The Chameleon Factor Read online

By now, Harrison could hear people shouting somewhere on the ship, so moving swiftly he got a pillow from the bed and used it to muffle the sound of the silenced pistol as he shot the dying Russian in the heart. The sound of the 9 mm round was reduced to no more than a cough, and death came instantly.

  “Consider it payment for the clothing,” he whispered, as footsteps went running past the closed door, and people started yelling in the hallway.

  Rummaging among the dead man’s clothing, Harrison found the clothing was a very good fit, but then the SAS taught its agents fashion and how to gauge sizes for similar situations. Although the scenario played in training had been for German uniforms and Arab business suits. Different countries, different targets.

  Neatly dressed, Harrison spotted a pair of glasses on the nightstand and tucked them into a pocket by the ear-stem so that they hung out of his breast pocket. Reloading the 9 mm HK, he racked the slide and tucked the weapon under his linen jacket. Glancing in a mirror, he avoided his own eyes, then abruptly departed, throwing open the door and coolly stepping outside.

  Half-dressed people were flooding into the hallway, shouting in a dozen different languages. The crowd parted for a burly woman carrying a medical bag, but closed in her wake, making passage impossible again. Everybody was trying to get closer to the corpses, which was the opposite of the direction Harrison wanted to go. Slapping a hand over his mouth, he started making gagging sounds. Instantly, people moved away to not be splattered by his vomit, and Harrison staggered into the stairwell at the end of the corridor. Once out of sight, he sprinted up the steps, taking two at a time. Reaching the main deck, he breathed in the clean salt air and planned his next move. A flight attendant would know about undertow from a sinking plane, so she wouldn’t be stupid enough to jump into the water. She might have some survival training, but did that mean she knew anything about releasing a lifeboat? Harrison would have to say no, and hold off checking the berths as his last option.

  Then he twisted his head about and looked at the bridge rising above the clean white deck of the White Pearl, its little radar mast spinning about amid the radio antennae. Then he smiled. No, she wouldn’t try to leave. Her training would impel her to seek the captain. Idiot.

  Calmly walking along the deck, Harrison reached the main stairs and stopped only long enough to pull the fire alarm. Now with bells clanging across the ship, he walked up the stairs, staying close to the wall and out of the way of the officers rushing out of the bridge to see what was happening on their ship. By the time he reached the observation deck, people started running about in panic on the deck below.

  Off to the side was an access door clearly marked No Admittance in Russian, Japanese, English and Chinese. Using his knife to slip the lock, Harrison eased into a short corridor with only two other doors. One was partially ajar, but the other had a grim steward standing guard in front. The big Russian frowned at the sight of the intruder, and he raised a hand to block the way. Harrison pulled the Heckler & Koch and fired a fast three times, the impacts driving the steward backward against the closed door. Spinning, the killer kicked open the other door and killed the helmsman at the wheel. There was a grunt of surprise as an older man wearing a captain’s uniform pulled a huge revolver from a holster at his side and thumbed back the hammer.

  Ducking low, Harrison shot under the chart table, blowing off the captain’s knee. The man yelled in agony and dropped to the deck, losing the pistol. Harrison stroked the trigger, sending a messenger of death directly into a startled eye, and the captain’s head rocked as the back of his head exploded into a horrible froth of bones and brains and blood.

  Standing slowly, he listened for any reaction to the shooting, but the rest of the crew and passengers seemed to be more concerned with the fake fire and the very real corpses on C deck. Checking the controls, Harrison saw the White Pearl was starting to veer off course. He flipped a few switches to set her on autopilot. The warm water currents were strong in the Sea of Okhotsk, but the computer would suffice until somebody came to regain command of the vessel.

  Starting to go, he paused to throw a few more switches and set off fire alarms in the engine room, and fuel pump room. That should put fear in the crew, and keep them out of his way until he was done.

  Returning to the corridor, he stepped over the dead steward and started to slide his knife into the jam alongside the lock when suddenly the wooden panel of the door burst into small holes and something hummed past his face to smack the far wall.

  Throwing himself sideways, he shot a fast four times, blowing off the lock and both hinges. More holes appeared in the door as a weapon fired twice more, and then the door began to topple into the room. A woman’s voice cried out in surprise, and Harrison came in fast and low over the door, throwing lead at everything in sight. A small Japanese woman wearing a white doctor’s coat tumbled sideways out of a chair, her cell phone flying away. Across the surgery, a table had been flipped on its side and crouched behind was the flight attendant. She aimed the KGB gun and Harrison dived out of the way. He hit the deck rolling and firing, the steel-jacketed rounds smacking into the heavy wooden table with the sound of hammer blows. Gwenneth aimed back, and Harrison threw a chair in the way as protection. Stupid bitch! The blasted weapon could be empty, but there was no way of knowing until a slug hit and blew him to hell. He couldn’t take the chance.

  Dropping the clip, he reloaded and fanned flame at the wall behind the woman. The glass front of an emergency case shattered, raining glass down upon her. Crying out in pain, Gwenneth raised an arm to shield her face and he shot her in the elbow. Shrieking in pain, Gwenneth tried desperately to crawl through the glass, cutting her legs badly, all the while wildly pulling the trigger to only subdued clicks.

  “One more step and I blow your little box to pieces!” she sputtered, tears of pain in voice.

  Laughing softly, Harrison stood and leveled his gun at the cringing woman. “That is only a nine shot,” he said, advancing slowly. “And you pulled the trigger a dozen times already. Thanks for letting me know it’s empty.”

  Snarling something in Chinese, Gwenneth threw the empty gun at her tormentor. He didn’t move and let it smack into his chest before returning the favor. The Heckler & Koch recoiled slightly as the coughing weapon sent half a clip into her face, blowing her beauty away forever.

  Pushing the table aside, Harrison put two more rounds into her chest just to make sure, and then began searching for the unit. Starting in the most obvious place, his impatience steadily grew until he at last found it tucked inside a pillow case on the small bed in the ship’s surgery. Forcing the device into a pocket of his jacket, he reloaded once more to make sure he had a full clip, then slipped out of the control area and back into the companionway.

  Mingling with the rest of the frightened passengers, Harrison mimicked their expressions and tried to appear equally bewildered and nervous. Personally, though, he was wondering how long it would take for things to settle down and lunch to be served. His evening of torture with Gwenneth had been interrupted by her futile escape, so the least he could do was console himself with a nice dinner.

  Upper Kamchatka Peninsula

  “ALL STOP,” McCarter said into his throat mike.

  Surrounded by the whirlwind of their own turbines under the rubber skirt, the two U.S. Navy SEAL hovercraft settled onto the ground and went silent. Directly ahead of them was a set of railroad tracks on an elevated berm of gravel. Off to the side was a small weather-beaten wooden shack to serve as a depot for passengers. Nearby stood a battered old truck that seemed to be held together almost entirely by baling wire and gray duct tape.

  Flipping down his night-vision goggles, Hawkins switched to infrared. “Engine and exhaust pipe both read warm,” he said, then turned slowly. “Nothing else in the vicinity.”

  “Perimeter sweep,” McCarter ordered, leveling his Barnett crossbow and starting for the shack.

  Spreading out, the rest of Phoenix Force covered the area, and t
hen the dilapidated truck, before joining their leader at the shack. It was completely empty, without even a schedule on the splintery wall. There was only a plank resting on some cinder blocks as a bench, and a rusted barrel with holes in its side to serve was a crude firebox to warm the shack in the bitter Russian winter.

  “Cold,” Encizo said, resting a bare hand on the metal rim. Then he frowned and reached down into the barrel to come up with a crumpled piece of silvery foil.

  “Now, I don’t read Chinese,” he said with a half smile, sniffing the scrap, “but this sure smells like honey-smoked airline peanuts to me.”

  “Bingo,” Manning muttered, hoisting his weapon. “And that’s the logo for China Air. We’re back in the game.”

  “Maybe,” McCarter growled, flipping down his night-vision goggles and scanning the area first in UV, then infrared.

  Following the directions of the Chinese airline captain, the team had easily located the downed parachutes of the thief and his prisoner. Spiraling out from the farm, they found the railroad, but now the big question was, did their quarry grab a ride here, or was this a diversion? That peanut pack was just the sort of subtle clue the ape would leave to fool professional trackers. Or had he had a mistake? Everybody slipped up now and then.

  Walking onto the railroad tracks, McCarter looked in both directions. The track stretched into the night and out of sight in both directions.

  “Any ideas?” James asked.

  “It’s a crapshoot,” McCarter growled. “There’s no way to tell which direction he went.”

  “Unless this was the rendezvous point,” Hawkins added. “And now the Russian Mob or some terrorist group is driving away with the Chameleon in the back seat.”

  Encizo shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense. Then why didn’t they simply meet him at the drop zone?” he said. “Why kill a family to steal their truck? It’s much more logical to simply call for a pickup.”

  “And who says he’s being logical?”

  “Besides, stealing the Chameleon took months and millions of dollars,” McCarter stated forcibly. “This is way out of the league of the Moscow Mafia, or some half-assed Ukrainian terrorists. Even the Hammers of Stalin couldn’t finance this big an operation, and they’re the local big boys on the block.”

  “Agreed. My gut feeling is that he is still on the move,” James said from the hovercraft. “Our boy is way too smart to jump out this close to his rendezvous point. He’s taking the train somewhere, getting lost in the crowd, hiding in plain sight.”

  “With a woman in tow?” Hawkins scoffed, pulling out a candy bar. “Must be crazy as a shithouse rat if he did.” Ripping off the wrapper, the man consumed the bar in a few bites and washed it down with a long draft from his canteen.

  “So what’s north of us?” Manning asked, looking in that direction.

  “Farmland, foothills, mountains, mines and then a million acres of nothing,” Encizo answered, then added, “and the old Soviet nuke testing range. Their version of White Sands, New Mexico.”

  “To the south is more farmland, some major mountains, a few industrial cities and then some fishing villages,” James commented, checking a map in the beam of a flashlight. “After that is the Kuril Islands, and Japan.”

  “Lots of folks in Tokyo would pay big for the Chameleon,” Hawkins stated grimly, flipping up his goggles.

  “Don’t I know it,” McCarter said. The Kuril Island archipelago. Nothing much there but sea lions, bamboo, pine trees and volcanoes. But beyond the chain of islands was Japan, and then North Korea. Pyongyang missiles protected by the jamming field could rain death upon cities across the world. The U.S., U.K. and NATO would be forced to strike back, and then China would protect their Communist ally, and…

  “Nuclear holocaust,” the Stony Man commando muttered, the soft words carried away by a chill night wind. “The end of the world.”

  Long minutes passed as Phoenix Force stood in the dark alongside the railroad tracks fighting to clear the nightmare images from their minds. The clock was ticking and they needed cool heads to catch the nameless thief.

  “Incoming,” Encizo said quietly over the radio.

  Instantly, the Stony Man team scattered into the darkness. Moments later, headlights appeared in the darkness as a police car rolled into view from behind the dense trees. The wide tires of the heavy vehicle crunched loudly on the loose gravel as it went directly to the abandoned truck. In the wash of the headlights a dome could be seen on the roof of the car, as well as lettering along the sides that clearly marked it as a police vehicle.

  The car was parked so that its headlights bathed the truck, the handbrake was set with a loud ratcheting sound and then both of the front doors swung open in unison. Two large men stepped out of the vehicle with big pistols in their hands. The Russian cops stood still for a minute listening to the night, their eyes sweeping the area. One man wore steel-rimmed glasses that sparkled in the darkness with reflected light, while the other sported a trim, square-cut beard like somebody in a painting from the sixteenth century.

  Both were wearing dark blue sneakers and light gray sweaters with some sort of an official emblem stitched on the right breast, instead of the left as in America. Leather rigs framed their powerful chests, spare ammunition clips for their guns balancing the shoulder holsters.

  “That is the stolen truck,” the man with glasses rumbled, his hoarse voice sounding like a broken machine. “I recognize it from the photograph on the kitchen wall of the farmhouse.”

  The other racked his pistol, chambering a round. “Perhaps you are right and the killer took the southbound train.”

  “Radio district headquarters,” the first policeman said, starting forward. “I believe the madman is heading for the White Pearl’s dock. I’ll sweep the truck.”

  “Be wary, my friend. This madman has killed five already,” his partner said, reaching for a mike from the dashboard of the running car.

  But before he could finish, soft coughs came out of the darkness and both policemen slapped their necks. Staggering, the cops dropped their guns and fell to their knees, then incredibly they each pulled out a small backup revolver. The man with glasses fired blindly into the night, while the other lurched into the car and grabbed the microphone.

  “Alert…” he croaked, the radio nowhere near his mouth.

  More coughs sounded, and the men recoiled from the impacts of the narcotic darts, their faces going slack from the onslaught of the drugs. Still fighting to try to stand, they finally collapsed sideways onto the ground and went still.

  As silent as ghosts, Phoenix Force stepped into the beams of the headlights, the tranquilizer guns still in their hands. McCarter and the others stood guard while James checked the pulse and respiration of the fallen police.

  “They’re okay,” James reported at last. “No sign of overdose or anaphylactic shock. They’ll wake up in a couple of hours feeling like boiled crap, but they’ll live.”

  “Are these policemen or dinosaurs?” Manning asked with a grimace, sliding out the compressed-air cartridge from the butt of the pistol and slipping it into a loop on his belt. He extracted a fresh cartridge and inserted it into the pistol, snapping the cover shut with a flourish. “These darts should have stopped them dead in their tracks.”

  “Pretty tough cops for the sticks,” Hawkins drawled, eyeing the snoring men suspiciously.

  Flipping down his goggles, Encizo glanced overhead. “Think they’re air rescue?”

  “Don’t care. Just put them in the car,” McCarter directed brusquely, “and lose the key.”

  Holstering their weapons, the team gently conveyed the gargantuan officers to the vehicle. Putting them into comfortable positions, James threw the ignition key away while Manning rolled up the windows and closed the doors.

  Hawkins shot the man a silent question.

  “They’ll sleep longer out of the fresh air,” the Canadian explained with a grin.

  “Smart,” Hawkins grunted, but he
suspected a more genial reason.

  “T.J., Rafe, watch for any more friendlies coming,” McCarter directed, changing the frequency of the powerful uplink radio on his belt.

  The men nodded and slipped away.

  “Stone House, this is Firebird,” McCarter subvocalized into the throat mike. There was only crackling static. “Stone House, this is Firebird, do you read?”

  “Roger, Firebird, this is Roosevelt,” Kurtzman replied through the hash.

  McCarter frowned. Who? Oh yes, the old American president who used a wheelchair. Clever.

  “Are you requesting pickup at the rendezvous point?” Kurtzman asked.

  “Not quite yet, Roosevelt,” McCarter answered gruffly, resting a boot on an iron rail. “We have lost the ape and need some intel on the White Pearl.”

  There was a crackling pause. “Repeat, please,” Kurtzman demanded.

  “The White Pearl,” McCarter repeated slowly. “If our boy is going for sushi, that would be the way.”

  “Firebird, this is Opera Star,” Delahunt said, cutting into the conversation. “We’re way ahead of you, and have been monitoring all major transports in the area for anything unusual. There was a fire and several deaths reported on the White Pearl less than an hour ago.”

  “Has there ever been any similar incident on the ship before?” he snapped, his stomach tingling with excitement.

  “Negative, Firebird,” Delahunt said. “A few stolen purses, and several fistfights in the bar, but nothing like this.”

  “It’s our boy!” James said, starting for the hovercraft.

  “Sure as bloody hell sounds like him,” Hawkins grunted, running alongside the other man. “We got enough fuel to reach the White Pearl while it’s still at sea?”

  “No way,” James said with a frown. “We’ll have to drop everything we can and transfer all of the fuel into one hovercraft just to reach the end of the peninsula!”

  “Stone House, we’ll need a long cool drink very soon,” McCarter subvocalized as he climbed into a hovercraft. “Can do?”