THE LONGBOW HAMMERED AGAINST MANNING’S SHOULDER

Downrange, the .338 Lapua round hit the assault team leader at 3000 feet per second. The armored figure lurched forward like he’d been kicked by a horse and slammed into the side of the warehouse before falling motionless to the ground. The gunner beside him spun just in time to take Manning’s second shot in the chest. He staggered backward, tripping over his fallen companion.

The big Canadian rolled away and began to crawl to his next sniping position, as the enemy started to sweep the trees with automatic rifle fire.

Rotors whipped the treetops as someone sought him from above. Green tracers streaked down in vertical lines of smoking light as the door gunners did recon by fire.

“Phoenix One, I’m pinned down! If you’re going to do something, you’ve got to do it fast!”

Other titles in this series:

#20 TERMS OF SURVIVAL

#21 SATAN’S THRUST

#22 SUNFLASH

#23 THE PERISHING GAME

#24 BIRD OF PREY

#25 SKYLANCE

#26 FLASHBACK

#27 ASIAN STORM

#28 BLOOD STAR

#29 EYE OF THE RUBY

#30 VIRTUAL PERIL

#31 NIGHT OF THE JAGUAR

#32 LAW OF LAST RESORT

#33 PUNITIVE MEASURES

#34 REPRISAL

#35 MESSAGE TO AMERICA

#36 STRANGLEHOLD

#37 TRIPLE STRIKE

#38 ENEMY WITHIN

#39 BREACH OF TRUST

#40 BETRAYAL

#41 SILENT INVADER

#42 EDGE OF NIGHT

#43 ZERO HOUR

#44 THIRST FOR POWER

#45 STAR VENTURE

#46 HOSTILE INSTINCT

#47 COMMAND FORCE

#48 CONFLICT IMPERATIVE

#49 DRAGON FIRE

#50 JUDGMENT IN BLOOD

#51 DOOMSDAY DIRECTIVE

#52 TACTICAL RESPONSE

#53 COUNTDOWN TO TERROR

#54 VECTOR THREE

#55 EXTREME MEASURES

#56 STATE OF AGGRESSION

#57 SKY KILLERS

#58 CONDITION HOSTILE

#59 PRELUDE TO WAR

#60 DEFENSIVE ACTION

#61 ROGUE STATE

#62 DEEP RAMPAGE

#63 FREEDOM WATCH

#64 ROOTS OF TERROR

#65 THE THIRD PROTOCOL

#66 AXIS OF CONFLICT

#67 ECHOES OF WAR

#68 OUTBREAK

#69 DAY OF DECISION

#70 RAMROD INTERCEPT

#71 TERMS OF CONTROL

#72 ROLLING THUNDER

#73 COLD OBJECTIVE

#74 THE CHAMELEON FACTOR

#75 SILENT ARSENAL

#76 GATHERING STORM

#77 FULL BLAST

#78 MAELSTROM

#79 PROMISE TO DEFEND

#80 DOOMSDAY CONQUEST

#81 SKY HAMMER

#82 VANISHING POINT

#83 DOOM PROPHECY

#84 SENSOR SWEEP

#85 HELL DAWN

Oceans of Fire

STONY MAN®

AMERICA’S ULTRA-COVERT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

Don Pendleton

To U.S. Special Forces

CONTENTS

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

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

Tajikstan

“There’s the bugger now.” David McCarter scanned through his laser range-finder binoculars. His target led the front of a column of horsemen that wound its way through the mountain pass on ponies bred on the steppes of Asia. The shaggy little horses almost looked like overgrown dogs and the stirrups of their riders threatened to brush the ground.

“I make it an even forty.” Gary Manning lay prone in the rocks beside McCarter and peered at their objective through the 3×10 variable-power optical sight of his .300 Magnum Dakota Longbow tactical rifle. “Man, is he ugly.”

Gotron “The Goat” Khan was a little man with a head like a bowling ball and a body shaped like a pear. The sloping shelf of his brow, his wide, flattened nose and the sparse beard tufting his chin made him look like his nickname. The fact that he had a complexion that looked as if he had taken a fragmentation grenade to the face didn’t help.

“He put the ‘ugh’ in ugly,” Calvin James agreed over the com link.

The ex-Navy SEAL was right, but despite first impressions, Gotron Khan was the most feared man in the Zeravshan Mountains. He was a modern-day warlord with his own fief, a kingdom built on the profits of smuggling guns, opium and slaves, and he ruled with an iron fist. He carried a WWII Soviet-issue Cossack saber in his sash, which was the symbol of his rule. The law of Khan was simple. Minor offences required the removal of a hand; felonies called for a beheading. Khan liked to dispense justice personally whenever possible. His men were heavily armed with black market Russian military equipment of every description, from submachine guns to squad automatic weapons.

It was the suspected black market Russian military equipment wrapped in carpets on the pack mules that held the interest of Phoenix Force’s leader. McCarter thumbed his throat mike. “I want the Goat, and what he’s packing on those mules. Options?”

“Well, I make it a full platoon of light cavalry.” Manning kept his crosshairs on Khan. “We can beat ’em easy, but securing them is another matter. When we start shooting, they can scatter and fast.”

T.J. Hawkins chimed in from farther down the side of the gorge. He was the youngest member of the team but spoke with the hard-won experience of a Delta Force commando. “The next village is ten klicks east. We’re ninety-nine percent certain that’s where they’re going. We can wait until nightfall, insert soft and make it a snatch rather than assault.”

“Rafe?” McCarter queried.

“I don’t know,” Rafael Encizo replied. “We’re in Khan’s stomping grounds. We let him get into the village and who knows how many more men he’ll have, and we’ll have to worry about collateral damage if things go hot.”

“Cal?”

“Rafe’s right,” Calvin James stated. “I say we take them here and now.”

McCarter agreed with the assessment. “We take them here, in the narrow, and cork both sides of the bottle. T.J. you plug the back door. I’ll take the front.”

Manning frowned without taking his eye off his scope. “We’ll need about a minute to get into position. How do you want to play it?”

“I guess I’ll just go chat up the bastard.” McCarter set down his binoculars. “All units. I’m heading down. Equip for Plan B. Be in position in two minutes.”

Phoenix Force responded “Affirmative” from their various positions.

McCarter made his way swiftly down through the rocks. As he hit the mountain path, he could hear the clatter of the horses’ hooves on the stones and smell the animals as they approached. The horsemen were in their own territory and at a low state of alert, laughing and smoking cigarettes. The Phoenix Force leader waited behind his chosen boulder until Manning spoke in his earpiece. “Ready on your go, Phoenix One.”

The Briton stepped out onto the path. Horses reared and men shouted in alarm. McCarter smiled at the warlord in a friendly fashion. “Top of the morning, Khan.”

Two dozen automatic weapons whirled in McCarter’s direction. Gotron Khan sawed savagely on the reins. The horse rolled its eyes and stamped, but not in fear. McCarter had startled the stallion and now it wanted to attack him.

“Top of the morning?” The Goat slapped his thigh delightedly. “English! Goddamn it!”

McCarter smiled. “You got me.”

“Hey!” Gotron took in McCarter’s desert camouflage fatigues, body armor and the scarf wrapped around his head. The warlord gazed appreciatively at the Barrett M-468 weapon system draped casually across McCarter’s shoulder. The 6.8-caliber rifle looked like an M-16 on steroids. A SUSAT optical sight had been mounted on the receiver and a 40 mm M-203 grenade launcher hung beneath the barrel. Eight inches of United States Marine Corps OKC 3S bayonet hung conspicuously from the muzzle. The Goat stabbed a gleefully accusing finger at McCarter. “British SAS! Who Dares Wins!”

“Well…” McCarter shrugged. “Not exactly.”

“Not exactly?” Khan leaned back in his saddle and scratched his goatee with the muzzle of a Russian A-91 compact assault rifle. “You lost?” He pointed south. “Afghanistan and NATO forces are eight hundred kilometers that way.”

His horsemen, who spoke English, smiled unpleasantly.

“No.” McCarter shook his head. “Not lost.”

Khan cocked an eyebrow. “You are on a mission.”

“As a matter of fact I am.”

“Ah! Goddamn!” Khan leaned forward with almost childlike-curiosity. “A secret mission?”

“No, no secret.” McCarter lifted his chin toward the baggage. “I’d just like to know what those mules are carrying.”

Gotron Khan smiled to reveal a mouth that could only be described as dental armageddon. “Cucumbers!”

The horsemen laughed coarsely.

“Yeah, bloody great big ones.” McCarter laughed. “Or so I hear.”

The laughter of Khan’s men became rougher and their eyes went hard. Manning spoke in McCarter’s earpiece. “All units in position.”

“The biggest!” Khan grinned.

“And where’re you off to with your great big cucumbers, then?” McCarter shrugged innocently. “If I might ask.”

“Mecca!” Khan roared. “We are on Haj!”

Khan’s men laughed uproariously.

The leader of Phoenix Force smiled. Gotron Khan and his forty horsemen smiled back. It was all very congenial.

“I’d fancy a look,” McCarter suggested.

The Goat sighed. “I fancy you give me your rifle now.”

“I think I’ll hold on to it.” McCarter replied smiling. “But, tell you what, mate. Why don’t you and the lads drop yours.”

Gotron Khan stopped smiling. The muzzles of two dozen weapons pointed at McCarter in open hostility. The Briton spoke quietly into his mike. “Show of force, lads.”

Horsemen shouted in alarm as Phoenix Force rose up out of the rocks. Khan craned around in the saddle and looked at Hawkins blocking the narrow path behind and James, Encizo and Manning in the rocks above.

“Well, English. You and your…four men?” Khan shook his head sadly. “Four men, have us surrounded, goddamn.”

“Goddamn bloody right we do.” McCarter nodded. “Now I’m going to count to five, and you and your men had better be dismounted and disarmed.”

Khan stared incredulously.

“One,” McCarter announced.

“Crazy Eng—”

There was no “Two.” Phoenix Force cut loose.

Each man save McCarter held a South African 40 mm Milkor revolving grenade launcher. They hammered off three quick rounds into the horsemen. The grenades broke apart into multiple bomblets as they hit the ground, skipping and hissing beneath the horses’ hooves. Khan’s horsemen struggled to control their rearing mounts. McCarter fired his M-203 into the ground directly in front of Khan and stepped back behind his boulder as his grenade flipped apart. He stripped off his fringed scarf and prudently pulled his gas mask over his face.

Automatic weaponsfire erupted all along the mountain path, but Phoenix Force had already dropped back behind cover. McCarter jacked a rubber baton round into his M-203 as he stepped out from behind his boulder.

Yellow marking smoke flooded the gorge in thick clouds. In the saffron haze the rocky landscape looked like the surface of Venus. Had McCarter not been wearing a gas mask he would have found the atmosphere almost as hostile. Beneath the burning smell of the smoke element for a split second he might have detected the more subtle odor of pepper and apple blossoms as CN/DM gas mixture blossomed unseen in the yellow fog.

McCarter put Gotron Khan in his sights.

The Goat leaned forward and threw up on his horse’s head.

CN/DM mixture was known colloquially as “Super Tear Gas.” It had all the tearing and burning effect of military-strength CN with the fun and frolic of vomit gas. It temporarily blinded and burned the eyes and throat, and at the same time sent the gastrointestinal track and the colon into spasm.

Horses were happily immune to the effect.

They weren’t immune to being regurgitated on by their riders, and they were instantly aware that their masters were no longer in control of them or themselves. Horsemen spilled to the ground as they were bucked spewing from their mounts. Phoenix Force had risen from cover. The 40 mm Milkors thudded in their hands as they emptied their remaining three chambers into the ambush.

CN/DM was rated as a nonlethal riot control agent, but it was toxic in high enough concentrations, and a man who was choking and vomiting at the same time could drown as he swallowed his lunch into his lungs.

A few of Khan’s men who were still mounted fired their guns blindly into the hillside. The sound of gunfire was enough for their horses to renew their bucking and send their riders to the ground. Gotron Khan remained in the saddle. He’d lost his rifle but his razor-sharp Cossack sword rasped from its sheath. He put spurs to his horse and charged, weeping and drooling to stab at McCarter where he stood.

McCarter triggered the M-203 and the grenade launcher thumped. The solid rubber baton round was the size of a shotglass and hit Khan in the chest at 85 meters per second. Remarkably the warlord remained in the saddle. He drunkenly raised his saber for the killing blow. Froth flew from the horse’s mouth as it raced to trample McCarter.

The Briton stepped to starboard to avoid the saber and cracked the extruded aluminum butt of his carbine across the horse’s muzzle. The stallion screamed as it sailed past shaking its head and bucking its hindquarters five feet in the air. Khan catapulted out of the saddle, flying, arms outstretched, until gravity brought him to the ground in a pinwheel of limbs.

McCarter put a knee in the warlord’s back and hog-tied him with plastic riot-cuffs. “The Goat is secure. T.J.?”

Hawkins held up the lead rope to the string of mules. “I have the packages.”

The Phoenix Force leader nodded. “Calvin, give me a head count and sitrep.”

Khan’s men were down in retching agony. Phoenix Force strode among them in their gasmasks and did a quick search. They kicked away weapons and buttstroked anyone who tried to rise with their Barrett rifles.

James was kneeling beside one of the prostrate horsemen. “All forty accounted for.”

“Situation?”

“We hit them with twenty grenades. That’s a high concentration. This one here had an allergic reaction to the gas and was going into anaphylactic shock. I hit him with epinephrine and he’s stabilized.” The ex-SEAL medic gazed upward. The clouds of yellow marking smoke were breaking up. “But the wind is around fifteen knots and we’re getting rapid dispersal. Their bodies should detoxify the agent in thirty minutes, but they’re going to be messed up with nausea, shortness of breath, physical weakness and possible mental depression for the next twenty-four hours. They won’t be following us anytime soon. I’m willing to leave them as is.”

“Aces.” McCarter slung Khan over his shoulder. “Gary, what have we got?”

Manning was over by the mules. The big Canadian had unwrapped one of the carpets and was staring at the contents. “The Goat wasn’t lying. He’s got great big cucumbers all right.”

McCarter approached and heaved Khan over a spare mule. Manning was the demolition expert of the team, but the Briton knew what he was staring at. The gray-green metal casing was roughly the size of a suitcase. Manning had flipped open a small control panel in one corner and he was examining the small bank of knobs and numeric dials.

Gotron Khan was transporting Russian nuclear demolition charges.

“You have a make and model?”

“It’s hard to make out with these goggles on.” Manning scanned the serial numbers along the side. “But this is definitely Soviet-era stuff. By the construction I’d say they were manufactured in the 1980s. They’re dial-a-yield, anywhere from one to ten kilotons depending on the job.”

“Right, let’s wrap this up. Gather your weapons and grab your rucks. I want to be out of here in five minutes and at the primary extraction site in an hour.” McCarter pulled his wandering-frequency satellite phone and deployed the chunky L-shaped black antenna. “Jack, we require extraction. We’ll be at the primary extraction sight in sixty minutes.”

Stony Man’s ace pilot was stationed at the NATO coalition base in Kholm, Afghanistan. “I’ll be there in forty-five.”

“Roger that.” McCarter hit a button on his phone. “Stony Base, this is Phoenix One. Over.”

“Phoenix One, this is Stony Base.” Mission controller Barbara Price was eight thousand miles away in the Stony Man War Room in Virginia, but her voice was as clear as a bell. “What is your mission status?”

“All four packages retrieved, and we have the Goat. We’re moving to primary extraction site. Extraction estimate one hour.”

There was a long pause on the other side of the line. “Please repeat, Phoenix One. Did you say four packages?”

David McCarter’s stomach went cold. He knew it had been too easy. “Affirmative, Base. Four packages. One special guest.”

Several moments passed before Barbara Price spoke again. “Phoenix One, we have a problem.”

CHAPTER TWO

Oval Office, Washington, D.C.

“Six nukes?” The President of the United States wasn’t pleased.

“Nuclear demolition charges, sir,” Hal Brognola corrected. He wasn’t happy, either.

“Demolition charges?” The President frowned. “You mean, backpack nukes.”

“No, sir.” General Jack Harper Hayes was the top military man on the President’s cabinet. The wiry little man seemed almost too short to be a general, but he had started his military career as a combat engineer and he knew a few things about blowing stuff sky-high. “He means nuclear demolition charges. They’re used to blowing things up.”

The President raised a droll eyebrow. “So I gathered.”

“What I mean is, sir, a nuclear demolition charge is not strictly a weapon. Its yield is low, generally between three to ten kilotons. No one has ever used one in combat but its typical purpose would be to destroy a very large or hard target, like a dam or an underground bunker or even to dig a giant hole if you needed one. We contemplated using them in Afghanistan to drop the tunnel complexes in Tora Bora, but the Joint Chiefs decided that although the nuclear fallout would have been nil, the political fallout of the United States being perceived to be using nukes would have been disastrous. So we went in the old-fashioned way.”

General Hayes gazed off into the middle distance a moment. “The old-fashioned way” had changed over the years. In Vietnam the then Private Hayes had been the smallest man in his platoon and been “volunteered” to crawl down into the Vietcong tunnels and clear them out.

In Afghanistan they had lit up the tunnel entrances with fuel-air explosives that sent massive blast waves down the tunnels and then hit them from above with deep-penetrating guided bombs before heavily armed and armored Army Rangers had gone in wearing night-vision equipment and hurling tear gas ahead of them.

In Vietnam, Hayes had been sent down alone with a flashlight, a .45 and a knife.

The President nodded. “So you’re saying it’s a giant satchel charge.”

“Indeed, sir,” the general agreed. “An excellent metaphor.”

“But a ten-kiloton satchel charge, nevertheless, and two of them seem to be missing.”

“That does seem to be the situation.” Hayes gazed at Brognola as he said it. The general clearly thought Delta Force could have wrapped things up quite nicely, and like a number of military men before him, he was extremely curious as to why there was a man from the Justice Department in the room, much less why the big Fed seemed to be one of the key people in control of the operation.

The President shrugged at Brognola. “Hal?”

“We got the word from British MI-6 two hours ago. They have a contact in one of the Russian arsenals. He confirms the count is now six. We retrieved four of them in the Zervashan Mountains forty-five minutes ago. We have to assume the other two are taking a different route out of Tajikistan.”

“And we have no idea as to that route?”

“No, sir, we don’t. However, the team took a high-priority prisoner and they have hopes of getting some useful intelligence out of him.”

The President scowled deeply. Both rightly and wrongly, the United States reputation for fair and humane treatment of prisoners had been tarnished in recent times. “That had better be done by the book or not all, Hal.”

General Hayes chewed his lip. “I hate to suggest this, Mr. President, but we don’t have time to ship this guy to Guantanamo and go through normal procedures.”

The President stared at Hayes bluntly. “You’re suggesting torture.”

“I’m suggesting, sir, that while the yield is low and the fallout minimal, a nuclear demolition detonated above ground in an urban center would result in thousands of casualties.” Hayes let out a heavy sigh. “And I’m suggesting we have contacts in that region. Allies with less scruples than ourselves.”

“So…” The President steepled his fingers and looked into a very ugly place. “We wash our hands and let someone else do our dirty work.”

Brognola met the President’s gaze. “Sir, the team currently has the man in custody. They have been in this situation before and produced results in manners your predecessors found acceptable. Give them an hour.”

“An hour?” Both the President and the general stared at Brognola in shock.

The Justice man nodded. “They have very…forceful personalities.”

Dushanbe, Tajikistan

GOTRON KHAN WAS nervous. He had every right to be. The warlord was tied to a chair in a cellar, facing five of the most dangerous men on Earth. Khan sat beneath the single bare bulb and sweated while Phoenix Force stared at him, as silent as headstones. The criminal swallowed with difficulty and screwed up his courage. “I want a lawyer.”

The men of Phoenix Force regarded him like a bug.

“I have been exposed to illegal war gas and wish medical treatment…and an interview with Red Cross representative.”

Calvin James leaned against the wall with his arms folded. “You hungry, Khan?”

“I…” Gotron winced. His body had detoxified the CN/DM gas in his bloodstream, but he was still green around the gills and the violent stomach spasms he’d endured left him hunched and beaten as if he’d gone ten rounds out of his weight class. “I think n—”

“How about a nice, cold, greasy pork sandwich?” James suggested.

Khan paled.

“Mmm, tallowy.” James Calvin sighed. “With a nice, tall, cool glass of olive oil with a butter floater to wash it down and—”

The sweat sheening Khan’s brow began to run in bullets.

Hawkins shook his head at Calvin. “You are one sick dude.”

Gotron Khan was the man who was sick. The warlord was as white as a sheet.

McCarter gazed down at Khan condemningly. “Where are the rest of the nukes?”

“I…don’t…” Khan gasped.

McCarter pulled a spent grenade casing out of a ditty bag and wafted it in front of Khan. A hint of apple blossom and pepper was discernable in the close confines of the cellar. Khan made a gobbling noise as his stomach spasmed in recognition of the scent. It was said that fatigue made cowards out of all men, but pain and fatigue could be endured through training, personal toughness and willpower.

Chemically induced nausea leveled the playing field, and Adamsite gas would bring Superman to his knees.

Gotron Khan shook like a man who had spent a bad eight days sailing the North Sea in winter and had been told he was going back out.

“No…” Khan gasped. “N-no, please, I…”

McCarter held the spent casing a little closer to Khan’s nose. “Where.”

“I…cannot tell you.”

McCarter spun on his heel. “Gas him again.”

Gary Manning slipped a grenade out of his jacket and pulled the pin.

Khan shrieked. “No!”

The big Canadian kept his thumb on the cotter lever and raised an eyebrow at McCarter. The Englishman turned and stared down at Khan implacably. “Where?”

“I do not know, but—”

“But you might know someone who does?” McCarter suggested helpfully.

Khan’s eyes were riveted in horror at the cylindrical grenade in Manning’s hand. “Perhaps.”

“Perhaps you’re about to puke so hard you’re going to bring up your bloody shoes.”

“No!” Khan’s eyes rolled in revulsion and terror.

“Or perhaps not.” McCarter shrugged noncommittally. “It’s up to you.”

“I—” Khan scuttled back as far as his restraints would let him as the Englishman loomed over him.

“Khan.” McCarter peered deeply into the man eyes. “I really want you to get this right.”

U.S. Embassy, Dushanbe

PHOENIX FORCE SAT in an arc around a titanium laptop attached to a satellite link. David McCarter checked his watch. “The lad’s late.”

T.J. Hawkins walked in on cue. He held an ice bucket loaded with drinks and set them on the table with a frown. “Explain to me how I became manservant for this chickenshit outfit, again?”

“Because you’re the youngest.” Calvin James reached over and snagged a beer. The lanky black man grinned. “And it would be politically incorrect for me or Rafe to do it.”

Hawkins considered for a half second suggesting Manning get up off his dead ass, but the big Canadian had put his feet up on the table and apparently was waiting for it with a smile on his face. Hawkins let that one die on the vine.

“T.J.?” McCarter pulled a bottle out of the bucket and frowned. “What is this?”

“Uh…a Coke?” Hawkins pointed at the wasp-waisted, fluted-glass bottle defiantly. “Look at that shape.”

McCarter stared at Hawkins unblinkingly. “It’s diet.”

Hawkins stared at the bottle. Aside from the Coca-Cola logo it was covered with incomprehensible scrawl. “You read Tajikistani?”

“No, Tajikistan doesn’t bottle Coke. They import from bottlers in Russia and the former Soviet states. This is Ukrainian, and diet. You can tell by the gold cap and the Cyrillic writing.”

Hawkins blinked. “You need an intervention.”

McCarter shoved the offending soft drink back into the bucket and pulled out a beer.

“Man…” Hawkins dropped into a chair and cracked himself a Russian brew. “How do I get transferred to Able Team?”

McCarter hit some keys on the computer. “Khan gave us two names.”A picture of a bullet-headed man appeared. His shaved head and his face had uniform-length stubble. His flat black eyes lived up to his nickname. “Here we have Sharypa ‘The Shark’ Sharkov. He’s Russian mafiya, and represents Moscow organized crime interests in Tajikistan. Interpol has a rap sheet on him as long as your arm. Standard provincial mafyia scumbag. He breaks legs, extorts, runs guns and prostitutes, and sends a piece to Moscow.”

“First we get ‘The Goat’ and now ‘The Shark’?” Rafe snorted in amusement. “All we need are Camelboy and the Limpet and we’ll have our own bad-guy petting zoo.”

McCarter hit another key. A disturbingly handsome man appeared on the screen. His black wavy hair was pulled into a short ponytail and his Vandyke made him look like Satan in an Armani suit. “This is Aidar Zhol, our local boy. He doesn’t have an animal nickname. He is an animal. Name a law of nature and he’s broken it. He likes the high life, likes gambling and spends a lot of time in Moscow. If you’re a Russian general or high-ranking politician and you want a beautiful, virgin Tajik girl fresh from the hills for your rape room, Zhol’s the man you see. He also owns a piece of any Afghani heroin that comes through the capital and owns the only casino in town. If you’re transporting nukes through Tajikistan, it’s a good bet Sharkov and Zhol at least know about it if they aren’t actually extracting a safe-passage fee. We have two devices unaccounted for. I’m betting either one or both of them have them or at least know which way they went.”

James took a long pull on his beer. “Russian nukes don’t just go missing. Someone has to deliberately misplace them.”

McCarter nodded. “MI-6 has an informant who broke the news about the nukes. There’s no doubt a Russian general had to be involved. The question is, which one? If these were actually nuclear warheads, we could narrow the selection down to officers of the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces, but these are nuclear demolition charges. They aren’t governed by any treaty and several Russian military branches have their own small stockpiles, so tracking our wayward general is going to be tough on the Farm’s end.”

Hawkins leaned back in his chair. “So we’re going to have to find him starting from the gutter up. Typical.”

James echoed the sentiment. “Tell me we have some kind of in with these guys.”

“We just might,” McCarter stated.

James didn’t like the smile on the Englishman’s face. “Shit…”

“That’s right. Our in just might be you.” McCarter clicked more keys. A black man with a shaved head appeared on the screen. His powerful physique strained his immaculately tailored blue-silk suit. To the trained eye it was clear that he was wearing a pistol beneath his jacket. He sat at a table with a beautiful, grinning blonde under his left arm while a second leaned over his shoulder laughing. A massive diamond adorned one ear. Dozens more glittered on the gold rings on his fingers and the custom Rolex Submariner on his wrist.

Sitting next to him was Aidar Zhol. They both had their arms over each other’s shoulders and were smiling happily into the camera.

“That is Clayborne Forbes.” McCarter hit another button and the same man appeared staring forward, iron-jawed and stern, wearing the dress white cap and blue jacket of the United States Navy. Service ribbons adorned his chest. “Lieutenant Clayborne Forbes. Former United States Navy SEAL. A year ago he was on operations in Afghanistan. His tour was up and he declined to reenlist. Honorably discharged. The last that was heard of him was that he was an independent contractor in Afghanistan for one of the stateside security companies.”

“And now the brother is dripping in blondes and bling in Tajikistan.” James shook his head. “Bodyguard?”

“Ostensibly. The name Navy SEAL has a hell of a lot of cache. Having a man like Forbes for a bodyguard would certainly enhance Zhol’s reputation,” McCarter stated. “But the Farm figures he’s probably a hell of a lot more than that. In the past year most of Zhol’s competition has wound up dead. Now, I’ll grant you, what with the civil wars, ethnic in-fighting, separatist movements, Russian mafiya and Muslim extremists, the former Soviet South Asian states are the wild, wild west. But Zhol’s enemies aren’t dying in the usual drive-by bloodbaths or car bombings, they’re—”

“They’re getting ghosted,” James concluded. “SEAL style.”

“That is the current conclusion we’re working with.”

“I don’t like pulling the race card, David.” James’s eyes went hard. “But I don’t like being sent to hunt my own, know what I’m saying?”

“I can understand that, but we’re talking about a man aiding and abetting in heroin trafficking and selling little girls. There’s also the matter of two loose nuclear demolition charges. And if his name was Nigel Ian Smythe and former SAS, I’d be the one going in.”

James let out a long breath. “I hear you.”

“Zhol’s casino is called the Silk Road. When he’s in town he lives in the penthouse. Intelligence says Zhol is in town. It’s Friday night, so he’ll probably be in the house and Forbes should be with him. We need to arrange a meet-and-greet.”

McCarter gazed around the table. “Any suggestions?”

CHAPTER THREE

The game was Texas Hold’em. Calvin James was winning, and winning big. He stared coolly into the smoldering eyes of his remaining opponent. Everyone else had folded and it was James’s deal. The man in front of him was heavy-shouldered and wore a poorly tailored suit of local manufacture, and a short turban.

The man was a maniac.

In poker a maniac was a hyperaggressive player who raised, bet and bluffed big pots whether he had a great hand or nothing at all. A genuine maniac wasn’t a good player, though he or she could often dominate a timid table. Players who occasionally played maniac to confuse their opponents were quite dangerous.

James’s opponent was positively psycho.

The game had attracted a crowd. The Silk Road mostly attracted Russian businessmen and local women who were ready to be relieved of their hard-earned currency. A smattering of diplomats and ex-patriots rounded out the clientele. Onlookers gasped as the man in the turban shoved chips forward to the tune of ten thousand dollars. He leaned in and thrust out his jaw, daring James to match it. It was a form of tell, or a habit that gave away the strength of another player’s hand. The most amateur forms of tells involved leaning. People unconsciously leaned forward and projected aggressiveness when they were bluffing. By the same token they leaned back with unconscious relief when they were dealt a strong hand.

Psycho Boy might as well have put a neon sign over his head.

James’s piles of chips tinkled and spilled as he shoved ten thousand dollars forward. “Call.”

The maniac turned over his cards to reveal two pair, aces and eights, the Dead Man’s Hand.

James turned over his cards. “Four ducks.”

The man in the turban started stupidly at the four deuces on the table. James had cleaned him out, and reached for the pot. “Nice playing with y—”

“Cheat.”

The immediate environment around the table went dead silent. The man looked up from the cards with murder in his eyes. “You cheat.”

“Listen.” James held up both hands in peace. “I—”

“Blackie…cheat.” The man was literally vibrating with rage. “Every time you deal, you win.”

James took a calming breath. “Friend, you—”

“Cheating negro,” the man declared.

A mountainous pair of bouncers began moving toward the table.

James’s fist closed around his drink. “You know, not my country, not my house, not my cards. I don’t speak the language. Hell, I’m not even that good a player. I’m just lucky.”

“Luck!” The man spit the word.

“Yeah.” James leaned back in his chair and grinned. “Lucky to be sitting across from a loser like you.”

The man froze.

James took a dainty sip of his gin and waggled his eyebrows over his glass insultingly.

“Bismillah!” The man erupted from his seat. He screamed incoherently and grabbed the edge of the table. The crowd screamed as he heaved the poker table upward, flipping it over and sending chips and cards flying. “I kill!” the man shrieked. “Kill you!”

The bouncers descended, trying to smother the irate gambler with shear weight. The man in the turban seemed awkward, but his fist flew into one bouncer’s jaw and dropped him like he’d been shot. The other bouncer reached to grab the frothing man and was scooped up into a fireman’s carry, airplane spun and sent flying across the craps table. Furniture shattered and patrons ran screaming in all directions.

The demented gambler advanced on James, his fingers curled into claws. “Kill you! K—!”

James rose from his chair and flicked his wrist, sending two ounces of gin into his attacker’s eyes. Before the man could even react to the stinging liquor, the Phoenix Force commando’s fist pistonned three times in chopping right-hand leads. The first blow snapped the man’s head back. On the second, he turned his wrist over and jammed his thumb into the notch between the maniac’s collarbones. The man had no time to gasp as his throat compressed because the third punch took him in the solar plexus.

The turbaned man made a sucking noise and went pale. James grabbed him by his shoulder and spun him, seizing him by his collar and the back of his pants. He marched the blinking and wheezing man past cringing patrons to the front of the building.

He whispered in the maniac’s ear, “Sorry about this, Rafe.”

Encizo’s eyes rolled and drool came from one corner of his bloody mouth, but his voice was very quiet and lucid amid the chaos in casino. “No problem, amigo—”

James took two lunging steps for momentum and flung Encizo through the smoked-glass double doors. People outside the casino screamed as the Cuban flew to the pavement in a cascade of glass. He rolled to a stop and lay bleeding on the sidewalk.

“Punk,” James announced as he made a show of wiping his hands.

The cocktail waitresses were still screaming and casino patrons shouted in consternation. A pair of Indian businessmen stood clapping their hands delightedly at the show.

James smiled and took a bow.

Shotguns racked behind him. He put up his hands and very slowly turned. Clayborne Forbes was pointing a stainless-steel Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver at his face. The weapon was a custom job, a product of the Smith & Wesson Performance Center. Its frame was made of titanium while the barrel and cylinder were stainless steel. James could clearly see the extra pair of holes that turned the revolver into an eight-shooter and the ugly lead cavities of the hollowpoints it had been stuffed with. For the average human, firing a Magnum with a two-inch barrel would be problematic at best.

Forbes didn’t look as though he’d have any problems.

He was even bigger in person, six-foot-four and built like an NFL tight end. His huge hand engulfed the grips of his pistol. Two more bloated, bearded bouncers flanked him, armed with enormous, 23 mm Russian KS-23, folding-stock shotguns.

“Well, goddamn.” Forbes blinked at James in surprise. Black men weren’t exactly common in Tajikistan. He lowered his revolver slightly. “You African or American?”

“African American.” James smiled. “Chicago, south-side born and raised.”

“No shit?” Forbes jerked his head toward a steel security door at the far end of the casino. “Follow me, Chicago.” He nodded at the bouncers. “Mukhtar, Askar, a round of drinks on the house and get this shit cleaned up, and find the brother’s chips.”

The two men lowered their shotguns and began shouting at the cocktail waitresses and the busboys. James followed Forbes into a standard casino security suite with banks of monitors watching the action at every table. Three security men stared up from their screens at James in open curiosity.

Forbes sighed. “Gonna have to relieve you of that piece.”

James nodded and reached under his jacket. He drew his Heckler & Koch P-9 from the concealed small-of-the-back holster he wore and handed it over. Forbes took in the big .45’s rakish lines appreciatively. “Nice.”

Forbes’s gleaming revolver rose to James’s face and the cylinder full of gaping, 125-grain hollowpoints turned as Forbes cocked back the hammer. “Now, you want to tell me what you’re doing in my crib? Or do I call in Mukhtar and Askar and have them squash it out of you?”

James leaned back slightly from the .357’s muzzle and held up his hands. “Heard a rumor a brother was getting ahead up north and came to see for myself.”

“Now that’s the kind of rumor that can get your ass killed. You—” Forbes suddenly stared at the ring on James’s finger. It was gold and carved with an eagle holding a trident and an anchor. It was the symbol of the United States Navy SEAL. Forbes’s face went flat. “If that ain’t for real, I’m going to cut it off you at the wrist.”

James grinned delightedly at a similar ring on Forbes’s gun hand. “Oh, man, you’re shitting me!”

The security men stared uncomprehendingly as the two men began a sudden, rapid exchange of Navy SEAL–speak involving teams, operations, mutually known naval officers and the halcyon days of BUDS, or basic underwater demolitions/SEAL student training.

After about five minutes of family reunion, Forbes holstered his pistol. “Well, fuck me running. Calvin James, you know I think I might even have heard of you at a SEAL meet or two.”

It was entirely possible. James and Forbes were two different generations of SEAL, but the United States Navy SEALs were a small, tightly knit community and African-Americans an even tinier minority within them. SEAL meets were get-togethers where SEALs past and present met to swap stories and gossip, engage in miniature SEAL-style Olympic events and down enormous quantities of alcohol.

“Man, they say you just up and disappeared one day, went all spooky. Got recruited by a special operations group or some other kind of top-secret black ops shit. Dropped off the Earth.”

The best lies were told by omission and cradled in truth. “That is a fact.”

Forbes handed James back his pistol. “And you came all the way here just to see my sweet ass? I mean, I know I’m pretty…” Forbes left his doubt hanging between them.

“I was retired for a while, and I really didn’t care for it. Then the Man asked if I would like to reenlist for the War on Terror. I took a year contract, the coin was decent, but I heard the private work was better. Hired on with Knight Securities to help train their newbies.”

“Heard of them,” Forbes acknowledged.

“But I got all nostalgic and shit, and decided I wanted to see some action.”

“Always a mistake.”

“Don’t I know it.” James shrugged. “So I hit the dirt in Iraq. Hadn’t been there in years. It was still 115 degrees in the shade, still infested with sand fleas and a brother still couldn’t get a piece of ass to save his life, but the car bombings, private security boys being dragged and hung from bridges and the hostage beheading? That shit was new. I didn’t dig it, so I went to Afghanistan. Lot of guys were making money in the private sector over there, double or more than what Uncle Sam was paying. Then one day in Kabul, I heard that rumor about a brother living large in Tajikistan. Sounded so crazy it had to be true.” James opened his hands, taking in the cut of Forbes’s suit and the diamonds and gold dripping from his hands. “And here you are.”

Forbes frowned. “You sayin’ you came here for a job?”

“You hiring?” James countered.

Forbes’s laughter rumbled in his chest. “Well, now, I’ll tell you. I got this town shit-scared. These Tajiks never seen a soul brother, much less soul brother SEAL. Shit, two of us? We could take this whole cracker-barrel country for every last somoni they got.

“Somoni?”

“Yeah, it’s the currency they replaced the Russian ruble with around here.” Forbes shook his head. “I wipe my ass with it.” He dug into his pocket and held up a gold money clip thick with U.S. one-hundred-dollar bills. “The good news is this gig pays in long, cool green.”

One of the security men nodded respectfully at the big man. “Mr. Forbes.”

One of the monitors showed Encizo lurching to his feet. His turban was askew and his eyes rolled dazedly.

Forbes lifted his chin. “You want me to jack him up?”

“I already did.” James flashed his smile. “And I took him for 10 K.”

Encizo staggered away into downtown Dushanbe, bleeding and mumbling.

“Well, brother, I feel the love. I surely do.” Forbes loomed forward. “But you are going to need references, and then you are going to have to meet the Man.”

“CALVIN’S IN.” McCarter confirmed.

“Excellent.” Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman said over the satellite link. “How did the initial insertion go?”

McCarter looked across the table to where Encizo sat holding a chemical ice pack against his lumped and purpled jaw. “Smoothly.”

Kurtzman’s brow furrowed at McCarter across the Web cam. “He’s not wearing a wire, is he?”

“Calvin said to get the love he’s got to show the love, and with a SEAL running security, wearing a wire would be suicide. I agreed with him. T.J. is watching the casino and will engage in a loose tail when he emerges. Rafe and I are ready to move on word go, and Jack has a helicopter hot on the pad with a full war load at the Dushanbe airport. Any other action is Calvin’s call.”

Kurtzman scratched his beard. “You know you’ve put that man out on a limb.”

“The good news is that he has the best cover in the world, and that is his cover isn’t a cover. He is who he says he is. The head honcho over at Knight Securities is a former SEAL, knows Calvin and was happy to back up his private contract story. Anything else Calvin can ad-lib as the situation warrants. Also, Special Forces groups are clannish, thick as thieves. Forbes is a United States Navy SEAL, and he’s got to be as giddy as a schoolboy to suddenly have a fellow SEAL as a partner in crime. On the criminal front, Forbes has done yeoman’s work decimating Zhol’s enemies, so Zhol has every reason to want to double his fun.”

“I still don’t like it.”

“You get paid not to like it, Bear, and we appreciate that.”

Kurtzman sighed. “When does Calvin have his interview with Zhol?”

McCarter glanced at his watch. “He should be meeting the man as we speak.”

“AN AMERICAN SEAL?” Aidar Zhol’s eyes looked Calvin James up and down. The crime lord sat in the casino office. The walls were covered with crushed-red velvet. His thronelike chair was red leather, and the wood of his desk and the carpet matched. Zhol was dressed from head to toe in black. He sat in his blood-red room, draping himself elegantly across his chair, and looked positively satanic.

“Man, did you see the security tape of him whipping that deadbeat’s ass?” Forbes waved a hand. “What else could he be? Besides, I’ve checked his references. He’s who he says he is.”

“Indeed, I do not doubt you.” Zhol leaned back in his chair. His deep voice and accent made him sound like Dracula. “Though he seems a bit small to be a bouncer.”

“I’m not suggesting you hire him as a bouncer, and you aren’t thinking it.” Forbes leaned his massive frame against the wall and folded his arms across his chest. “The brother has skills, know what I’m saying?”

Zhol lifted a sculpted eyebrow. “As good as yours?”

“Well, he is old-school SEAL,” Forbes conceded with a grin. “But I can bring him up to speed.”

Zhol’s eyes were unreadable. “And you, Mr. James. What kind of employment are you looking for?”

“Well, like Clay said. I am old school. I gotta start thinking about my retirement. Now, I got some money squirreled away, and I can always sit my ass behind a desk at a security firm. For that matter I’ve got that Navy pension waiting for me. But you know?” James shook his head in disgust. “Fuck that shit. I’m thinking I want to shrivel up and die someplace warm, with a beach and a boat and a lot of willing señoritas as a comfort in my old age. That’ll take some investment money. Honestly? I came up here looking for some fat paychecks.”

A slinky cocktail waitress entered the office with a loaded tray. Her hair was so black and her skin so pale she looked like a vampire. Her lips were blood-red against her complexion. Her dark eyes slid up and down James in a very friendly fashion as she handed him a gin and tonic. Forbes lifted an immense snifter of brandy from the tray and a cigar from an open box. Zhol took mint tea from a gold cup and an unfiltered Turkish cigarette between his little and ring fingers. The girl lit their smokes. One corner of her lips quirked upward and she gave James a lingering look before swiftly disappearing.

Zhol let out a long stream of blue smoke toward the overhead lighting. “So, tell me, Mr. James, what are you willing to do for me?”

“Well, I’d rather not run drugs or pimp little girls. But I still have a few skills.” He sipped his gin. “Tell me, Mr. Zhol. You have enemies?”

Zhol smiled at Forbes. “Significantly fewer than I once had.”

“The law of business is to expand or be swallowed up. You strike me as an expansionist. I have no doubt you’ll be making new enemies, and encountering new problems.” James had kept his attitude relaxed, but he was a trained Special Forces soldier. Such men were a breed apart. Having joined Phoenix Force, he was now the elite of the elite, and one of the most dangerous men on Earth. He let that intensity show through as he stared deep into Zhol’s eyes. “Both of which I can make disappear.”

“Shee-it!” Forbes’s smile lit up the room as he pointed at James, recognizing the eye of the tiger. “I told you, Mr. Zhol. I told you. Just look at that beautiful man. You put me and him together? We could take goddamn Moscow.” Forbes became serious again. “And we have current projects, and we have run into problems. This man would be a fucking force-multiplier, guaranteed.”

Zhol didn’t blink as he stared into James’s eyes. The Phoenix Force commando saw the sociopath behind the flat black eyes and knew the man was a killer. Zhol’s eyes slit almost imperceptibly in decision.

“Mr. Forbes, give Mr. James ten thousand dollars. He will room with you in your suite until we find him his own place. We are on a swift timetable, and you will indeed need to bring him up to speed. However…” Zhol suddenly smiled disarmingly. “Bermet found you pleasing, Mr. James. Did you like her?”

“The Goth girl?” James sat up in his chair. “Oh, hell yes.”

Zhol nodded at Forbes. “Tell Bermet Mr. James’s door will be open to her tonight if she so desires. Tell her she might wish to bring along her friends Dariga and Tatiana.” Zhol shrugged at Calvin. “They’re twins.”

James blinked. “Really.”

Zhol rose and extended his hand. “Have a pleasant evening, Mr. James.” He smiled as they shook hands. “I look forward to a profitable association.”

“Man…” Forbes put a massive hand on James’s shoulder and nodded as Zhol left the office. “I told you this was a good gig.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“We have the Shark.” David McCarter sat, apparently reading the paper, in the terminal. He watched the bullet-headed Russian mobster disembark with a pair of bodyguards. Sharypa Sharkov was a big man, built like a rugby striker who had let himself go. His men weren’t particularly large or imposing, but they scanned the crowd around their boss with hard and searching eyes. The men weren’t mindless muscle. They were shooters, and their right hands never strayed far from the front of their black leather jackets. McCarter subvocalized into his throat mike. His signal was being picked up at the safehouse and bounced to Virginia through the sat link. “Two bodyguards. My instinct is they’re ex-Special Forces. Packing heat.”

“Affirmative, Phoenix One.” Barbara Price confirmed. “Tail is go.”

“Roger that.” McCarter tossed down his paper and walked through the terminal slightly behind and parallel to Sharkov. They stepped out into the drizzly Tajikistani morning. Sharkov stepped into the back of a dilapidated Toyota Land Cruiser. McCarter eyed the vehicle. “Base, according to intel, Sharkov likes to live large, correct?”

“Affirmative, Phoenix One. According to what we got from CIA Moscow Station, Sharkov tries to keep up with Zhol in the style department and usually fails.”

“What’s his usual ride?”

Price looked over the Sharkov report. “He keeps a Mercedes-Benz in every city he has a residence in.”

“Right.” McCarter threw a leg over his BMW F650 Dakar motorcycle. There was another nondescript SUV parked behind the one Sharkov had just gotten in. The vehicles had dents and scratched paint, and had apparently seen hard use over the years. Sharkov’s had one headlight out. There was nothing strange about that. Toyota SUVs were one of the workhorses of the Third World. They were nothing if not reliable. If you just changed the oil every three thousand miles they could limp along for decades doing yeoman’s work. Manning’s eyes narrowed as he took in the tinted windows. He smiled as the SUVs’ engines snarled into life and spit blue smoke into the misting rain. These weren’t workhorses.

They were thoroughbreds.

The dirt and dings were cosmetic. Beneath the sheep’s clothing their V-6 engines were supercharged. David McCarter was a connoisseur of motor vehicles. He took in the run-flat tires and recognized the work. The two Land Cruisers were the product of Asbeck Armoring Bonn. He suspected they were VIP 100 Models, and custom. They would be armored against massive attack, undoubtedly European “extreme protection” B6 category. They would be impervious to direct hits of up to .30-caliber. It would take a .50-caliber, crew-served machine gun or a shoulder-launched rocket to crack them.

McCarter’s instincts spoke to him. Sharkov was going incognito and with maximum protection. The Briton followed the two-car caravan for a couple of blocks, and their destination was evident. “Base, targets are headed for the casino.”

“Affirmative, Phoenix One. It’s your call.”

McCarter considered his options. If his suspicions were correct, he had just located the courier vehicles for the nukes. They needed to be marked. Once they went into the casino they’d be parked in Zhol’s private garage. There were three options. James could go in and tag them, but that would risk his cover. Two, McCarter could send in a team to break into the garage and do it. It probably wouldn’t be too difficult, but security would have to be overcome. There was a good chance that the enemy might know they had been breeched. They wouldn’t know why or by whom, but the enemy security level would rise, and that threatened the entire mission.

Option three was for McCarter to do it himself, now.

“Base, I’m taking the shot.”

“Affirmative, Phoenix One.”

McCarter pulled up behind the Toyotas. He reached into his jacket. His hand brushed past the concealed Browning Hi-Power pistol and pulled out a slightly oversize cell phone. At a traffic light he came to stop beside Sharkov’s vehicle. He could feel the gaze of the hardmen inside from behind the tinted windows. McCarter flipped open his phone as the light changed. The back passenger window of the Land Cruiser cracked slightly. McCarter passed the armored vehicle, apparently oblivious of scrutiny as he shouted into his phone in angry French.

The phone had no communications capability. Two stubby smooth-bore barrels and a pair of compressed air cylinders took up body of the phone. The flip-top acted as a simple see-through optical sight. McCarter slid open the muzzle cover and unlocked the safety while he blithered away about getting out of the goddamn country and delivery schedules. He let Sharkov’s car pull slightly ahead.

“Merde!” McCarter took the phone away from his ear and held it forward, his thumb working the buttons as if he were dialing another number. He peered through the sight and put the crosshairs on the brake light above the cargo door of Sharkov’s Toyota. He pressed zero on the keypad and the phone chuffed in his hand.

McCarter was rewarded as the .40-caliber paintball hit the bulge of the brake light and shattered, splattering across the top of the vehicle. He was slightly worried by the rain factor. He had only two shots, and one positive mark was better than two partials, and the window of opportunity was now. He pressed the button and fired his second barrel. He missed the brake light but luck was with him as the plastic sphere struck the luggage rack and broke apart.

“Marking complete, Base. Do you have the target acquired?”

“One moment, Phoenix One.” Back in Virginia, Price turned to Kurtzman. “Aaron?”

The computer wizard was staring intently at a six-foot flat screen. The feed showed an overhead view of traffic. Cars and trucks moved through the grid of streets and buildings in high-contrast black-and-white. The paintballs McCarter had fired were filled with a liquid infrared luminescent material. Once it was exposed to air, it gelled and hardened, and the infrared chemical reaction began. The luminescent material was clear and, after it hardened, almost undetectable. Minute scrutiny would reveal it as a hardened film that would be difficult to scrub off. The infrared goo in the projectile was its own power source. Over the course of time it would fade. However, for the next three months, it would glow at a steady 300 candlepower in the infrared spectrum, invisible to the unaided human eye.

Three hundred miles above the surface of the Earth a distinctly nonhuman eye was peering intently at the traffic in downtown Dushanbe. The satellite’s radio receiver was tracking McCarter by triangulation. Once he was acquired, it was child’s play to keep him under observation. Kurtzman could make out McCarter on his motorcycle and he could see the truck he trailed. The infrared feed of the satellite was set to high-polarity white on black. Infrared light sources appeared in varying shades of white. McCarter’s high-performance motorcycle had its own very distinctive infrared signature.

Kurtzman grinned as the top of Sharkov’s armored SUV suddenly began to glow in brilliant bright white. The satellite instantly noted the candlepower and frequency of the infrared light source and transmitted them to the net of satellites that the NSA had programmed to observe Tajikistan. Day or night, rain or shine, anytime Sharkov’s vehicle was above ground, Kurtzman and his team would be watching it.

Kurtzman nodded at Price. “The Shark is marked.”

“Good work, Phoenix One. Target has been acquired.”

“Affirmative, Base.” McCarter’s motorcycle peeled down a side street. “Breaking contact.”

The Stony Man computer wizard watched Sharkov’s armored convoy as it wound its way through traffic and disappeared into the casino’s rear garage. He leaned back in his wheelchair and typed a few keys. The giant screen split between the real-time feed of the satellite watching the Silk Road casino and a geopolitical map of Southern Asia. “The question is, Sharkman,” Kurtzman mused, “if you have the packages, where are you planning on taking them?”

“NOW, I DON’T NORMALLY dig nines.” Clayborne Forbes held up an SR-3 Vikhr short assault rifle. “But this baby puts them out at a thousand feet per second with a bullet twice the weight of a normal 9 mm. Throw in the tungsten steel penetrator? This shit sings. Kevlar? Car doors? Titanium? If you aren’t wearing ceramic when this hits you—” Forbes’s smile was ugly as he handed it to Calvin James “—Jack, you are dead.”

Sharkov laughed harshly and took another weapon from the crate.

James examined the weapon. It had a stubby barrel and a folding sheet-metal stock. The super-heavy 9 mm bullet was fired from a cut-down AK-47 rifle shell. The weapon’s light weight produced heavy recoil and a cyclic rate of 900 rounds a minute that was almost impossible to control on full-auto, and ate up the 20-round magazine in a matter of heartbeats.

However, in the Vikhr’s favor, the design bureau of the Russian Central Institute of Precision Machinery Construction had been asked to create a compact, concealable weapon that could penetrate most known forms of body armor and semihardened vehicles for Russian Special Forces. That was all metaphor. The real specification was in fact for a short-range weapon that would penetrate armored limousines, body armor, the bodyguards wearing it and the VIP they were trying to protect. The Vikhr had been designed as an assassination weapon, pure and simple, and it had met the specification with wild success.

James snapped the folding stock into place and shouldered the Vikhr. The weapon’s inaccuracy was somewhat mitigated by the laser-designator mounted beneath the barrel and the optical sight above. He wouldn’t care to go into open battle with it, but for slaughtering someone in a phone booth or defoliating the occupants of a limousine during a drive-by, he was hard-pressed to think of a better weapon.

Forbes seemed intimately familiar with it.

“Fact is, Cal. This town? Hell, this whole country, is wide open. Zhol’s got the local juice.” Forbes grinned at Sharkov. “And the Shark has Moscow backing him.”

“Da.” Sharkov nodded. “That is correct.”

“Hell.” Forbes checked the fit of the Vikhr’s shoulder rig. “As long as we don’t assassinate the president or blow up a mosque, we can do anything we want, kill anyone we want, hell, take anything we want.” He racked the action of his weapon and chambered an armor-piercing round. “This place is a goddamn gold mine.”

“You Navy SEAL, huh?” Sharkov turned his black eyes on Calvin James. “Like Forbes.”

“Yeah.” James tried his shoulder rig and found he could draw the weapon smoothly from under his leather jacket. “Back in the day.”

“Back in day.” The Russian savored the American slang.

“So what’s the plan?”

“Baby-sitting from Point A to Point B. Nothing could be simpler.”

James knew too much eagerness on his part would get him killed. They were both Special Forces operators, and from long, hard experience, hated being kept in the dark. He put some doubt into his voice. “Uh-huh.”

“Listen, man, I know you don’t like being out of the loop, but this shit is on a need-to-know basis.”

“Need to know.” Sharkov nodded.

James let his frown speak for him.

Forbes nodded in empathy. “We aren’t pimpin’, and we aren’t pushin’ drugs. I can tell you that.”

Sharkov scowled at the admission.

“No, man, I told you, the brother’s cool.” He looked at James frankly. “We’re transporting technology that some people with the right kind of money want to acquire. That’s really all you need to know. Consider yourself a caravan guard. You guard the boss and the goods with your life. You do that and you’re gonna see the fattest paycheck of your life, with more to follow.”

Sharkov grunted. “Exactly so.”

Forbes cocked his head. “You down with this?”

James racked his Vikhr and flicked on the safety. “I’m down with it.”

“Good, that’s real good.” Forbes handed him a bandolier with eight spare 20-round magazines. James checked each one out of habit, noting the blue-gray needle points of the tungsten carbide cobalt penetrators protruding from the tips.

“Point A to Point B, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“Does a brother get to know where Point B is?”

Forbes looked to Sharkov. The ugly Russian shrugged dismissively. “He is SEAL. He will figure it out soon enough anyway.”

James looked back and forth between the two men. “And?”

“Afghanistan, man. Kabul.” Forbes tossed his weapon and ammo on the bed. “Our old stomping ground.”

“We’re driving from Dushanbe to Kabul?”

“That’s right.”

“That’s a long-ass drive.”

“Right again.” Forbes leaned in and spoke in a conspiratorial tone. “But, strangely enough, the safest. Like I told you. We got the juice.”

“So when do we ship out?”

“Tomorrow, at dawn.” Forbes leered. “So tonight I’d go with Bermet or the twins, but not all three. You’re going to need your beauty sleep for this one.”

CHAPTER FIVE

“Wake up, Sunshine.”

Calvin James was already awake. He had sensed the door of his room opening and without opening his eyes had known it was Forbes by the big man’s footfalls and the power of his aftershave. Some of James’s limbs were pinned by the sleeping Bermet, but beneath his pillow his right hand was curled around his Heckler & Koch .45. “Morning.”

“Look at you.” Forbes stared down in mock disapproval at the tangle of bodies on the bed and the champagne bottles strewed about. The big man tsked and shook his head. “You’re a disgrace to the race.”

James began to disentangle himself from Bermet. “When you see a sister here in Tajikistan, you let me know. Until then…”

“When in Rome.” Forbes grinned and handed him a mug. The coffee was Turkish, strong enough to strip paint and heavily laced with sugar and cardamom. James sighed as he sipped the coffee. “This place does have amenities.”

“It’s good to a big fish in a small pond,” Forbes agreed.

“Yeah.” James stood. “But I want to be a big fish in a big pond.”

“Oh, yeah?” Forbes looked at him measuringly. “Well, first things first. We got a job to do. Get dressed. Bring your bag. Follow me.”

“How soon till we leave?”

“You have twenty minutes.”

James got up and went to the bathroom. He ran water and then pressed his ear to the door. He could hear Forbes speaking very quietly and Bermet answering. She was being debriefed. She had gone through his bag and dresser drawers the first night. One look at his shaving kit told him that her nocturnal trip to the bathroom had included riffling his few belongings by the sink. Forbes had already checked James and his belongings for bugs, telling him he was on “probation,” but the big man was taking no chances. James suspected his room was bugged. He couldn’t afford to be caught on the phone or sending smoke signals from the roof.

But he had the collected minds of Stony Man Farm on his side.

James took out his toothpaste and squeezed. About five inches of minty-fresh, tartar-control dentifrice squeezed out and suddenly the tube ribboned forth clear gel. He stuck his arm out of the small bathroom window and began crudely writing on the side of the casino with infrared luminescent gel.

NUKES HERE

DPT 2O MIN

DST KABUL

James shucked himself into the clothes hanging on the door hanger. He took the gel and drew an invisible circle on the back of his leather jacket, then brushed his teeth and shaved. When he came, Bermet was gone. His bag was already packed and a second gym bag contained the Vikhr compact assault rifle and ammo. Forbes sat on the bed smoking a cigar and watching news on the casino cable. James strapped on his pistol and his knife. “Let’s do it.”

Forbes rolled to his feet. “Follow me.”

They took a private elevator down to a private garage. Sitting incongruously among the limousines, sports cars and luxury sedans were three battered-looking Land Cruisers, their engines running. Zhol and Sharkov stood waiting, surrounded by a full squad of hardmen. It was bitterly cold. You could see the men’s breath in the unheated garage. Beneath their bulky jackets the hardguys were clearly wearing armor and each had a gym bag like James’s by his feet. Zhol smiled and rolled back a calfskin glove to glance at his Rolex watch. One satanic eyebrow rose in question.

“Sorry we’re late, Mr. Zhol.”

Zhol beckoned James over. “Mr. James.” He nodded at one of his men, who raised the hatchback of the center vehicle. The Phoenix Force commando gazed at the cargo. In the back bed of the SUV were two suitcase-size metal casings painted in Russian military gray-green. Each was wrapped in military webbing with a pair of padded straps so that the device could be carried like a backpack. “Do you know what those are?”

James scrutinized the casings. “Clay told me we were transporting technology. Never saw a security case like that before, but it looks like military security and tamper-proofed.”

“Indeed. And?”

“In the U.S. we liked to use thermite in security cases to burn the contents if someone messed with them. Russian military always preferred high-explosive charges. They like to kill the thief as well as destroy the contents.” James eyed the case warily. “My bet is if someone tries to get inside that case it’ll blow.

An enigmatic smile passed across Zhol’s face. “Yes, Mr. James. If someone tampers with those cases, they will blow.”

Sharkov nodded, smiling at the joke. “We do not want those falling into wrong hands, Mr. James.”

“No,” James agreed earnestly, “we don’t.”

Forbes’s cell phone rang. He listened for a moment, then nodded. “Guten morgen.” Forbes shook his head. “Nien, keine Probleme, kein Problem an allen.”

James yawned and looked at his watch. Forbes was speaking German. There were no problems, no problems at all.

“Alles ist auf Zeitplan.” Forbes smiled. “Ja danke. Auf wiedersehen, meine Herr.”

All was going according to plan.

Forbes clicked his phone shut. He put a hand on James’s shoulder and pointed at the two devices in the back of the truck. “Cal, you gotta guard that shit with your life.”

James spoke with utmost sincerity. “I will.”

Stony Man Farm

“THE PACKAGE IS MOVING.” McCarter’s voice spoke calmly over the sat link. “On schedule, just like Calvin said.”

On the giant screen the satellite image of the Silk Road Casino showed three vehicles pulling out of the private rear garage. It was a misty morning, not ideal for infrared viewing, but the vehicle in the middle was still glowing bright white where McCarter had marked it the day before. “Roger that, Phoenix One.” Barbara Price swung into her chair and adjusted her headset. “Showtime, people. Phoenix Flight, you are go.”

The pilot’s voice came back over the sound of rotors. “Gary and I are airborne. ETA downtown Dushanbe five minutes.”

“I’ve established the tail.” McCarter spoke over the sound of his motorcycle. A circle of bright white infrared luminescent paint marked his helmet like a halo. “They’re heading due south, as predicted. Looks like they’re going to take route A377 all the way down to the Afghan border.”

Aaron Kurtzman shook his head. “I’m just not buying a road trip all the way to Kabul, despite the vehicles David reported. The route is too long, too mountainous and there are far too many curious and unfriendly people with AK-47’s up in those hills. Zhol and Sharkov know they got hit up in the mountains once already, and by now they know Gotron Khan’s gone missing. They’re driving now to avoid the airport and any possible surprise inspection or ambush, but I’m betting after they leave the city they’re getting off the main route ASAP. For that matter, those are off-road vehicles. I think they’re going to go cross-country where a helicopter is going to pick them up.”

Price’s brow knitted. “These are Russian gangsters. They’re known for their sticky fingers. I doubt they’d leave behind three custom-made, Asbeck-armored VIP specials. You’re looking at over half a million dollars’ worth of rides.”

“You know, you’re both right.” Everyone in the War Room could almost hear Jack Grimaldi grinning behind the stick of his helicopter as things fell into his area of expertise. “Zhol owns construction companies, and this is Tajikistan. Ninety-nine percent of the country is mountain or desert, and the roads are so bad that almost any company that can afford it does their major hauling with helicopters rather than trucks. I’m betting Zhol has one or more Mi-26 Halos hot on the pad in some clearing outside the capital. The Halo’s the most powerful helicopter on Earth. It’s like a C-130 Hercules except with rotors. We’re talking large-cargo clamshell loading doors in the back and a maximum payload of 44,000 pounds plus.”

“Damn it.” Price watched the three-car caravan wend its way south through the early morning traffic. “They’ll just drive their SUVs inside the chopper and take off.”

“It’s worse than that.” Kurtzman stared into middle distance as he began to crunch all the angles. “Jack’s right. Zhol owns construction companies, so he probably has access to a fleet of helicopters. He knows he’s been hit already. He’ll be taking every precaution. If Zhol hasn’t factored in possible satellite surveillance, Forbes has. They’ll have multiple helicopters.”

“A shell game.” Price watched the satellite feed as Rafael Encizo and T. J. Hawkins pulled into traffic in a Russian Tarantula off-road vehicle marked with a broad circle of infrared luminescent paint on the hood. “And we can’t be sure which vehicle the nukes are in, or if they’ve been split up.”

“That’s right,” Kurtzman said. “We’re playing nuclear poker with a Navy SEAL. The best of the best.”

“Base, this is Phoenix Two,” Encizo reported. “We have the caravan in sight. Paralleling.”

“Affirmative, Phoenix Two,” Price said. “Bear?”

“We can’t afford to let these guys get out of the city, or even into a park or city square wide enough to land a helicopter.” Kurtzman nodded and hit his comm switch. “Phoenix One, this is Bear. Take them down. Take them down now.”

“AFFIRMATIVE, BASE.” McCarter was a hundred yards behind the convoy. He wore infrared goggles beneath the visor of his helmet and he could see the white light shining off the back of the middle car. “Phoenix Flight, what is your ETA?”

“I have you in sight, Phoenix One.”

“Phoenix Two?”

“We’re parallel on Western Avenue, Phoenix One,” Encizo replied.

“All units, I’m assuming the middle car has the VIPs and the packages. I want to avoid directly attacking it if possible. We take out the guard vehicles first then try to force the main target to stop. With luck, Calvin can work some magic from the inside. Phoenix Two and Three, come from behind. Phoenix Flight, drop Phoenix Four to plug any holes.”

All units came back “Affirmative.”

McCarter slid a Farm-modified RKJ-3M grenade from his jacket and pulled the pin. “Phoenix One, beginning attack run.” The Dakar 650 snarled and spit blue smoke as the Englishman gunned the engine. McCarter’s visor beaded with mist as he shot forward through traffic like an arrow.

The RKG-3M antitank grenade was a forty-year-old design, though still a clever one. The operator threw the grenade above the tank. A small parachute deployed from the handle so that the warhead deployed nosedown against the tank’s thin upper armor. It had been used effectively in the 1973 Arab Israeli War, but its main drawback then and now was that the operator had to run up and throw the grenade at the tank. Tanks and armored vehicles generally bristled with cannons and machine guns, and their crews tended to take a very dim view of anyone running toward them with cylindrical metal objects in their hands. Antitank grenades were considered at best a last-ditch defense if not open suicide. In the twenty-first century there were few modern tanks or APCs against which the RKG-3M would still be effective even if the operator could survive to get close enough.

An unsuspecting Toyota Land Cruiser in misty morning traffic was another kettle of fish.

McCarter flew past the rear and middle cars of the convoy. He lifted his thumb and the cotter lever pinged away in his wake. He whipped in front of the lead vehicle, took a moment to match its speed and tossed the grenade back over his shoulder.

Tires screamed on the wet asphalt as the lead driver stood on his brakes. McCarter had counted on that. The grenade bounced off the windshield and landed nosedown on the hood of the vehicle.

The magnetic ring that had been welded around the edge of the cylinder-shaped grenade clacked onto the metal hood, and the parachute collapsed around the throwing handle as the grenade locked in place.

McCarter had five seconds of fuse time to get out of the ten-meter secondary fragmentation radius. The BMW Dakar screamed into the red line as the grenade detonated behind it. The copper forcing cone inside the grenade shaped the detonating 567 grams of TNT and RDX high explosive into a highly condensed jet of superheated gas and fire.

The fire shot out the wheel wells like a rocket in takeoff, and the SUV lifted off its front tires. German engineering was nothing if not efficient. The designers at Asbeck knew they couldn’t make an SUV that could withstand shaped-charge attacks, but they had worked to minimize the damage and injury to passengers. The armored box around the engine channeled the blast up and down, and kept grenade and engine fragments from ripping through the passenger compartment. Halon fire-suppression units blasted out the burning oil and fuel, and hissed against the molten metal.

The stricken SUV slammed down on the molten remains of its run-flat tires.

McCarter whipped his motorcycle around in a screaming 180-degree halt. His 10 mm Parker-Hale Personal Defensive Weapon ripped free of the Velcro holding it in its shoulder holster. He snapped the folding stock into position and shouldered the weapon as all four doors of the armored Land Cruiser flung open at once.

The red dot of McCarter’s reflex sight was a glowing white blob through his infrared goggles. The white blob coincided with the forehead of the driver, and McCarter squeezed the PDW’s trigger. Three 10 mm armor-piercing slugs opened the smuggler’s skull to the sky in a spray of brain and bone. McCarter raised his sights slightly as the driver collapsed and gunned for the man coming out of the driver’s side passenger door. The Briton’s first burst clipped the killer’s shoulder and spun him, the second took him in the side of the face and rippled his head into ruins.

McCarter stood and shot. The men who leaped out of the passenger doors died even as they tried to level their automatic weapons. “Lead vehicle down! Hostiles down! Phoenix Two, attack—!”

The Phoenix Force leader swung his weapon back to the driver’s door and exchanged fire with a fifth man who popped out spraying lead from a compact assault rifle. Sparks sprayed as McCarter’s weapon mangled in his hands and his head snapped back like he’d taken a punch from a heavyweight. The Russian shooter fell with a crushed skull.

“Phoenix One!” Grimaldi shouted across the radio.

The PDW had taken two hits, and its action was dented and held open in a permanent jam. It fell from McCarter’s nerveless fingers as he toppled back across his bike.

The Briton tasted blood in the back of his throat. He ripped his helmet free and drew his Browning Hi-Power pistol. The world spun as he tried to sit up, and he fell back again. The front of his motorcycle helmet had an inch-deep crater blasted in the forehead. The copper base of a bullet gleamed from the middle of the hole. Only the ballistic ceramic insert had saved his life from the armor-piercing round.

“Move!” Grimaldi roared.

McCarter rolled to his feet as the other two SUVs pulled around the smoldering lead vehicle. Their tires screamed on the wet asphalt as they caught sight of him and swerved inward. The rest of the caravan was swerving to crush McCarter beneath its wheels.

The Briton began to empty his Browning Hi-Power into the windshield of the left-hand vehicle. His pistol stood no chance of piercing the armored glass, but the bullets did spall and create spiderwebs of cracking in the upper glass layer. McCarter ran for the curb and his opponent swerved to take him. He leaped, arms outstretched, for the top of a parked ZIL sedan. His hands closed around the luggage rack as he heaved himself onto the roof. Metal screamed as the Land Cruiser sideswiped the ZIL. McCarter’s foot went numb as the SUV’s passenger window clipped his boot heel in passing and he was flung from his perch. He hit the sidewalk with bone-jarring force and rolled. He got to his feet and emptied the last four rounds of his pistol into the back of the second armored SUV in parting.

The driver spitefully ran over McCarter’s Dakar, crushing one of the motorcycle’s wheels and crumpling the front fork.

The Briton snarled in anger and limped back to the vehicle he had disabled. He took a compact assault rifle and a bandolier of ammo from one of the fallen gunmen as he roared into his mike, “Phoenix Flight! Cut them off!”

“Phoenix Flight in position!” Grimaldi replied. “Deploying Phoenix Four!”

Rotors beat the air as the pilot dropped his helicopter like a stone three blocks up the street. The little Russian Mi-34 Hermit was a civil aircraft Phoenix Force had acquired locally. Grimaldi held the Hermit a hundred feet over the intersection. Gary Manning fast-roped out of the cabin, falling toward oncoming traffic like a spider. Horns blared and brakes shrieked as Manning’s boots hit pavement and traffic parted like the Red Sea around the heavily armed man. Manning spun his weapon on its sling as his two targets screamed through the intersection one block down.

“Phoenix Four in position. Targets acquired.” The big Canadian shouldered his Barrett M-82 A-2 rifle. It was a huge rifle, more than five and a half feet long and weighing twenty-seven pounds. It used the same action as the Barrett “Light Fifty” heavy sniper rifle, but had been redesigned in bullpup configuration. Most of the weapon’s massive action was situated in the back of the gun rather than the middle, and passed over the operator’s shoulder.

McCarter dropped to one knee, holding the big Barrett over his shoulder like a rocket launcher. The two armored SUVs came on. One pulled ahead as Manning peered through the 3x infrared sight. He saw the halo of light eclipsed as the lead Land Cruiser pulled directly in front as a shield.

“This is Phoenix Four. I’m taking out lead vehicle.” Manning put his crosshairs on the grille of the oncoming SUV. The .50-caliber round had been designed in the latter days of WWI with the specification of being able to attack observation balloons, aircraft and the tanks of the day. It had defeated such targets with grotesque ease, and a hundred years later it was still the most powerful round that one man could reasonably operate in a weapon.

The Canadian master rifleman squeezed the trigger.

The huge .50-caliber round shot forth a four-foot blast of flame from the muzzle and Manning grimaced as the rubber recoil pad behind the magazine kicked him like a mule. Steam blasted out of the lead vehicle’s grille as the .50-caliber armor-piercing round punched through the armored box surrounding the engine. Manning yanked his muzzle down and fired again. The engine shrieked and clanked as the engine block cracked and the vehicle lost power.

Manning put his third shot through the driver’s side of the windshield.

The armored windshield cratered around the .50-caliber hole and the interior went red in a spray of arterial blood. The SUV fishtailed out of control as the dead driver collapsed against the wheel. The vehicle veered onto the wrong side of the road and rammed into a parked bread truck at forty miles per hour. The side of the panel van folded around the front of the armored car.

The bumper of the last SUV was aimed straight at Manning and appeared to have no intention of stopping. Shooting into the last vehicle wasn’t the preferred action. Calvin James was inside, along with two, ten-kiloton nuclear demolition charges. Sending armor-piercing bullets sailing through the car body or shaped charges sheeting the interior with superheated gas and molten metal was a last option.

The driver had no such reservations.

He accelerated straight for Manning where he knelt in the middle of the intersection. Manning dropped the big Barrett on its sling and clicked the brake on his repelling harness. “Phoenix Four requesting immediate extraction!”

“Extracting!” Grimaldi said.

The radial engine in the helicopter overhead roared into emergency war power. Manning’s harness cinched against him as the helicopter’s rotors hammered the sky and clawed for altitude. The Land Cruiser bore down on him like a juggernaut. Manning’s feet left the ground as the helicopter pounded straight up into the sky like an elevator.

The vehicle tore past less than a yard beneath Manning’s boots. “Phoenix Flight, Phoenix Four redeploying!”

“Affirmative, Phoenix Four!”

Manning released the brake and repelled to the ground, releasing the rope from his harness. “Phoenix Four deployed and clear!”

“Roger, Phoenix Four.” Grimaldi took his helicopter back above the rooftops and resumed the chase.

The doors of the crashed Land Cruiser flew open.

The big Barrett was too unwieldy for a close-range fire-fight. Manning shrugged out of the sling and drew his pistol. The Para-Ordinance P16-40 barked in his hands as he began double-tapping the enemy. The range was twenty-five yards and the big Canadian could see the bulge of body armor beneath their jackets. At that distance he could reliably put every shot into a dinner plate in rapid fire. His first double-tap shot away one hardguy’s jaw, and his second neatly put out another man’s eye and brain as he went for head shots.

Manning moved toward cover as men deployed from the opposite side of the Land Cruiser. He dived behind a white Sputnik 4×4 sedan and rolled up, slamming his pistol across the hood. The .40-caliber weapon barked twice, cracking the skull of one of the Russian hardmen behind the SUV. Manning dropped low as the other two men opened up, their compact assault rifles spewing flame like buzz saws in their hands.

“Shit!” The Phoenix Force commando flinched as bullets zinged straight through the car he was using for cover. He jammed himself as low as possible between the curb and the tires. The Sputnik shuddered above him as it was riddled by automatic fire. The bullets zipped through and blasted on into the hairdresser’s shop behind him. A bullet plucked at the shoulder of his jacket and sparks flashed inches over his eyes as the car body tore like cheesecloth. “Phoenix Four requesting immediate backup!”

“Phoenix Four, this is Phoenix One, I’m on your twelve!”

A man screamed as McCarter opened up from behind. Manning leaped to his feet as the remaining Russian dived over the hood of the Land Cruiser to avoid McCarter. Manning whipped up his pistol. His first two rounds hit the killer in the chest, standing him up and pushing him back against the vehicle’s fender. The Russian raised his rifle even as he took hits.

His forehead geysered jellied brain as McCarter’s bullet transversed his skull from behind. Manning holstered his pistol and sprinted forward, confiscating the dead man’s rifle and his bandolier of spare magazines.

McCarter came up at the run. “Phoenix Flight, sitrep!”

“We have third vehicle directly beneath us,” Grimaldi reported.

“Phoenix Two, what’s your position?”

“Parallel course,” Encizo replied.

“Step on it! Pull ahead three blocks and Phoenix Flight will vector you in.” Manning fell into step with McCarter, scooping up his Barrett .50 as they charged up the street. McCarter broke into a dead run. “Take them out.”

“Affirmative, Phoenix One.” McCarter could hear the roar of Encizo’s engine over the link as he accelerated. “Taking them down now.”

CHAPTER SIX

“We’re getting goddamn hammered!” Forbes thrust his finger angrily over the driver’s shoulder and pointed at Manning where he knelt in the middle of the intersection. “Run his ass down, Gurza! Do you hear me? Run his ass down!”

Gurza stood on the accelerator. Manning made no attempt to move. Calvin James cradled his rifle, prepared to blow out Gurza’s brains. Zhol rode shotgun next to Gurza, and Forbes was next to James on the seat. Sharkov and one of his hardmen were in the back, sitting on the nuclear devices. James doubted he could get all six, but that was his last option. Ideally, Phoenix Force would force the vehicle to a halt and convince Sharkov and Zhol to surrender. If that succeeded, then James would go along and surrender, also, continuing his cover and hopefully getting Forbes to drop information about the who and the where the nuclear demolition charges were headed.

If Sharkov and Zhol decided to go down fighting, James would be the Trojan horse and blindside their attack. His other duty was to make sure no one in the vehicle decided to go down in a blaze of glory and detonate the devices in downtown Dushanbe.

However, James wasn’t about to let Gary Manning get turned into applesauce across the armored car’s grille. The muzzle of his weapon drifted to the back of the driver’s head.

Gurza swore. James watched through the armored glass as Manning was sky-craned into the air like a jumping jack up and over their vehicle. Forbes flipped his assault rifle to automatic fire as he swiveled. Manning had already repelled back down and was engaging the crashed car.

“God…damn it!” Forbes’s face was a mask of rage. “Who are these guys!”

“Clay, that mother had a Barrett .50. These guys, they aren’t mafiya. They’re operators.” James stared at Forbes grimly. “Brother, we’re in trouble.”

Sharkov snarled from the back of the truck. “Gotron! He was captured! Compromised! He betrayed us! I told you not to trust that goddamn hill bandit!”

“Gotron Khan did not know enough to betray us.” Zhol produced a Russian R-92 revolver like a magic trick. The muzzle of the snubnose gaped only inches from James’s eyebrows. “But he did.”

Forbes spoke in a very low, very professional voice. “Mr. Zhol, we checked the man. His bonafides are real. We checked his room and everything he owns for bugs. I was with him every minute of the day and Bermet was with him at night. He had no way to communicate.”

“Nevertheless.” Zhol thumbed back the shrouded hammer of the revolver. He and James locked gazes. “He betrayed us.”

Sharkov’s carbine pressed into the back of James’s head. “Bastard…”

James wasn’t entirely certain his weapon would cut through the armored panel in Zhol’s seat back, but he wouldn’t live to raise it, and regardless, it would be the last thing he ever did. He spoke without taking his eyes off Zhol. “Clay…”

Forbes’s voice went cold. “Mr. Zhol…”

Zhol ignored Forbes as he and James continued their staring contest. “Will your friends negotiate for your release?” He smiled slightly as he answered his own question. “No, but they will pretend to, to buy time and set us up for another ambush. Mr. Forbes, take his weapon. Sharkov, radio the helicopter. Tell them to come into the city. We are extracting from the square in Pamir Park, but first, tell them to shoot down the enemy helicopter.”

Sharkov began to shout in his radio.

Zhol still hadn’t blinked. “Mr. Forbes, take Mr. James’s weapon.” He spoke to Sharkov’s man in the back. “Levchenko, if Mr. Forbes does not take Mr. James’s weapon, shoot him in the head.”

Levchenko pointed his rifle at the back of Forbes’s gleaming skull.

Forbes’s weapon was pointed at the driver. “I’ll blow Gurza’s head off. This car will crash, and we all go down.”

“Mr. Forbes, you know I respect you, but right now our priority is extraction. We can settle this situation later.” Zhol’s eyes and the muzzle of his pistol stayed trained on Calvin James. “But I am not going to ask you again. Take his weapon.”

Forbes grimaced. “Cal, give me the goddamn gun. I got your back. Once we’re out of here I’ll straighten this shit out.”

James shrugged. “Fuck it.”

The compact assault rifle clattered to the floorboards. Everyone except Zhol sighed with palpable relief. Zhol’s one concession was that he uncocked his revolver. “Good.”

“I got your back, Cal.” Forbes leaned down and picked up the rifle. “We’ll straighten this shit out. I promise you.”

Zhol jerked the muzzle of his pistol at James’s waist. “The pistol, if you please.”

Everyone’s attention was on James. Even the driver had been keeping his attention on the rearview mirror, flicking his gaze back and forth between James and Forbes and the assault rifle aimed at his head.

They hadn’t seen what the Phoenix Force warrior saw over Zhol’s shoulder. James lifted his chin. “What’s that?”

Everyone in the armored car looked out the passenger-side windows.

“Shit!” Forbes roared.

Calvin James braced himself as Gurza desperately cranked the wheel.

The last thing anyone saw before the world ended was Rafael Encizo grinning out of the roll cage of the Tarantula 4x4. The off-road vehicle T-boned the Land Cruiser broadside at fifty miles per hour. The armored SUV whipped into a violent 360-degree spin. Gurza lost control of the vehicle and rolled it. The world tumbled end-over-end as metal buckled, tearing and screaming into ruin. Sharkov and his man in the back weren’t strapped in, and one of them bounced into the passenger area and landed on top of James and Forbes. The Phoenix Force commando grunted as the big man crushed him and was instantly flipped away as the Toyota rolled again. James tried to brace himself, but a ten-kiloton nuclear demolition charge bounced squarely into his face. He saw stars and tumbled with everyone else like the contents of an armored cocktail shaker. The Land Cruiser hit something and bounced. Everyone and everything collapsed to the roof as the SUV came to a rest on its back like a turned-over turtle.

The world was still spinning and James viewed it upside down and through a very long and dark tunnel. His mouth was full of blood and he couldn’t clear his head. Battle instincts took over. He clawed for the door handle and shoved. The armored door was heavy, but James pushed it open with a groan. He reached back and his hand closed around pack straps. He crawled out of the Land Cruiser dragging the nuke onto the pavement with him.

It was early morning, but people were leaning out of windows and gathering on the street, shouting. James pushed himself to his hands and knees to retrieve the other device.

He threw up instead.

A large hand clamped down on his shoulder. “C’mon, Cal.” Forbes heaved the man to his feet. The other nuke was already strapped to his back “Gurza’s neck is broke. Suck it up. Help me with Zhol and Sharkov. We gotta steal a car and go.” He turned back to the stricken SUV.

“Clay.”

Forbes turned to find James’s pistol pointed at his forehead.

“Don’t move.”

Forbes’s eyebrows dropped dangerously as he stared down the barrel of the .45. “You Judas bastard.”

“Calvin!” Manning and McCarter were shouting his name from somewhere along the street. “Calvin!”

Ten yards down the street the Tarantula lay on its side. Hawkins hung in his harness. Encizo was climbing out of the roll cage shakily.

“Judas bastard,” Forbes repeated.

James didn’t bother to respond. He saw three Clay Forbeses in front of him. He kept his front sight on the one in the middle.

Zhol’s door was crumpled, but remarkably his power window whined upward. The Tajik gangster wormed his way out onto the street. His face was a mask of blood. James kept his pistol on Forbes. He stepped to his left and slammed his boot into the side of Zhol’s jaw. Zhol’s eyes rolled back in his head as he rolled belly-up with the blow.

“Forbes. Shrug out of that nuke.”

Encizo limped forward with his SIG-Sauer P-226 leveled. “And lose the piece. Real slow.”

Out of the corner of his eye James noticed Sharkov lying in the back of the Toyota. He was speaking rapidly into his radio.

McCarter and Manning pounded down the street, shouting at the top of their lungs. “Calvin! Get out of there!”

Grimaldi suddenly veered his helicopter off.

An aluminum cloud came hammering out of the sky. The Russian Halo was the second largest helicopter on Earth, and the giant machine roared over the rooftops. It was a dedicated transport, but the Russians never designed a helicopter without some kind of armament option. The DShK-38 heavy machine gun mounted in the Halo’s nose ripped a line of smoking holes through the tail boom of Grimaldi’s little Hermit helicopter. The Halo came on and dipped its nose.

Tracers screamed down, ripping asphalt in a line that ran straight at Calvin James, who hurled himself aside. He was sprayed by chunks of road as the line of the death passed him by. He rolled back up into a gunfight.

“Hey, Cal!” Forbes’s gleaming Magnum revolver boomed in his hand. James staggered as a .357 hollowpoint round hit his armor at the top of his sternum. He felt the supersonic crack like a knife through his eardrum as a second bullet passed inches from his ear. James’s .45 thudded in his hand as he returned fire. Forbes jerked as the heavy slugs hit him and sat him down hard against the Land Cruiser.

Encizo dived for his life out of the line of the Halo’s fire.

McCarter was spraying his rifle up into the air. “Calvin!”

The giant Halo’s rotors beat the air like thunder and whipped the air between the city buildings into a hurricane. The mighty machine spun on its axis to bring its gun to bear on James again. The Phoenix Force pro took six running steps onto the sidewalk and hurled himself through the window of a tea shop.

Shattered glass fell in a cascade around him.

Armageddon erupted as the Halo opened up and fired its heavy machine gun into the shop at six hundred rounds a minute. The brick walls of the building were no cover but they took James out of sight. He rolled back directly against the wall to try and get under the helicopter’s angle of fire. Glass, brick and mortar rained down as a thousand rounds of armor-piercing ammunition tore the tea shop apart.

James popped up as the fusillade suddenly ended. He ignored his cuts as he leaped back out. Manning was in the middle of the street with the big Barrett over his shoulder. He was firing nearly straight up. The heavy sniper rifle recoiled like a jackhammer in his hands as he pumped his own armor-piercing rounds into the chin of the Halo. The giant helicopter broke off, dipping to one side and disappearing back over the rooftops.

Clayborne Forbes was swiftly disappearing down the street with the nuke strapped to his back.

James broke into a dead sprint after him. His head throbbed with every footfall but he doggedly pursued. Forbes ran like the fullback he’d been at the Naval Academy. James staggered as a bullet struck him like a hammer between the shoulder blades. He turned to find Sharkov leaning against the Land Cruiser firing a pistol. James’s .45 thudded and Sharkov staggered. Then he shuddered as McCarter ripped a 20-round magazine through him from his Vikhr rifle. Sharkov’s man, Levenchko, dropped his rifle and dropped to his knees with his hands up.

McCarter waved James forward. “Get the nuke! Go! Go! Go!”

James slammed in a fresh magazine and sprinted on. The fact was, Forbes was younger and faster and had the lead. Forbes hit an intersection and turned left. The Halo suddenly thundered into view and followed him. James tasted the lactic acid in the back of his throat as he called on every last ounce of his flagging strength.

He rounded the corner and saw Forbes rising up into the air on the end of a rope. James took his pistol in both hands. The pistol cycled seven times in rapid semiauto and clacked open on empty. McCarter and Manning ran up behind him, weapons leveled, but the Halo was already receding from sight with Forbes strung beneath it.

James sank to one knee and tried to get air into his lungs. “What’s…the situation?”

“Rafe has the other nuke. T.J.’s unconscious. Jack was losing power to his tail rotor and had to set her down. He crashed it in a soccer field three blocks from here. He’s okay and heading our way. The good news is that we have Zhol. The bad news is…” McCarter trailed off as he watched the helicopter disappear into the rising sun.

“Bad news is we have a Broken Arrow,” James finished. “Loose nuke.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Panji Poyan, Tajikistan

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

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

“And the packages?”

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

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

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

“And who has the other one?”

“I don’t know.”

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

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

“Were what?”

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

“So who are they?”

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

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

“Mr. Zhol hired him.”

“On your glowing recommendation, as I recall.”

“Yeah.”

“I want the device back.”

“Yeah.”

“You wish payback.”

“Yeah.”

“What do you intend to do about this?”

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

“What do you intend?”

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

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

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

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

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

U.S. Embassy, Moscow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I did.”

“And?”

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

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

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

“You got it.”

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

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

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

Kremlin Square

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phoenix Force came back in the affirmative.

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

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

“Phoenix, we are go!”

Hawkins and Manning both threw a leg over their bikes.

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

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

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

“All units converge!” McCarter commanded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Traffic parted around it like it had the plague.

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

Sirens began wailing in the distance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Payback was owed.

“We’re out of here.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

“I’m thinking closed casket,” Calvin James suggested.

McCarter had to agree. Aidar Zhol’s corpse had been cleaned up but his head and face were still horrible to behold. McCarter had seen a lot of shotgun wounds, but the Tajik gangster looked as though someone had teed off on his face with a claw hammer. “What the bloody hell did that, then? Not buckshot.”

“Nyet.” Forensic Pathologist Sirpa Sokolova sighed in recognition. “Kopeck do this.”

“Kopeck?” James cocked his head, reexamining the wounds again with a combat medic’s eye. “You mean, the money or a man?”

“Both.” Aside from being the deputy assistant coroner, Dr. Sokolova was also a CIA intelligence asset. Barbara Price had arranged for the woman to extend McCarter and Calvin James every professional courtesy. The forensic pathologist was six feet tall and built like a ballet dancer. She’d put a wiggle in her walk for her two American guests that hadn’t gone unnoticed or unappreciated on the walk to the basement morgue.

The carnage inflicted on Aidar Zhol’s corpse held everyone’s attention now.

“Both?” McCarter gazed down at the carnage once more. “What do you mean, both?”

“Mean both.” Sokolova’s accent was thick enough to cut with a knife. “You ask what do such damage?” She opened a tray beneath the metal gurney and pulled out a plastic bag. The contents tinkled onto the stainless-steel tool tray as she emptied them into a glittering pile. “Twenty-five silver, Csar Nicholas, ten-kopeck pieces. Twenty-five more pulled from body armor in chest.”

“Bloody hell.” McCarter shook his head. “Shot him full of silver.”

“Da,” the doctor agreed. “Shotgun loaded with silver kopeck do such damage.”

James ran his hands through the coins. They were pitted from being fired from a gun and many had deformed when they’d hit bone, but each was genuine minted silver with Csar Nicholas on the face. They were about the diameter of a dime but twice as thick, and by James’s estimation twenty-five of them would fit just about perfectly into a 12-gauge shotgun shell. “You know, the Italian Mafia used to do this kind of shit in Sicily, back in the day. They killed you with enough money to pay for your funeral. Some kind of messed-up, old-school respect thing.”

McCarter stared at the pile of coins that had been pulled from Aidar Zhol’s skull. “Dr., you said kopeck was the method and a man’s name.”

“Da, every cop in Moscow know Kopeck. Kopeck is assassin. Double-barrel shotgun loaded with silver kopeck is his MO. One barrel in chest. One in face.” Dr. Sokolova tossed her head. “Kopeck is bad man.”

“What else do you know about him?” McCarter asked.

Dr. Sokolova went to a filing cabinet and pulled out a thick folder. File after file had pictures of horribly, unmistakably, coin-mutilated corpses. Sokolova pulled out a separate file. It was written in Cyrillic, but it was clearly a police rap sheet. McCarter gazed at the mug shot at the top. Kopeck’s face was all brutal bulges of brow and cheekbones and jaw with cauliflowered ears, and his hair was clipped close to his skull. He had bad teeth. McCarter could tell because Kopeck was grinning shamelessly into the police camera.

“Name, Pietor Shulin, alias ‘Kopeck.’ Was wrestler in ninety kilogram weight class but failed to make Olympic team. He lose sports dispensation and do army service in Chechnya. Implicated in atrocities against civilians but not prosecuted. Honorably discharged. Shulin became doorman at Moscow club where it is assumed he made mafiya connections. First ‘kopeck killing’ in Moscow occur two years ago. Victim was witness to alleged mafiya slaying. There have been eleven kopeck killings within last twenty-four months. Shulin has been arrested in conjunction with three but unsuccessfully prosecuted. Once before, murderer with this same MO escape police pursuit by using manhole trick you describe.”

McCarter shook his head at how they’d been eluded. He’d been in the bowels of Moscow before. The modern sewers connected with the ancient sewers built during the time of Peter the Great as well several extensive systems of catacombs that were even older. A mind-numbing labyrinth existed below the streets of Moscow and Russian criminals had been making use of it for centuries.

“Dr. do you have any idea which syndicate he’s with?” James asked.

“Kopeck is thought to be freelancer. You wish man dead? You have money? Kopeck kill. You wish woman or child dead? Kopeck kill them, too.”

McCarter had seen the type before. In the old days hit men had been the soldiers of their syndicate. They were trusted members of their families who did the dirty work of defending them. The family system in organized crime had steadily eroded since the 1960s with the rise of the narcotics trade. Kopeck was part of the new breed of killer. He wasn’t a hit man so much as an assassin, and aside from his colorful MO, he was true to type.

Kopeck was a sociopath with no loyalties to speak of. He killed for money and because he liked it.

“Kopeck’s a bad man,” James stated.

“Yeah, and if he’s freelance, that means he doesn’t have a syndicate backing him,” McCarter stated.

James grinned. “Maybe we should go and have ourselves a Come to Jesus with this boy Kopeck.”

“I wish you would.” Dr. Sokolova favored them with a predatory smile. “I weary of pulling coins from faces.”

“We need to put together a snatch, then.” McCarter turned to James. “Get on the horn to the Bear, we—”

A pair of orderlies entered the room pushing a gurney laden with a sheet-covered corpse. Dr. Sokolova gave the two orderlies a withering look and spoke in Russian. “I specifically gave orders not to be disturbed.”

McCarter cleared leather. James shoved Sokolova to the floor and drew his weapon. The orderlies withdrew PP-2000 machine pistols from beneath their smocks as McCarter and James opened up. McCarter’s Browning Hi-Power “Detective” model was an Argentine weapon with a three-and-a-half-inch barrel for concealed carry. The 13-round magazine was “Dutch-Loaded” with 9 mm +P+ hollowpoints and Teflon-coated, armor-piercing ammunition. The high-performance ammo screamed from the shortened barrel in ear-splitting blasts of fire. An armor-piercing round punched a neat hole through the first assassin’s heart. A hollowpoint round exploded his throat and dropped him to the floor.

James’s Heckler & Koch boomed four times in rapid succession. The big .45 smashed the second killer across the room and dropped him flapping to the floor. The man on the gurney sat up out of his shroud like the living dead, a sawed-off double barrel shotgun in each hand.

McCarter and James emptied their pistols into him.

The assassin jerked and shuddered under the fusillade. His right-hand shotgun boomed out of both barrels, and McCarter felt the sting of the hit in his left arm. He dropped his left arm and fired one-handed until his pistol racked open on an empty, smoke-oozing chamber. The killer lay back on the gurney in final rest with fifteen holes in his chest.

James slapped in a fresh magazine and shot his slide home on a fresh round. McCarter ignored the burning in his arm and reloaded, as well. Out in other areas of the morgue people had begun to scream. Dr. Sokolova started to push herself up and McCarter put a hand on her shoulder to keep her down. “Wait.”

James went to the double swinging door and kicked it open. He led with his pistol as he quickly scanned the corridor. “Clear.”

Sokolova rose and touched McCarter’s arm. “You are hit.”

James stayed in the doorway. “You all right?”

The doctor took a scalpel and cut away the sleeve of McCarter’s jacket and shirt. Blood ran in a river down McCarter’s arm from a pair of ragged but shallow wounds. She took a pair of forceps from the tool tray and stopped. “My God.”