The Chameleon Factor Read online

  With a stubby AK-105 in one hand and a long AK-74 in the other, Hawkins hit the opposite side of the hatchway, and Manning swung in with both of his weapons sweeping for targets. James and Encizo took sniper positions near empty windows, their faces masked with IR night goggles. Then McCarter slammed the butt of his AK-105 onto the cracked glass of the window. As it shattered, Hawkins slipped inside the hatch as backup for Manning.

  Sliding down his own night goggles, McCarter started for the hatchway when there came a brief burst of machine-gun fire. The Briton froze at the sound. With both sides using the same weapons, he couldn’t tell if that had been from one of his people or from the raiders looting the plane!

  “Give me a sit-rep, Stony Two,” McCarter subvocalized into his throat mike. “Are you green?”

  “Confirm, David,” Manning said over the earphone. “Green and clear. We found somebody trying to hide among the dead passengers. I fired a burst as a diversion so T.J. could go for a capture, but the stupid bastard pulled a knife.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “Me, yes, him, no,” Hawkins stated matter-of-factly.

  “Damn it, we could have used a prisoner to question,” McCarter said, walking into the plane. There was rubbish and blood everywhere, yet the aircraft was in amazingly good shape. Most of the destruction seemed to have occurred after the crash.

  “Must have been an amazing pilot at the controls,” Encizo observed, walking in with James. “Especially considering the rugged terrain.”

  “Trees and planes are natural enemies,” Manning muttered gruffly. “But, yes, these people landed alive.”

  “Then the raiders came.” James scowled. “I wonder if that was part of the plan for our thief, or just bad luck?”

  Tiny sparkling squares of broken green glass from the safety windows were scattered across the slightly tilting deck. Mixed among them was shiny gold, spent shells casings from the automatic weapons. Hawkins knelt to pick one up, then picked up a warm shell on the floor. The cold shell was longer, 7.62 mm, rather than 5.45 mm. “This is from a brand-new AK-104,” he said, frowning. “These clowns were carrying AK-74s.” He raised the two brass shells. “Somebody else was here.”

  Kneeling carefully to avoid a dried pool of blood, McCarter touched a few of the shells on the floor until finding a cold one. He sniffed inside the brass carefully.

  “This is more than two hours old,” he finally said. “Three at the most.”

  “Handload?” Encizo asked, furrowing his brow.

  McCarter shook his head. “Factory fill. Military grade.” He tossed over the brass.

  Encizo made the catch and checked the stamp on the bottom. Standard Russian army ordnance. “Why the hell would the army not take all of the surviving passengers with them?” he demanded, his breath fogging into cold air.

  “Maybe it wasn’t the Russian army, just their guns,” Hawkins said, closing the eyes of a dead woman still strapped into her seat.

  McCarter frowned deeply. Yeah, that was his call on the slaughter, too. The Russian army had a civilian review board to answer to these days, just like the American and British armed forces. The old blood and thunder time of the Red Army running amuck was long gone, with nobody happier about the change than most of the Russian army. Most, but not all.

  “T.J., go back to the hovercraft and watch the radar for incoming. Cal, cover the door. Gary, check for survivors pretending to be dead. Encizo, hit the cargo hold,” McCarter ordered, heading straight for the cockpit.

  As he expected, everybody there was dead, the copilot and navigator still at their posts. However, the pilot chair was empty. A jacket was draped over the near of the chair, the nametag indecipherable Chinese. A long hair on the collar was jet-black. So the flight had a female pilot. Yeah, made sense—China had a lot of those. Women had naturally faster reflexes than men, and could take more G forces. Most of the top fighter pilots in the Israeli air force were women, and there had never been any complaints about their work.

  Glancing out the cracked port-side window, McCarter frowned. Neither of the two women assaulted outside by the raiders could be the pilot; one was far too young, and the other much too large. Both were blondes.

  “Check over the crew,” McCarter said, touching his throat mike. “We’re looking for the pilot, female, black hair, most likely Chinese.”

  “On it,” Manning replied.

  “Keep me posted,” McCarter growled. Going under the control console, he looked for the black box and discovered it was gone, and the emergency radio beacon had been deliberately smashed. Nobody involved had wanted this plane found but the crew and passengers.

  As he started to leave, McCarter stopped as something on the floor caught his attention. It was just another brass shell case, similar to the hundreds of others on the dirty decking, but something about it had triggered his attention.

  Picking up the shell, his face got hard as he realized it was too big for any Kalashnikov rifle. The damn thing was a 9 mm cartridge, but trimmed down to a 7 mm, and the opening was blocked solid with a smooth piece of steel. Steel inside a brass cartridge. Their thief had been here!

  “Look at this,” McCarter said, walking back into the main section.

  Accepting the cartridge, Manning scowled. “This is a silent round,” he said in surprise. “That’s KGB weapon technology. These aren’t available on the weapons market. Nobody can make these but Russian and American Special Forces.”

  The shell was an invention of the Soviet special forces. The standard-issue cartridge detonated a half-powder charge that shoved forward a tiny piston blocking the narrowed-down mouth airtight, but the impact shoved forward a smaller-caliber bullet. With the propellant gas completely trapped inside the cartridge, there was no bang, or muzzle-flash. The shells only made a soft click of the piston ramming forward that sounded remarkably similar to a misfire. Yet the tiny piston hit hard enough to throw a bullet forward at subsonic speed. The silent rounds had terrible range and even worse penetrating power. But for a spy it was the ultimate covert weapon, and could be used in any pistol of the correct caliber.

  Even reduced to 7 mm, there was still sufficient firepower to blow open the cockpit door and kill the crew. But checking, McCarter found it was undamaged. Which meant the hijacker tricked his way inside, maybe with a hostage, or else he used the Chameleon to neutralize the magnetic locks.

  “Yeah, he was here,” McCarter said.

  Manning nodded. “Looks like, David.”

  “Everybody accounted for?”

  Something in one of the small fires popped, and both men swung about with their weapons at the ready, then relaxed.

  “Not quite,” Manning said with a scowl. “The manifest says 118 passengers and crew, and there are 115 bodies.”

  “Including the two outside?”

  Manning cast a sideways glance out a busted window. Hawkins had already cut the dead women free from their ropes and covered them with blankets. It wasn’t much, but all they could do at the moment.

  “Yes, counting them, too,” Manning said softly.

  “So we have three missing people.”

  “One of them is the pilot, one is our thief and somebody else. A hostage, maybe.”

  “Unfortunately, we don’t even know if our thief is a man or a woman.”

  “Could be a team, and they took the pilot.”

  “Maybe so,” McCarter conceded.

  “Head’s up,” Encizo said, and threw some clothing on the floor. “I found this in the cargo hold.”

  It was a woman’s dress and handbag, with a wig and glasses stuffed inside. But the dress was out of shape, lopsided and distended in the middle.

  “Pregnant,” Manning said in sudden realization. “The bastard was disguised as a pregnant woman!”

  “Any pregnant women among the dead?” McCarter asked.

  “No, thank God,” Manning stated.

  “It’s not a woman,” Encizo said, turning the wig over for the others to see. There was dou
ble-side tape lining the inside.

  Both McCarter and Manning frowned at that. Not bobby pins or clips. Tape. That meant a bald head.

  “A man,” McCarter stated, his breath fogging slightly. “Our thief is a man, disguised as a pregnant woman.”

  “Probably had the Chameleon strapped around his belly with some padding,” Manning agreed, resting the stock of his AK-105 on a hip. “Along with that KGB silent gun. And probably a lot more.”

  “Well, he wasn’t carrying a parachute,” Encizo stated. “Not if the Chameleon was as big as we were told.”

  “Any missing?”

  “I already checked. There are slots for ten emergency parachutes, and two are missing,” Encizo said, “and the seal covering the belly hatch is ripped to pieces.”

  Two parachutes gone, but three people were missing. The only scenario that made any sense was the thief hijacked the plane, and jumped with the pilot as a hostage. With the rest of the cockpit crew dead, he could leave the plane on autopilot, and it would eventually crash far away from where he left.

  “Only somebody broke in and landed the damn thing,” Manning said, obviously following the same train of thought. “Crew maybe, or a passenger with flight experience.”

  “Then the raiders arrived,” Encizo started, then frowned. “No, we killed all of them. Somebody else was here first and the raiders came later.”

  “Or their boss took somebody for questioning, and left the rest for his men,” Manning said, standing straight. “If that’s right, they might know when our thief jumped.”

  “Alert. Company coming,” James said over the earphones. “One large plane, two helicopters.”

  “Military gunships?” McCarter demanded, striding from the wreckage.

  “I’d say no. But the Russians still use a lot of stuff that we’d consider obsolete, so who knows?”

  Fair enough. After the fall of communism, the country was still reeling financially, and the lower military services often had to use equipment left over from World War II. On the other hand, most of it still worked. Say what you wanted about their politics, but the Russkies built machines that lasted.

  “ETA?”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “More than enough,” McCarter said, heading through the debris and corpses for the hovercraft. “Okay, mates. I want a recon sweep of the area right now. Somebody took a prisoner and we need them back. These assholes got here from somewhere else, and I want to follow their tracks home. We have nineteen and counting. So, move!”

  Snapping on flashlights, Hawkins and Encizo took off at a trot in opposite directions around the huge craft, their beams playing along the ground looking for tracks. Near the tree line, James stayed in the hovercraft, watching the blips moving on the glowing screen.

  “David?” Manning said, his face cast in shadows from a kerosene lantern on the ground.

  McCarter turned. “Yeah?”

  “It just occurred to me that our thief might have simply shoved the pilot out of the plane when he jumped using a chute,” Manning suggested.

  “Yeah, I thought of that, too.”

  “If he did, we’re dead in the water.”

  “True,” McCarter said, lighting a Player’s cigarette and drawing the smoke in deep. “But the only way to be sure is to find the leader of these bastards and see for ourselves.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Ungalik City

  “This’ll do,” Lyons said, pulling the stolen Jimmy to the side of the highway.

  With the tires crunching on the loose gravel, he set the vehicle behind a large boulder where it couldn’t be easily seen, set the brakes and turned off the engine. Able Team got out of the vehicle.

  Rolling up the sleeves of his shirt, Blancanales knelt along a tire pretending to work on the lug nuts in case somebody drove by.

  Meanwhile, the others walked to the edge of the cliff and scanned the horizon. Even though the men of Able Team were all world travelers, they had to admit that the view from the simple Alaskan hilltop was extraordinary. In front of them was a rocky shoreline, the blue-gray waves of the Northern Sound crashing white onto the rusted steel-and-concrete shipping piers of Ungalik City. Lazy smoke rose from a hundred chimneys in the sleepy town to join the slate-colored clouds blanketing the sky, mystically connecting Earth and Heaven into a single, homogenous whole.

  Behind the men were nameless rolling hills stretching past the raging Yukon River and onward to the imposing, distant, snowcapped Kaiyuh Mountains.

  Standing on the gravel berm, Lyons and Schwarz could feel the wild power of Nature filling the air like the aftereffects of a lightning strike. Man wasn’t the dominant force in Alaska. Nature ruled here, untamed and defiant. This was raw land, still bleeding from the fresh scars of live glaciers and constant earthquakes.

  “Got any change?” Lyons asked, rubbing at the numerous thorn scratches on the back of his hand. Nearby was a bulky telescope set on an iron stand for tourists to use. The machine was low powered, but their binoculars had been destroyed in the SUV. Unfortunately, the machine was coin operated, and better armored than an ATM, probably more against the inclement weather than vandals. But the end result was the same. There was no way for them to break open the coin box without using explosives.

  “Nope,” Schwarz replied, reaching inside his torn jacket. “But I have something that we can use.”

  Lyons raised an eyebrow. “Not one of those telescope pens?”

  “Better.” Schwarz grinned, and, resting a shoe on the line of small boulders that served as a safety rail, he pulled out a small set of survivalist glasses. They were about the size of a cassette tape and weighed virtually nothing. With one hand, he pressed the release on the side, and the flat box sprang open into a triangle formation with exposed plastic lenses.

  “What kind of magnification does that have?” Lyons asked, trying to keep the amusement from his voice.

  “Thirty power,” Schwarz replied, looking over the city below.

  “Not bad,” Lyons grudgingly admitted, then jerked a thumb. “Better than that coin-operated thing.”

  “Of course,” Schwarz replied, trying to keep the amusement out of his voice. He didn’t carry this stuff around because he was a tech buff. Well, okay, he was. But all of it was useful, in one way or another.

  In the city below, people wearing sweaters and jeans were walking about in the chaos of ordinary life. A drunk waving a bottle seemed to be singing to a tree, and a huge caribou was strolling across a parking lot, pausing now and then to nibble on the vinyl rooftops of cars.

  Wood and fieldstones were the main components of the homes, with only the government buildings made of red brick. There were no sidewalks, as with most towns near the Arctic Circle, and few buildings above five stories. Schwarz could identify the hospital by the heliport on the flat roof. Ungalik was a typical Alaskan town, the streets wide, the main artery six lanes across, and every building was spaced far from its neighbor, making the whole place seem oddly deserted. But that was necessary for snow control when the brief days of summer were past and the North seized the world once more in its white fist of indomitable snow.

  “Anything happening?” Lyons asked, squinting at the sky. The cell phone weighed heavily in his pocket, but he didn’t want to make a coded report to Price at the Farm yet until they had completed the job at hand.

  “Looks clear,” Schwarz said, putting the compact binoculars away again. “No sign of any activity at the police station.”

  “Good,” he muttered, rubbing his hands together for warmth. “Let’s finish the search.”

  Returning to the Jimmy, Lyons replaced Blancanales at pretending to work on the wheel, and the other two men began a more detailed search of the Jimmy 4WD, now examining the places that they couldn’t when it was in motion.

  After locating the dead gunner’s rental car hidden behind some bushes, Able Team had quickly checked for traps. There was a tear gas cartridge rigged behind the passenger-side visor, obviously for get
ting rid of unwelcome guests, but aside from that the vehicle was clean. Clearly, the gunner hadn’t been expecting serious trouble.

  With the bobbing flashlights of the military coming up the hill, the Stony Man commandos climbed inside and drove off into the night without using headlights until they went around a curve. Then Lyons flipped on the beams and hit the gas.

  Trying to put as much distance between them and the Kobuk Valley, the Able Team commander raced along the interstate road without stopping, cutting through the Waring Mountain pass and crossing Hog River. The deep gorge was still choked with pieces of floating winter ice in spite of the seasonal warmth.

  While Lyons drove, the others tore the vehicle apart, searching for anything useful about the identity of the assailant or possibly whom he worked for. But there wasn’t so much as a used gum wrapper on the floor mats. No spare ammo, no maps, not even a thermos of coffee for the cold nights.

  Opening the rear area, Schwarz lifted up the carpet to discover there was no spare tire or jack. Those had been removed to make space for spare ammunition, a medical kit, handcuffs, leg irons, a ball gag, blindfolds and a case of torture instruments.

  “He badly wanted something our thief had,” Schwarz said grimly. “And wasn’t squeamish on how he got it.”

  “Has to be the Chameleon,” Lyons muttered. “Or who he was planning on selling it to.”

  When he was a cop in Los Angeles, Carl Lyons had done business with several bounty hunters who used items similar to the leg irons. This wasn’t new equipment, and had been well used. Could their gunner have been a collector for a turkey doctor? It was a chilling thought. Turkey doctors were brutal torturers for organized crime: the Mafia, the Jewish mob, the Russian Mafia, the Colombian drug lords, the Rastafarians, Yakuza, everybody used them. Maybe this whole thing was a play of some crime family to steal the Chameleon, and not a covert mission by a foreign government. That would expand the scope of their search for the device a hundredfold. Shit!

  Standing, Lyons wiped his hands clean on a pocket handkerchief, pulled out his cell phone and tapped in a memorized number.