Red Frost

There was a tall, olive-complected guy standing just inside the rear entrance. He was leaning against the closed metal-sheathed door. His arms were folded across his chest.

“I got a delivery to make inside,” Manning told him. “How about moving one of those cars out of the way so I can pull in the van?”

“Come back later,” said the man in the doorway, who looked like a bodybuilder. His loose-fitting Hilfiger gangsta-wear was open to the navel to show off his pecs and six pack. He had high-top Nike running shoes; all that was missing was the poser, sideways white billcap.

“Can’t do that,” Manning said, leaving the van running and setting the emergency brake. “Got a schedule to keep.”

“Are you deaf, or just stupid? I told you to sod off!” The sentry stepped out of the doorway. With a practiced snap of his wrist, he telescoped a black baton to full length—seventeen inches of spring steel with a weighted steel knob on the business end.

Manning ignored him. He turned on his emergency lights, then got out of the van and headed for the rear doors.

“Hey!” the sentry called at his back.

James and Hawkins exited the far side of the truck. Hawkins, the only one carrying a conventional weapon, covered the shop entrance from the front bumper with a suppressor-equipped machine pistol.

As the sentry rounded the back of the van, Manning raised his trank gun to greet him. The range was three feet and closing.

Manning put the dart between the sentry’s lapels, into a bulging right pec.

The hypo hit the guy hard enough to stop him in his tracks. The color and the anger drained from his face, replaced by shock as he stared at the trank gun and the report echoed down the alley.

It took four seconds for the guy to realize he hadn’t just been shot in the heart. Then he ripped the dart out of his chest in fury and threw it on the ground between them. He brandished the baton. “What you think you’re playing, you fucking bender? Is this some kind of fucking joke?”

In two more seconds, the 250-pound guard was trembling and staggering like a near comatose drunk. Two seconds after that, he went down for the count.

As he fell, he reached out to grab Manning for support. The big Canadian sidestepped out of the way, letting the man topple forward. The sentry banged his head hard on the rear bumper as he went down. He never felt the impact; he was unconscious before he hit the ground.

Manning quickly reloaded the trank gun while James hauled the limp sentry toward the metal door by the back of his jacket collar. A unlocked padlock hung from the door’s hasp.

James and Manning burst through the entrance side by side, with Hawkins right behind them.

A fraction of an instant later, Encizo and McCarter kicked the storeroom door off its hinges.

The brick walls were lined with tiers of cardboard boxes and five-gallon plastic tubs. Four guys sat around a card table in their shirtsleeves, drinking mint tea and smoking tobacco from ornate hookahs. Two of the men carried autopistols in shoulder leather.

Before they could reach for them, the trank guns popped out four darts. On impact, the explosive charges in the hypos made faint flashes in the dim light. The flashes were followed by shrill cries of pain. Two of the bodyguards managed to get to their feet before falling on the floor. The other two never made it off their chairs; they slumped facedown on the card table.

“We’re clear,” McCarter said. He took in the unconscious bodies. “Which one’s our guy?”

“This one,” James said as he raised a stout, black-turbaned man from the table and held him propped in his chair.

Dr. Freddy Hassan was sixty-one years old, long bearded, grizzled, with spectacular bushy eyebrows. He had large pores and a peppering of brown moles on his cheeks, his bloated nose and his forehead.

“Let’s roll,” McCarter said.

James and Hawkins stretched Dr. Freddy out on the floor, belly up. Then Hawkins stripped off the turban, revealing a coiled, bobby-pinned topknot of waist-long, coarse gray hair. He pulled heavy shears and a cordless electric trimmer from his jacket pocket.

The others left Hawkins to it.

Their mission was hit-and-git.

McCarter, Manning, James and Encizo moved quickly, using plastic cable ties on all the downed men, securing wrists behind their backs and tethering their ankles. They confiscated cell phones and ripped the landline out of the wall. After Encizo dragged the curry man into the storeroom with the others, they opened their SOG Auto-Clips and started cutting off the men’s clothes. They took their shoes and socks, too, leaving them naked on the floor.

It wasn’t strictly part of the job, but a little psy ops never hurt.

“Man, you are really messing him up,” James said as he leaned over Hawkins’s shoulder.

“What are you talking about? He looks great,” Hawkins insisted.

He had already hacked off Dr. Freddy’s beard and the long hair, and was going to town with the electric trimmer, crudely shaving his chin, his cheeks and his head. In a final flourish, Hawkins sheared off the dramatic eyebrows, too.

The unconscious financier bled from dozens of tiny cuts where Hawkins had nicked him with scissor points and trimmer blades.

“Looks like he fell into a weedwhacker,” Encizo remarked.

“Even his own mother won’t recognize him,” Manning said.

“DIA will,” McCarter said. “They’ve got his fingerprints.”

Phoenix Force had already accomplished two-thirds of its mission. They had live-captured a high-profile, politically sensitive figure, and changed his appearance so he could be spirited out of the country without raising alarm. All that remained was to arrange a pass off of the captive to an on-the-books U.S. intelligence service. Dr. Freddy was going to wake up in a nameless prison in Syria or Dakar with a twelve-volt battery connected to his balls.

They left the boom box booming in the shopfront to cover cries for help from the bound men after they came to. As James and Encizo carried Dr. Freddy to the back of the van, Manning locked the padlock on the rear entrance.

With McCarter behind the wheel, they were out of the alley and back on the main road in a hurry. He negotiated the crosstown traffic snarls and free-for-all roundabouts like the professional driver he was. As they closed on the drop-off location, McCarter took out a disposable cell phone and made the call to DIA’s London branch.

“I have a package for you,” he said to the man who picked up on the other end. “It’s something that’s been on your wish list for a long time. Highly perishable, though. You need to pick it up in fifteen minutes or less, and move it out of country within two hours.”

“Who the hell is this?” demanded the agent on the other end. “How did you get this number?”

“If you want Penguin, bucko,” McCarter said, “you’d better come and get him before he wakes up and walks away. He’s in the phone booth near the corner of Great Russell and Bloomsbury. An ambulance would do the job nicely.” Then he hung up, wiped the phone down and threw it out the window.

A long line of traffic inched toward the intersection just ahead.

When the van came up alongside a red phone booth, James and Hawkins slid back the side door and jumped out carrying Dr. Freddy between them by the armpits. They quickly muscled him into the booth and shut him inside. There were pedestrians moving in both directions on the sidewalk, but no one stopped. No one said anything. Up at the corner of Bloomsbury and Great Russell Street, the light turned green. James and Hawkins piled back into the van, and McCarter drove on.

A few blocks down he made a left turn and circled the little park in the middle of Bloomsbury Square. When he was sure they hadn’t been followed, he retraced his route on the other side of the street and pulled into a loading zone within sight of the phone booth.

“Now we’re going to see just how good these guys are,” Manning said as he checked his wristwatch for the elapsed time.

The drop-off was close to DIA’s London HQ and a major hospital, where they could commandeer an ambulance.

Despite what McCarter had told the agent, he had no intention of letting someone like Dr. Freddy “walk away.” That’s what the engine block in the back of the van was for. The fallback plan was to chain it to his waist and sink him in the Thames.

People walked right past the booth where Dr. Freddy sat slumped. Nobody paid any attention; in fact, they averted their eyes when they saw him. Given his rough appearance and the neighborhood’s decline, they thought he was an overdosed heroin addict. After about ten minutes, a siren sounded in the distance. A couple of minutes later, an ambulance stopped at the curb beside the phone booth with roof beacon flashing. Two uniformed attendants picked up the unconscious man, loaded him inside, and then the ambulance left the curb, siren blaring.

“Heathrow, here he comes,” James said.

“That’s where we’re heading, too,” McCarter informed the others. “The Gulfstream is fueled and ready to go. Looks like we might have another job on our plates.”