Orbital Velocity. Don Pendleton

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ AND MANNING lurched through the door of their hotel room, running on fumes from the energy they’d exerted in dealing with the Piccadilly riot. Manning secured the door while McCarter turned on the television, flicking it to the news. As it hadn’t taken them more than a few minutes to get back from Haymarket Road, the news media was still in the dark about what was going on, putting up rumors as true information.

      McCarter could see the news cameras focused on one arm of the riot for a moment. He could see himself and Manning amid chemical smoke and tear gas battling against a throng. Luckily, the quality of the camera images was too grainy and jumpy to be of any use in identifying them, and by then, Stony Man Farm would have grabbed extant copies of the video footage from where the files had been stored across the internet and doctored them to make any attempts at clarifying their features totally impossible.

      Price and Brognola, back at the Farm, would be gnashing their teeth that McCarter and Manning may have exposed their identities on international television.

      Manning picked up the phone as McCarter continued to scan the channels, looking for more information on the riots. If he was going to risk the privacy of the Sensitive Operations Group, he might as well know the extent of the damage.

      “Barb wants to talk to you, David,” Manning said, holding out his cell to McCarter.

      “Tell her it’s not my fault,” McCarter replied, checking the television.

      “It’s not that,” Manning corrected him. “Besides, the Farm’s running its own scans of local news.”

      McCarter looked over his shoulder, then held out his hand to accept the cell phone. “What did I do now?”

      “Aside from risk exposing Phoenix Force’s existence?” Barbara Price asked. Stony Man Farm’s mission controller sounded only mockingly reproachful, which eased McCarter’s nerves somewhat. The Briton was a man of action, but he dreaded paperwork and he also hated the subterfuge necessary to keep him on the front lines, battling against the forces of evil. He was a doer, not a politician who needed to massage the egos of law enforcement agencies or foreign governments.

      “Any time Phoenix Force and a riot are in the same city, you know we’ll bump into each other, even if we’re outnumbered,” McCarter answered.

      “Luckily this time you bumped hard enough to stop the riot’s spread in one direction,” Price told him. “We have to keep you on station in London for a little while, but Cal and the others won’t be coming to assist you. We need to spread out in order to deal effectively with the nature of this threat. You might also have to go elsewhere in Europe.”

      “The other states in the G8 have been threatened, most likely,” McCarter responded.

      “Exactly, which is why we can’t keep Phoenix Force as one contiguous unit. If it’s any consolation, Lyons and his men are splitting up, as well,” Price confirmed.

      “Things are getting bloody serious if that’s the case,” McCarter muttered. “More riots?”

      “We think that the riots and the orbital bombardment attacks are tied in,” Price said. “The Russian soccer gangs went wild in full force. We’re fairly certain that they’ve also been backed by the neo-Nazi movement in Moscow.”

      “Neo-Nazis,” Manning muttered, listening in as the phone was set on speaker mode. “Now that there’s been an influx of other people from the Middle East and other countries, the Russians are putting aside the bad memories of the battle of St. Petersburg and embracing racial purity.”

      “It doesn’t hurt that the Russian economy is in the shitter,” McCarter added. “White, young and jobless people tend to congregate and cast hairy eyeballs at the nonwhites who are taking jobs that the whites would normally turn their noses up at. It happened a lot in London with Jamaican, Indian and Pakistani immigrants. Bigots like picking at the edges of groups of disenchanted youth.”

      “It just so happens that the Moscow neo-Nazi sympathizers are well-organized, and they have a lot to pick from on the streets,” Price said.

      “Cal’s going to be bloody useless in that venue. Rafael, too,” McCarter pointed out.

      “Cal’s not going to Moscow. We’ve activated an old friend or two to deal with Japan and China,” Price explained. “Hope you don’t mind if he’s hanging out with Mei.”

      “No. You said or two…are we thinking of my favorite ninja?” McCarter asked.

      “John’s going to be in action,” Price said. “Cal’s heading to Tokyo on a jet fighter right now.”

      “And what about Lyons and the boys?” McCarter asked.

      “Right now it’s all need-to-know. I’m just informing you of your teammates—”

      “To keep my head straight, so I don’t worry over their problems,” McCarter finished. “Thanks, Barb.”

      “Any potential information on where the kinetic darts came from?” Manning asked.

      Price paused for a moment. “The only thing we can tell is that there was a scrambling signal that interrupted observation satellite feeds for forty-five minutes.”

      “All of them?” Manning asked.

      “We’re not certain for other governments, but looking at our own reconnaissance satellites, we’ve got most of an hour missing due to active jamming,” Price said. “From the tropic of Capricorn to the tropic of Cancer, it’s one big blind spot.”

      “Equatorial satellites, meaning we’ve narrowed down the possible places where the enemy could have launched from,” Manning said.

      “That’s still millions of square miles,” Price countered. “Who knows if it’s a land-based launch or someone utilizing a decommissioned submarine’s missile silos.”

      “Or worse, converted a regular freighter to utilize such silos,” Manning added. “Some tanker ships have the room and the strength to fire Atlas rockets if they wanted.”

      “No clue where the jamming signal could have originated?” McCarter asked.

      “We’ve got our people on it. Whatever it was, it transferred from system to system easily,” Price said.

      “An opposing force of hackers,” Manning surmised.

      “We’re looking at that. The nature of the interference was such that we couldn’t tell if it was signal interruption or a viral computer program affecting satellite uplinks,” Price said. “Either way, the jamming hasn’t affected telecommunications.”

      “No. Even though they could utilize local cell towers to keep in touch with their people, this Fist of Heaven group seems to want us to know the kind of horror happening in Moscow,” Manning said. “A sword of Damocles for the other seven member nations of the G8.”

      “David, I just got a hit on the picture you took of the bag man you wrangled in that alley,” Price said.

      “Something’s better than nothing,” McCarter replied. “What is it?”

      “We’ve got his name, and he’s on Scotland СКАЧАТЬ