Oceans of Fire Read online

  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 lung
s. “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.”r />
  “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.