Orbital Velocity

While the mob had a wild might, it was unfocused and undisciplined. They crashed helplessly against the wall of authority that pushed forward. In the meantime, McCarter found himself helped up by two cops who followed behind the living barrier that descended upon the riot. McCarter was relieved to see the Flying Squad’s efficiency in herding the hooligans.

“You all right?” one of the bobbies asked.

“I’ve been better, but not by much,” McCarter replied with a wink.

“Dispatch told us to keep an eye out for you and your partner,” the other metropolitan policeman said. “They told us that the two of you would be holding the line as if you were a two-man riot squad.”

“Where’s my chum?” McCarter asked. He scanned around and breathed a sigh of relief as he saw the unmistakable bulk of Gary Manning among the policemen following the riot-squad phalanx.

“I hope that’s him,” the first cop said. “When the shield men passed him, he’d wound two of the rioters up in those hulking arms of his.”

“Yeah, that’s him,” McCarter confirmed. “How is the suppression going?”

“Well, thanks to the two of you hammering this end of Haymarket Road, we were able to divert the fire hose trucks that would have been here to other approaches,” the second lawman explained. “A good rinsing is taking the piss out of these drunken louts.”

“Looks like you’ve got them all well and kettled up,” McCarter said.

“You sound like you know a little of what the Met likes to do,” the first police constable noted.

McCarter shrugged. “I’ve been around the Met and worked alongside the Sweeney a few times in a professional capacity.”

The other PC sized the Phoenix Force leader up. It had been a while since McCarter had worn the short, close-shorn haircut of a professional military man, his hair naturally feathered and flowing down over his ears. Still, even through the layers of his windbreaker and shirt, it was easy for the lawman to notice that McCarter was fit and muscular in the way that a professional soldier would be, lean with very little bulk to get in his way. “Professional but unofficial?”

McCarter nodded curtly, indicating that further discussion along those lines was no longer open.

“Who are you and the barrel-chested bloke?” the first constable asked.

McCarter sighed. “Friends. Concerned friends. That’s all I can say.”

“Well, you’re a right geezer in my book,” the second constable said. “Anyone who can take on that many hooligans with only a few bruises…”

McCarter wondered what the lawman was talking about, but then he noticed that he was starting to feel stings along his face and arms. He’d been so wrapped up in battling the riot, he hadn’t noticed where glancing impacts had connected with him. Had he been less quick and skillful, he would have suffered broken bones and muscle tears from the melee.

“You still with us, friend?” the first bobby asked.

“Yeah,” McCarter replied. “Just taking inventory on all my bits and pieces.”

The two officers studiously ignored the sight of McCarter’s holstered pistol and the shotgun that hung through the tatters of his windbreaker, but their nonchalance only lasted so long.

“Would you want us to take those for you?” the first lawman asked.

“I’m keeping my Browning,” McCarter said. “But you can take the riot gun.”

The two officers looked at each other, then thought about the orders, the description they’d been given. They also looked at the stunned and battered dozens left in the wake of the riot police, men who had been knocked down mostly by the efforts of the man with the Browning and his partner. If McCarter was a threat to the peace they’d sworn to protect, he could easily have gunned down countless more of the soccer hooligans as opposed to leaving them alive but hurting. They could trust the Phoenix Force commander with his sidearm.

“Thank you for your assistance,” the second of the officers said. He took McCarter’s hand and shook it.

The “concerned friend” waved Manning over, and the pair disappeared down Haymarket Road. They had to contact Stony Man Farm.

MCCARTER AND MANNING lurched through the door of their hotel room, running on fumes from the energy they’d exerted in dealing with the Piccadilly riot. Manning secured the door while McCarter turned on the television, flicking it to the news. As it hadn’t taken them more than a few minutes to get back from Haymarket Road, the news media was still in the dark about what was going on, putting up rumors as true information.

McCarter could see the news cameras focused on one arm of the riot for a moment. He could see himself and Manning amid chemical smoke and tear gas battling against a throng. Luckily, the quality of the camera images was too grainy and jumpy to be of any use in identifying them, and by then, Stony Man Farm would have grabbed extant copies of the video footage from where the files had been stored across the internet and doctored them to make any attempts at clarifying their features totally impossible.

Price and Brognola, back at the Farm, would be gnashing their teeth that McCarter and Manning may have exposed their identities on international television.

Manning picked up the phone as McCarter continued to scan the channels, looking for more information on the riots. If he was going to risk the privacy of the Sensitive Operations Group, he might as well know the extent of the damage.

“Barb wants to talk to you, David,” Manning said, holding out his cell to McCarter.

“Tell her it’s not my fault,” McCarter replied, checking the television.

“It’s not that,” Manning corrected him. “Besides, the Farm’s running its own scans of local news.”

McCarter looked over his shoulder, then held out his hand to accept the cell phone. “What did I do now?”

“Aside from risk exposing Phoenix Force’s existence?” Barbara Price asked. Stony Man Farm’s mission controller sounded only mockingly reproachful, which eased McCarter’s nerves somewhat. The Briton was a man of action, but he dreaded paperwork and he also hated the subterfuge necessary to keep him on the front lines, battling against the forces of evil. He was a doer, not a politician who needed to massage the egos of law enforcement agencies or foreign governments.

“Any time Phoenix Force and a riot are in the same city, you know we’ll bump into each other, even if we’re outnumbered,” McCarter answered.

“Luckily this time you bumped hard enough to stop the riot’s spread in one direction,” Price told him. “We have to keep you on station in London for a little while, but Cal and the others won’t be coming to assist you. We need to spread out in order to deal effectively with the nature of this threat. You might also have to go elsewhere in Europe.”

“The other states in the G8 have been threatened, most likely,” McCarter responded.

“Exactly, which is why we can’t keep Phoenix Force as one contiguous unit. If it’s any consolation, Lyons and his men are splitting up, as well,” Price confirmed.

“Things are getting bloody serious if that’s the case,” McCarter muttered. “More riots?”

“We think that the riots and the orbital bombardment attacks are tied in,” Price said. “The Russian soccer gangs went wild in full force. We’re fairly certain that they’ve also been backed by the neo-Nazi movement in Moscow.”

“Neo-Nazis,” Manning muttered, listening in as the phone was set on speaker mode. “Now that there’s been an influx of other people from the Middle East and other countries, the Russians are putting aside the bad memories of the battle of St. Petersburg and embracing racial purity.”

“It doesn’t hurt that the Russian economy is in the shitter,” McCarter added. “White, young and jobless people tend to congregate and cast hairy eyeballs at the nonwhites who are taking jobs that the whites would normally turn their noses up at. It happened a lot in London with Jamaican, Indian and Pakistani immigrants. Bigots like picking at the edges of groups of disenchanted youth.”

“It just so happens that the Moscow neo-Nazi sympathizers are well-organized, and they have a lot to pick from on the streets,” Price said.

“Cal’s going to be bloody useless in that venue. Rafael, too,” McCarter pointed out.

“Cal’s not going to Moscow. We’ve activated an old friend or two to deal with Japan and China,” Price explained. “Hope you don’t mind if he’s hanging out with Mei.”

“No. You said or two…are we thinking of my favorite ninja?” McCarter asked.

“John’s going to be in action,” Price said. “Cal’s heading to Tokyo on a jet fighter right now.”

“And what about Lyons and the boys?” McCarter asked.

“Right now it’s all need-to-know. I’m just informing you of your teammates—”

“To keep my head straight, so I don’t worry over their problems,” McCarter finished. “Thanks, Barb.”

“Any potential information on where the kinetic darts came from?” Manning asked.

Price paused for a moment. “The only thing we can tell is that there was a scrambling signal that interrupted observation satellite feeds for forty-five minutes.”

“All of them?” Manning asked.

“We’re not certain for other governments, but looking at our own reconnaissance satellites, we’ve got most of an hour missing due to active jamming,” Price said. “From the tropic of Capricorn to the tropic of Cancer, it’s one big blind spot.”

“Equatorial satellites, meaning we’ve narrowed down the possible places where the enemy could have launched from,” Manning said.

“That’s still millions of square miles,” Price countered. “Who knows if it’s a land-based launch or someone utilizing a decommissioned submarine’s missile silos.”

“Or worse, converted a regular freighter to utilize such silos,” Manning added. “Some tanker ships have the room and the strength to fire Atlas rockets if they wanted.”

“No clue where the jamming signal could have originated?” McCarter asked.

“We’ve got our people on it. Whatever it was, it transferred from system to system easily,” Price said.

“An opposing force of hackers,” Manning surmised.

“We’re looking at that. The nature of the interference was such that we couldn’t tell if it was signal interruption or a viral computer program affecting satellite uplinks,” Price said. “Either way, the jamming hasn’t affected telecommunications.”

“No. Even though they could utilize local cell towers to keep in touch with their people, this Fist of Heaven group seems to want us to know the kind of horror happening in Moscow,” Manning said. “A sword of Damocles for the other seven member nations of the G8.”

“David, I just got a hit on the picture you took of the bag man you wrangled in that alley,” Price said.

“Something’s better than nothing,” McCarter replied. “What is it?”

“We’ve got his name, and he’s on Scotland Yard’s watchlist,” Price explained.

“Given that he’s on a watchlist, he’s probably in with a neo-Nazi group like Combat 18,” McCarter said. “Organizations like them see the soccer hooligan growth as a breeding ground for new recruits.”

“His name was Kent Hyle, and he’s part of the Jakkhammer Legacy,” Price provided.

“Jakkhammer Legacy,” McCarter replied, nodding sagely, his tone transmitting his understanding over the phone.

“What the hell is the Jakkhammer, and why are neo-Nazis holding it in high honor?” Price asked.

“Jakkhammer, in the ’70s, was a righteously brilliant punk band. When I was in a band, too young for signing up, I was a great fan of theirs,” McCarter replied. “Then around 1980, they became a part of the Rock against Communism movement, which just started a slippery slope.”

“Nothing wrong about being against communism,” Price noted.

McCarter shrugged. “I’ve seen communism’s failures, but the RAC was simply blowing smoke up arses. The RAC was formed to be a counter to the Anti-Nazi League’s Rock against Racism drive, because Jakkhammer was a pro-white power band.”

“All the little white boys were feeling edged out of their lowest rung on the social ladder by the addition of Indians and Jamaicans to the London population,” Manning added.

“Oh,” Price replied. “And much like American politics today, communism or socialism is a handy slur that can’t be used as the basis of slander by far-right extremists.”

“Bingo,” McCarter replied. “I wouldn’t be surprised if certain U.S. news network pundits weren’t punk fans back in the late ’70s.”

“Regardless, Jakkhammer Legacy has a reputation with the British police,” Price said.

“I know that,” McCarter said. “When the whole team was in London a while back on holiday, we ended up having to teach a few of their number a lesson about accosting blacks and Latinos.”

“Good times,” Manning said, showing a rare grin at the commission of physical violence against anyone. “Punching a Nazi makes anyone’s day a little better.”

Price chortled. “You’re going to have an excellent evening with the information we’ll give you two, then.”

McCarter flexed his fists, tendons popping, a cruel grin on his lips. “Give us an address, and we’ll ask a few hard questions.”

Manning opened the pair’s “special” suitcase and pulled out two pairs of brown leather gloves. The gloves were designed for law enforcement and military, with reinforcement and padding to protect the small bones of the human hand when utilized for punches against people’s heads and faces. He tossed a pair to McCarter. They would, of course, go with firearms to meet with members of the Jakkhammer Legacy, but going in guns blazing was a hard way to get information. On the other hand, it would take considerable damage to the lips and nose to leave an opponent unable to talk after being thrashed.

McCarter received the files from Stony Man Farm as he prepared to head out, the leather of his fighting gloves creaking as he fit them snugly over his hands. He couldn’t help feeling a slight bit of guilt over taking such glee in laying abuse on a violence-and-racism-prone group of disenfranchised young men, nor could he dismiss the irony that he was going to become to the hooligans what the hooligans were to honest, law-abiding people.

McCarter glanced at Manning. “Let’s go teach some lessons tonight, Gary.”

“Be Afraid 101?” Manning asked.

McCarter nodded. “Class is now in session.”

CHAPTER THREE

Los Angeles

Carl Lyons was a man who had been born to hunt monsters. It had been apparent when he worked the rough streets of Los Angeles, patrolling neighborhoods in dispute zones between rival gangs with a determination that had earned him the title of Ironman. Hal Brognola had seen it after Lyons’s chance encounter with Mack Bolan, the Executioner, and had guided the young cop to put his unwavering courage and sharp mind to work in Brognola’s organized crime task force, going undercover against the most murderous of gangs. Finally, Lyons had found a home in the Stony Man Farm–based Sensitive Operations Group, alongside Rosario Blancanales and Hermann Schwarz as the leader of Able Team.

With his new position, Lyons had tackled gangsters, terrorists and psychopathic madmen from Alaska to Sri Lanka. All that experience gave Lyons insight into the minds of human predators. He knew that there was one certain place to find his prey and that was where it would find the tastiest meals.

Right now, it was in Los Angeles, where the President was returning from a trip to the G8 conference. The President would stay there for a few days, and there were rumors in the wind that something was going to happen. Those rumors tickled Lyons’s honed instincts, informing him that he would be needed in the City of Angels.

Unfortunately, the intel fragments that had been picked up indicated that whatever was going to happen might occur on either coast, or both. That meant leaving his partners in Able Team behind while he went solo to L.A. His fears were confirmed when Moscow became the target of a volley of orbitally launched spears, then Britain came under assault by electronically directed rioters.

Brognola had just finished relaying the London situation over Lyons’s earpiece.

“Two G8 nations in less than two hours,” Lyons mused. “It looks like a lot of things are coming together right now. I don’t like this one bit.”

Brognola grunted in agreement. “We were lucky to have David and Gary on hand for London. But with the teams spread so piecemeal across the globe…”

“We’ll cope,” Lyons responded as he looked around the LAX terminals. There were dozens of Secret Service and other agency personnel assembled, their nerves on edge as they waited for Air Force One to touch down. Up in the night skies, United States Air Force jets were flying air patrols and their radar and infrared sensors searched for sign of any menace that would come close to harming the leader of the free world.

Lyons noted that he blended in with the L.A. police who had been pulled in to supplement federal agents in putting a protective ring around the President. It was standard operating procedure to draw from local law enforcement, and in a way, it had made things easier for Lyons to slip unnoticed among them. He had spent enough time as both a cop and a Fed to pass for the other when encountering either side. It was a two-edged sword, unfortunately. The very hodgepodge of personnel that had allowed him an anonymous presence, fully armed, in an airport on heightened security would make any other ex-cop or former federal agent blend in, and not every retired law enforcement agent was out of work because he wanted to leave the job amicably.

Lyons had encountered too many bent cops and corrupt Feds to make him feel complacent about the ease with which he operated within the supposedly airtight security cordon around the terminal. Lyons had come into the airport with an assortment of firepower that would give him a chance to grab something more substantial in the case of a full-blown gunfight. He had his favorite revolver, a Colt Python, on him as always. This particular .357 Magnum was a snub-nosed version with its frame cut and adapted to wear Pachmayr Compacs, tucked into an extralarge side pocket in his slacks. Speed loaders packed with 125-grain semi-jacketed hollowpoints weighed down the pockets of his sports blazer, ready to slam six rounds at a time into an empty cylinder. A .357 Magnum hammerless, five-shot Centennial revolver rode in an ankle holster under each of his pant legs for backup, even though the revolvers were only going to be supplementary to his main sidearm.

The three wheelguns were in reserve for the .357 Auto chambered Smith & Wesson Military and Police he wore in a shoulder holster. The high-powered auto-pistol was filled to the brim with sixteen windshield-smashing shots to start, and he carried forty-five more rounds in three magazines he wore in a pouch that balanced the MP-357.

“Carl, Hunt’s picked up an anomaly on the radar over the airport,” Brognola said. “The VOR radio had a burst of static for a moment, then the original image appeared.”

Brognola referred to Huntington Wethers, one of the most meticulous and attentive human beings that Lyons had ever encountered. Wethers had an acute eye for detail, which meant that anything he considered an anomaly was a serious deviation from the norm. Lyons consulted his PDA, which had a map of LAX loaded onto it. “The VOR station had a hiccup, and Wethers is concerned about it? Time to take a look at the transmitter.”

“Your identification will only get you so far if there’s something truly kinky going on,” Brognola said. “A gunfight on the tarmac will bring an army down on your head.”

“I’ll be careful,” Lyons promised.

Lyons slipped out an exit door close to the VOR station and jogged out onto the tarmac. The speedloaders in his pockets kept the wind across the flat concrete from blowing his lapels up to reveal the arsenal under his shoulders. He was dressed in a dark blue mock-turtleneck sweatshirt, light enough for the Los Angeles weather, and his jacket was a plaid blend of navy blue, Lincoln green and burgundy stripes, tinted just right so that Lyons could disappear into the shadows if he had to. It was a concept his friend and armorer, John “Cowboy” Kissinger, had developed—true urban camouflage. If someone saw Lyons decked out in black from neck to feet skulking around at night, they would be suspicious of him. However, with a little bit of light, he looked just like a normally dressed man, not a black-clad commando on the stalk. If he needed to totally disappear, he had a pocketed do-rag that he could stretch over his blond hair, removing the glint of its golden sheen from his profile.

He didn’t know what he would be looking for, and with grim concern, he realized that he wasn’t equipped for a stealth probe, unless he counted the Protech automatic knife he had clipped onto his belt. With a touch of a button, its five-inch blade would flash out, and as a cop on the violent streets of Los Angeles, he had no illusions that five inches of sharpened steel was any less deadly a weapon than a contact blast from a shotgun. A knife, even an inch-long stub, could destroy much more tissue than the largest bullet in the world. He’d have to get up close and personal to kill silently with the sleek switchblade, but with lives and national security at stake, he would make the sacrifice if necessary.

As Lyons neared the VOR transmitter, he slid behind the shadow of a parked luggage cart. A man paced back and forth, his bright cell phone screen causing his face to light up. The glowing reflections in his eyes were the only warning the Able Team commander had of his presence.

He pulled out his own PDA, made certain its LCD wasn’t too bright, then pulled up the cell phone cloning application that Hermann Schwarz had loaded into the powerful pocket device. He didn’t know the exact programming science behind the process, but Schwarz had explained simply that cellular phones were just encrypted radios that connected to a regular telephone network. This was why so many transmitter towers were needed around towns, as the cells were effectively only short-range. Schwarz explained that his program located the transmissions of nearby phones, then decrypted the mathematical keys that kept others from listening in.

A row of digits appeared on the screen and Lyons recognized the area-code prefix on the phone was for a cell number. He copied the text, put it in his instant messenger program and fired off the number to the Farm to trace it. In the meantime, he’d wait and observe, keeping his senses peeled for friends and foes in the darkness. If the Secret Service or a police officer saw him skulking in the shadows, he knew that his identification wouldn’t explain why he was acting like a ninja when the President was due any minute. If the menace targeting the President had posted guards to scout their operation, then a bloody fight would be inevitable.

For all of Carl Lyons’s reputation as a berserker warrior, a man capable of phenomenal violence in the face of the enemy, he was still a policeman and had become the tactical leader of Able Team. Observation and planning were Lyons’s two secret weapons that allowed him to appear as an unstoppable engine of destruction in addition to his great strength, endurance and fighting prowess. He studied his opponents, sized them up and found their weaknesses. By applying his strengths to his foes’ flaws, he could blow through them as if they were made of tissue.

Lyons looked at the PDA screen and saw that Stony Man Farm had come up with the original phone number that his quarry was using. It was a cell phone owned by a fifty-eight-year-old woman in San Bernardino County. Right now, he was operating on a clone of a cloned phone. The cybernetic geniuses back in Virginia were running the recent list of calls that had been made on the line, but the other end of the line was well encrypted. There were regular numbers, and then there were lines of gibberish that couldn’t be deciphered.

Whoever they were up against, they had good, secure communications. Naturally, Lyons sighed mentally; anyone who would dare go after the leaders of eight nations, let alone the U.S. President, would have to be highly organized and capable. When something showed up on Able Team’s radar, it generally had to be a national-scale conspiracy seeking to achieve its goals by murder and mayhem.