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.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Port Angeles, Washington,
7:23 a.m. PDT
As Commander Starkey backed down through the sail hatch, particulate matter howled up past him in a black torrent. He descended into swirling darkness, reversing down the ladder with forty pounds of fire extinguisher on his back. On the way down, he counted the ladder’s rungs, one by one. Relative to the ground, the ladder canted off to the right. The engine and prop vibration trembled through his hands and arms, as well as his feet. Inside the hollow shell of titanium, the warning klaxon was much louder, contributing to the sense of chaos.
Five rungs down and even with the high-intensity headlamp he couldn’t see the backs of his own gloved hands. The concentration of smoke was always thickest at the highest point of the hull—in other words, the sail. He had to be careful, but he also had to move quickly through it. He needed to get his people in and seal the sail hatch shut. An influx of oxygen from the outside could cause a catastrophic flare-up.
Somewhere in the darkness above, his number two, Chuck Howe, was starting down the ladder.
Starkey knew there were twelve rungs from the top of the sail to the control deck ceiling on Akula/Bars-class subs. And there were a dozen more rungs to the control deck floor. With a variant design like this, things below could be altogether different.
That thought gave the commander a sudden jittery-sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.
He squelched it.
Fifteen rungs down, Starkey stopped climbing and braced himself against the ladder. He switched on the NIFTI—his eyes in the dark—and aimed