you want Penguin, bucko,” McCarter said, “you’d better come and get him before he wakes up and walks away. He’s in the phone booth near the corner of Great Russell and Bloomsbury. An ambulance would do the job nicely.” Then he hung up, wiped the phone down and threw it out the window.
A long line of traffic inched toward the intersection just ahead.
When the van came up alongside a red phone booth, James and Hawkins slid back the side door and jumped out carrying Dr. Freddy between them by the armpits. They quickly muscled him into the booth and shut him inside. There were pedestrians moving in both directions on the sidewalk, but no one stopped. No one said anything. Up at the corner of Bloomsbury and Great Russell Street, the light turned green. James and Hawkins piled back into the van, and McCarter drove on.
A few blocks down he made a left turn and circled the little park in the middle of Bloomsbury Square. When he was sure they hadn’t been followed, he retraced his route on the other side of the street and pulled into a loading zone within sight of the phone booth.
“Now we’re going to see just how good these guys are,” Manning said as he checked his wristwatch for the elapsed time.
The drop-off was close to DIA’s London HQ and a major hospital, where they could commandeer an ambulance.
Despite what McCarter had told the agent, he had no intention of letting someone like Dr. Freddy “walk away.” That’s what the engine block in the back of the van was for. The fallback plan was to chain it to his waist and sink him in the Thames.
People walked right past the booth where Dr. Freddy sat slumped. Nobody paid any attention; in fact, they averted their eyes when they saw him. Given his rough appearance and the neighborhood’s decline, they thought he was an overdosed heroin addict. After about ten minutes, a siren sounded in the distance. A couple of minutes later, an ambulance stopped at the curb beside the phone booth with roof beacon flashing. Two uniformed attendants picked up the unconscious man, loaded him inside, and then the ambulance left the curb, siren blaring.
“Heathrow, here he comes,” James said.
“That’s where we’re heading, too,” McCarter informed the others. “The Gulfstream is fueled and ready to go. Looks like we might have another job on our plates.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Port Angeles, Washington,
7:23 a.m. PDT
As Commander Starkey backed down through the sail hatch, particulate matter howled up past him in a black torrent. He descended into swirling darkness, reversing down the ladder with forty pounds of fire extinguisher on his back. On the way down, he counted the ladder’s rungs, one by one. Relative to the ground, the ladder canted off to the right. The engine and prop vibration trembled through his hands and arms, as well as his feet. Inside the hollow shell of titanium, the warning klaxon was much louder, contributing to the sense of chaos.
Five rungs down and even with the high-intensity headlamp he couldn’t see the backs of his own gloved hands. The concentration of smoke was always thickest at the highest point of the hull—in other words, the sail. He had to be careful, but he also had to move quickly through it. He needed to get his people in and seal the sail hatch shut. An influx of oxygen from the outside could cause a catastrophic flare-up.
Somewhere in the darkness above, his number two, Chuck Howe, was starting down the ladder.
Starkey knew there were twelve rungs from the top of the sail to the control deck ceiling on Akula/Bars-class subs. And there were a dozen more rungs to the control deck floor. With a variant design like this, things below could be altogether different.
That thought gave the commander a sudden jittery-sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.
He squelched it.
Fifteen rungs down, Starkey stopped climbing and braced himself against the ladder. He switched on the NIFTI—his eyes in the dark—and aimed it below him. Even with the shaking screen, he could make out a distinct, bright fluorescent-green blob.
“Got one hotspot on the control deck,” he said into his mike. “Seems to be isolated.” He continued to swing the NIFTI around. “I’m picking up what looks like body heat in a big clump aft. Nothing’s moving down here.”
He lowered the thermal imager and descended another four rungs of the ladder. He still couldn’t see the deck between his boots, but with his naked eye he could just make out a faint red glow where the control deck ceiling should have been. It wasn’t from burning embers—it was the battle lanterns.
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