Orbital Velocity

McCarter looked at the pad on which the Canadian demolitions expert had been calculating trajectories. “What about those angles? Did someone put a satellite in orbit right over Moscow?”

Manning tapped the end of his pen against his chin. McCarter could see a brilliant light working behind the Canadian’s eyes. “We don’t have footage of their whole approach. All I can tell is that they came in off of a supra orbital arc. Whether it was akin to the supergun or a satellite-mounted kinetic weapons system I couldn’t tell without proper examination of their approach vectors. Even then we’d be dealing with over-the-horizon launches.”

“You know, maybe the Farm picked up something,” McCarter offered.

Manning shook his head. “Unlikely. A release of kinetic darts would have a minimal thermal profile. There’s no indication of any rocket thrusters so they would be untrackable except when they hit the atmosphere. Then the friction of their passage through the air would provide for infrared tracking, but we’re looking at trailing a projectile at thousands of feet per second…”

“Terminal velocity. We experienced that kind of speed ourselves,” McCarter replied.

“A little too closely,” Manning returned. He smiled. “I bet you had the time of your life playing bumper cars with space shuttles.”

McCarter held up his thumb and forefinger to indicate a small amount. “A bit, mate.”

Manning chuckled, and McCarter looked away from him, his eye catching something going on in the corner. He’d come to the pub to watch the two booths full of young men wearing football jerseys. He counted twelve of them, all shaved-headed, with faces that looked as if they’d taken multiple punches over the years. These were soccer hooligans if they were anything, a breed of troublemaker with whom McCarter was quite familiar. A couple of them were looking at their cell phones, the brightly glowing LCD screens reflecting in their eyes lending them a haunting, soulless appearance.

“Gary, you know all about technology. What’s it called when groups assemble due to instant messages?” McCarter asked.

“Flash mobs,” Manning answered immediately. “Given a proper network of like-minded people, flash mobs are hard, almost impossible to anticipate and difficult to track. Why?”

McCarter nodded toward the hooligans who were assembled at the two booths. Manning narrowed his eyes, studying the group as the two men with the cell phones pocketed them and gestured to the other jersey-clad men. The group threw down their money on the table for the waitress to scoop up as she took their order for the current round. In a London pub, you paid before you got your alcohol. She returned with a tray of lager bottles, which the hoodlums grabbed off her tray. Where they had been garrulous moments before, now they had fallen into silence.

“As always, good instincts,” Manning noted. “There’s no game on tonight, and these guys are in a hurry for something.”

“We’ve got a little bit of time before we’re called in. Let’s see where they’re headed,” McCarter suggested.

Manning nodded. He left a tip for the bartender and the two men exited the pub, staying back but still within sight of the small mob of ruffians. Both Manning and McCarter were members of Phoenix Force, the foreign-operations strike team of Stony Man Farm. McCarter had summoned Manning to London to assist him in checking out rumors that someone had been organizing the roughhousing young men of the hooligan scene. There had already been plenty of arrests of more enterprising hooligan gangs doing muscle work for organized crime and street-corner drug dealing. This had been part of a disturbing trend from London to Vladivostok. The clique mentality of the thuggish sports fans had given the roughnecks an impetus to organize, and they had found plenty of opportunity to make money from mayhem and destruction.

McCarter frowned. “Viruses tend to spread in patterns, right?”

Manning nodded. “Especially social constructs.”

McCarter’s frown deepened. “This isn’t the normal kind of sport fan. These are ruffians who have taken their social ostracism and turned it into gang mentality. In the U.S., street gangs are nothing like the Crips and Bloods who developed in the 1970s into gun-wielding thugs. But right here, we’re seeing the same kind of evolutionary changes occurring among the hooligans.”

“In order to fund their lifestyle, they commit robberies or they sell drugs,” Manning agreed. “And they could increase their level of violence—”

“As if they aren’t savage enough in hand-to-hand,” McCarter interrupted.

“Then you don’t want to imagine them with shotguns or rifles,” Manning said.

McCarter nodded. He kept his eye on the group. He’d kept watch over them all morning. The soccer thugs had been on a pub crawl all night long, and it was close to nine now. So far, he had Stony Man’s cybernetics teams studying Twitter notification streams and other text message hubs to look for signs of organized communication networks. The young men were now on the move soon after a near apocalyptic event in Moscow. McCarter couldn’t believe that this was a coincidence.

He pulled his phone and sent a secure text to the Farm, hoping to catch someone’s attention.

“Hooligans in motion. Copy?”

There was no response, and the Briton wrinkled his nose. Of course the Farm wasn’t going to take the electronic organization of London street gangs as a priority over a high-powered strike on a major international capital. He looked over at Manning, who gripped the strap of his backpack. Both McCarter and his Canadian partner were well-armed with handguns and knives, but the satchel contained more potent equipment.

McCarter was someone who had a predisposition to action and had developed a level of lethal ruthlessness when dealing with opponents who had no qualms about murder. However, the thought of opening fire on unarmed foes was something that the Special Air Service veteran found abhorrent. Manning’s backpack had a pair of shotguns, but the twelve-gauge weapons were filled with nonlethal shells. The initial loads inside the pistol-gripped pumps were tear-gas-spewing ferret rounds, but there were bandoliers filled with mixed gas and spongy baton rounds. While the ammunition wasn’t intended to be deadly, they could kill if Manning or McCarter chose their shots carefully.

McCarter felt that if he was going to drop an assailant permanently, he’d use either his beloved 9 mm Browning Hi-Power or his new backup pistol, a Springfield Armory Enhanced Micro Pistol. The EMP was also a 9 mm pistol, and it also shared the same mechanism that allowed him to carry the Browning locked and cocked; the EMP was simply a resized version of the Hi-Power’s cousin, the John Moses Browning–designed 1911 pistol. The flat EMP fit easily into an ankle holster. Manning had his choice of sidearms, as well. The big Canadian had opted for a .357 Magnum Colt Python with a 9 mm Walther P5 for backup. For quiet but bloody work, the two carried chisel-bladed knives in sheaths around their necks.

“No response from the Farm?” Manning asked.

McCarter confirmed Manning’s query. “On the bright side, they might have had the kind of data you couldn’t access over a TV news screen.”

“And far superior physics simulation programming to allow for air current effects upon objects in motion,” Manning replied.

“Would that make it easier to determine what the weapon was?” McCarter asked.

“Slightly,” Manning answered. “They’d also know if a radioactive element was utilized in the kinetic darts.”

“Radioactive metal? You think we’d have to deal with that again?” McCarter asked.

Manning shrugged his brawny shoulders. “I always assume the worst, but even with the rod assault being made of conventional materials, it carries enough kinetic energy to obliterate entire city blocks and infrastructure. You noted the flames.”

“Gas mains and electrical lines disrupted,” McCarter agreed. “They haven’t confirmed the dead, but if just one of those rods hit a crowded tube, er, subway…”

Manning grimaced at that thought. “It wouldn’t have to hit dead-on. If my calculations of the mass of the orbital impact objects are correct, we’re looking at a landing within a quarter mile of a subway tunnel. According to the map I was working from, we’re looking at between four and seven tunnels collapsed, as well as at least three transit platforms. The death toll underground can reach over two thousand, independent of above-surface structural collapse.”

McCarter’s mood matched the expression on Manning’s face. Since the Canadian was a demolitions expert, the Briton had little cause to doubt his friend’s calculations. McCarter returned his attention to the hooligans, whose numbers had tripled as they met up with more groups of their comrades. He felt a moment of uncertainty, judging the superior numbers he and Manning would face if their quarry decided to turn en masse and confront them. The Phoenix Force veterans were survivors of multiple riots, having fought off dozens of crazed opponents alongside their other three Phoenix Force partners, but in those situations, they had terrain and training advantages. The hooligans were something different from what they would be used to—men who used their strength of numbers as a lethal weapon against foes unlucky to get into their path.

McCarter spotted hammers and sharpened shanks of steel in some of the hooligans’ hands, and the football fans were uniformly buzzed on beer, drunk enough to surrender their individuality to the madness of the mob but not so inebriated that they couldn’t concentrate on targets of rage and opportunity. With weapons in hand, these men were a threat to anyone they encountered, and even though the group had tripled in size, they still hadn’t reached their final destination. Manning slipped his backpack off his shoulder, allowing McCarter to reach in surreptitiously and withdraw the stubby shotgun and transfer it under his windbreaker. Suddenly the ex-SAS commando was wishing that he had his preferred Cobray submachine gun, a well-tuned little chatterbox that could spit out its deadly 9 mm kisses at 800 hits per minute.

“It’s not going to be much if they turn on us,” Manning noted.

McCarter managed a smirk. “As long as they don’t have guns, we can at least use the shotguns as clubs.”

Manning nodded at the suggestion. “Sometimes your optimism can be contagious.”

McCarter snorted. “But this isn’t one of those times.”

“You read my mind,” Manning replied with a chuckle.

McCarter’s cell phone beeped, letting the Briton know that he’d received a text message from Stony Man Farm. He fished out the phone.

“Message received. Network shows thugs assembling at Piccadilly Circus,” the text read. From the use of full words, but terse wording, McCarter could tell that it had been Carmen Delahunt who had sent the message. Akira Tokaido would have used abbreviated terms, while Huntington Wethers would have written out entire sentences, including prepositions.

McCarter quickly typed a reply. “Alert locals, incl Flying Squad.”

The growing mass, headed to one of the most famous shopping districts in the free world, would turn into a rampaging stampede of bulls in a proverbial china shop. The sight of hammers and shivs in various hands showed a capacity for violence. He checked his watch. At 10:00 a.m. there would be hundreds if not thousands of shoppers on hand for the buzzed, hostile hooligans to menace. The mention of the Flying Squad, London Metropolitan Police’s premier emergency response team, was one of McCarter’s hopes for evening the odds, as well as limiting the chances of fatalities. The Met’s Flying Squads were made up of rough-and-ready men, many of them veterans of the SAS like McCarter himself, or of the Royal Marines. But they were more than just gun-toting civil servants. The warriors in the “Sweeney” units, named for the Flying Squad’s rhyme of Sweeney Todd, were also trained in emergency first aid, as well as riot suppression. If the Flying Squad wasn’t on hand to immediately squelch the hooligans’ violence, they could provide vital life-saving assistance to their victims.

“Notified,” Delahunt’s message returned.

McCarter ran his thumbs across his phone’s minikeyboard. “Moscow news?”

“Situation remains fluid,” Delahunt told him.

“Fluid,” Manning grumbled. “Moscow’s football gangs are of a slightly more violent level of hostility than London’s.”