Читать книгу Citadel Of Fear - Don Pendleton - Страница 9

The Annex, Stony Man Farm

“Wow!” Akira Tokaido proclaimed. “Just…wow.”

The insides of the little UAV Phoenix Force had captured in Gdansk were even more impressive in person. Phoenix Force had managed to get the unmanned vehicle’s remains delivered to the United States Embassy in Stockholm and a private courier jet had gotten them to the United States in just under twenty-four hours. Tokaido, Kurtzman, Huntington Wethers and “Gadgets” Schwarz might as well have been in an operating theater.

The slightly scorched and smoke-stained patient had taken half a dozen steel fléchettes, but the damage had done nothing to mar the UAV’s majesty in the eyes of everyone assembled. Save one. Able Team happened to be in-house and Carl “Ironman” Lyons stood like a stone Buddha as the geek talk flew fast and thick. He finally began to lose patience with all the oohing and ahhing.

“So, can Phoenix trace any of it?” Lyons inquired. The Able Team leader was the one Stony Man member who had been a policeman rather than a soldier before he had been tapped by the Farm. He had risen to the rank of detective, and he was very good at it. “Can I?”

Wethers stood tall and stretched from all the hunching over the table. The distinguished, brilliant, black university professor was a key member of the Stony Man Farm cybernetics team. If you were one of the bad guys, Hunt Wethers turning his mind upon you and your operation as a problem that needed solving probably meant your ass. “Not exactly, Carl.”

“What do you mean, not exactly?”

“It means, technically, these components are untraceable.”

Lyons blinked. “What, it’s a People’s Republic knock-off and there are no serial numbers? We’ve dealt with that before. There’s a factory someplace that manufactured this stuff, and they will have left their stink all over it.”

Wethers shook his head. “Not this time.”

“You’re saying there’s no factory?”

“Not precisely, no.”

“It wasn’t manufactured?”

“No.”

Lyons shrugged. “You’re saying some closet-case, geek genius just built it in his garage out of pipe cleaners, bubble gum and baling wire? Hunt, even pipe cleaners, bubble gum and baling wire have a trail. I know, I’ve followed them.”

“You’re exactly right, Carl. Except that this exceptional little machine was not manufactured or cobbled together by some—” Wethers rolled his eyes “—geek genius in his garage.”

“You’re saying it was conjured out of thin air?”

“Exactly!” Wethers smiled happily as if Lyons were a student who was slowly but surely bringing his grades up and just might graduate on time. “Every last piece of that UAV, from stem to stern, motors to rotors, GPS, CPU—you name it—guidance, flight controls and the fuselage itself, were all conjured out of thin air.”

Lyons’s blond brows slowly bunched as he chewed all this over. “You’re saying it was printed.”

“Carl, you get an A.”

“Thanks, Prof.” The Able Team leader surveyed what he considered to be a shot-down toy helicopter. He was aware of the burgeoning world of 3-D printing, but mostly over the hysterics surrounding the idea of people being able to print their own guns. He hadn’t found the single-shot, .22-caliber zip guns the size of a small megaphone all that impressive, but he knew the technology involved was growing by leaps and bounds and revolutionizing a lot of industries. “The whole thing?”

“Every component save the wiring was put together one micron-thin layer at a time.”

“So we can trace the wires?”

“Oh, yeah.” Tokaido nodded absently as he tried to make the UAV’s CPU communicate with his laptop. The young hacker frowned. The CPU’s encryption was fighting him. To his chagrin it was holding its own. Whoever had designed the CPU, its programming and encryption was starting to disturbingly remind Tokaido of himself. “The wires came from China.”

“That’s a start?”

Schwarz looked at his Able teammate wryly. “Carl, do you have any idea how many meters of wire the PRC manufactures per year?”

“Millions?” Lyons ventured.

“Billions.”

“Oh.”

“This specific component wire could have been bought in any Radio Shack in America or, for that matter, any place that sells wire on planet earth. I myself happen to own reams of it. Trying to trace the wire is a nonstarter, buddy. Sorry.”

Lyons gazed down upon the remains of the immaculately conceived UAV. The detective part of his mind had already leapfrogged past the wire. “So this was an expensive proposition?”

Kurtzman shook his head at the wreckage in admiration. “Carl? You have no idea.”

“Give me an idea.”

“All right. The United States military has all sorts of unmanned vehicles, aerial, terrestrial and aquatic vehicles both surface combatant and submersibles. But this baby? Every last piece is custom designed and printed. You could not get Congress to pass a spending budget that included something like this. The Europeans? Forget it. The Chinese or the Russians? Maybe, just maybe, if they were really that motivated, but they would probably have to subcontract the work and why bother? They’ve got their own unmanned vehicles, not as good as ours—at least not yet. But again, why wouldn’t they just use commercial parts and if the UAV got captured just deny everything? It’s what they do. Someone cared enough to make this baby from scratch.”

Lyons leaned over the table. “Cal shot this bird down over Gdansk, and it was watching a bunch of Russian mafiya assholes that had been sent to wipe out Phoenix, except they didn’t know who Phoenix was or they wouldn’t have been so stupid.”

Kurtzman agreed. “Exactly.”

Lyons’s instincts spoke to him. “This is a private venture, a very well-funded private venture, and they’ve got an agenda we haven’t even begun to fathom.”

“That sounds about right,” Wethers agreed.

Lyons nodded to himself. “Somewhere there is a money and a technology trail. Whoever these guys are they used Russian muscle in Gdansk. That’s where the money trail starts. Where’s David and Phoenix now?”

Barbara Price, Stony Man’s mission controller, stepped into the room. “They’re about to sneak into Russia.”

* * *

Kaliningrad, Moskovsky District

IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL, sunny day in the Russian Federation oblast. The past three days of misting rain had stopped and the sun had broken out.

McCarter, Manning and Propenko were not in a very beautiful part of town. The Kaliningrad oblast was almost the Russian version of Okinawa. The exclave was a small landmass overloaded with naval bases, air bases and army bases. That many military men crammed into such a small amount of acreage required a great deal of off-duty entertainment.

In the Moskovsky District the strips that provided neon-lit clubs with strippers and liquor quickly gave way to the back streets that provided prostitutes and drugs. Those gave way to the rotting back alleys that provided shooting galleries and the worst of streetwalkers.

McCarter and his two-man team walked through the worst part of town at high noon. The area, much like most of its denizens, was decidedly unattractive in direct sunlight. Spent needles and cigarette butts littered the gutters. Russia did not believe in recycling, so no bums collected the sea of empty liquor bottles. Garbage and human sewage was openly dumped in the streets, and snarling, sprung-ribbed mongrel dogs ate the parts they could digest. Given the smell and the swarm of flies, McCarter was fairly certain one of the soiled-newspaper-covered bums they had passed was dead.

The plan was fairly simple. Phoenix Force had deliberately left Propenko’s two remaining associates alive and sent an anonymous call to Polish State Security forces. The Polish State Police had arrived to find a fairly massive, recent battleground, a sea of bodies and weapons, and two Russian mobsters handcuffed to a truck. Polish gun-control laws were fairly lax compared to a great deal of Europe, but owning and operating antiaircraft guns was strictly illegal. Poles as a general rule had very little love for Russians, much less Russian gangsters without visas but with automatic cannons. The Polish state justice system was not particularly known for its leniency; it was, however, known for being utterly corrupt.

Neither Phoenix Force nor Propenko was surprised to learn that Ilya and Artyom Gazinskiy had made the Polish equivalent of bail and disappeared. Using Occam’s Razor, the obvious answer was that whoever had bailed them out had most likely had them killed. However, Ilya and Artyom were Kaliningrad mafiya born and raised. They would have connections and, for a short time, possibly even people who would protect them. The question was where would they go to ground?

Propenko had not hired the Gazinskiy brothers. Rather, they had been bequeathed onto him by money-hemorrhaging parties unknown. Still, he had run the Gazinskiys in the Gdansk operation, listened to them drink and shoot their mouths off, and he felt as though he had a pretty firm idea of where they might be found if they were to be found at all.

That would be the worst part of the Moskovsky District.

Walking across the Polish/Russian Federation oblast border and walking to Kaliningrad had been a very bold move, but even in a militarized area like the oblast, borders were mostly long and unguarded things. In the city of Kaliningrad the team was simply three very dangerous-looking men in a very dangerous part of town. No one gave them a second look. In fact, most of the local denizens immediately cast their gaze down and refused to make eye contact.

Propenko pointed at a sagging, grimy, prewar, three-story tenement. All the windows were boarded up. It didn’t have a neon sign or even a red light. However, over the door faded red paint in a very sloppy version of western graffiti read $$$Luffy-Land$$$.

“Luffy?” McCarter inquired.

“Ilya and Artyom brag about how they are ‘pimping large’ when not kicking ass. This is establishment. Luffy-Land.”

Manning stared at the hideous, rotting building. He could almost swear the spavined structure was staring back, malevolently. “Why is Luffy written in English instead of Cyrillic?”

Propenko kept a remarkably straight face. “Classier.”

“I thought you said they didn’t speak English,” McCarter mentioned.

“I lied. They speak better than me.”

“Thanks.”

“This serves, easier for you to interrogate, and I lied for them. This may be enough to make them trust for a few minutes. Gives us advantage. They only dealt with Nubian. Gummer was sniper, not seen. You, English, were mostly being smoke-obscured man behind cannons. We may be able to be lying our way in.”

Manning nodded reluctantly at McCarter. “He keeps making sense. I’ll give him that.”

“How’s your leg, Nick?” McCarter asked.

“Not bleeding again yet. Nubian does good work.”

McCarter once again reconsidered that Propenko had marched twenty kilometers with a hole in his leg. “That he does.”

The Russian gave McCarter an interested look. “What is plan?”

McCarter was pretty sure Propenko had a plan but the Russian was interested in seeing what his new boss was made of. “Oh, let’s just walk right in.”

“That was my plan, also.”

McCarter walked up the short flight of sagging steps. Manning and Propenko fanned out to either side to form a three-man wedge. The establishment was mafiya-owned and protected and it was the middle of the day. The door wasn’t locked and no bouncer guarded the entrance. McCarter and his team walked through the tiny foyer and entered Luffy-Land. Manning had seen the insides of bad bordellos from Bangkok to Tijuana. He looked around and was appalled.

“Oh, for God’s sake…” Manning muttered.

Propenko nodded. “Yes.”

It wasn’t just that it was a bad bordello. Luffy-Land was an affront to all five senses. If Manning had possessed a sixth sense he was pretty sure the place’s aura would be urine yellow and thrown-up lime green, and he was pretty sure he could feel it pulsing against his skin, and sticking. The smell reminded Manning of a rugby locker room if the players mostly didn’t shower but wore perfume and smoked unfiltered cigarettes.

An interior wall had been knocked down to form the main “hospitality area.” The decor consisted mostly of old torn movie posters taped over old torn and peeling paisley-pink wallpaper and old tattered couches. There were a few stolen Russian military folding tables and chairs for drinking and playing cards. Bad Russian rap with too much bass thudded from somewhere deeper in the building, and some sort of Slavic soap opera played on a big-screen TV on the wall.

Hardly anyone was around. A few of the ladies of the house sat drinking straight vodka and watching television just in case some soldier or sailor managed to sneak off base for some afternoon delight. If one’s idea of love in the afternoon were middle-aged, Baltic women’s rugby players in pancake makeup spilling out of 1980’s vintage Jane Fonda workout wear, right down to the headbands and leg warmers, Luffy-Land might just be heaven. The working girls instantly picked up on the fact that the three very dangerous-looking men were not clients. They gave McCarter and his team a few heartbeats of bored and exhausted interest before returning to the TV and liquor.

“Gazinskiy brothers, pimpin’ large,” Manning mused.

Propenko made a noise. “Yes.”

McCarter walked right up to the zinc bar. A huge, bald, sagging bull of a man in a white tracksuit sat watching a European League basketball game on a small TV. He had sleepy eyes but eyed McCarter with keen interest. His right hand disappeared under the bar. “Dah?” he grunted.

McCarter grunted back. “Ilya. Artyom.”

Propenko took a cigarette from a pack of CCCPs lying on the bar without it being offered and lit up. The bartender looked as if he might say something and then thought better of it. Manning just leaned against the bar and glared. McCarter gave the bartender a dead “don’t make me repeat myself” look. The bartender nodded again. “Dah.” He jerked his head at one of the girls. “Roona!”

Roona sighed and scratched what looked like bed bug bites. She rose with a sigh to do the bartender’s bidding. The bartender’s right hand reappeared empty. He rose and took three cans of Baltika beer out of the cold case. He looked at the trio before him, frowned and reached up for some rather cleaner glasses and poured. The music in the back of the building suddenly got louder as a door opened. Ilya and Artyom Gazinskiy emerged, accompanied by three men even larger and goonier-looking than themselves. McCarter was bemused that both men wore $$$Luffy-Land$$$ logo T-shirts and he thought about acquiring one for Hawkins. Ilya’s eyes bugged at the sight of Propenko. Ilya’s fatter brother, Artyom, fired off a stream of surprised swearwords.

Propenko snarled. “Speak in English.”

The Gazinskiy brother blinked.

“We want no one besides us to understand this conversation.”

Ilya shrugged and spoke with a thick accent. “Hey, Nika, whatever you say, man. What happened to you? I thought you are maybe being in Guantanamo, or dead. And who are these guys? Friends of yours?”

McCarter and Manning drank beer and continued to stare at the Gazinskiy crew as though they were bugs.

“Mission went very bad, Ilya. I got shot and I have lost great deal of money.”

“Hey, man. Hey!” The fat Gazinskiy held up his hands placatingly. “We all lost money! Me and Ilya? We lost friends!”

“I lie for you. Tell them you are idiot hammerheads not speaking English. You get picked up and slapped around a bit by Polish police. Then you make bail and twenty-four hours you are back in Luffy-Land dripping in beer and whores. Me? I had to kill some people and walk back. My leg hurts and I hate Poland.”

“Hey, Nika. Me and Arty fought hard. We did not give up until they turned our own damn cannons on us.”

“This I know. How you made bail when you are found at battle scene hand-cuffed to antiaircraft cannon in Poland? This I do not know.”

McCarter glanced around Luffy-Land dryly and managed a TV-worthy Russian accent. “Girls did not pass hat.”

Manning laughed unpleasantly.

The Gazinskiy brothers pulled back slightly. The Gazinskiy goon squad bristled and glanced back and forth at each other. They did not understand what was being said but they did not like seeing their bosses intimidated. Artyom was becoming both scared and angry. “Hey! Who are these guys?”

McCarter continued. “You did not make call. You were surprised. Who is bailing you out?”

Artyom stabbed out an accusing finger. “Listen! You—”

“I am listening, but I am not hearing answer.”

Ilya grew some backbone. “You don’t come into our place! Make us speak English!”

McCarter smiled without an ounce of warmth. “I already have.”

The brothers Gazinskiy blinked in unison.

Propenko’s already gravelly voice dropped a dangerous octave. “Who bails you out?”

Artyom made an unhappy noise. “We were told not to talk about it.”

“Yes.” McCarter nodded at the wisdom of this. “Who told you not to talk about it?”

Artyom threw a desperate look at Propenko. “Listen, I do not think you want to be screwing with these people.”

Propenko glanced at McCarter and Manning and spoke the truth. “I know for fact you do not want to mess with these men.”

Manning noted that Ilya was staring at McCarter, and the Russian’s brows slowly knitted as if he was mentally doing long division counting on his fingers. It had been a decent ploy, but things were about to go FUBAR. Manning smiled and punched Ilya in the throat.

Gazinskiy the Elder did a short, remarkable imitation of a seagull squawk-and-flap and fell to the grimy floor. Propenko instantly followed suit. He shot the heel of his hand forward and made a credible attempt to shove Gazinskiy the Younger’s nose into his brain. The Gazinskiy bullyboy brigade seemed to have spent more time stomping drunken sailors and looking tough than in getting in real fights; seeing their bosses fall in the space of two seconds left them hesitating for one more. It cost the one closest to Manning a kneecap. It cost the one closest to Propenko a left eye.

The last remaining goon screamed something defiant in Russian. He pulled up his tracksuit jacket with his left hand and went for his gun with his right. McCarter slapped a hand over each of the Russian’s wrists and gave him the Danish Kiss.

McCarter was happy to acknowledge the English had not invented the head butt, but he was rather insistent that they had perfected it. English soccer hooligans would have squealed in delight as a cranium of the United Kingdom met a skull of the Russian Federation and the hammerhead dropped like a cow that had just reached the end of the slaughter chute.

McCarter ignored the dancing lights as he caught motion behind him. The bartender swung. McCarter had known a lot of bartenders who kept baseball or cricket bats behind the bar. He had about one heartbeat to note that this was the first bat he had seen that had been scored with shallow, cross-hatching saw cuts and filled with several dozen safety razor blades. He stepped into the blow, caught the bartender’s wrist and heaved his sagging bulk over the bar. He kept the weapon as the barman landed badly in a clatter of bar stools.

McCarter regarded the hideous bludgeon he had acquired. “Nice hate stick, old son. You just earned yourself an appointment with your old Doc Marten, and the doctor is in.” McCarter gave the bartender his boots until the big man was reduced to twitching, bleeding and wheezing.

The floor of Luffy-Land was a sea of broken, moaning, screaming Russians. None of the girls had moved an inch or batted an eye, much less screamed. They seemed to have found the spectacle slightly more interesting than their soap opera. They watched avidly to see what might happen next.

McCarter turned to his team and held up the razor-enhanced baseball bat. “Did you see this?”

Propenko grunted. “I have seen this. In Vladimir Central Prison. It was used for rectal purposes.”

Manning gazed heavenward. “Could have gone my whole life…”

Propenko held out his hand.

McCarter handed him the hate stick. The Russian went and took a knee on Artyom’s chest. “I told you. You do not want to screw with these men. Now, answer their questions.”

Artyom bubbled and gasped around his shattered septum and the blood filling his mouth. “Listen, Nika, we can—”

“Do not talk to me.” Propenko glanced back at McCarter. “Talk to him.”

Artyom babbled. “Christos…”

“Do not talk to Jesus. These men are your god. God helps those who help themselves.” The Prison Spetsnaz officer spit on the razor club meaningfully. “Help yourself, Artyom. Help your brother. While you still can.”

Artyom Gazinskiy whimpered and began helping himself and his brother.