Red Frost

“How long before the sub’s grounding did the skimmers reach land?” Kurtzman asked.

“Looks like the wakes hit the beach twenty-three minutes prior,” Tokaido said.

In an explosion of pent-up frustration, Brognola demanded, “Are we under attack? If so, by whom? And by what? We have to come up with answers, people.”

The outburst was met by an uncomfortable silence.

Then Delahunt said, “We haven’t been able to ID the ship, Hal. The configuration isn’t part of the existing archive. It has elements of two previous designs, the Alfa and the Akula, and other elements that are unique to itself. Hunt and I have assembled a list of all the architects and engineers known to have worked on those programs. It spans almost forty years.”

“A penetration like this, however it was accomplished, requires new technology,” Kissinger said. “This is way beyond Akula.”

“How long have the Russians had it?”

“A long time,” Kissinger said. “My guess is it would take a decade or more to actually design and build a ship around it. The question is, how did they manage to hide an entirely new class of vessel from our inspectors? How many more are there? Where are they?”

“And why are they letting the cat out of the bag now?” Kurtzman added.

“DOD is going to have a field day tearing that sub apart,” Wethers said.

“Bear, do we know where it came from?” Brognola said.

“We know where it didn’t come from. It didn’t sail out of any of the previously identified naval shipyards or sub bases in the last twenty-four months. The construction site is equally a black hole.”

“Why aren’t we already at DEFCON 1?” Delahunt asked.

“The President has ordered our missiles retargeted and ready for launch,” Brognola replied, “but he is holding back the go-code. He has reason to believe that if this is an attack, it wasn’t coordinated by the Russian government or its armed forces.”

“Because they’re still denying it’s their ship?” Wethers said incredulously.

“No, Hunt, because the Russian government and military have just given the President complete access to their most sensitive internal-security material and to crack black-ops units already in the field,” Brognola said. “That’s what the last call from the White House was about. It appears that today’s events may be part of an isolated conspiracy on the fringes of the Russian military establishment. If that’s the case, the Russian politicians and generals want to root it out as badly as we do. As an act of good faith, they haven’t reprogrammed their launch codes or prepped their missiles. And they’ve invited us to participate in the ground action, on their home soil.”

“Whoa,” Kissinger said.

“The details are for our eyes only,” Brognola said. “No other clandestine service will be involved—none of the information we receive will be shared. That’s the deal the President made. We’ve got to live with it.

“Able Team’s Homeland Security credentials and closed-airspace flight authorization are waiting for pickup at Boeing Field in Seattle,” Brognola went on. “Barbara, do we have a live link to Phoenix Force?”

“I just finished alerting David to the necessity of a quick exit from the U.K.,” Price replied.

“What about just scrubbing his current mission in light of events?” Kurtzman said.

“David said there’s no need, and I agree with him. We’re basically still in a holding pattern at this end. The presence of the target at the London location has been confirmed. Phoenix Force is closing in as we speak, about to initiate contact on-site. Mission wrap-up in the next hour.”

“With any luck we’ll know more by then,” Brognola said. “Make sure the Gulfstream at Heathrow is fueled and cleared for a flight east.”

CHAPTER SIX

London East End,

2:20 p.m. GMT

David McCarter and Rafael Encizo hustled down the rain-slick East End street, a treeless, winding canyon of two-story, nineteenth-century brick. In the middle of the gray afternoon, it was deserted but for a few mothers pushing prams on the opposite sidewalk. McCarter noted the huge For Sale signs in upper-story windows. This neighborhood of tenement slums was gradually being gentrified. Where immigrants from Eastern Europe had once lived ten to a room without running water, frantically upscale yuppies from the city’s financial district cooked on their Jenn-Air ranges under expansive skylights.

The white panel van following behind McCarter and Encizo turned hard right, then angled down an alley that ran parallel to the street they were on.

Phoenix Force was closing in fast.

McCarter and Encizo walked on with their heads slightly lowered, their stocking caps pulled down over the tops of their ears. They looked like a couple of workmen, painters or plasterers in white-spattered coats, pants and shoes, hurrying to get back to a remodel job after an ale break.

They stopped in front of a take-out curry shop. The shopfront was made up of small, wooden-framed windows and a wooden-framed door that was mostly glass. A Closed sign hung in the window.

Through the glass McCarter could see a guy with his back to the entrance, working at a table on the far side of the service counter. He was small, brown, wiry, and he was wearing an orange-stained white apron. Loud, rhythmic music blared from a boom box on a shelf above him. Manic Punjabi rock.

While McCarter shielded Encizo from street view with his big body, the little Cuban deftly popped the lock with a credit card and put his shoulder to the door. Encizo had cased the front door lock the night before.

The glass shuddered in the door as it swung open and a little bell tinkled, announcing the arrival of new customers.

McCarter and Encizo had already pulled down their ski masks when the little guy behind the counter began to turn around, a big chopping cleaver in his hand. He said, “Damn, I thought I…”

The aroma of concentrated spices—cumin, coriander, garlic, bay leaf, cinnamon and onion—permeated the very walls of the cramped little shop.

The curry guy looked from their masks to their white hands and jumped to the obvious conclusion. “You’re in the wrong neighborhood for this game, you bloody skinhead wankers!” he shouted over the music, waving the cleaver in the air. “Do you know who the fuck you’re robbin’?”

McCarter reached under his paint-spattered jacket. The curry guy’s angry black eyes stared down the muzzle of the dehorned blue-steel pistol that was suddenly pointed at his head. The gun sort of looked like a Luger, but wasn’t. IDing the weapon’s make and model was the furthest thing from curry guy’s mind; he was mesmerized by the size of the bore, which was immense.

He dropped the knife on the counter and held up his hands in surrender.

McCarter fired practically point-blank. The .50-caliber pistol didn’t jump in his fist; it didn’t boom deafeningly, either. It whacked, as if someone had dropped a metal pan on the scarred linoleum floor.

Like magic, the red plastic tail of a hypodermic dart appeared in the front of curry guy’s throat. The impact of the projectile and simultaneous explosive injection of bolus of viscous fluid sent him staggering backward into the edge of his worktable. The one-inch-long, hollow needle was unbarbed. The dart immediately fell out of his neck, but the dose of sedative had already been delivered. A madly pounding heart sped the drug through his system. Grimacing in pain, the curry man clutched his throat with both hands, then his mouth began to sag, his face went slack and his eyes rolled up in his head. His knees gave way and he crumpled down behind the counter.

McCarter took another loaded hypo dart from his jacket pocket, opened the breech of the Benjamin-Sheridan Model 179B CO2 pistol and chambered it. Then he cocked the single-shot mechanism. The stock Model 179B pellet pistol had been customized, rebarreled and rechambered into a smooth-bore tranquillizer gun intended for close-range injection of large animals, penned livestock. With the right sedative concoction, it worked just as well on people. Cowboy Kissinger had ground off the ridiculous leaf rear and ramp front target sights so they wouldn’t hang up on their clothing.

Encizo kicked a metal wedge between the door and its floorplate, then kicked another along the jamb near the knob so the door couldn’t be opened from the outside. While he was doing that, McCarter moved beside the bead curtain that separated the storefront from a narrow, windowless hall that led back to the shop’s storage room. With the muzzle of his trank gun, he spread the strands of beads. The corridor was lit by a single bare light bulb in the ceiling. At the far end of the hall, the unpainted hollow-core door was closed. On the other side of that door was their target, Dr. Freddy Hassan, a wealthy Jordanian national. Codenamed “Penguin” by U.S. intelligence services, Dr. Freddy was a suspected international terrorist financier, widely known in London’s tight-knit Islamic community as a philanthropist and benefactor. He always traveled with a private four-man security team.

Personally, McCarter would have preferred to use 9 mm FMJs and silencers on the lot of them, but dead men don’t talk.

And talk was what this mission was all about.

After Encizo joined McCarter at the curtain, the Briton slipped through the dangling beads and took the lead down the hall with weapon raised.

IN MIRROR SUNGLASSES and hooded black sweatshirt, Gary Manning drove the van down the cobblestone alley. Calvin James rode in the passenger seat, likewise in shades and hood. The third man, T. J. Hawkins, was back in the van’s cargo compartment, sitting on a crated junk-yard four-cylinder engine block. The alley was narrow and dotted with puddles of standing water. Empty clotheslines were strung overhead, from the back of one building, across the alley, to the back of the building opposite.

The curry take-out’s rear entrance was on the left, and coming up fast. There was enough room for a delivery truck to pull in, but the space was taken up by two parked cars, both black, top-of-the-line Mercedes sedans with dark-tinted windows all around.

Dr. Freddy’s rides.

Manning stopped the van in the middle of the alley, cranked down his window and stuck his head out.