Don Pendleton - Oceans Of Fire

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.