Don Pendleton - Oceans Of Fire

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.”

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—”