Orbital Velocity. Don Pendleton

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ destroyed entire city blocks in the air war between the RAF and the Luftwaffe.

      “That technology is years off,” he whispered, as if to dispel the sudden dread that overwhelmed him. Out the window, he saw a puff of smoke. Soryenkov wondered if it had been a car bomb, but it was too far away and had kicked up too much debris. Something else blurred through the air and struck the ground. While the shock wave of the distant impact finally rumbled through the floor, the windowpanes cracked as the building flexed.

      “I said that technology is—” There was a third, fourth and fifth impact, all occurring more or less at the same instant. Soryenkov’s window shattered an instant later, but by then, he’d already thrown his arms across his face to keep the broken glass from carving him apart.

      There were no more spears cast down from heaven, no more buildings vaporized into dust by two-ton hunks of steel striking them at terminal velocity. But when Soryenkov next looked through the broken window of his office, he saw a city rocked to its core. Columns of dust rose lazily skyward as alarms wailed across the city.

      Damnation had rained down on Moscow in the form of a weapon that wasn’t supposed to exist.

      CHAPTER ONE

      London, forty-five minutes after the Moscow incident

      “Oy, lads, fancy a couple Britneys?” the bartender asked Gary Manning and David McCarter as they focused on the LCD-screen television hanging over the bar. The TV news was dominated by the aftermath of the disaster in Russia. The bartender’s question pulled Manning’s attention away from the pad of paper where he’d been scribbling angles he’d guessed at from video footage and the oblique shapes of the impact craters.

      McCarter looked at the bartender. Though he’d lost most of his accent, McCarter still could hear a touch of Polish in his speech.

      Manning’s look was quizzical in response to the pub man’s comment. He turned to his friend for an explanation. “Britneys?”

      “Rhyming slang,” McCarter explained. “Britney Sp—”

      “Her name rhymes with beers,” Manning cut him off. “How’d she get across the pond to influence London barkeeps?”

      “Sitting naked in music videos does a lot to improve international popularity,” McCarter answered. He looked at the bartender. “Two more pints, mate.”

      “The Babel concept,” Manning muttered. “Languages are far from immutable, more like living creatures. Viruses actually.”

      “Language is a virus?” McCarter asked.

      “More appropriately, an information virus,” Manning told him. “Viruses are a part of this planet. The first transfer of information was in the form of a virus, one simple organism transmitting DNA code to another in the creation of life. All data is viral in nature, be it a new word in a language or a catchy set of lyrics in a song. Every bit of information is a single permutation of that first virus.”

      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 СКАЧАТЬ