Orange Alert. Don Pendleton

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      Prologue

      A cloud passed in front of the moon, and the moors became so dark Steven Oxford couldn’t even see his hand in front of his face, much less the outlines of the three men who stood in the ankle-high grass with him. The wind picked up from the east, gusting across Lake Erne, carrying with it the earthy scent of peat and a chill that penetrated Oxford’s heavy black wool sweater and the long-sleeved cotton T-shirt he wore underneath. Even in July, the moors between Donegal Bay and the lakes became uncomfortably cold at night.

      In a belt holster tucked into the small of his back, Oxford carried a Glock 17, the standard handgun issued to CIA operatives.

      A few months earlier, during his annual requalification, Oxford had placed ten of the seventeen 9 mm rounds into a two-and-a-half-inch circle at twenty-five yards—exactly twice the quantity required. Oxford was a man who liked to keep track of those details even more than the CIA did. His office walls at Langley were covered with citations and certifications, all arranged in precise chronological order.

      The cloud passed, exposing the moon’s thin crescent, enabling the outlines of the waiting men to become discernable as blobs of deeper darkness against the sepia blanket that cloaked the moors. Oxford’s three companions were also dressed in black, their features highlighted by the silvery illumination, giving the impression that their faces floated like decapitated heads in ghostly search of their lost bodies.

      A freight train rumbled in the distance, one of many that traveled the railroad tracks crisscrossing the moors. Barely audible above the clack and clatter of the passing train was the howl of a dog—a mournful sound that echoed over the wasteland to be answered a few seconds later by another of its species. Had Oxford been superstitious, the wail would have sent a shiver down his spine. But neither superstition nor fear were words in the agent’s vocabulary. Despite standing on a moor in the middle of the night in an Irish county where half the population over sixty years of age swore to personal knowledge of banshees, he was confident that he and the Glock could handle whatever came their way.

      He took a swift, visual inventory of his companions. Bobbie Reegan was clearly the most dangerous, driven by a hate so fiery his eyes sometimes glowed as if lit from behind. The other two were no more than common thugs, losers drawn to the Orange Order in much the same way that Oxford thought skin-heads were attracted to organizations spewing white supremacy. Political motives, if considered at all, were secondary. Blacks, Catholics, Jews, it didn’t matter whose blood they were spilling—it was the actual hate and killing that pulled them in.

      The night’s meeting with Cypher would be an important one. He’d said they’d be assigned their targets and given half the money, which meant that Oxford’s undercover assignment was coming to an end. Once Cypher doled out the actual missions, it was Oxford’s time to fish or cut bait, to convey all the intel to his superiors and move on.

      Oxford felt, rather than saw or heard, Cypher’s СКАЧАТЬ