Oceans Of Fire. Don Pendleton

pushed himself out of the case and fell back on the sea of broken glass covering the floor. His helmet and riding leathers had prevented him from being sliced to pieces. He waited for the telltale nausea that signaled broken bones.

      “Phoenix Four!” McCarter yelled across the radio. “Phoenix Four!”

      “Phoenix Four…down.” Manning groaned. “I need extraction.”

      “Sit tight! We’re on our way! Phoenix Five! What is your status?”

      Hawkins had continued to follow the van. After trying to crush Manning it had gone one more block and come to a halt behind a parked truck in a space marked off by orange traffic cones.

      “Target has stopped. No movement.” Hawkins dismounted but his muzzle never left the vehicle. He ripped off his helmet and shouted in Russian, “Police!” He waved his hand violently and the few bystanders on the side street scattered. He stared at the parked truck and cones framing the van in the parking spot.

      “I don’t like it,” Hawkins said as his instincts spoke to him. “I think this is their final destination—Shit!”

      He dived over the hood of a parked sedan as a grenade spiraled out of the shattered back window of the van and bounced near him and his bike. The grenade detonated with a whip-cracking yellow flash and shrapnel rattled against Hawkins’s cover like hail. He rose over the hood of the sedan and emptied his pistol into the van, firing low to catch anyone hugging the floorboards. He reloaded and ran to the passenger window. Hawkins snaked his pistol inside and emptied eight rounds into the interior before ripping the door open.

      James brought the surveillance van to a screeching halt at the top of the street and Encizo and McCarter leaped out. Hawkins glared at the interior of the bullet-riddled van. A trapdoor had been cut in the floor. In the street beneath a gaping circular hole emptied into blackness below. The heavy iron disk of the manhole cover lay in the back of the van. McCarter ran up beside Hawkins while Encizo stayed back to cover. “What have you got?”

      “They’ve extracted into the sewer sys—” Hawkins jumped back as something metallic rattled against concrete below. He grabbed McCarter’s jacket and yanked him back with him. “Fire in the hole!”

      Streamers of winking yellow fireflies fountained up out of the manhole borne on a geyser of superheated smoke. McCarter and Hawkins sprinted down the street as the smoke blasted out of the broken windows, sending its streamers of molten phosphorous in all directions. Seconds later the van’s gas tank caught and van went up like a metal balloon.

      McCarter watched the van burn out of control. Besides Zhol’s body back in Kremlin Square there wasn’t going to be much in the way of forensic evidence. The Briton felt his temper begin to boil. It wasn’t that the mission had gone FUBAR. That was part of the game.

      What galled him was that he and Phoenix Force had gotten played.

      Payback was owed.

      “We’re out of here.”

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      “I’m thinking closed casket,” Calvin James suggested.

      McCarter had to agree. Aidar Zhol’s corpse had been cleaned up but his head and face were still horrible to behold. McCarter had seen a lot of shotgun wounds, but the Tajik gangster looked as though someone had teed off on his face with a claw hammer. “What the bloody hell did that, then? Not buckshot.”

      “Nyet.” Forensic Pathologist Sirpa Sokolova sighed in recognition. “Kopeck do this.”

      “Kopeck?” James cocked his head, reexamining the wounds again with a combat medic’s eye. “You mean, the money or a man?”

      “Both.” Aside from being the deputy assistant coroner, Dr. Sokolova was also a CIA intelligence asset. Barbara Price had arranged for the woman to extend McCarter and Calvin James every professional courtesy. The forensic pathologist was six feet tall and built like a ballet dancer. She’d put a wiggle in her walk for her two American guests that hadn’t gone unnoticed or unappreciated on the walk to the basement morgue.

      The carnage inflicted on Aidar Zhol’s corpse held everyone’s attention now.

      “Both?” McCarter gazed down at the carnage once more. “What do you mean, both?”

      “Mean both.” Sokolova’s accent was thick enough to cut with a knife. “You ask what do such damage?” She opened a tray beneath the metal gurney and pulled out a plastic bag. The contents tinkled onto the stainless-steel tool tray as she emptied them into a glittering pile. “Twenty-five silver, Csar Nicholas, ten-kopeck pieces. Twenty-five more pulled from body armor in chest.”

      “Bloody hell.” McCarter shook his head. “Shot him full of silver.”

      “Da,” the doctor agreed. “Shotgun loaded with silver kopeck do such damage.”

      James ran his hands through the coins. They were pitted from being fired from a gun and many had deformed when they’d hit bone, but each was genuine minted silver with Csar Nicholas on the face. They were about the diameter of a dime but twice as thick, and by James’s estimation twenty-five of them would fit just about perfectly into a 12-gauge shotgun shell. “You know, the Italian Mafia used to do this kind of shit in Sicily, back in the day. They killed you with enough money to pay for your funeral. Some kind of messed-up, old-school respect thing.”

      McCarter stared at the pile of coins that had been pulled from Aidar Zhol’s skull. “Dr., you said kopeck was the method and a man’s name.”

      “Da, every cop in Moscow know Kopeck. Kopeck is assassin. Double-barrel shotgun loaded with silver kopeck is his MO. One barrel in chest. One in face.” Dr. Sokolova tossed her head. “Kopeck is bad man.”

      “What else do you know about him?” McCarter asked.

      Dr. Sokolova went to a filing cabinet and pulled out a thick folder. File after file had pictures of horribly, unmistakably, coin-mutilated corpses. Sokolova pulled out a separate file. It was written in Cyrillic, but it was clearly a police rap sheet. McCarter gazed at the mug shot at the top. Kopeck’s face was all brutal bulges of brow and cheekbones and jaw with cauliflowered ears, and his hair was clipped close to his skull. He had bad teeth. McCarter could tell because Kopeck was grinning shamelessly into the police camera.

      “Name, Pietor Shulin, alias ‘Kopeck.’ Was wrestler in ninety kilogram weight class but failed to make Olympic team. He lose sports dispensation and do army service in Chechnya. Implicated in atrocities against civilians but not prosecuted. Honorably discharged. Shulin became doorman at Moscow club where it is assumed he made mafiya connections. First ‘kopeck killing’ in Moscow occur two years ago. Victim was witness to alleged mafiya slaying. There have been eleven kopeck killings within last twenty-four months. Shulin has been arrested in conjunction with three but unsuccessfully prosecuted. Once before, murderer with this same MO escape police pursuit by using manhole trick you describe.”

      McCarter shook his head at how they’d been eluded. He’d been in the bowels of Moscow before. The modern sewers connected with the ancient sewers built during the time of Peter the Great as well several extensive systems of catacombs that were even older. A mind-numbing labyrinth existed below the streets of Moscow and Russian criminals had been making use of it for centuries.

      “Dr. do you have any idea which syndicate he’s with?” James asked.

      “Kopeck is thought to be freelancer. You wish man dead? You have money? Kopeck kill. You wish woman or child dead? Kopeck kill them, too.”

      McCarter had seen the type before. In the old days hit men had been the soldiers of their syndicate. They were trusted members of their families who did the dirty work of defending them. The family system in organized crime had steadily eroded since the 1960s with the rise of the narcotics trade. Kopeck was part of the new breed of killer. He wasn’t a hit man so much as an assassin, and aside from his colorful MO, he was true to type.

      Kopeck