Stony Man 105 - Season of Harm by Don Pendleton

Author:Don Pendleton [Pendleton, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-04-06T20:26:52.771000+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Sportivnaya Station, the Moscow metro

The men of Phoenix Force, spread out among the crowd in the Moscow metro station, moved among the white marble pylons beneath the impressive embossed, asbestoscement tiles that made up the ceiling of the station. T. J. Hawkins, as the youngest of the group, had drawn the duty with the surveillance equipment provided by the Farm. Designed to look like a fairly typical digital camera, the device was actually a very sensitive multidirectional-focused microphone. Once tracking an audio source, while the camera lens would see only what it was aimed at, the audio pickup would rotate on microswivels within the device to keep contact with the first audio surveillance source until the link was deliberately separated. It was really a rather brilliant piece of equipment, David McCarter had to admit.

The audio feed would be fed through their transceivers. The device's little audio processor included a real-time speech-recognition program that would render a slightly delayed synthetic translation, too. Once their quarry was identified, they would be as good as sitting in on the meeting.

The recovered PDA's information had been transmitted to the Farm and quickly analyzed by Kurtzman and his crew. Unfortunately, they'd learned little more than they already knew — that a meeting between the mafiya, of whom the former owner of the PDA was a known member with a long criminal record — and unknown representatives of Katzev was to take place at this time and in this place. That left them trawling the Metro station, looking for suspicious knots of people, while trying very hard not to look like that was what they were doing.

It was Calvin James who finally spotted them. "I've got something over here," he said. "Looks like two groups of suits. Based on the cut of the coats and the price of the shoes, not to mention the black-on-black fashion sense, one of the groups is definitely mafiya. The other could be businessmen, or something else. I see suits, I see briefcases and I see sunglasses everywhere."

"Watch those cases, lads," McCarter said. All the men of Phoenix Force were only too familiar with the types of automatic weaponry that could be hidden easily inside such a case — not to mention fired from within it. For that matter, dressed as they were, the Russians could have a small arsenal of hardware under their coats and suit jackets.

Hawkins moved into position, taking a photograph of the ceiling of the metro station, a common enough act for a tourist. His youth worked for him. He looked like a foreign traveler on holiday, trying to record the sights of this exotic locale.

They heard a burst of static over the transceiver link. Then the voices of the men, now clustering around a group of low benches, were transmitted at very low volume through the link. A moment later, the English translation came. While the translation wasn't perfect, it was easy enough to imagine the exact dialogue of the meeting, give or take.

"Generals Karpov, Ryenko," one of the mafiya thugs was saying.

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