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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.”
“Not by much,” McCarter said. He typed a quick question to send to the Farm. “Riots in Moscow?”
“Confirmed,” Delahunt answered. “Moscow police overwhelmed.”
McCarter and Manning looked to the sky. If London was going to be the site of flash mob violence, there was the possibility that the city on the Thames would receive a hammering from the same weapon that had scarred the Russian capital. The Briton typed in another question. “We expecting rain?”
“Wish we could tell,” Delahunt answered.
McCarter grit his teeth. “So while we’re looking at these berks, someone could be targeting my city?”
“Berks?” Manning asked.
“Berkshire Hunts,” McCarter explained. It was more rhyming slang, and Manning shook his head as he figured out the curse that his term stood in for.
“It’s unlikely that our opposition could stage a second orbital weapon launch, nor probable that they would assault this city without a declaration of intent,” Manning said. “According to the news, Moscow broadcast sources received a threat a few hours before the attack.”
“And Carmen would have told us if there was something for London,” McCarter said. He texted again. “No warnings?”
“None. Yet,” was the response.
McCarter’s brow wrinkled in concern. “Get C, R and T.J. on deck.”
“Already done.”
McCarter pocketed his phone. They were already on Haymarket Road, and in the distance, even in the morning daylight, he could see the bright, glowing signs of the Piccadilly Circus. McCarter could tell that they were on Haymarket due to the presence of four rearing horses off to one side. They were carved in black marble, and were beautifully polished. This statue, nestled in a semicurved corner over a small fountain, was one of McCarter’s favorite pieces of art in London, a visage of natural beauty and power. Its fame would always be in the shadow of Eros at the center of Piccadilly Circus, the massive cherub that was poised on one foot, aiming its bow at some distant lover’s heart, surrounded by the blazing neon of Piccadilly’s shops. McCarter squinted and he could barely make out the tall form in the distance over the heads of the massing hooligans.
The throng they trailed had swelled even further in size. Four more groups had hooked up to form a mob of potential rioters that seemed like an army. Throughout the crowd, he and Manning took note of dozens of glass bottles held up like torches of liberty. A more ominous sight along the edges of the crowd were the black handles of knives poking out of waistbands here and there. A couple of men carried gym bags, signaling that they were devotees of the Manchester Blacks. McCarter was too aware that those satchels could easily conceal firearms, as he and Phoenix Force had managed to disguise their arsenal that way in the past.
“I see four men with those bags on this end of the throng,” Manning stated.
“Who knows how many are mixed in with that lot,” McCarter grumbled. “I’ll need a distraction.”
Manning nodded, knowing that McCarter would need to ambush one of the bag carriers to see what he had hidden in a nylon sack. The Briton slipped closer to a hooligan he’d picked since he was the rearmost of the group. This particular soccer thug looked sober and too well groomed to be in with this lot, despite the fact that he wore team colors.
It was a simple prisoner snatch, something he had done in both service to Britain and to the Sensitive Operations Group. Off to the side, a sudden crackle of a dozen firecrackers popping drew all eyes. That was Manning’s distraction, utilizing a small portion of explosives that the demolitions genius always kept on his person. McCarter slipped his forearm around the bagman’s throat and brought up his free fist, driving the bottom edge of it hard against his target’s ear. The hooligan was paralyzed with agony as his eardrum was ruptured by the boxing of his ear, and luckily the man’s nerves were frozen, maintaining the death grip on the nylon web straps of his bag. McCarter swiftly backed into a small nook between shopfronts, sliding down the narrow entryway.
The prisoner struggled to speak, but McCarter cut him off with a sharp blow that landed just above his navel, driving the wind from his lungs. He was unable to cry out for assistance in the dark and narrow walkway down which McCarter and his captive had disappeared. The thug reached up with one hand, fingers hooked like claws, but the Briton grabbed his wrist and burst his knuckles on the brick wall. McCarter was more concerned with what his opponent’s other hand was doing, and he yanked on the hooligan’s collar, pulling him off balance.
The man’s hand rose, a snub-nosed revolver locked in it, but it was pointed toward the alley, not at the Phoenix Force commander. With a hard chop, McCarter jarred the thug’s neck with enough force that he dropped the weapon, his knees buckling.
“Not nice. Don’t you know they have laws against that shit here?” McCarter asked, yanking the hooligan’s wrists down to the small of his back. He slipped a plastic cable tie out of his pocket and bound his prisoner’s hands behind his back.
“Fuck off, Nancy,” the goon snarled.
McCarter whacked him again, this time in the temple, sending him into unconsciousness. With the bagman out cold, he was able to look inside the nylon gym bag. He saw dozens of canisters that he recognized as grenades, their pin-laden tops ominously looking back at him. A shadow fell across the entryway opening and McCarter turned to see who it was. Manning was there, keeping watch.
McCarter pulled out one canister and saw that it was chemical smoke. There were three different kinds of hand-thrown bombs inside, none of them purely explosive, but there were plenty of tear gas and stun grenades on hand to sow terror in Piccadilly Circus.
“Four that we saw, maybe three more groups,” McCarter mused.
“Whatever the amount, there are plenty of grenades to start a wild riot,” Manning replied.
McCarter grimaced. He could hear sirens in the distance. The Metropolitan police were on their way, alerted to action by Stony Man Farm. He didn’t know if that would be enough, however. He hoisted the confiscated bag, holding it out to Manning. “Forget about the shotgun rounds. We’ll need this.”
“How will we track where these came from?” Manning asked.
“Bugger that,” McCarter grumbled. “You’ve got hundreds of hooligans ready to go crazy amid thousands of innocents.”
Manning held out his backpack and McCarter gave him half a dozen flash-bangs. “We could just start the violence early if we throw these around.”
“Or we could throw them off their timing—and pull their attention our way,” McCarter answered.
Manning nodded. It was a standard bit of strategy on the part of the action-oriented Phoenix Force leader. If there was the potential for mayhem, McCarter chose to make himself a target to pull trouble away from those he’d sworn to protect. “I’ll give us some room.”
McCarter saw the brawny Canadian draw his Colt Python. The powerful revolver would make plenty of noise, being heard more clearly than any mere 9 mm pistol with its Magnum level loads. There was one thing that the Phoenix pair could count on—the reactions of everyday people to gunfire. They wouldn’t be certain how the crowd of hooligans would react, but luckily the shoppers had thinned out at the sight of a mob of rowdy drunks.
“Let fly,” McCarter said, and Manning aimed at a facade of a building, triggering three rapid, bellowing shots at the brick. The Magnum’s hollowpoints were easily stopped by the stone and mortar, preventing dangerous ricochets or rounds cutting through a wall to harm a second-floor resident.
People scattered, running away from the heart of Piccadilly Circus while the throng clogging Haymarket whirled at the sudden burst of new violence. The Python was far more authoritative than the firecrackers Manning had dropped. The rioters glared at the two men who stood defiantly in the middle of the road.
Manning and McCarter were both the same height, six foot one, but Manning was broad-shouldered and barrel-chested while McCarter was leaner.
“Who do you berks think you are?” one of the bagmen grunted. He had noticed McCarter’s bag full of tricks.
“The Peace Corps,” McCarter replied.
“Why don’t we promote you berks from corps to corpses?” the spokesman said. He turned to his mates. “Fuck ’em up!”
The wall of thugs surged, taking one step forward, but McCarter and Manning had been cooking their flash-bangs from the moment the loudmouthed bagman snarled his response to McCarter. The Phoenix pros hurled their flash-bangs in underhanded tosses, both canister grenades rolling between the crowd’s feet.
Detonating, the distraction devices unleashed twin stunning pulses through the crowd of drunken thugs. The unified surge that they had attempted transformed into a snarl of limbs as dozens folded over with painful deafness. Those who were farther back in the riot crowd tripped over those who had been halted by the blasts. McCarter and Manning had produced a dam of humanity against the flood tide of rage that would have overwhelmed them, but the grenades were only the beginning of what they needed.
The bagman had pulled a pistol from his waistband. McCarter, a British Olympic pistol champion, saw him start his quick draw and hauled out his Browning Hi-Power, triggering a quick shot faster than the gunman. The hooligan jerked violently as the bridge of his nose exploded with a precision-placed shot straight to the brain.
Not being a dedicated handgunner like his British friend, Manning whipped out his shotgun and fired the .12-gauge ferret rounds into the knees of three rioting hooligans. The tear gas shells weren’t designed to be fired directly at someone, but with the numbers they were facing, Manning erred on the side of injury rather than shooting someone in the chest.
Legs knocked out from under them, the thugs tumbled, providing a break that their allies, unhindered by flash-grenade deafness, had trouble passing. The tumble of stunned bodies created by the explosions snarled their path. It was a brief reprieve, and both Manning and McCarter were facing down a dozen angry hooligans whom they weren’t willing to gun down in cold blood.
Conversely, the surging rioters were out for Phoenix Force blood and outnumbered the merciful warriors six to one.
CHAPTER TWO
Normally, Gary Manning did not rely on melee weapons when it came to close-quarters combat. He preferred to utilize his great strength and skill to deal with opponents, but now he was faced with a less than optimal situation. The London roughneck charging at him had a brain-smashing weapon locked in his fist.
Manning quickly reversed the pistol-grip pump in his big hands and brought the weapon up to bat aside the whistling steel of a ball-peen hammer targeting his skull. Metal struck metal with a loud clang and a spark, and the Canadian knew that although his weapon would not be reliable anymore, it had saved him from a traumatic head injury. He knotted his left hand into a ham-size fist and brought it up hard under the chin of the hammer-wielding rioter. The uppercut literally lifted Manning’s target off his feet and hurled him against another soccer hooligan behind him.
Manning didn’t have time to celebrate his victory. Instead he whirled and jammed his shoulder against the chest of a third rioter, getting inside of the arc of the young man’s scything knife. The shoulder block turned the blade-wielding hooligan into a plow, which allowed the powerful Canadian to run over four of the surging rioters. He reached up and snared the improvised battering ram by his football jersey and whipped him around as a living club, bowling over more of the rowdy maniacs.
Manning glanced quickly to one side and saw that McCarter had trapped one of his foes in an armlock and was utilizing the hooligan as a fulcrum and a shield. The big Canadian returned his attention to the combat at hand in time to hear his captive howl from the stab of a sharpened strip of metal into his shoulder. Manning hurled his charge aside, away from where he’d encounter more rioter weapons, and snapped down a judo chop on the forearm that held the bloody shank. Bones cracked under the assault, and the ruffian stumbled backward.
