Act Of War

Slinging their machine guns, Hawkins and Encizo prepared their own handguns as they walked down the hallway, past the alcoves. There was a fast flurry of gunfire, then three slow deliberate shots.

Appearing in the smashed mirror, David McCarter carefully studied the war zone outside the alcove before emerging with his MP-5 in one hand and a thick book tucked under the other arm.

As he moved followed, the members of his team came around the corner.

“All clear?” McCarter asked.

The soldiers nodded.

“Well, I found the sales ledger,” McCarter announced, tapping the fat volume with the hot barrel of the machine gun.

“Great,” Hawkins muttered, working out a jam from his MP-5. “Then let’s get out of this shithole.” Saving the girls had been the mission priority, but this was the prize. The names and address in the book would send dozens of men and women to the gas chamber. Or whatever method of execution their assorted countries used to execute criminals in these so-called enlightened days. Hawkins had seen enough death in his career to understand that making somebody wait ten years on death row was a cruel and unusual punishment. A bullet to the back of the head was swift and painless, carrying much more mercy and compassion than the cannibals of society ever showed to their victims.

“I’ll call in the rescue planes. Find some blankets, spare clothing, anything like that, and go help Calvin open the cages,” McCarter directed. “And be gentle. The girls have been through double hell. If anybody doesn’t want to leave her cage, then just unlock the door and let her be. To them, we’re just another bunch of ugly guys with guns.”

“Ugly?” Manning almost smiled at that, then he turned to Hawkins. “Must be talking about you.”

Finally clearing the jam, Hawkins gave a snort. “Ugly in Texas is beautiful everywhere else in the world.”

“I’ve been to Dallas, brother, and that dog won’t hunt.”

“Yeah, right.”

“How about we bring along a peace offering?” Encizo suggested, reaching down to grab a dead Sardinian by the collar. He lifted the bloody corpse off the floor. “To show our goodwill.”

“Now you’re talking sense,” Hawkins said, slinging the machine gun.

As the Stony Man operatives walked away, dragging the dead slavers along behind, McCarter worked the transceiver on his belt. The civilian cell phones would never have worked this deep underground, but the team had left a repeater unit hidden in the bushes on the surface. “Rock House, this is Firebird One,” he said, touching his throat mike. “The clubhouse is clear, and the goods have been recovered.”

“Excellent. Any breakage?” Barbara Price said, her voice wavering slightly from the interference of the surrounding rock.

Resting the hot barrel of the MP-5 machine gun on his shoulder, McCarter looked sideways at the woman in the alcove. “Yes,” he said in a flat voice. “Send body bags along with the medics.”

“Confirm. Sorry to hear that.” Price sighed. “I’ll contact the NATO frigate waiting offshore and have the prisoners picked up ASAP. As soon as the rescue helicopters arrive, proceed to your former staging area and wait for further instructions.”

“Something local?” McCarter asked, pulling a cigarette from the packet of Player’s in his shirt and lighting up. He pulled in the dark smoke with little satisfaction. Maybe they hadn’t gotten all of the slavers, and another nest of the vipers had been found. That’s fine by me. Let’s end this filthy practice, once and forever, he thought.

“Nothing local. We’ve got hot soup with breakage,” Price said tersely. “Coffeemaker will relay details over a more secure line.”

Coffeemaker had to be Kurtzman. “What kind of breakage?” McCarter asked, getting a bad feeling.

“Not over an open transmission.”

That made McCarter raise an eyebrow. Open? These radios were protected by 254-byte encoding! The situation had to be really bad.

“Confirm,” he stated, exhaling a long stream of smoke. “You sending Sky King?”

There was a crackle of background static. “Negative. Look for a man in dark clothing.”

A blacksuit from the Farm would be bring them a plane, the leader of Phoenix Force translated. “Understood. We’ll be ready. Over.”

“Over and out,” Price repeated, and the radio went silent.

Dropping the cigarette to the floor, McCarter crushed it under a boot, then went to inform the rest of the team. Their long night was over, but it sounded like an even longer day was just beginning.

CHAPTER FOUR

North Atlantic Ocean

The waves were low and sluggish, the thick waters of the Atlantic shimmering with the glassine effect of the nearly frozen brine. Peeking out from behind a few scattered clouds, the sun was high in the sky, but the light gave little warmth to the chilly world.

Standing on the bow of the HMS Harlow, the young boson swept the horizon with a large digital camera, his finger pressed lightly on the start button as if it were the trigger of an assault rifle. Standing closeby were the captain and the first officer, looking through computer-augmented binoculars.

“Anything?” the captain asked, an unlit cigarette jutting from a corner of his mouth.

“Nothing yet, sir,” the first officer replied. “Boson?”

“Same here, Skipper,” the man replied, swaying slightly to the motion of the deck as the missile frigate cut through the cold waters.

“Well, stay sharp!” the captain shouted above the wind. “It’ll be any second now, and we won’t get a second chance!”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

The salty wind was brisk, the sailors’ uniforms slowly becoming damp as the material snapped against their arms and legs. High above them on the bridge were the gray half domes of the radar pods, and behind the bulletproof Lexan plastic windows could be seen more officers and crewmen with field glasses, monoculars, digital cameras and old-fashioned 16 mm chemical cameras, the boxy Nikons equipped with telephoto lens. This was going to be a historic day for Her Majesty’s navy, hopefully, and every detail needed to be recorded.

“Look there, sir!” the first officer called excitedly, pointing starboard. “North by northwest!”

The captain replied with a grunt, but swung around to face the new direction, his hands tight on the binoculars.

Obediently, the boson followed their example. Through the electronic viewfinder, the sailor looked closely for any signs of submarine activity. The British navy was holding a live-fire test today of their new weapon, some thing called the Firelance. Unofficially, the rocket-powered torpedo had already been nicknamed by the sailors of the Harlow as the Thunder-fish.

Which was pretty accurate considering what the bloody thing could do, the boson thought, leaning harder against the safety railing to stop from swaying.

Removed from its regular duties, the Harlow was now on patrol outside the coastal wars of the Isle of Man, thought by some to be the most lonely spot in the North Atlantic that the UK still deemed to recognize as a royal possession. Just a lot of bare rock islands, hardly bigger than cricket field, and a million seagulls.

However, the royal missile frigate was not here to participate in the test, but assigned merely to be an observer. This was to be a battle of the titans, so to speak, and a vital stage in developing an adequate defense for the crown against this Russian aquatic killer. The British-made Firelance was going up against a Russian Squall purchased illegally on the black market by MI-5. Good lads all, the boson thought. Hopefully, the new British weapon could take out the Russian monster. Back during the cold war, the Soviet Union had invented the Squall, and the Iranians had their own version of the Russian superweapon. Sadly, the British navy was lagging behind in third place with the Yanks breathing hot on their necks. The boson smirked in pleasure. At least the French didn’t have them yet, thank Jesus. That was some comfort, anyway.

The Firelance was incredible, with a maximum speed of 350 kilometers per hour. The captain had been forced to play the instructional video several times for the startled crew before they got over the shock of seeing anything move that fast under water. The torpedoes had a powerful rocket engine instead of propellers at the end, and a flat, armored crown, which seemed to be the secret to its success. The torpedo looked about as streamlined as a truck, and needed to be hard-fired into the water, not merely released like a regular torpedo. But when the Firelance hit the ocean, the impact caused a momentary shock wave effect that created yawning cavitation on the armored crown. In effect the concussion pushed aside the seawater for a split second, leaving behind a small empty space that was almost a vacuum. The Firelance flew through the shock wave, in a vacuum of its own creation. A Squall could blow any surface ship out of the water before the crew even knew it was under attack.

An abrupt disturbance in the pattern of the waves caught the attention of everybody. Excited voices rose from the bridge. This was it! Then a humpback whale broke the surface for a moment to grab a breath and dived out of sight again.

Lowering the camera to clean the lens of spray, the boson hoped the big creature got the hell out of the engagement zone. Somewhere out there were two Royal Navy Vanguard submarines, and when the war games commenced, this was not going to be a safe place for innocent bystanders. Any minute now, the whale was going to find itself in more danger than a tourist in Liverpool.

There was subtle movement below the surface, the waves canting in different directions for only a heartbeat. Just long enough for the boson to catch sight of a periscope descending below the waves. Gotcha!

“Sub at four o’clock, sir!” the boson called out, tightening his grip on the video camera. Softly, the machine began to hum. “Range, one thousand meters!”

As the officers spun around, something flashed past the Harlow just below the surface. The blur was visible for a split second, then was gone.