Oceans Of Fire

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.

Shattered glass fell in a cascade around him.

Armageddon erupted as the Halo opened up and fired its heavy machine gun into the shop at six hundred rounds a minute. The brick walls of the building were no cover but they took James out of sight. He rolled back directly against the wall to try and get under the helicopter’s angle of fire. Glass, brick and mortar rained down as a thousand rounds of armor-piercing ammunition tore the tea shop apart.

James popped up as the fusillade suddenly ended. He ignored his cuts as he leaped back out. Manning was in the middle of the street with the big Barrett over his shoulder. He was firing nearly straight up. The heavy sniper rifle recoiled like a jackhammer in his hands as he pumped his own armor-piercing rounds into the chin of the Halo. The giant helicopter broke off, dipping to one side and disappearing back over the rooftops.

Clayborne Forbes was swiftly disappearing down the street with the nuke strapped to his back.

James broke into a dead sprint after him. His head throbbed with every footfall but he doggedly pursued. Forbes ran like the fullback he’d been at the Naval Academy. James staggered as a bullet struck him like a hammer between the shoulder blades. He turned to find Sharkov leaning against the Land Cruiser firing a pistol. James’s .45 thudded and Sharkov staggered. Then he shuddered as McCarter ripped a 20-round magazine through him from his Vikhr rifle. Sharkov’s man, Levenchko, dropped his rifle and dropped to his knees with his hands up.

McCarter waved James forward. “Get the nuke! Go! Go! Go!”

James slammed in a fresh magazine and sprinted on. The fact was, Forbes was younger and faster and had the lead. Forbes hit an intersection and turned left. The Halo suddenly thundered into view and followed him. James tasted the lactic acid in the back of his throat as he called on every last ounce of his flagging strength.

He rounded the corner and saw Forbes rising up into the air on the end of a rope. James took his pistol in both hands. The pistol cycled seven times in rapid semiauto and clacked open on empty. McCarter and Manning ran up behind him, weapons leveled, but the Halo was already receding from sight with Forbes strung beneath it.

James sank to one knee and tried to get air into his lungs. “What’s…the situation?”

“Rafe has the other nuke. T.J.’s unconscious. Jack was losing power to his tail rotor and had to set her down. He crashed it in a soccer field three blocks from here. He’s okay and heading our way. The good news is that we have Zhol. The bad news is…” McCarter trailed off as he watched the helicopter disappear into the rising sun.

“Bad news is we have a Broken Arrow,” James finished. “Loose nuke.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Panji Poyan, Tajikistan

“Forbes.” The voice on the secure phone was cold, clipped and spoke with a heavy, non-Russian accent. Forbes was fluent in four languages, but the man on the other end of the line chose to speak English. “Report.”

“Sharkov’s dead.” Forbes sat in a safehouse on the Tajikistan-Afghan border and held an ice pack to his head. “Zhol’s in custody.”

“And the packages?”

Forbes’s finger absently tapped the suitcase-size device next to him on the bed. “I have one.”

The voice on the other end waited for moment. “And the other?”

Forbes glanced at his lumped face in the mirror and shook his head. “I have one,” he repeated.

“And who has the other one?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do not…know?” the voice repeated.

Forbes scowled. “These guys who hit us, they were—”

“Were what?”

The ex-SEAL thought back on the battle. “Unorthodox. Throwing antitank grenades from motorcycles, ramming attacks, and their equipment was like they had their own candy store, whatever the job required. No budget constraints.”

“So who are they?”

“They ain’t SOCOM, that’s for damn sure. All I know is one of them—”

“Used to be a Navy SEAL, like yourself, Mr. Forbes.” The man on the other end of the line paused significantly. “This man you hired.”

“Mr. Zhol hired him.”