“We’re in Cairo now,” Tokaido said, staring to frown. “The signal is splitting…one call is going to Langley, Virginia. I’ll ignore that one. It’s a fake. Aha! He’s going on a ground line now, across the transatlantic cable. I can kill the call now if you want.”
“Carmen?” Kurtzman asked a ton of questions in his voice.
“Just tell me when,” she repeated calmly.
“And we’re in Nova Scotia! A lighthouse off the northern shore…now, that one I know. It’s an SAS safehouse! David has mentioned it from time to time.”
“Get ready, I’m betting this is the last leg,” Kurtzman said. “He’ll want the call traced back to his old agency, a little political revenge for the SAS kicking him out.”
Tokaido leaned forward over his console. “We’ve gone cellular…back on landlines…damn, this guy is good…switching through Texas…cellular again…Illinois!”
“Now!” Kurtzman shouted, pointing across the room.
Without a word, Delahunt flipped a switch.
“Did it work?” Kurtzman demanded.
“Unknown,” Delahunt said, removing her helmet. “The timing had to be perfect, so either Cascade just got the design plans on how to make a Sony PlayStation, or the schematics for the Chameleon. There’s no way to tell.”
“Inform Able Team the ball may be in play,” Kurtzman directed her, then turned. “Akira, good job. Now give Phoenix Force the location of Harrison. It’s their job now.”
“Does Barbara or Hal want him alive anymore?” Tokaido asked, stroking his keyboard once more with the skill of a concert pianist.
Turning his chair around, Kurtzman snorted at that. “For the moment.”
Near Matua Island
AT THE BOW of the hovercraft, Hawkins was watching the horizon of the ocean with a pair of binoculars. Line of sight in the open sea was seven miles, but the volcano peak of Matua rose high enough to be visible for well past a hundred miles.
“Alert,” Akira Tokaido said over the radio in his ear. “Somebody has just placed a cell-phone call to Cascade in your immediate area.”
“At sea?” McCarter demanded, touching his throat. “Where?”
“Just east of you. Roughly four miles.”
“Move!” McCarter roared, pointing to the right.
Holding the joystick tight, James shoved the throttle all the way and the hovercraft rocketed forward, flashing above the ocean waves.
“Anything on radar?” Encizo asked, swaying to the bouncing motion of the speeding craft. Opening the breech of the grenade launcher mounted beneath his AK-105, he slid out the antipersonnel round of steel slivers. Designed by the DEA to blow off door locks so they could instantly enter drug labs, what the thundering barrage of metal fléchettes did to human flesh had to be seen to be believed. Tucking the AP shell in a pocket, he thumbed in a stun bag round and closed the breech with a solid snap. They still wanted to take Harrison alive. If only for a little while, until they knew who had the Chameleon and what they planned on doing with it.
Craning his neck, James did a fast check. “Not yet. Radar screen is clear.”
Tense minutes passed, and then James sharply whistled, gesturing to the southeast.
Swinging his binoculars that way, Hawkins saw it was a small speedboat with a slim, pale man at the wheel.
“It’s Harrison!” he called out.
McCarter growled and raised his AK-105, then lowered it again. The speedboat was far outside the range of the assault rifle. Swinging up the Barrett, Manning braced himself and worked the bolt, levering in a cartridge.
“We want him alive,” McCarter reminded brusquely, sounding almost sorry he had to say it.
“That was the plan, David,” Manning growled and stroked the trigger.
As the Barrett boomed, Hawkins watched the speedboat closely. The first shot seemed to have hit nothing, but firing from a bouncing platform at a bouncing target was damn near impossible at this distance. However, Hawkins saw Harrison snap his head around as the noise of the Barrett reached him a second later. The man dropped his jaw at the sight of the oncoming hovercraft filled with armed men.
His own hands aching to fire, Hawkins barely restrained himself as Harrison shoved the throttle of the speedboat all the way. The nimble craft leaped forward, almost doubling its speed.
Levering in another round, Manning fired again, and this time, a huge chunk of the wooden gunwale exploded off the speedboat. Incredibly, Harrison left the helm and rushed to the rear of the craft. The reason why was made clear in just a moment as he tossed two bodies overboard. Oddly, he had a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, but it was clearly too slim to hold the Chameleon unless he had totally disassembled the jamming unit.
As the lightened speedboat increased its speed again, Harrison raced back to the helm and swung directly away from Phoenix Force, heading out to the open sea.
At first, the distance between the two crafts stayed the same, then the gap slowly began to widen. McCarter bitterly cursed at the sight. The hovercraft was a lot faster than the speedboat, but it was also carrying tremendously more weight. The chase had started equal, but now it was all in favor of Harrison.
“He’s getting away,” Encizo pointed out, firing his assault rifle, even though he knew the rounds couldn’t reach.
“If he does, we’ll never find him again,” McCarter stated, switching his grip from the assault rifle to the 40 mm grenade launcher mounted under the main barrel. “Okay, we have no choice. Dead is better than escaped. Take him out!”
Expecting that order, the team raised their weapons and cut loose, the combined chatter of the Kalashnikovs almost equaling the strident boom of the unleashed Barrett. Harrison ducked just in time as the back of his chair was blown apart. Then something splashed into the waves just off his bow and exploded, pelting hot salt water across the speeding vessel.
More 40 mm grenades rained down around the boat as the team got the range of their moving target. Then the Barrett spoke once more and the cowling was slammed off the aft engine assembly. With a gurgling sputter, the twin gasoline motors stopped working, only to whoof into orange flames.
As the powerless speedboat began to coast to a stop, a dripping-wet Harrison popped into view with two handguns, firing both together. McCarter emptied a clip at the man, but only the last few rounds finding their target as the hovercraft finally got into range. Blood exploded from Harrison’s left shoulder, and he spun about to drop out of sight again.
Still racing closer, James sharply angled the hovercraft aside as a wheezing Harrison appeared with a flare gun held in both hands. The sizzling charge rocketed past the hovercraft, missing the engine by only a foot. Phoenix Force answered with their Kalashnikovs, the lead chewing up the speedboat from stem to stern. Incredibly, their quarry popped up once more with two weapons in his grip, the briefcase dangling from his wrist now with a sheet of paper sticking out of the side showing it had just been opened and hastily closed. As the flare gun flashed in discharge, he dropped it and held the larger pistol with both hands before working the trigger. There came the deep, strident boom of a rifle.
As the flare streaked by harmlessly, something punched hard through the rubber skirt of the hovercraft, and there came the horrible high-pitched scream of a turbine shattering, the blades breaking into countless pieces.
Dropping his rifle, a cursing James grabbed the joystick with both arms, trying to bring the wildly veering hovercraft back under control by brute force.
Forcing his chattering assault rifle to stay on the speedboat, McCarter scowled as he shot numerous holes in the hull at the waterline. What kind of bleeding weapon was that? The man was holding a pistol, not some sort a bloody hunting rifle! Then McCarter noticed Harrison working the bolt on the pistol to ram in another huge brass cartridge. A bolt-action pistol?
“That’s a Wichita Thunderbolt!” Hawkins shouted over his chattering weapon. “Fires a .575 Magnum rifle round!”
“We noticed!” McCarter told hi
m, sending another 40 mm round toward the listing speedboat.
Grinning in triumph, Harrison raised the bizarre weapon again as the bow of the craft violently exploded from the incoming grenade. Thrown sideways, he lost the Wichita and it went flying.
Desperately throwing himself after the weapon, Harrison tried for a save, but it went over the side and vanished into the ocean.
With a roar, the burning engines blew apart, spreading the flames across the listing vessel. Suddenly, the hovercraft leveled out and darted forward. McCarter and Hawkins stitched Harrison across the bloody shirt and the man staggered, but didn’t go down. He was wearing body armor!
Diving for the deck, Harrison came up again with a revolver and the flare gun in his red-streaked fists. Shifting his aim, Encizo fired, and the stun bag hit Harrison directly in the face. Blood and teeth went airborne as he went backward over the side and splashed into the water.
It took James a few moments to guide the hovercraft around the burning speedboat, and as it got clear the Phoenix Force commandos discharged everything they had into the murky water. A red stain appeared and began to spread outward. Ruthlessly, Manning lowered the barrel of the Barrett and put a couple of deafening rounds smack through the middle of the crimson fog.
Using his body weight to control the joystick, James maneuvered the damaged hovercraft in a circle around the area, as the rest of the team randomly shot into the ocean. Encizo pulled the pin of a grenade, but McCarter stopped him.
“Don’t waste it,” he said as the red stain continued to expand. “He’s dead. Look.”
“The cavalry arrives,” Manning stated, shouldering his weapon. A couple of shark fins were cutting through the waves nearby, the deadly killers obviously attracted by the smell of fresh blood in the water.
“Now let’s find the buyer on Matua,” McCarter said.
Very carefully, Encizo reinserted the pin into his grenade.
“Well, whoever they are,” Hawkins said, slapping in a fresh clip, “they can’t possibly be as much trouble as this guy.”
“Let’s go find out,” James said, turning the off-balance hovercraft directly toward Matua Island.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Cascade Headquarters
Drumming her blue fingernails on the steering wheel of the Cadillac, the angry whore looked down at Carl Lyons crouched under the dashboard.
“Okay, we’re here, asshole,” she snapped. “Now what? If this is a robbery—”
“Can it! Act normal and you stay alive,” Lyons ordered, nudging her nylon-clad thigh with the muzzle of the Colt Python.
Flipping a wave of platinum hair over a bare shoulder, the busty whore sneered in reply, then put on a neutral face as the doors to the loading dock of Building 14 began to lift open.
“They’re going to bust you apart,” Arnette muttered out of the side of her mouth. “And I’ll piss myself laughing to death.”
Lyons just gestured with his Colt Python for her to keep driving. Shifting into gear, the woman pressed her sandal on the accelerator.
“Tony Stark, this is the Professor,” Schwarz whispered in Lyons’s ear over the radio. “Bear just reported that Cascade got a call from Harrison. They tried for a switch, but don’t know if Woods has the goods or a dummy. The ball could be in play.”
Lyons frowned. That meant that Woods now knew the airport had been a trick, and that somebody was coming his way after the Chameleon. Damn. No time for finesse anymore.
“Roger, Professor. Looks like it’s balls to the wall. We’ll meet at the graveyard.”
“Confirm. Out.”
“Whadya say?” Arnette drawled, raising an eyebrow.
“Just keep your hand away from the emergency brake,” Lyons warned, cocking back the hammer on the massive revolver. “A sudden stop might make me accidentally blow off your tits.”
Her eyes flashed alive with fear, and Arnette made no reply, but she quickly placed her left hand back on the steering wheel where it was in plain sight.
“Laughing,” she said again softly. “I’ll be laughing all the way to your fucking grave.”
Lyons started to answer when the hum of the radio in his ear became crackling static. Bear was on time as usual. Feeling the electric surge of adrenaline, the Able Team leader turned off the radio and removed the earplug. Radios would be useless in Gary until further notice. How long it took Woods and Cascade to figure that out depended on a lot of things, first and foremost being how fast Lyons could breach the main building.
Driving past the wire fence, the big Caddy jounced over the cracked concrete of the access ramp making certain ample portions of Arnette’s anatomy bounce in a most distracting manner before it stopped. As she braked to a halt, the loading-dock door rumbled shut behind them with a hard clang of metal on metal.
“You’re ours now, idiot,” Arnette muttered. “You’ll never leave this building alive with one red cent.”
“And who says it’s a robbery?” Lyons asked, watching the windows for moving shadows.
Confusion crossed the woman’s face, and under its softening effects, for the first time Lyons caught a fleeting glimpse of the great beauty that had once been her wealth in youth, before the savage street took it away. As a former cop, the first thing he had noticed were the needle marks on her arms and thighs. It’s why she wore sandals, to shoot out between her toes, because her arms and legs were too tender to take the needle anymore. Smack, probably. It didn’t matter. It was all a one-way trip to oblivion.
“Just leave the damn engine running,” Lyons warned, getting ready.
“Hey, Arnette!” a male voice called out. “Busy day, huh, baby?”
Drumming her nails on the wheel with hard clicks, Arnette stayed motionless and stared straight ahead.
A bald man appeared at the window wearing a black turtleneck and a tan leather rig supporting an Uzi submachine gun.
“Something wrong, honey?” he asked with a lopsided grin. “Yang isn’t really that mad at you for giving him a dose. Hey, shit happens.”
Arnette flicked her eyes to the right. The bald man followed the look and stepped back in shock at the sight of Lyons pushing aside a dirty blanket.
“Sweet Jesus!” he cried, digging for the Uzi.
Lyons fired once, the Magnum slug from the .357 Colt Python blowing away half the bald head. Even as the body dropped from sight, Arnette started screaming obscenities at the top of her lungs, and beat frantically at the stinging residue of the muzzle flash across her skimpy clothing.
Having already jimmied the lock, Lyons kicked open the passenger-side door and dived out, firing fast at two more men moving his way. They fell back into forever, one of them dropping a sawed-off shotgun. Spinning fast, Lyons saw six more people across the garage, some of them going for weapons, others just standing there with their mouths hanging open.
“Freeze! This is the FBI!” he shouted, swinging up the Atchisson autoshotgun.
Now everybody went for a gun, and Lyons cut loose, the deafening roar of the superfire blowing a hellstorm of hot death. Literally chewed to pieces, the members of Cascade died on the spot, the tools on the pegboard behind them clanging loudly as they danced from the ricochets and penetrating rounds.
“You’re a feeb?” Arnette shrieked, using the street term for the FBI as she got out of the Cadillac.
As Lyons dropped the clip to reload, Arnette reached inside her blouse, pulled out a Remington .32. With no choice, Lyons threw the shotgun at her and went for his Colt. She ducked the flying shotgun and fired, the round hitting Lyons smack in the chest. He grunted as his NATO-issue body armor took the impact, then he fired back.
Walking briskly across the bloody garage, the Able Team leader checked her pulse, but it was useless.
“Dumb move, Arnette,” he said softly, reclaiming the shotgun. “Real dumb.”
Reloading quickly, Lyons checked the rest of the loading dock and found nobody else around. But he did spot a Mack truck with a Rolls-Royce Caprice in the
back. Had to be Peter Woods’s private wheels, he decided.
Shooting out all four tires on the Rolls with his Colt, Lyons then hurried back to the main garage and went up the catwalk to the overpass. Stepping outside, he felt incredibly exposed, and bent low to try to stay behind the iron safety railing as he raced between the two buildings.
Reaching the other side, he threw himself hard against he brick wall and searched for any reaction from the street below. There was no movement in the ruins, but certainly somebody had heard the Atchisson in operation. Okay, if not outside, then they were coming his way inside.
Just then voices sounded from behind the access door. Whirling, Lyons brought up his weapon just as the door swung aside.
“Who the fuck are you?” a bald man demanded, cocking back the hammer on his 9 mm HK pistol.
Were they all bald? Lyons fired from the hip, the Atchisson sending a grisly spray of the man backward into the arms of the Cascade members behind him. Releasing the autoshotgun to swing on its strap, the Able Team leader unlimbered the Colt and stepped into the building, firing at anybody with a weapon. Two more bald men died, one managing to get off a burst from an M-16 assault rifle before joining his brethren in eternity.
Grabbing his leg, Lyons cursed at the numbness spreading outward from the bloody area. There was no spurting, which meant the bullet hadn’t hit an artery, so that was good. Gingerly probing the muscle, he found it was only a flesh wound and nothing serious. Good enough.
Using a pocketknife, he slit open the leg of his pants and slapped on a military field dressing, the adhesive edging sticking to his skin in spite of the slippery blood. Good enough for now.
Limply slightly, he moved onward, sweeping through the old factory, ducking under conveyor belts thick with dust, and rusty machinery, searching for the smell of death that would lead him directly to the hidden entrance of the Cascade base.
IN THE AIR-CONDITIONED computer room, the technicians were busy at the consoles preparing the huge, humming Cray for its next task. Behind a soundproofed door, Peter Woods sat in a small office and watched the men at their tasks while skimming through the thick sheaf of printouts spread out on the desk.
The Chameleon Factor Page 22