Oceans Of Fire

“Base, this is Phoenix Two,” Encizo reported. “We have the caravan in sight. Paralleling.”

“Affirmative, Phoenix Two,” Price said. “Bear?”

“We can’t afford to let these guys get out of the city, or even into a park or city square wide enough to land a helicopter.” Kurtzman nodded and hit his comm switch. “Phoenix One, this is Bear. Take them down. Take them down now.”

“AFFIRMATIVE, BASE.” McCarter was a hundred yards behind the convoy. He wore infrared goggles beneath the visor of his helmet and he could see the white light shining off the back of the middle car. “Phoenix Flight, what is your ETA?”

“I have you in sight, Phoenix One.”

“Phoenix Two?”

“We’re parallel on Western Avenue, Phoenix One,” Encizo replied.

“All units, I’m assuming the middle car has the VIPs and the packages. I want to avoid directly attacking it if possible. We take out the guard vehicles first then try to force the main target to stop. With luck, Calvin can work some magic from the inside. Phoenix Two and Three, come from behind. Phoenix Flight, drop Phoenix Four to plug any holes.”

All units came back “Affirmative.”

McCarter slid a Farm-modified RKJ-3M grenade from his jacket and pulled the pin. “Phoenix One, beginning attack run.” The Dakar 650 snarled and spit blue smoke as the Englishman gunned the engine. McCarter’s visor beaded with mist as he shot forward through traffic like an arrow.

The RKG-3M antitank grenade was a forty-year-old design, though still a clever one. The operator threw the grenade above the tank. A small parachute deployed from the handle so that the warhead deployed nosedown against the tank’s thin upper armor. It had been used effectively in the 1973 Arab Israeli War, but its main drawback then and now was that the operator had to run up and throw the grenade at the tank. Tanks and armored vehicles generally bristled with cannons and machine guns, and their crews tended to take a very dim view of anyone running toward them with cylindrical metal objects in their hands. Antitank grenades were considered at best a last-ditch defense if not open suicide. In the twenty-first century there were few modern tanks or APCs against which the RKG-3M would still be effective even if the operator could survive to get close enough.

An unsuspecting Toyota Land Cruiser in misty morning traffic was another kettle of fish.

McCarter flew past the rear and middle cars of the convoy. He lifted his thumb and the cotter lever pinged away in his wake. He whipped in front of the lead vehicle, took a moment to match its speed and tossed the grenade back over his shoulder.

Tires screamed on the wet asphalt as the lead driver stood on his brakes. McCarter had counted on that. The grenade bounced off the windshield and landed nosedown on the hood of the vehicle.

The magnetic ring that had been welded around the edge of the cylinder-shaped grenade clacked onto the metal hood, and the parachute collapsed around the throwing handle as the grenade locked in place.

McCarter had five seconds of fuse time to get out of the ten-meter secondary fragmentation radius. The BMW Dakar screamed into the red line as the grenade detonated behind it. The copper forcing cone inside the grenade shaped the detonating 567 grams of TNT and RDX high explosive into a highly condensed jet of superheated gas and fire.

The fire shot out the wheel wells like a rocket in takeoff, and the SUV lifted off its front tires. German engineering was nothing if not efficient. The designers at Asbeck knew they couldn’t make an SUV that could withstand shaped-charge attacks, but they had worked to minimize the damage and injury to passengers. The armored box around the engine channeled the blast up and down, and kept grenade and engine fragments from ripping through the passenger compartment. Halon fire-suppression units blasted out the burning oil and fuel, and hissed against the molten metal.

The stricken SUV slammed down on the molten remains of its run-flat tires.

McCarter whipped his motorcycle around in a screaming 180-degree halt. His 10 mm Parker-Hale Personal Defensive Weapon ripped free of the Velcro holding it in its shoulder holster. He snapped the folding stock into position and shouldered the weapon as all four doors of the armored Land Cruiser flung open at once.

The red dot of McCarter’s reflex sight was a glowing white blob through his infrared goggles. The white blob coincided with the forehead of the driver, and McCarter squeezed the PDW’s trigger. Three 10 mm armor-piercing slugs opened the smuggler’s skull to the sky in a spray of brain and bone. McCarter raised his sights slightly as the driver collapsed and gunned for the man coming out of the driver’s side passenger door. The Briton’s first burst clipped the killer’s shoulder and spun him, the second took him in the side of the face and rippled his head into ruins.

McCarter stood and shot. The men who leaped out of the passenger doors died even as they tried to level their automatic weapons. “Lead vehicle down! Hostiles down! Phoenix Two, attack—!”

The Phoenix Force leader swung his weapon back to the driver’s door and exchanged fire with a fifth man who popped out spraying lead from a compact assault rifle. Sparks sprayed as McCarter’s weapon mangled in his hands and his head snapped back like he’d taken a punch from a heavyweight. The Russian shooter fell with a crushed skull.

“Phoenix One!” Grimaldi shouted across the radio.

The PDW had taken two hits, and its action was dented and held open in a permanent jam. It fell from McCarter’s nerveless fingers as he toppled back across his bike.

The Briton tasted blood in the back of his throat. He ripped his helmet free and drew his Browning Hi-Power pistol. The world spun as he tried to sit up, and he fell back again. The front of his motorcycle helmet had an inch-deep crater blasted in the forehead. The copper base of a bullet gleamed from the middle of the hole. Only the ballistic ceramic insert had saved his life from the armor-piercing round.

“Move!” Grimaldi roared.

McCarter rolled to his feet as the other two SUVs pulled around the smoldering lead vehicle. Their tires screamed on the wet asphalt as they caught sight of him and swerved inward. The rest of the caravan was swerving to crush McCarter beneath its wheels.

The Briton began to empty his Browning Hi-Power into the windshield of the left-hand vehicle. His pistol stood no chance of piercing the armored glass, but the bullets did spall and create spiderwebs of cracking in the upper glass layer. McCarter ran for the curb and his opponent swerved to take him. He leaped, arms outstretched, for the top of a parked ZIL sedan. His hands closed around the luggage rack as he heaved himself onto the roof. Metal screamed as the Land Cruiser sideswiped the ZIL. McCarter’s foot went numb as the SUV’s passenger window clipped his boot heel in passing and he was flung from his perch. He hit the sidewalk with bone-jarring force and rolled. He got to his feet and emptied the last four rounds of his pistol into the back of the second armored SUV in parting.

The driver spitefully ran over McCarter’s Dakar, crushing one of the motorcycle’s wheels and crumpling the front fork.

The Briton snarled in anger and limped back to the vehicle he had disabled. He took a compact assault rifle and a bandolier of ammo from one of the fallen gunmen as he roared into his mike, “Phoenix Flight! Cut them off!”

“Phoenix Flight in position!” Grimaldi replied. “Deploying Phoenix Four!”

Rotors beat the air as the pilot dropped his helicopter like a stone three blocks up the street. The little Russian Mi-34 Hermit was a civil aircraft Phoenix Force had acquired locally. Grimaldi held the Hermit a hundred feet over the intersection. Gary Manning fast-roped out of the cabin, falling toward oncoming traffic like a spider. Horns blared and brakes shrieked as Manning’s boots hit pavement and traffic parted like the Red Sea around the heavily armed man. Manning spun his weapon on its sling as his two targets screamed through the intersection one block down.

“Phoenix Four in position. Targets acquired.” The big Canadian shouldered his Barrett M-82 A-2 rifle. It was a huge rifle, more than five and a half feet long and weighing twenty-seven pounds. It used the same action as the Barrett “Light Fifty” heavy sniper rifle, but had been redesigned in bullpup configuration. Most of the weapon’s massive action was situated in the back of the gun rather than the middle, and passed over the operator’s shoulder.

McCarter dropped to one knee, holding the big Barrett over his shoulder like a rocket launcher. The two armored SUVs came on. One pulled ahead as Manning peered through the 3x infrared sight. He saw the halo of light eclipsed as the lead Land Cruiser pulled directly in front as a shield.

“This is Phoenix Four. I’m taking out lead vehicle.” Manning put his crosshairs on the grille of the oncoming SUV. The .50-caliber round had been designed in the latter days of WWI with the specification of being able to attack observation balloons, aircraft and the tanks of the day. It had defeated such targets with grotesque ease, and a hundred years later it was still the most powerful round that one man could reasonably operate in a weapon.

The Canadian master rifleman squeezed the trigger.

The huge .50-caliber round shot forth a four-foot blast of flame from the muzzle and Manning grimaced as the rubber recoil pad behind the magazine kicked him like a mule. Steam blasted out of the lead vehicle’s grille as the .50-caliber armor-piercing round punched through the armored box surrounding the engine. Manning yanked his muzzle down and fired again. The engine shrieked and clanked as the engine block cracked and the vehicle lost power.

Manning put his third shot through the driver’s side of the windshield.

The armored windshield cratered around the .50-caliber hole and the interior went red in a spray of arterial blood. The SUV fishtailed out of control as the dead driver collapsed against the wheel. The vehicle veered onto the wrong side of the road and rammed into a parked bread truck at forty miles per hour. The side of the panel van folded around the front of the armored car.

The bumper of the last SUV was aimed straight at Manning and appeared to have no intention of stopping. Shooting into the last vehicle wasn’t the preferred action. Calvin James was inside, along with two, ten-kiloton nuclear demolition charges. Sending armor-piercing bullets sailing through the car body or shaped charges sheeting the interior with superheated gas and molten metal was a last option.

The driver had no such reservations.

He accelerated straight for Manning where he knelt in the middle of the intersection. Manning dropped the big Barrett on its sling and clicked the brake on his repelling harness. “Phoenix Four requesting immediate extraction!”

“Extracting!” Grimaldi said.

The radial engine in the helicopter overhead roared into emergency war power. Manning’s harness cinched against him as the helicopter’s rotors hammered the sky and clawed for altitude. The Land Cruiser bore down on him like a juggernaut. Manning’s feet left the ground as the helicopter pounded straight up into the sky like an elevator.

The vehicle tore past less than a yard beneath Manning’s boots. “Phoenix Flight, Phoenix Four redeploying!”

“Affirmative, Phoenix Four!”

Manning released the brake and repelled to the ground, releasing the rope from his harness. “Phoenix Four deployed and clear!”

“Roger, Phoenix Four.” Grimaldi took his helicopter back above the rooftops and resumed the chase.

The doors of the crashed Land Cruiser flew open.

The big Barrett was too unwieldy for a close-range fire-fight. Manning shrugged out of the sling and drew his pistol. The Para-Ordinance P16-40 barked in his hands as he began double-tapping the enemy. The range was twenty-five yards and the big Canadian could see the bulge of body armor beneath their jackets. At that distance he could reliably put every shot into a dinner plate in rapid fire. His first double-tap shot away one hardguy’s jaw, and his second neatly put out another man’s eye and brain as he went for head shots.

Manning moved toward cover as men deployed from the opposite side of the Land Cruiser. He dived behind a white Sputnik 4×4 sedan and rolled up, slamming his pistol across the hood. The .40-caliber weapon barked twice, cracking the skull of one of the Russian hardmen behind the SUV. Manning dropped low as the other two men opened up, their compact assault rifles spewing flame like buzz saws in their hands.

“Shit!” The Phoenix Force commando flinched as bullets zinged straight through the car he was using for cover. He jammed himself as low as possible between the curb and the tires. The Sputnik shuddered above him as it was riddled by automatic fire. The bullets zipped through and blasted on into the hairdresser’s shop behind him. A bullet plucked at the shoulder of his jacket and sparks flashed inches over his eyes as the car body tore like cheesecloth. “Phoenix Four requesting immediate backup!”

“Phoenix Four, this is Phoenix One, I’m on your twelve!”

A man screamed as McCarter opened up from behind. Manning leaped to his feet as the remaining Russian dived over the hood of the Land Cruiser to avoid McCarter. Manning whipped up his pistol. His first two rounds hit the killer in the chest, standing him up and pushing him back against the vehicle’s fender. The Russian raised his rifle even as he took hits.

His forehead geysered jellied brain as McCarter’s bullet transversed his skull from behind. Manning holstered his pistol and sprinted forward, confiscating the dead man’s rifle and his bandolier of spare magazines.

McCarter came up at the run. “Phoenix Flight, sitrep!”

“We have third vehicle directly beneath us,” Grimaldi reported.

“Phoenix Two, what’s your position?”

“Parallel course,” Encizo replied.

“Step on it! Pull ahead three blocks and Phoenix Flight will vector you in.” Manning fell into step with McCarter, scooping up his Barrett .50 as they charged up the street. McCarter broke into a dead run. “Take them out.”

“Affirmative, Phoenix One.” McCarter could hear the roar of Encizo’s engine over the link as he accelerated. “Taking them down now.”

CHAPTER SIX

“We’re getting goddamn hammered!” Forbes thrust his finger angrily over the driver’s shoulder and pointed at Manning where he knelt in the middle of the intersection. “Run his ass down, Gurza! Do you hear me? Run his ass down!”

Gurza stood on the accelerator. Manning made no attempt to move. Calvin James cradled his rifle, prepared to blow out Gurza’s brains. Zhol rode shotgun next to Gurza, and Forbes was next to James on the seat. Sharkov and one of his hardmen were in the back, sitting on the nuclear devices. James doubted he could get all six, but that was his last option. Ideally, Phoenix Force would force the vehicle to a halt and convince Sharkov and Zhol to surrender. If that succeeded, then James would go along and surrender, also, continuing his cover and hopefully getting Forbes to drop information about the who and the where the nuclear demolition charges were headed.

If Sharkov and Zhol decided to go down fighting, James would be the Trojan horse and blindside their attack. His other duty was to make sure no one in the vehicle decided to go down in a blaze of glory and detonate the devices in downtown Dushanbe.

However, James wasn’t about to let Gary Manning get turned into applesauce across the armored car’s grille. The muzzle of his weapon drifted to the back of the driver’s head.

Gurza swore. James watched through the armored glass as Manning was sky-craned into the air like a jumping jack up and over their vehicle. Forbes flipped his assault rifle to automatic fire as he swiveled. Manning had already repelled back down and was engaging the crashed car.

“God…damn it!” Forbes’s face was a mask of rage. “Who are these guys!”

“Clay, that mother had a Barrett .50. These guys, they aren’t mafiya. They’re operators.” James stared at Forbes grimly. “Brother, we’re in trouble.”

Sharkov snarled from the back of the truck. “Gotron! He was captured! Compromised! He betrayed us! I told you not to trust that goddamn hill bandit!”

“Gotron Khan did not know enough to betray us.” Zhol produced a Russian R-92 revolver like a magic trick. The muzzle of the snubnose gaped only inches from James’s eyebrows. “But he did.”

Forbes spoke in a very low, very professional voice. “Mr. Zhol, we checked the man. His bonafides are real. We checked his room and everything he owns for bugs. I was with him every minute of the day and Bermet was with him at night. He had no way to communicate.”

“Nevertheless.” Zhol thumbed back the shrouded hammer of the revolver. He and James locked gazes. “He betrayed us.”

Sharkov’s carbine pressed into the back of James’s head. “Bastard…”

James wasn’t entirely certain his weapon would cut through the armored panel in Zhol’s seat back, but he wouldn’t live to raise it, and regardless, it would be the last thing he ever did. He spoke without taking his eyes off Zhol. “Clay…”

Forbes’s voice went cold. “Mr. Zhol…”

Zhol ignored Forbes as he and James continued their staring contest. “Will your friends negotiate for your release?” He smiled slightly as he answered his own question. “No, but they will pretend to, to buy time and set us up for another ambush. Mr. Forbes, take his weapon. Sharkov, radio the helicopter. Tell them to come into the city. We are extracting from the square in Pamir Park, but first, tell them to shoot down the enemy helicopter.”

Sharkov began to shout in his radio.

Zhol still hadn’t blinked. “Mr. Forbes, take Mr. James’s weapon.” He spoke to Sharkov’s man in the back. “Levchenko, if Mr. Forbes does not take Mr. James’s weapon, shoot him in the head.”

Levchenko pointed his rifle at the back of Forbes’s gleaming skull.

Forbes’s weapon was pointed at the driver. “I’ll blow Gurza’s head off. This car will crash, and we all go down.”

“Mr. Forbes, you know I respect you, but right now our priority is extraction. We can settle this situation later.” Zhol’s eyes and the muzzle of his pistol stayed trained on Calvin James. “But I am not going to ask you again. Take his weapon.”

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.