity to the sinus-inflaming effects of the pepper extract. Even so, McCarter’s eyes and nose were running freely. He had been almost at ground zero of the detonations, but the number of rioters had worked in his favor. The press of their bodies absorbed the concussion of the flash-bangs, as well as diluting the tear gas and smoke he would have taken full force otherwise. McCarter fired off quick rabbit punches, tagging sides and abdominal muscles, knocking air from the hooligans’ lungs, forcing them to breathe in deep gulps of atmosphere that was no longer good for them. The cottony cloud that enveloped McCarter and his crowd of opponents provided a shield that limited the advance of dozens who could no longer find him.

McCarter pumped a knee into the gut of one ruffian who tried to fight on despite his blindness. That foe collapsed to the ground, gasping for breath. Another man took a karate chop to the shoulder, the pain of a broken clavicle taking the fight out of him. The Briton had bought himself time with the use of the grenades, but smoke and tear gas dissipated, and the stunning force released by the high-pressure flash-bangs would fade, allowing enemies to recover their senses.

Suddenly, McCarter stumbled, pushed back by two of the rioters. He would have fallen on his ass had it not been for the presence of a pair of curved plasticine shields. McCarter glanced back, and hands reached in the gap between the two riot cops, tugging the ex-SAS man behind a wall of lawmen who pushed forward with rubberized clubs and their clear plastic but nigh invulnerable shields. The police were wearing gas masks to protect them from the choking clouds that had been unleashed by the Phoenix Force pros, so they went in with all of their senses working. The phalanx of officers also had the benefit of trained coordination. Each man covered himself and the man to his right, and they moved in step.

While the mob had a wild might, it was unfocused and undisciplined. They crashed helplessly against the wall of authority that pushed forward. In the meantime, McCarter found himself helped up by two cops who followed behind the living barrier that descended upon the riot. McCarter was relieved to see the Flying Squad’s efficiency in herding the hooligans.

“You all right?” one of the bobbies asked.

“I’ve been better, but not by much,” McCarter replied with a wink.

“Dispatch told us to keep an eye out for you and your partner,” the other metropolitan policeman said. “They told us that the two of you would be holding the line as if you were a two-man riot squad.”

“Where’s my chum?” McCarter asked. He scanned around and breathed a sigh of relief as he saw the unmistakable bulk of Gary Manning among the policemen following the riot-squad phalanx.

“I hope that’s him,” the first cop said. “When the shield men passed him, he’d wound two of the rioters up in those hulking arms of his.”

“Yeah, that’s him,” McCarter confirmed. “How is the suppression going?”

“Well, thanks to the two of you hammering this end of Haymarket Road, we were able to divert the fire hose trucks that would have been here to other approaches,” the second lawman explained. “A good rinsing is taking the piss out of these drunken louts.”

“Looks like you’ve got them all well and kettled up,” McCarter said.

“You sound like you know a little of what the Met likes to do,” the first police constable noted.

McCarter shrugged. “I’ve been around the Met and worked alongside the Sweeney a few times in a professional capacity.”

The other PC sized the Phoenix Force leader up. It had been a while since McCarter had worn the short, close-shorn haircut of a professional military man, his hair naturally feathered and flowing down over his ears. Still, even through the layers of his windbreaker and shirt, it was easy for the lawman to notice that McCarter was fit and muscular in the way that a professional soldier would be, lean with very little bulk to get in his way. “Professional but unofficial?”

McCarter nodded curtly, indicating that further discussion along those lines was no longer open.

“Who are you and the barrel-chested bloke?” the first constable asked.

McCarter sighed. “Friends. Concerned friends. That’s all I can say.”

“Well, you’re a right geezer in my book,” the second constable said. “Anyone who can take on that many hooligans with only a few bruises…”

McCarter wondered what the lawman was talking about, but then he noticed that he was starting to feel stings along his face and arms. He’d been so wrapped up in battling the riot, he hadn’t noticed where glancing impacts had connected with him. Had he been less quick and skillful, he would have suffered broken bones and muscle tears from the melee.

“You still with us, friend?” the first bobby asked.

“Yeah,” McCarter replied. “Just taking inventory on all my bits and pieces.”

The two officers studiously ignored the sight of McCarter’s holstered pistol and the shotgun that hung through the tatters of his windbreaker, but their nonchalance only lasted so long.

“Would you want us to take those for you?” the first lawman asked.

“I’m keeping my Browning,” McCarter said. “But you can take the riot gun.”

The two officers looked at each other, then thought about the orders, the description they’d been given. They also looked at the stunned and battered dozens left in the wake of the riot police, men who had been knocked down mostly by the efforts of the man with the Browning and his partner. If McCarter was a threat to the peace they’d sworn to protect, he could easily have gunned down countless more of the soccer hooligans as opposed to leaving them alive but hurting. They could trust the Phoenix Force commander with his sidearm.

“Thank you for your assistance,” the second of the officers said. He took McCarter’s hand and shook it.

The “concerned friend” waved Manning over, and the pair disappeared down Haymarket Road. They had to contact Stony Man Farm.

MCCARTER AND MANNING lurched through the door of their hotel room, running on fumes from the energy they’d exerted in dealing with the Piccadilly riot. Manning secured the door while McCarter turned on the television, flicking it to the news. As it hadn’t taken them more than a few minutes to get back from Haymarket Road, the news media was still in the dark about what was going on, putting up rumors as true information.

McCarter could see the news cameras focused on one arm of the riot for a moment. He could see himself and Manning amid chemical smoke and tear gas battling against a throng. Luckily, the quality of the camera images was too grainy and jumpy to be of any use in identifying them, and by then, Stony Man Farm would have grabbed extant copies of the video footage from where the files had been stored across the internet and doctored them to make any attempts at clarifying their features totally impossible.

Price and Brognola, back at the Farm, would be gnashing their teeth that McCarter and Manning may have exposed their identities on international television.

Manning picked up the phone as McCarter continued to scan the channels, looking for more information on the riots. If he was going to risk the privacy of the Sensitive Operations Group, he might as well know the extent of the damage.

“Barb wants to talk to you, David,” Manning said, holding out his cell to McCarter.

“Tell her it’s not my fault,” McCarter replied, checking the television.

“It’s not that,” Manning corrected him. “Besides, the Farm’s running its own scans of local news.”

McCarter looked over his shoulder, then held out his hand to accept the cell phone. “What did I do now?”

“Aside from risk exposing Phoenix Force’s existence?” Barbara Price asked. Stony Man Farm’s mission controller sounded only mockingly reproachful, which eased McCarter’s nerves somewhat. The Briton was a man of action, but he dreaded paperwork and he also hated the subterfuge necessary to keep him on the front lines, battling against the forces of evil. He was a doer, not a politician who needed to massage the egos of law enforcement agencies or foreign governments.

“Any time Phoenix Force and a riot are in the same city, you know we’ll bump into each other, even if we’re outnumbered,” McCarter answered.

“Luckily this time you bumped hard enough to stop the riot’s spread in one direction,” Price told him. “We have to keep you on station in London for a little while, but Cal and the others won’t be coming to assist you. We need to spread out in order to deal effectively with the nature of this threat. You might also have to go elsewhere in Europe.”

“The other states in the G8 have been threatened, most likely,” McCarter responded.

“Exactly, which is why we can’t keep Phoenix Force as one contiguous unit. If it’s any consolation, Lyons and his men are splitting up, as well,” Price confirmed.

“Things are getting bloody serious if that’s the case,” McCarter muttered. “More riots?”

“We think that the riots and the orbital bombardment attacks are tied in,” Price said. “The Russian soccer gangs went wild in full force. We’re fairly certain that they’ve also been backed by the neo-Nazi movement in Moscow.”

“Neo-Nazis,” Manning muttered, listening in as the phone was set on speaker mode. “Now that there’s been an influx of other people from the Middle East and other countries, the Russians are putting aside the bad memories of the battle of St. Petersburg and embracing racial purity.”

“It doesn’t hurt that the Russian economy is in the shitter,” McCarter added. “White, young and jobless people tend to congregate and cast hairy eyeballs at the nonwhites who are taking jobs that the whites would normally turn their noses up at. It happened a lot in London with Jamaican, Indian and Pakistani immigrants. Bigots like picking at the edges of groups of disenchanted youth.”

“It just so happens that the Moscow neo-Nazi sympathizers are well-organized, and they have a lot to pick from on the streets,” Price said.

“Cal’s going to be bloody useless in that venue. Rafael, too,” McCarter pointed out.

“Cal’s not going to Moscow. We’ve activated an old friend or two to deal with Japan and China,” Price explained. “Hope you don’t mind if he’s hanging out with Mei.”

“No. You said or two…are we thinking of my favorite ninja?” McCarter asked.

“John’s going to be in action,” Price said. “Cal’s heading to Tokyo on a jet fighter right now.”

“And what about Lyons and the boys?” McCarter asked.

“Right now it’s all need-to-know. I’m just informing you of your teammates—”

“To keep my head straight, so I don’t worry over their problems,” McCarter finished. “Thanks, Barb.”

“Any potential information on where the kinetic darts came from?” Manning asked.

Price paused for a moment. “The only thing we can tell is that there was a scrambling signal that interrupted observation satellite feeds for forty-five minutes.”

“All of them?” Manning asked.

“We’re not certain for other governments, but looking at our own reconnaissance satellites, we’ve got most of an hour missing due to active jamming,” Price said. “From the tropic of Capricorn to the tropic of Cancer, it’s one big blind spot.”

“Equatorial satellites, meaning we’ve narrowed down the possible places where the enemy could have launched from,” Manning said.

“That’s still millions of square miles,” Price countered. “Who knows if it’s a land-based launch or someone utilizing a decommissioned submarine’s missile silos.”

“Or worse, converted a regular freighter to utilize such silos,” Manning added. “Some tanker ships have the room and the strength to fire Atlas rockets if they wanted.”

“No clue where the jamming signal could have originated?” McCarter asked.

“We’ve got our people on it. Whatever it was, it transferred from system to system easily,” Price said.

“An opposing force of hackers,” Manning surmised.

“We’re looking at that. The nature of the interference was such that we couldn’t tell if it was signal interruption or a viral computer program affecting satellite uplinks,” Price said. “Either way, the jamming hasn’t affected telecommunications.”

“No. Even though they could utilize local cell towers to keep in touch with their people, this Fist of Heaven group seems to want us to know the kind of horror happening in Moscow,” Manning said. “A sword of Damocles for the other seven member nations of the G8.”

“David, I just got a hit on the picture you took of the bag man you wrangled in that alley,” Price said.

“Something’s better than nothing,” McCarter replied. “What is it?”

“We’ve got his name, and he’s on Scotland Yard’s watchlist,” Price explained.

“Given that he’s on a watchlist, he’s probably in with a neo-Nazi group like Combat 18,” McCarter said. “Organizations like them see the soccer hooligan growth as a breeding ground for new recruits.”

“His name was Kent Hyle, and he’s part of the Jakkhammer Legacy,” Price provided.

“Jakkhammer Legacy,” McCarter replied, nodding sagely, his tone transmitting his understanding over the phone.

“What the hell is the Jakkhammer, and why are neo-Nazis holding it in high honor?” Price asked.

“Jakkhammer, in the ’70s, was a righteously brilliant punk band. When I was in a band, too young for signing up, I was a great fan of theirs,” McCarter replied. “Then around 1980, they became a part of the Rock against Communism movement, which just started a slippery slope.”

“Nothing wrong about being against communism,” Price noted.

McCarter shrugged. “I’ve seen communism’s failures, but the RAC was simply blowing smoke up arses. The RAC was formed to be a counter to the Anti-Nazi League’s Rock against Racism drive, because Jakkhammer was a pro-white power band.”

“All the little white boys were feeling edged out of their lowest rung on the social ladder by the addition of Indians and Jamaicans to the London population,” Manning added.

“Oh,” Price replied. “And much like American politics today, communism or socialism is a handy slur that can’t be used as the basis of slander by far-right extremists.”

“Bingo,” McCarter replied. “I wouldn’t be surprised if certain U.S. news network pundits weren’t punk fans back in the late ’70s.”

“Regardless, Jakkhammer Legacy has a reputation with the British police,” Price said.

“I know that,” McCarter said. “When the whole team was in London a while back on holiday, we ended up having to teach a few of their number a lesson about accosting blacks and Latinos.”

“Good times,” Manning said, showing a rare grin at the commission of physical violence against anyone. “Punching a Nazi makes anyone’s day a little better.”

Price chortled. “You’re going to have an excellent evening with the information we’ll give you two, then.”

McCarter flexed his fists, tendons popping, a cruel grin on his lips. “Give us an address, and we’ll ask a few hard questions.”

Manning opened the pair’s “special” suitcase and pulled out two pairs of brown leather gloves. The gloves were designed for law enforcement and military, with reinforcement and padding to protect the small bones of the human hand when utilized for punches against people’s heads and faces. He tossed a pair to McCarter. They would, of course, go with firearms to meet with members of the Jakkhammer Legacy, but going in guns blazing was a hard way to get information. On the other hand, it would take considerable damage to the lips and nose to leave an opponent unable to talk after being thrashed.

McCarter received the files from Stony Man Farm as he prepared to head out, the leather of his fighting gloves creaking as he fit them snugly over his hands. He couldn’t help feeling a slight bit of guilt over taking such glee in laying abuse on a violence-and-racism-prone group of disenfranchised young men, nor could he dismiss the irony that he was going to become to the hooligans what the hooligans were to honest, law-abiding people.

McCarter glanced at Manning. “Let’s go teach some lessons tonight, Gary.”

“Be Afraid 101?” Manning asked.

McCarter nodded. “Class is now in session.”

CHAPTER THREE

Los Angeles

Carl Lyons was a man who had been born to hunt monsters. It had been apparent when he worked the rough streets of Los Angeles, patrolling neighborhoods in dispute zones between rival gangs with a determination that had earned him the title of Ironman. Hal Brognola had seen it after Lyons’s chance encounter with Mack Bolan, the Executioner, and had guided the young cop to put his unwavering courage and sharp mind to work in Brognola’s organized crime task force, going undercover against the most murderous of gangs. Finally, Lyons had found a home in the Stony Man Farm–based Sensitive Operations Group, alongside Rosario Blancanales and Hermann Schwarz as the leader of Able Team.

With his new position, Lyons had tackled gangsters, terrorists and psychopathic madmen from Alaska to Sri Lanka. All that experience gave Lyons insight into the minds of human predators. He knew that there was one certain place to find his prey and that was where it would find the tastiest meals.

Right now, it was in Los Angeles, where the President was returning from a trip to the G8 conference. The President would stay there for a few days, and there were rumors in the wind that something was going to happen. Those rumors tickled Lyons’s honed instincts, informing him that he would be needed in the City of Angels.

Unfortunately, the intel fragments that had been picked up indicated that whatever was going to happen might occur on either coast, or both. That meant leaving his partners in Able Team behind while he went solo to L.A. His fears were confirmed when Moscow became the target of a volley of orbitally launched spears, then Britain came under assault by electronically directed rioters.

Brognola had just finished relaying the London situation over Lyons’s earpiece.

“Two G8 nations in less than two hours,” Lyons mused. “It looks like a lot of things are coming together right now. I don’t like this one bit.”

Brognola grunted in agreement. “We were lucky to have David and Gary on hand for London. But with the teams spread so piecemeal across the globe…”

“We’ll cope,” Lyons responded as he looked around the LAX terminals. There were dozens of Secret Service and other agency personnel assembled, their nerves on edge as they waited for Air Force One to touch down. Up in the night skies, United States Air Force jets were flying air patrols and their radar and infrared sensors searched for sign of any menace that would come close to harming the leader of the free world.

Lyons noted that he blended in with the L.A. police who had been pulled in to supplement federal agents in putting a protective ring around the President. It was standard operating procedure to draw from local law enforcement, and in a way, it had made things easier for Lyons to slip unnoticed among them. He had spent enough time as both a cop and a Fed to pass for the other when encountering either side. It was a two-edged sword, unfortunately. The very hodgepodge of personnel that had allowed him an anonymous presence, fully armed, in an airport on heightened security would make any other ex-cop or former federal agent blend in, and not every retired law enforcement agent was out of work because he wanted to leave the job amicably.

Lyons had encountered too many bent cops and corrupt Feds to make him feel complacent about the ease with which he operated within the supposedly airtight security cordon around the terminal. Lyons had come into the airport with an assortment of firepower that would give him a chance to grab something more substantial in the case of a full-blown gunfight. He had his favorite revolver, a Colt Python, on him as always. This particular .357 Magnum was a snub-nosed version with its frame cut and adapted to wear Pachmayr Compacs, tucked into an extralarge side pocket in his slacks. Speed loaders packed with 125-grain semi-jacketed hollowpoints weighed down the pockets of his sports blazer, ready to slam six rounds at a time into an empty cylinder. A .357 Magnum hammerless, five-shot Centennial revolver rode in an ankle holster under each of his pant legs for backup, even though the revolvers were only going to be supplementary to his main sidearm.

The three wheelguns were in reserve for the .357 Auto chambered Smith & Wesson Military and Police he wore in a shoulder holster. The high-powered auto-pistol was filled to the brim with sixteen windshield-smashing shots to start, and he carried forty-five more rounds in three magazines he wore in a pouch that balanced the MP-357.

“Carl, Hunt’s picked up an anomaly on the radar over the airport,” Brognola said. “The VOR radio had a burst of static for a moment, then the original image appeared.”

Brognola referred to Huntington Wethers, one of the most meticulous and attentive human beings that Lyons had ever encountered. Wethers had an acute eye for detail, which meant that anything he considered an anomaly was a serious deviation from the norm. Lyons consulted his PDA, which had a map of LAX loaded onto it. “The VOR station had a hiccup, and Wethers is concerned about it? Time to take a look at the transmitter.”

“Your identification will only get you so far if there’s something truly kinky going on,” Brognola said. “A gunfight on the tarmac will bring an army down on your head.”

“I’ll be careful,” Lyons promised.

Lyons slipped out an exit door close to the VOR station and jogged out onto the tarmac. The speedloaders in his pockets kept the wind across the flat concrete from blowing his lapels up to reveal the arsenal under his shoulders. He was dressed in a dark blue mock-turtleneck sweatshirt, light enough for the Los Angeles weather, and his jacket was a plaid blend of navy blue, Lincoln green and burgundy stripes, tinted just right so that Lyons could disappear into the shadows if he had to. It was a concept his friend and armorer, John “Cowboy” Kissinger, had developed—true urban camouflage. If someone saw Lyons decked out in black from neck to feet skulking around at night, they would be suspicious of him. However, with a little bit of light, he looked just like a normally dressed man, not a black-clad commando on the stalk. If he needed to totally disappear, he had a pocketed do-rag that he could stretch over his blond hair, removing the glint of its golden sheen from his profile.

He didn’t know what he would be looking for, and with grim concern, he realized that he wasn’t equipped for a stealth probe, unless he counted the Protech automatic knife he had clipped onto his belt. With a touch of a button, its five-inch blade would flash out, and as a cop on the violent streets of Los Angeles, he had no illusions that five inches of sharpened steel was any less deadly a weapon than a contact blast from a shotgun. A knife, even an inch-long stub, could destroy much more tissue than the largest bullet in the world. He’d have to get up close and personal to kill silently with the sleek switchblade, but with lives and national security at stake, he would make the sacrifice if necessary.

As Lyons neared the VOR transmitter, he slid behind the shadow of a parked luggage cart. A man paced back and forth, his bright cell phone screen causing his face to light up. The glowing reflections in his eyes were the only warning the Able Team commander had of his presence.

He pulled out his own PDA, made certain its LCD wasn’t too bright, then pulled up the cell phone cloning application that Hermann Schwarz had loaded into the powerful pocket device. He didn’t know the exact programming science behind the process, but Schwarz had explained simply that cellular phones were just encrypted radios that connected to a regular telephone network. This was why so many transmitter towers were needed around towns, as the cells were effectively only short-range. Schwarz explained that his program located the transmissions of nearby phones, then decrypted the mathematical keys that kept others from listening in.

A row of digits appeared on the screen and Lyons recognized the area-code prefix on the phone was for a cell number. He copied the text, put it in his instant messenger program and fired off the number to the Farm to trace it. In the meantime, he’d wait and observe, keeping his senses peeled for friends and foes in the darkness. If the Secret Service or a police officer saw him skulking in the shadows, he knew that his identification wouldn’t explain why he was acting like a ninja when the President was due any minute. If the menace targeting the President had posted guards to scout their operation, then a bloody fight would be inevitable.

For all of Carl Lyons’s reputation as a berserker warrior, a man capable of phenomenal violence in the face of the enemy, he was still a policeman and had become the tactical leader of Able Team. Observation and planning were Lyons’s two secret weapons that allowed him to appear as an unstoppable engine of destruction in addition to his great strength, endurance and fighting prowess. He studied his opponents, sized them up and found their weaknesses. By applying his strengths to his foes’ flaws, he could blow through them as if they were made of tissue.

Lyons looked at the PDA screen and saw that Stony Man Farm had come up with the original phone number that his quarry was using. It was a cell phone owned by a fifty-eight-year-old woman in San Bernardino County. Right now, he was operating on a clone of a cloned phone. The cybernetic geniuses back in Virginia were running the recent list of calls that had been made on the line, but the other end of the line was well encrypted. There were regular numbers, and then there were lines of gibberish that couldn’t be deciphered.

Whoever they were up against, they had good, secure communications. Naturally, Lyons sighed mentally; anyone who would dare go after the leaders of eight nations, let alone the U.S. President, would have to be highly organized and capable. When something showed up on Able Team’s radar, it generally had to be a national-scale conspiracy seeking to achieve its goals by murder and mayhem.

Just wait and see who’s calling in, Lyons thought. He fished along his belt for a small sheath that contained a compact Bushnell night-vision monocular. The device had a 4x magnification, which would allow him to get a better look at the man with the phone.

The man was clad in a denim jacket, and through the green tint of the night vision, Lyons could see what appeared to be sigrunes on his neck. Normally, Lyons wouldn’t know about arcane, occult designs, but the sigrunes were on a list of identifying tattoos for the southern California Reich Highwaymen, a widespread gang of thugs enlisted by the prison-based White Pride Defenders as muscle for their outside operations. The makeup that covered the lightning-bolt S’s on the man’s neck was very different from his normal skin color under the light magnification, and the dark ink underneath showed through. In regular vision, even under good light, Lyons knew that the man would have covered himself so as not to be noticed.

Lyons grit his teeth, then checked his PDA, sending a text message off.

“Any signs of neo-Nazi activity in London or Moscow?” Lyons asked.

“Jakkhammer Legacy in London,” came the reply almost instantly. “Suspect RNCG organizing rioters in Moscow.”

Lyons furrowed his brow in concern. Sightings of three different local neo-Nazi groups in relation to threats to G8 nations was a disturbing trend. He quickly took a snapshot with the PDA and entered the text CRLR. He got the rapid message and its attachment off as quickly as possible as he heard his quarry’s phone ring.

Lyons listened in.

“Your phone is compromised. Ditch it,” came the terse order. “Pull back for Plan B.”

The Reich rider looked up from the cell, then dropped it to the tarmac, his boot heel crushing the device. Lyons cursed, but even this bit of activity had given him information about his enemy. They were able to monitor their phones, and somehow had picked up on the fact that their line had been cloned. Sophisticated technology plus a white supremacist biker gang with national prison ties added up to the kind of opposition that Lyons couldn’t help but welcome.

Whatever the biker’s contingency plan, Lyons hoped that they only had one mode of communication that they felt was secure. As it was, the Reich rider turned and jogged to the VOR transmitter building. The boxy red-and-white base of the building with its conelike tower was an unassuming little place, but it could hide at least three more men inside. Lyons was going to have to ask about Plan B before he got to the others.

Lyons exploded from his hiding space with the speed that had made him a star football player in high school and college. Powerful legs propelled him along like a human rocket, and he caught up to the anxious neo-Nazi biker before he could make out the thump of feet or the trainlike pants of breath escaping the ex-cop’s nose and mouth. The denim-clad gang member turned just in time for Lyons’s brawny arm to catch him right across the throat. Momentum and velocity slammed the Reich rider to the ground hard, his head bouncing on the tarmac.

Breath released in a subdued “oof,” thanks to the force that Lyons had applied to his throat, and his face was clenched up in a painful wince. The undercover biker must have hit the back of his head hard on the ground, which was fine with the Able Team commander. A little pain was a handle with which he could convince his prisoner to talk. He didn’t have much time before whoever the motorcycle thug had come here with came looking for him.

“Plan B?” Lyons growled, drawing his Protech automatic knife. A simple press of the button and the five-inch serrated blade flickered into being right before his prisoner’s eyes. Shock registered on the man’s face as he tried to squirm away from the razor-sharp cutting edge that ended in a wicked needle tip.

The biker had trouble getting enough breath to speak louder than a harsh whisper thanks to Lyons’s weight and the placement of his forearm. There was also an enraged madness flickering behind Lyons’s eyes, informing the downed criminal that if he cried out for help, the burly warrior would slice his face off and leave him to die slowly.

“I’m not asking again,” Lyons said, resting the edge of the knife against the biker’s left eyebrow. One flick of the wrist, and the biker knew he would be blinded and mutilated. It was a basic, inborn fear. The blind rarely lasted well in the days before the modern world. The biker himself not only had the gruesome mental images of his eyes punctured running through his mind, but also the realization that he would be ostracized by his circle of acquaintances. Riding with the gang would be out of the question, as well, as he would have failed his brothers. There was also no guarantee that Lyons wouldn’t take out the other orb, too, leaving him blind. He would lose the life he’d known for the past decade or so.

“We’re supposed to meet up with another group. They tell us the location when we call them,” the man said.

“You guys are too tight not to have a password on hand,” Lyons mentioned. “A code word to let them know everything is all right.”

“I don’t have that,” the thug confessed. “Bones does.”

“Which one is Bones?” Lyons asked.

“He has a baby skull on a necklace,” the biker told him.

“How many others?” Lyons asked.

“Two,” the prisoner confessed. “Don’t mess my eyes up, man.”

Lyons nodded, but that didn’t preclude reversing the blade, then punching the pommel of the knife against his temple. The steel-reinforced fiberglass handle was less fragile than the small bones of the human hand, which broke easily when punching a man in the skull. Out cold, the biker wouldn’t be much of a threat now.

Lyons rose from the ground and scanned the VOR station. One thing in his favor was that few such transmitter buildings had windows installed. Unfortunately, such structures had very limited numbers of entrances. In this case, there were two, parallel to each other. Lyons could try to go through the front door, but that would leave him a target for armed men inside. Three-to-one odds wasn’t new for the Able Team commander, and indeed, he’d handled far worse.

Lyons preferred to fight smart, as well as hard. He scooped up the unconscious biker and put him in the luggage cart’s driver’s seat. The cart itself was hardly a step up from a riding mower, except with an engine that let it pull thousands of pounds of luggage a day. Lyons strapped the biker in, started the engine, then steered toward the VOR station’s door. His final act was to push his former prisoner’s foot against the accelerator.

He was setting bait, getting the bikers inside the building as bunched up as possible. A slow-moving cart bumping against the side of the station would draw curiosity, while anything faster striking the structure would send everyone packing.

With the cart set up, Lyons jogged along in its shadow, easily keeping up as he moved in a crouch behind the low-speed hauler. It struck one of the doors and crunched to a halt, its wheels grinding against the ground and causing the door to rattle. Lyons slipped out of sight behind the hauler and the unconscious biker.

Sure enough, the door opened a crack. Then a little farther. Lyons stayed hidden in the shadows, his do-rag tugged down to hide the glint of his blond hair in the ambient light.

“Toady? Toady, what the fuck? You drunk again?” a voice challenged.

“What’s up?” another asked.

“Damn fool passed out riding a goddamned luggage trolley around,” the man at the door said. Lyons saw a bone-white globe around the man’s neck. He stepped out into the open, and the other two men joined him.

Lyons had set his bait well, as Bones stuffed his big shiny stainless revolver into his waistband. The three of them walked closer to Toady in his perch, and one of the bikers leaned over the dashboard, looking for the ignition to stop the cart’s unrelenting “assault” on the locked door.

“Of all the—” Bones began.

Lyons didn’t let him complete his curse toward his fallen comrade. With a lunge, the big ex-cop burst into view, his forearm crashing against Bones’s jaw with the force of a sledgehammer. Lyons wanted the skull-wearing freak out cold and out of the fight to prevent the possibility that the other two could keep Bones from speaking. The biker toppled backward like a felled tree, but Lyons didn’t hear him fall, as he was too busy concentrating on other problems. One of the bikers was stooped over to catch Bones, but the last of them reached for a black 1911 he had tucked into his belt.

The handgun made him a target for Lyons, who lashed out with mae geri, the Shotokan front kick. Lyons had been a karateka for several years, since just before he’d joined Able Team, and his familiarity with the blunt, direct Shotokan style had proved to be more than an edge in countless fights at home and abroad. The blow struck the biker in the stomach, just below his navel, driving the wind from his lungs and folding him over reflexively. Thus positioned, Lyons automatically transitioned to a ushiro empi chop, bringing his elbow down savagely on the enemy’s back.

The gunner struck the ground face-first, mouth and nose gushing blood as they rocketed against the concrete. Lyons flipped the man onto his back and plucked the 1911 from his waistband. He dumped the magazine and worked the slide to eject the one in the pipe. He followed with a press of the thumb and a flick of the slide stop out of the frame. Now the weapon was useless, in two pieces and tossed away in two directions.

“Think you’re hot shit?” said the biker who’d lunged to Bones’s aid.

Lyons regarded the opponent who was reaching for his own iron. With a suiki uki block, Lyons scooped the man’s hand away from the handle of his sidearm, and he followed it up with his one-knuckle fist, his favorite punch in the art. With his knuckle projecting like a spearhead, he struck the biker in the breastbone with enough force to halt his breathing. Lyons stiffened his hand for a shuto strike and plunged the hardened blade of flesh and bone into his foe’s sternum. Fetid breath escaped from the man’s lungs, but Lyons withdrew and stabbed into the man’s clavicle, right at the juncture of nerves and blood vessels running along the side of the neck.

The biker was unconscious within moments.

Lyons turned and saw Bones struggle to get to his hands and knees. Lyons swept the biker’s hand out from under him. A quick frisk revealed that his shiny .44 Magnum was accompanied by a claw hammer, a favorite biker weapon. He threw both of them aside and hauled the stunned criminal to his feet.

“Come on, Bones,” Lyons said. “We’re going to talk about Plan B, and about that skull around your neck.”

CHAPTER FOUR

The Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia

Hermann Schwarz entered the cybernetic paradise that was known as the Stony Man Farm War Room. He paused, looking at the wall of digital LCD monitors that offered a tapestry of views from around the globe. Workstations sprawled out, each indicative of their owner, all of whom were at work right now. There was an optional side station that Schwarz and Manning had appropriated for themselves whenever they were working at the Farm. The Canadian utilized the station simply for research on his varied fields, from ballistics to structural physics. Schwarz, on the other hand, fiddled and experimented with computer codework, constantly updating and improving the efficiency of the programs that he ran on his personal cell phone and the combat Personal Data Assistants that he’d assigned to his comrades in the action squads Able Team and Phoenix Force.

Right now, his Able Team partner and friend Carl Lyons was in Los Angeles, already in town on a rare moment of much-earned leave. With the veiled threat against Russia and the rest of the G8, Lyons had gone back on duty immediately. Schwarz was watching his combat PDA, knowing that it was possible that he’d be called to action to deal with problems along the coast.

In the meantime, Schwarz was working with the rest of the cybernetic team at the Farm in an effort to backtrack the kinetic shafts that had struck Moscow. They surely weren’t the only ones trying to figure out the trajectory of the deadly missiles, but at least they could act on that information almost as soon as they received it, as opposed to a more conventional agency, which needed at least four hours of logistics and even more time for intricate planning.

It wasn’t that Able Team and Phoenix Force could ever be accused of going off without a plan. However, the two Stony Man Farm teams had enough experience and skill, as well as the ability to think unconventionally, that they could be called upon at a moment’s notice. They trained for as many contingencies as possible, honing and refreshing their skills in the time between their missions. Their intelligence, training and the technology they were able to fall back upon had all combined into a cohesive catch-all for whatever they could face.

That had been proved by the events in London less than an hour ago, when two members of Phoenix Force had been the deciding factor in what could have been a tragedy, containing mass violence and allowing innocent civilians to escape from seething, violent soccer hooligans. Schwarz made certain to listen in on Lyons’s conversation with Brognola, though the big Able Team leader had gone silent as the VOR station at LAX was mentioned.

Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman turned his attention toward Schwarz. “You come up with anything yet, Gadgets?”

Schwarz looked at Bear, the Stony Man cybernetics expert, and shook his head. He was still running mathematical calculations in his mind, but the Able Team electronics genius was the kind of a person who could mentally multitask with remarkable ease. When his teachers complained that he, as a youth, seemed to be antsy and distracted in class, he realized that it was because the lessons they gave him only occupied a small fraction of his brain power. He needed other distractions. Schwarz would hum to satisfy the part of his mental focus that needed music, while he idly designed circuits or performed complex equations as mere doodles. He literally had designed some of his gadgets in his sleep, the burning intellect trapped in his skull looking for something to do even as he dreamed.

In one way, it was a godsend for the brilliant technician. The burning need to create, to tinker, to modify and program allowed him to live in the moment, to focus on nothing and thus able to experience everything. There were times when he seemed to have an almost paranormal danger sense, but while the genius believed in the possibility of ESP, he knew the truth was a matter of being able to reconcile his conscious and subconscious minds. The human subconscious was vastly aware of the world around it, but very few people had tuned their upper mental faculties to pay attention to those background cues. Schwarz’s subconscious awareness was a directly accessible part of his mind, allowing him to process the sound of a scrape as either a breeze blowing a twig or a boot sole scuffing concrete.

“The nearest I could make out was that we’re looking at an eastward launch,” Schwarz replied. “The people who fired those darts were using Earth’s rotation to add to the relative velocity of those missiles. And who knows how many times they orbited the planet before they struck.”

“Given an equatorial launch, we could assume two or three cycles around the earth to angle in on Moscow,” Kurtzman replied.

“Maybe more, since those darts came in almost directly from the east,” Schwarz mused. Something caught his eye in his peripheral vision, and he turned his head, focusing on it.

“What is it?” Kurtzman asked.

“Something on the world map,” Schwarz said, getting up and walking toward the plasma screens. He headed toward the monitor panel that contained northern, equatorial Africa. It was a small flicker in Cameroon.

The monitor screen kept watch for anomalies that would add up to flags for potential problems that would end up in Stony Man’s lap. The computer would look for trends in increased criminal or terrorist activity, either smuggling or intensified violence. Then it would take regular census numbers of American or allied agents in those areas. Operatives who had not reported in for three consecutive days raised the flag.

“What do we have in Cameroon?” Schwarz asked.

“Nothing for CIA or NSA as far as we can tell,” Barbara Price spoke up from her liaison station. She frowned. “I’m checking Department of Defense.”

“You think this might be relevant?” Kurtzman asked.

Schwarz pointed at the proximity of the African coastal nation to the equator. “What were we just talking about, launchwise?”

Kurtzman grimaced. “Barb, what is the DoD looking at?”

“Two operatives were sent to the Congo to look into reports of kidnapping among the local population,” Price answered. She looked up. “Modern-day slavery, and in that region, slaves equal diamond mines.”

“Not necessarily in this case,” Schwarz said, “But then, there had to be something done to fund a potential launch pad.”

“Construction teams for a launcher,” Price murmured. “The Congo is akin to a million square miles…”

“One point four million square miles to be exact,” Schwarz corrected. “That’s just for the river basin, which is one of the top three largest unspoiled rainforests in the world.”

“Even with satellites, it’s going to take a lot of time to look through all that jungle,” Price noted, taking a deep breath. “And it’s not as if we have a lot of eyes in the sky looking down at the Congo.”

“Things are more interesting with piracy off the Horn of Africa or around the Mediterranean,” Kurtzman added. “Reallocating orbital surveillance for something that’s only a hunch is going to take a lot of effort and might raise too many flags.”

Schwarz turned, regarding Kurtzman. “I know it’s just a hunch, but everyone else is looking to the sky and pointing fingers at China and the U.S.”

“The only two countries with the resources to launch orbital bombardment satellites,” Price noted. “Though we’re concerned with something in the U.S. Lyons informed us that the Reich Highwaymen were skulking around LAX.”

“Reich Highwaymen in the U.S., Jakkhammer Legacy in England,” Schwarz mused. “Anything on our Nazi watch?”

“There’ve been funds flying around the backtrails, but nothing that points in any solid direction,” Carmen Delahunt spoke up. “All we know is—” she looked at her screen, her green eyes flashing as she did some quick math “—the amount of money in the stream is increased.”

“And no old artifacts or gold has turned up,” Schwarz stated.

“That’s true, but violence has increased in Europe among diamond smugglers,” Delahunt replied, anticipating Schwarz’s next supposition.

The Able Team genius frowned. Being right while he grasped at rumors and hints to form a plan of action was no victory. While he’d put together circumstantial evidence for where Stony Man should direct its attention for the origins of their unknown enemy, the conspiracy seemed to have links to violent, neofascist, racial supremacist groups from Moscow to Los Angeles. Putting boots on the ground in Africa would do nothing to stem the tide of mayhem that humans could cause, as opposed to the destruction wrought by throwing giant crowbars at cities from orbit.

Able Team had encountered the adherents of racial intolerance in the U.S. and engaged them in brutal combat. They were bloodthirsty and ruthless in their ideology, and recently the white supremacist scum had gone from supplementing their income with drug dealing and weapons smuggling to becoming full-time players, exercising their greed at easy money, power and prestige.

The Reich Highwaymen were symptomatic of this trend, being among the most successful smugglers across the border between California and Mexico. There were also five warrants for RHM members wanted for questioning in regard to twenty murders.

That’s just what the police knew. Unreported killings, in Schwarz’s experience, would be exponentially more.

“See if the Highwaymen have any friends here on the east coast,” Schwarz suggested. “It’s not as if the FBI and the CIA aren’t following more obvious, less arcane leads, right?”

“It could just be that you’ve got a bias against those gangs,” Price noted. “We could be spinning our wheels for an old grudge against a particular type of biker.”

“What was that about Jakkhammer Legacy?” Schwarz asked. “British neo-Nazis who are the strong-arm behind the British Imperial Revival Society? Looking for the day when all the brown peoples in the world know their place, and it’s usually toiling for a white limey?”

“You’re fast on the research,” Kurtzman noted.

“I heard Barb talking about it with David,” Schwarz said.

“A worldwide fascist conspiracy, and they’re working out of darkest Africa,” Price said.

“Using black slaves to mine diamonds and build launch pads,” Schwarz added. “Can you think of something a white supremacist wouldn’t like more than having Africans work themselves to death for their purposes?”

Price shook her head reluctantly. “Racist bastards… For once I completely agree with Carl about dealing with them.”

“Shoot first, ask questions, then finish shooting,” Schwarz explained for the computer experts in the War Room.

A phone warbled. Price picked it up. “Gadgets, it’s Pol.”

“Pol” was short for “Politician,” the nickname for the diplomatic and smooth-talking Rosario Blancanales, the third and final member of Able Team. When Lyons had activated and stayed on station in Los Angeles, the ex-LAPD cop had suggested that someone go on alert in Washington, D.C., preferably working from street level to avoid duplicating the efforts of federal agencies who were looking at terrorist groups and foreign governments. Lyons had been a beat cop, and while he had the advantage of electronic, satellite and internet-scoured information, he had never given up on the reliability of rumors and chatter on the mean streets. Blancanales, an affable, nearly chameleonlike person who could disarm an enemy with his words and his hands, had volunteered, leaving Schwarz free to utilize his particular skills.

Somewhere Blancanales had come through, prying loose some nugget of information that would give Stony Man Farm an edge.

Schwarz punched the speaker phone button, so that Blancanales could be heard by the rest of the War Room staff. “What’s the news, Pol?”

“I stumbled my way to a town just a mile past Chevy Chase,” Blancanales answered. “Don’t tell Carl, but his primitive, stone-age cop ways still work.”

Schwarz grinned. “A town?”

“Barely a town, actually. Basically, it’s the runoff from an interstate. It’s got some fast-food restaurants, two major gas station franchises and a bunch of small rest stops catering to the nomadic sort,” Blancanales explained.

“Bikers and truckers,” Schwarz translated for Price. She rolled her eyes, exasperated by the assumption that she hadn’t learned the verbal shorthand utilized by the field teams.

“I work at a desk for a few hours a day. I’m not a hermit stuck on an island,” Price responded.

“Anyway, there’s a congregation meeting. It looks as if they’re getting set for a holy revival,” Blancanales said. “Be nice if you got here.”

“Is Jack or Charlie around?” Schwarz asked, referring to Jack Grimaldi or Charlie Mott, Stony Man’s two resident pilots.

“I’ve had Charlie keep a helicopter on standby,” Price said. “Get to the pad, and he’ll take you up as soon as you get there.”

“I’ll be there in a few minutes, Pol,” Schwarz said. “Tell Barb your exact location so Charlie can take me there as the crow flies. Need party favors?”

“I’m pretty well strapped. Just bring plenty of ammo,” Blancanales replied.

Herman Schwarz raced out of the War Room.

It was time to ask some questions, Able Team style.

The Congo

JOHN CARMICHAEL TRIPPED but recovered his balance by hugging a tree trunk. The trouble with doing that in a rainforest was that creatures started crawling along his arm, making a beeline for his shoulder and neck. It took five hard, quick slaps to make certain everything had been either knocked off or crushed, and the smashed insects that clung to his dark arm left behind a gooey mess that attracted hungry flies. He mopped the stuff off his arm, not wanting to catch a bite from a tsetse fly or some infection from a disease-ridden set of insect mandibles.

“Congratulations, you made it another hundred yards before something else tried to kill you,” he panted. He glanced back, trying to take consolation in the fact that the only things that had been after him, at least those that he could see, weren’t men packing assault rifles.

“Only problem with that,” he told himself, “is you can’t shoot bugs.”

Carmichael felt that he could relax his pace now. Too much exertion in the heat and humidity of the jungle would drain and dehydrate a man, despite the amount of moisture in the air.

He checked his satellite phone again, as if some how the bullet hole through it would have disappeared. Naked electronics, a shattered silicon board, peeked out, and Carmichael sneered. Arcado had been carrying the device when he’d been hit. The memory of his partner came unbidden, and he clenched his teeth.

“Don’t think about it,” he told himself, putting one foot in front of the other. Each step was closer to civilization, another step toward warning the world of what was going on. He checked his watch; it was only hours since the rocket went up.

That didn’t mean much, Carmichael calculated. At orbital velocities, whatever had been launched could have gone around the world a dozen times in just sixty minutes. He could just be too late to raise the alarm that death would be raining down from above.

If that was the case, Carmichael would have to bring in someone to avenge those killed, including his best friend. Raw anger gnawed at him along with the willingness to channel that rage.

Carmichael glanced over his shoulder again, looking back toward the jungle-camouflaged base. He frowned as he realized that the enemy wouldn’t give up. There was someone on his trail, willing to enter the sprawling rainforest basin to keep their secret. They couldn’t afford to let Carmichael reach civilization alive. Once he spoke, they would die.

Carmichael had only given himself a lead on the enemy; he hadn’t given them the slip. He didn’t know what kind of cushion he had. Slowing down would be the only rest he could get. Stopping for any length of time would give his hunters a chance to catch up. He wiped his brow and sighed. There were only two spare magazines for his Kalashnikov, giving him ninety rounds for the rifle, and the four magazines for the 1911 he used for a sidearm. He also had five shots for the tiny .357 Magnum Centennial he wore in the small of his back, but if it got down to handguns, especially the two-inch-barreled snubby, he was doomed. The enemy would have a full combat kit and outnumber him at least four to one, putting him at a disadvantage when it came to a fight.

Arcado’s advice, from back when Carmichael was a rookie operative for the DoD, came to mind. “Guns make you fight stupid. Sure, firepower could possibly save your ass when it comes to bad-breath distance, but if you want to fight smart, you stay away from fights. And if you can’t avoid a fight, then don’t fight stupid. But I don’t have to tell you that. When you’re in the shit, you’ll be scared. And when you’re scared, you’ll fight smart.”

It wasn’t until Carmichael had read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War that he realized that Arcado was paraphrasing the brilliant Chinese general. Carmichael paused and assessed his situation.

What were his strengths? He knew how to get through a jungle and survive off the land, thanks to his Robin Sage Green Beret training. As only one man, he was a low-profile target, making him more mobile and able to hide in smaller places. He knew he was being hunted, and he knew how vital it was for the enemy to capture him, so he could gauge how much force they had and how well-skilled his pursuers would be. He knew in which direction he’d been heading as he smashed his trail through the rainforest while moving at full-tilt.

What were his enemy’s strengths? They outnumbered him. They outgunned him. They had a home-field advantage. They had communications and could call on extra resources if necessary. They were trackers, and they had been good enough to be within sweating distance for at least the first hour of their pursuit. They were smart enough to ease up and let Carmichael burn himself out running like hell, so they had been resting for the past two hours while he exerted energy and used up vital reserves.

Carmichael was already painfully aware of his weaknesses; no apparent water source to replenish his lost fluids, low on ammo, far from his allies. Carmichael looked for their weaknesses, even as he trod through the jungle, taking care to move slowly and easily, not breaking branches or tearing leaves with his passage. He made certain to step on exposed roots and fallen, heavy branches to minimize his footprints, though most of them were readily swallowed by the thick undergrowth that somehow thrived on faint rays of sunlight that had penetrated the forest canopy.

“There are more of them, so moving quietly will be more difficult for them,” Carmichael reminded himself. As he made that assessment, he added another strength that they possessed over him. Because they had numbers, they could fake him out, distracting him with a larger number, thus herding him toward a scout who would be moving singly and with stealth.

“They have confidence,” Carmichael said. “They have the perception of certain superiority. I know I’m in the hole.”

He went back to Arcado’s words. “When you’re scared, you’ll fight smart.”

Carmichael continued his march. He was scared, but his training and determination kept him from blind panic. The shots of fear kept him wary, attuned, in a state where his body was able to pump all manner of energy into fight or flight, but his mental processes were clear and focused.

“Survive for David,” Carmichael told himself as he continued into the dark rainforest, demons nipping at his heels.

CHAPTER FIVE

Maryland

Rosario Blancanales lowered his binoculars as Hermann Schwarz pulled up behind his van. He was parked far enough from the biker bar that even the four men who were watching the near side of the perimeter wouldn’t notice the arrival. Just the same, Schwarz had kept his headlights off. It was a couple of hours before dawn, and Schwarz’s vehicle was a low-profile, nonreflective dark blue. He joined Blancanales in the van.

“Did I miss anything?” Schwarz asked. He looked Blancanales over, and noticed that he was dressed in dark blue overalls with a county waste-management patch. “Oh, the old Dumpster trick?”

“Slapped a sign on the side of the van, rolled up behind the bar, got called a spic by the troglodytes working security,” Blancanales said.

“Didn’t they wonder why you weren’t driving a garbage truck?” Schwarz asked.

“Dumpster inspection. Clipboard and a few stickers and said that their can wouldn’t need to be replaced because of the rust on the bottom if I got a few bucks,” Blancanales explained.

“That’s one way to get your ass stomped by those slope-headed knuckle draggers,” Schwarz growled. “Yet I note the lack of bruises.”

“Sure way to find out that these pricks are doing some serious dirt if they don’t want to draw attention by smacking a county worker around,” Blancanales answered.

“So it could be a gun or drug deal,” Schwarz noted, musing. “But if that were the case, they’d have brought some vans and automobiles.”

“This is a rabble-rousing meeting,” Blancanales said. “Just standing out back I heard them revving the crowd with hate metal.”

Schwarz frowned. “Sure?”

“I could hear the lyrics,” Blancanales said. “And I can’t make a mistake about Nick Cobb and Night Heat.”

Schwarz nodded. Able Team, as a component of their general domestic awareness, made certain to keep an eye on two particular brands of music. One was narcocorridas, the songs glorifying the life of Mexican and Central American drug dealers. It was a genre of music that had expanded into Texas, Arizona, Nevada and California. The other genre of music they kept familiar with was the aforementioned “hate metal” or “white power rock,” which was far more widespread than the chosen medium of the Latino drug dealers. Rosario Blancanales, the son of Puerto Ricans who had immigrated to the U.S. to give their children a good life, had taken a special interest in Nick Cobb and his band, Night Heat, a group of so-called Minutemen who sang the anthems of the white supremacists, the same racists who corrupted the immigration-reform movement. Cobb and his group jabbed a raw nerve on the first-generation-American Blancanales, so he became intimately familiar with the bigoted venom they spewed as a form of political protest.

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.