Oceans of Fire

by Don Pendleton

  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.

  Hawk slammed a fresh mag into his SIG and gunned the engine of his Ural. “What about Zhol!”

  “Forget him!” McCarter ordered. “Let Moscow police take him! We have a contact! Take the van!”

  Hawkins shot into traffic. Manning had already crossed the square and was weaving between cars in pursuit. The van wasn’t hard to spot. It had ripped away the shreds of its tires and was showering sparks off the back bumper and out of both wheel wells.

  Traffic parted around it like it had the plague.

  The driver of the van leaned out of his window. The small blue-steel shape of a Makarov pistol began popping off rounds at Manning in rapid fire. Manning’s .40-caliber weapon filled his hand and boomed back. The driver jerked back inside as his side mirror exploded inches from his abdomen.

  Sirens began wailing in the distance.

  McCarter’s voice came across the radio. “We have to wrap this up fast. It’s broad daylight and we don’t have a hunting license.”

  “Affirmative, Phoenix One.” Manning pointed as Hawkins pulled up into the wingman position. “Front tires! I’ll take the passenger side!”

  “Affirmative!” Hawkins split off into the left lane as Manning went right. The former Ranger pulled in a few yards back from the driver’s door and extended his pistol. The Swiss pistol barked three times and the van slumped into a left-leaning tilt. The driver nearly lost control as he overcorrected the wheel.

  Manning raised his .40 to take the van’s last leg from underneath it.

  The driver violently spun his wheel to the right. Manning went full-throttle and leaped his bike up onto the sidewalk to avoid being crushed. Civilians screamed and dived out of the way as the big Canadian roared down the pavement. Manning jammed on his brakes to avoid running over an immense woman walking her dog. The woman stood screaming in place and the little dog jumped and barked between her legs. Between the cars parked on the curb and the storefronts girding the narrow sidewalk there was nowhere to go but through the woman and her dog.

  Manning yanked his bike to the right, popped a wheelie and went through the display window of a flower shop instead.

  His front tire erupted through the window; his rear tire hit the brick beneath it. The rear end of the bike bucked Manning off like a mechanical mule as it flipped nosedown through the display case. He flew through space in a cloud of sunflowers, daisies, marigolds and broken vases.

  He came to a violent halt as he flew headfirst through double glass doors of the cold case. Manning smashed the shelving holding the displays and bounced off the solid wall behind them, then collapsed with the upper half of his body in the refrigerated case and his legs sprawled out on the floor. He lay stunned for a moment with sprays of roses and shattered arrangements heaped upon him like accolades upon the body of a fallen hero.

  Manning pushed himself out of the case and fell back on the sea of broken glass covering the floor. His helmet and riding leathers had prevented him from being sliced to pieces. He waited for the telltale nausea that signaled broken bones.

  “Phoenix Four!” McCarter yelled across the radio. “Phoenix Four!”

  “Phoenix Four…down.” Manning groaned. “I need extraction.”

  “Sit tight! We’re on our way! Phoenix Five! What is your status?”

  Hawkins had continued to follow the van. After trying to crush Manning it had gone one more block and come to a halt behind a parked truck in a space marked off by orange traffic cones.

  “Target has stopped. No movement.” Hawkins dismounted but his muzzle never left the vehicle. He ripped off his helmet and shouted in Russian, “Police!” He waved his hand violently and the few bystanders on the side street scattered. He stared at the parked truck and cones framing the van in the parking spot.

  “I don’t like it,” Hawkins said as his instincts spoke to him. “I think this is their final destination—Shit!”

  He dived over the hood of a parked sedan as a grenade spiraled out of the shattered back window of the van and bounced near him and his bike. The grenade detonated with a whip-cracking yellow flash and shrapnel rattled against Hawkins’s cover like hail. He rose over the hood of the sedan and emptied his pistol into the van, firing low to catch anyone hugging the floorboards. He reloaded and ran to the passenger window. Hawkins snaked his pistol inside and emptied eight rounds into the interior before ripping the door open.

  James brought the surveillance van to a screeching halt at the top of the street and Encizo and McCarter leaped out. Hawkins glared at the interior of the bullet-riddled van. A trapdoor had been cut in the floor. In the street beneath a gaping circular hole emptied into blackness below. The heavy iron disk of the manhole cover lay in the back of the van. McCarter ran up beside Hawkins while Encizo stayed back to cover. “What have you got?”

  “They’ve extracted into the sewer sys—” Hawkins jumped back as something metallic rattled against concrete below. He grabbed McCarter’s jacket and yanked him back with him. “Fire in the hole!”

  Streamers of winking yellow fireflies fountained up out of the manhole borne on a geyser of superheated smoke. McCarter and Hawkins sprinted down the street as the smoke blasted out of the broken windows, sending its streamers of molten phosphorous in all directions. Seconds later the van’s gas tank caught and van went up like a metal balloon.

  McCarter watched the van burn out of control. Besides Zhol’s body back in Kremlin Square there wasn’t going to be much in the way of forensic evidence. The Briton felt his temper begin to boil. It wasn’t that the mission had gone FUBAR. That was part of the game.

  What galled him was that he and Phoenix Force had gotten played.

  Payback was owed.

  “We’re out of here.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “I’m thinking closed casket,” Calvin James suggested.

  McCarter had to agree. Aidar Zhol’s corpse had been cleaned up but his head and face were still horrible to behold. McCarter had seen a lot of shotgun wounds, but the Tajik gangster looked as though someone had teed off on his face with a claw hammer. “What the bloody hell did that, then? Not buckshot.”

  “Nyet.” Forensic Pathologist Sirpa Sokolova sighed in recognition. “Kopeck do this.”

  “Kopeck?” James cocked his head, reexamining the wounds again with a combat medic’s eye. “You mean, the money or a man?”

  “Both.” Aside from being the deputy assistant coroner, Dr. Sokolova was also a CIA intelligence asset. Barbara Price had arranged for the woman to extend McCarter and Calvin James every professional courtesy. The forensic pathologist was six feet tall and built like a ballet dancer. She’d put a wiggle in her walk for her two American guests that hadn’t gone unnoticed or unappreciated on the walk to the basement morgue.

  The carnage inflicted on Aidar Zhol’s corpse held everyone’s attention now.

  “Both?” McCarter gazed down at the carnage once more. “What do you mean, both?”

  “Mean both.” Sokolova’s accent was thick enough to cut with a knife. “You ask what do such damage?” She opened a tray beneath the metal gurney and pulled out a plastic bag. The contents tinkled onto the stainless-steel tool tray as she emptied them into a glittering pile. “Twenty-five silver, Csar Nicholas, ten-kopeck pieces. Twenty-five more pulled from body armor in chest.”

  “Bloody hell.” McCarter shook his head. “Shot him full of silver.”

  “Da,” the doctor agreed. “Shotgun loaded with silver kopeck do such damage.”

  Jam
es ran his hands through the coins. They were pitted from being fired from a gun and many had deformed when they’d hit bone, but each was genuine minted silver with Csar Nicholas on the face. They were about the diameter of a dime but twice as thick, and by James’s estimation twenty-five of them would fit just about perfectly into a 12-gauge shotgun shell. “You know, the Italian Mafia used to do this kind of shit in Sicily, back in the day. They killed you with enough money to pay for your funeral. Some kind of messed-up, old-school respect thing.”

  McCarter stared at the pile of coins that had been pulled from Aidar Zhol’s skull. “Dr., you said kopeck was the method and a man’s name.”

  “Da, every cop in Moscow know Kopeck. Kopeck is assassin. Double-barrel shotgun loaded with silver kopeck is his MO. One barrel in chest. One in face.” Dr. Sokolova tossed her head. “Kopeck is bad man.”

  “What else do you know about him?” McCarter asked.

  Dr. Sokolova went to a filing cabinet and pulled out a thick folder. File after file had pictures of horribly, unmistakably, coin-mutilated corpses. Sokolova pulled out a separate file. It was written in Cyrillic, but it was clearly a police rap sheet. McCarter gazed at the mug shot at the top. Kopeck’s face was all brutal bulges of brow and cheekbones and jaw with cauliflowered ears, and his hair was clipped close to his skull. He had bad teeth. McCarter could tell because Kopeck was grinning shamelessly into the police camera.

  “Name, Pietor Shulin, alias ‘Kopeck.’ Was wrestler in ninety kilogram weight class but failed to make Olympic team. He lose sports dispensation and do army service in Chechnya. Implicated in atrocities against civilians but not prosecuted. Honorably discharged. Shulin became doorman at Moscow club where it is assumed he made mafiya connections. First ‘kopeck killing’ in Moscow occur two years ago. Victim was witness to alleged mafiya slaying. There have been eleven kopeck killings within last twenty-four months. Shulin has been arrested in conjunction with three but unsuccessfully prosecuted. Once before, murderer with this same MO escape police pursuit by using manhole trick you describe.”

  McCarter shook his head at how they’d been eluded. He’d been in the bowels of Moscow before. The modern sewers connected with the ancient sewers built during the time of Peter the Great as well several extensive systems of catacombs that were even older. A mind-numbing labyrinth existed below the streets of Moscow and Russian criminals had been making use of it for centuries.

  “Dr. do you have any idea which syndicate he’s with?” James asked.

  “Kopeck is thought to be freelancer. You wish man dead? You have money? Kopeck kill. You wish woman or child dead? Kopeck kill them, too.”

  McCarter had seen the type before. In the old days hit men had been the soldiers of their syndicate. They were trusted members of their families who did the dirty work of defending them. The family system in organized crime had steadily eroded since the 1960s with the rise of the narcotics trade. Kopeck was part of the new breed of killer. He wasn’t a hit man so much as an assassin, and aside from his colorful MO, he was true to type.

  Kopeck was a sociopath with no loyalties to speak of. He killed for money and because he liked it.

  “Kopeck’s a bad man,” James stated.

  “Yeah, and if he’s freelance, that means he doesn’t have a syndicate backing him,” McCarter stated.

  James grinned. “Maybe we should go and have ourselves a Come to Jesus with this boy Kopeck.”

  “I wish you would.” Dr. Sokolova favored them with a predatory smile. “I weary of pulling coins from faces.”

  “We need to put together a snatch, then.” McCarter turned to James. “Get on the horn to the Bear, we—”

  A pair of orderlies entered the room pushing a gurney laden with a sheet-covered corpse. Dr. Sokolova gave the two orderlies a withering look and spoke in Russian. “I specifically gave orders not to be disturbed.”

  McCarter cleared leather. James shoved Sokolova to the floor and drew his weapon. The orderlies withdrew PP-2000 machine pistols from beneath their smocks as McCarter and James opened up. McCarter’s Browning Hi-Power “Detective” model was an Argentine weapon with a three-and-a-half-inch barrel for concealed carry. The 13-round magazine was “Dutch-Loaded” with 9 mm +P+ hollowpoints and Teflon-coated, armor-piercing ammunition. The high-performance ammo screamed from the shortened barrel in ear-splitting blasts of fire. An armor-piercing round punched a neat hole through the first assassin’s heart. A hollowpoint round exploded his throat and dropped him to the floor.

  James’s Heckler & Koch boomed four times in rapid succession. The big .45 smashed the second killer across the room and dropped him flapping to the floor. The man on the gurney sat up out of his shroud like the living dead, a sawed-off double barrel shotgun in each hand.

  McCarter and James emptied their pistols into him.

  The assassin jerked and shuddered under the fusillade. His right-hand shotgun boomed out of both barrels, and McCarter felt the sting of the hit in his left arm. He dropped his left arm and fired one-handed until his pistol racked open on an empty, smoke-oozing chamber. The killer lay back on the gurney in final rest with fifteen holes in his chest.

  James slapped in a fresh magazine and shot his slide home on a fresh round. McCarter ignored the burning in his arm and reloaded, as well. Out in other areas of the morgue people had begun to scream. Dr. Sokolova started to push herself up and McCarter put a hand on her shoulder to keep her down. “Wait.”

  James went to the double swinging door and kicked it open. He led with his pistol as he quickly scanned the corridor. “Clear.”

  Sokolova rose and touched McCarter’s arm. “You are hit.”

  James stayed in the doorway. “You all right?”

  The doctor took a scalpel and cut away the sleeve of McCarter’s jacket and shirt. Blood ran in a river down McCarter’s arm from a pair of ragged but shallow wounds. She took a pair of forceps from the tool tray and stopped. “My God.”

  McCarter took the forceps from her hand and grimaced as he pulled a projectile from his arm by its edge and held it up to the light. “Bloody hell.” He held a silver kopeck. “Cal, check the bloke on the gurney. Is he our man?”

  James eased back from the door and scanned the corpse. “Nah, man. He’s ugly, but there’s no resemblance.”

  McCarter pulled a second coin out of his bicep and dropped it to clink onto the stainless-steel tray. “Sent his bloody errand boys, then.”

  “Looks like it.” James eyed the hallway. “There had to be a lookout. Kopeck’s going to know he failed. You still want to go for the snatch?”

  Dr. Sokolova began to swab and stitch McCarter’s wounds.

  McCarter’s glare stayed fixed on the ragged holes in the sleeve of his jacket lying on the table. “Seven hundred dollars of Italian leather. Kopeck owes me.” The Briton scooped up the two scarlet-stained silver coins and jingled them in his palm. “And he’s bloody short.”

  IT WASN’T A NICE PART of Moscow, but it appeared Kopeck could afford to take the entire upper floor of a warehouse by the river for his base of operations. McCarter watched the old building through the gray-green filter of his night-vision equipment. Nothing was moving. “What have you got, Phoenix Four?”

  Hawkins responded from the other side of the warehouse. “No activity. Grounds are secure to the east.”

  McCarter nodded. “Phoenix Two?”

  “No activity on the river,” James reported. “The pier is deserted.”

  “Phoenix Three, what do you see?”

  “Dog crap,” Manning answered. “But no dogs. I’m willing to assume they’re inside.”

  McCarter turned to Encizo. “Anything?”

  Encizo wore earphones and directed the black plastic dish of a Bionic Ear and sound booster at the warehouse. “The lights are on, and someone’s home. I detect two distinct voices, one male, and one female, both speaking Russian. There are other voices and sounds, but I’m attributing them to television noise.”

  “That’s
it?”

  “That’s it.”

  McCarter considered. “I don’t like it.”

  “Me neither,” Encizo agreed. “For a guy who dropped a punk card on you at the Moscow morgue, he’s pretty goddamn lax on security. He’s got to expect some payback.”

  McCarter liked it less and less by the second. “Phoenix Two?”

  James sighed. “I don’t know. You think he’s so stupid that he assumed he got us?”

  “No, bonkers maybe, but not stupid,” McCarter responded. “Stupid assassins don’t last this long.”

  Rafe let out a long breath. “So it’s a trap.”

  McCarter nodded slowly, not taking his gaze from his binoculars. “Too right, it is.”

  “And…?” Encizo prompted.

  “And we’re going to trip it, then, aren’t we?” McCarter began to move forward. “All units converge.”

  Phoenix Force loped through the river district like wolves, little more than shadows in darkness. They were armed with sound-suppressed 10 mm Heckler & Koch MP-5/10 submachine guns. Manning held his position in the trees, his T-76 Dakota Longbow sniper rifle covering the team’s assault. “No movement. You’re still clear.”

  McCarter came to the side of the warehouse with Encizo beside him. “Phoenix One and Four are on the east side.”

  James and Hawkins responded from the other side of the building. “In position.”

  “Watch out for the dogs.” Manning advised them.

  McCarter loosened the can of pepper spray in his web gear. Police strength pepper spray was 10% Oleo-Resin Capsicum. McCarter and his team were carrying Alaska Guard 20% bear strength, rated against Alaskan grizzlies. The Phoenix Force leader put a hand on a galvanized pipe bolted to the wall that ran to the roof. He pulled against it and grinned as he determined it would bear his weight. “All units hold position. I’m heading up top for a look-see.”