STONY MAN

The covert teams of Stony Man Farm battle terrorist threats few know exist. Operating under the President, these elite warriors and cybertech experts are bound by honor and ready to sacrifice their lives to protect the innocent, overseas or on U.S. soil.

HIDE AND SEEK

Ecoterrorism becomes the perfect cover for a renegade Chinese and North Korean military group. Striking Japanese whaling and oil vessels on the high seas, the terrorists plan to trigger an economic war between Japan and the States. But when a Japanese delegation is attacked on U.S. soil, Able Team gets the call to hunt down those behind the lethal ambush while Phoenix Force goes in to stop the mass targeting of sailors and fishermen on the Pacific. With the mastermind behind the scheme still unknown, Stony Man Farm can only hope the trail of bodies will lead them to their target.

BROGNOLA HEARD THE DISTANT CRACK OF HIGH EXPLOSIVES

He touched the earpiece. “Barbara, what was that?”

“Grenade and small arms fire,” Price answered. “The protesters who started for the security entrance have been hit. Secret Service is on the lookout for grenade launchers and assault rifles.”

“Any idea who opened fire?” Brognola asked. He jogged to a nearby window overlooking the scene. Wisps of black smoke curled into the sky, a grisly grave marker for the brutal violence.

A police car racing to the scene suddenly erupted, bursting apart under the force of a shoulder-mounted missile. Flames blew out the glass on all sides.

Secret Service guards at the gate took cover as automatic fire sizzled at the guardhouse. Even bullet-resistant glass and built-in steel plating did little to alleviate the incoming torrent of bullets.

Brognola grimaced as the sudden flurry of violence abated.

This was not going to be the last shot fired in this war.

Not if Stony Man Farm had anything to say about it.

Cold Snap

Don Pendleton

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

Hideaki Isamu ran along the deck, knowing that Captain Katashi expected nothing less than absolute efficiency and timeliness from his crew. Isamu skirted against the railing, allowing other sailors to rush past him in the opposite direction, and the young man was glad for the perfect paint job. The last thing he needed was a sliver of old paint or rusted metal to rip open his palms as he glided along the rail before turning back and running full speed ahead.

Isamu stared out over the blue-gray waters of the Ross Sea. It was a magnificent sight. To the south, as far as he could see, was the white crust of the massive Ross Ice Shelf, a V of thick sea ice that stretched from the end of the bay to a mere 200 miles from the geographic South Pole. It was more than 185,000 square miles of ice between 50 and 150 feet thick. The Saburou Maru was miles off of the shelf, but even from this distance, the thin sliver of purest white was an unmistakable horizon, taking Isamu’s breath even on a mere glancing notice. He was looking at a body of ice that someone once said was the size of France. Ignoring something that huge, that magnificent, would take some formidable willpower, but Isamu tore himself away and concentrated on his duty.

The announcement had spurred the crew to the proximity of a pod of whales. While the water was choppy, whitecaps forming bright scars against the rippling surface, he noticed the breaches of whales in the far distance.

The Saburou Maru was on its annual research trip down into the Antarctic waters, along with other ships in the fleet, to determine if there were enough whales present to continue sustainable whaling for Japan. Isamu squinted and made out that the humps were from Minke whales, small animals, less than thirty feet in length. As opposed to the other species such as Fin or Sperm, the Minkes were common.

Isamu recalled a number of more than half a million living within the Antarctic ocean, plentiful enough to sustain Japanese whaling. Those numbers had not diminished significantly in the wake of research catches, some 14,000 between 1988 and the present.

If they were that plentiful, Isamu didn’t feel bad about going after them. Captain Katashi was the same way. Whaling was central to Japanese culture; it was in the blood of many a young man seeking adventure on the high seas. There were times when Isamu wondered why world opinion was so harsh on Japan when there were cultures out there that treated human beings as property and enforced female genital mutilation.

Priorities, Isamu thought. Minke whales were not in danger of extinction and human lives were far more important than—

Something shook the boat.

“What the hell?” Isamu asked.

“We need fire control crews to starboard aft!” Katashi said over the announcement system. “Emergency.”

Katashi was a firm, calm man, but even Isamu could hear the slight tremor of urgency in his voice. Isamu was a member of the on-board fire team and immediately about-faced and started to a causeway that would take him from the port rail.

Catching a few whales would have to wait. His fellow seamen were in trouble as even now the stench of burning paint, metal and...

Is that pork? Isamu wondered. Dread flushed through the sailor as he bolted into the passageway and took off. Some part of his mind drifted back to the tales of the south seas and how they likened the cooking of human flesh to the smell and flavor of pork; hence the name “long pork” for cannibalism. His stomach twisted into a knot as he ran, but he didn’t allow himself to slow down. If there was a fire and someone was burning, then he needed to get there immediately. He was part of the fire safety crew and he’d allow nothing to slow him down.

As he reached the starboard deck, he immediately plunged into a thick, roiling cloud that hit him like a brick wall. A spasm of coughing struck him and Isamu stumbled back, hacking gunk out of his nose and throat in an effort to regain his breath. He reached into his pocket for a rag and pressed it over his nose and mouth to form an improvised filter, but as he leaned out, the charcoal-gray smoke made it impossible to see more than a few feet toward the aft.

The grisly stench was stronger now and it was accompanied by screams of pain. Isamu cursed himself for being so impatient to get to the scene of the accident that he’d passed the fire-gear locker on the starboard side. He’d assumed that he’d prove able to get to the equipment locker on that side of the ship, and his haste now cost him. Rather than rush back and take even more time, Isamu relied upon his memory, feeling along the way to where he remembered the equipment locker stood.

Getting it open, Isamu reached in, found an oxygen mask and pulled it over his head, but only after the face piece was in place did he take the rag away from his mouth. No longer assailed by chemical smoke, his tears helped to clear his vision. Now with less of an excuse to be clumsy, he shrugged into a fireproof coat and tugged on his gloves. An industrial-strength fire extinguisher would get him moving toward the center of the disaster while others prepped the hoses.

Almost as an afterthought, Isamu grabbed up a walkie-talkie and plugged its jack into the firefighter’s mask. Now he could transmit and receive, hands-free.

“I’m in gear. Heading to the fire with the extinguisher,” he announced, following protocol. He’d screwed up once, and found himself floundering in the passageway. Another mistake would cost lives.

He scrambled toward the thickest of the smoke, the high-test extinguisher making him list with each step simply due to its weight. The bottle was heavy, seventeen pounds of mono-ammonium phosphate, which would give it sufficient endurance to move in and save as many of his shipmates as he could. The phosphate was a good neutral compound, perfect for dealing with anything from electrical to burning fuel. It would cut loose with a high-pressure cloud, more than enough to snuff out a large column of flames that he could maneuver through.

Sure enough, his first tug on the trigger quenched a section of deck, not only clearing a path for him to cut through to the main fire, but also allowing a couple of injured sailors to escape. Isamu waved and patted them on, careful not to touch any burned areas, for risk of exacerbating tissue damage to already injured skin. “Fire control, I have three coming in, severe burns, but they’re still ambulatory.”

“I read you,” came the quick response. “We’re prepping sick—”

Thunder crashed and Isamu suddenly lost his radio signal.

“Hello? Hello!” he shouted through his mask.

He couldn’t waste more time. He gave the extinguisher trigger another squeeze, blasting more of the phosphate and smothering more yards of sizzling deck. As he did so, the smoke thinned, just for a moment, and he could see where a gigantic “bite” had been taken out of the ship, hot metal smoldering as a surging wave slapped it, a cloud of steam rising from the wreckage. The fires came back within moments, farther on, but because Isamu was far from the actual hole, he could see that the flames came from metal that was white-hot. For some reason the explosion looked as if it had originated two or three yards from where the hull should have been, but the harpoon guns that they used didn’t have that much gunpowder and the magazine was elsewhere, closer to the bow.

A third thunderous impact shook the ship and Isamu whirled to see what was happening. Even as he did so, he noticed a low black object about four hundred yards away. At first Isamu thought it might be a whale from its sheer bulk, but it was too far out even to be a sperm whale. Another part of what made Isamu think it was a whale was the puffing smoke. It looked like the exhalation of a whale, the hot moisture of its breath expelled into frigid Antarctic air.

But another puff erupted. Something dark and small shot up and sailed through the sky toward his ship.

Hideaki Isamu had only a few moments to realize that the object on the waves looked reminiscent of an American stealth fighter, so famous and recognizable from countless video games and Japanese anime. He also recalled that there were ships—warships—that had a similar configuration. Comparable stealth craft had even been used in one of Isamu’s favorite movies to destroy a Red Chinese—

* * *

THE YINGJI-82, yingji literally meaning “eagle strike” in Chinese, was a magnificent piece of weaponry. Though it was nearly 21 feet in length, because it was stored inside the trimaran’s missile magazine, no camouflage paint was required to make it low profile. White with red piping and nose cone, the missile accelerated from the low-profile launcher and accelerated to 664 miles an hour in the space of a few seconds.

The YJ-82 was fired straight up, especially since the range and target were being guided by the launcher’s own internal radar that currently painted the Saburou Maru with beams invisible to the human eye. The Eagle Strike—known by NATO forces as CSS-N-8 Saccade—had been designed from the ground up as an anti-shipping missile, complete with the ability to carry 360 pounds of high explosive to its target at speeds just below subsonic. The speeding munition rode on its turbojet at Mach 0.9 toward its target.

Though it was a current front-line surface warship and air-to-surface fighter jet weapon, the Yingji-82 wasn’t exactly the newest in designs. It had begun its fighting history in 1989 and spread to the Middle East, particularly to Iran, thanks to sales by China in 1992. The weapon, though it hadn’t been utilized in major military engagements, had proved its stealth in crippling an Israeli naval frigate in 2006. Hezbollah, supplied by the Iranians, hit the INS Hanit with a YJ-82 that managed to penetrate the warship’s multilayered anti-missile defenses.

A Japanese whaling ship such as the Saburou Maru wouldn’t stand a chance. The first round struck with enough force to make a forty-foot-wide hole in the aft of the whaler. Materials around the blast zone were heated up phenomenally, igniting any flammable objects in the area. On a warship, the flames would not have been so bad, as there was far more fire control equipment on hand and far less that would actually burn. On a whaler, which didn’t expect torpedo or missile strikes, it was a churning inferno.

The Yingji-82 came down in close proximity to Hideaki Isamu, its semi-armor-piercing high explosives penetrating the interior of the Maru. Isamu didn’t suffer at all as the detonation produced a sheet of force that instantly burst every single cell in his body. Neurons detonated under the pressure wave, and as such, Isamu literally had no means by which to experience the trauma that killed him outright, liquefying organs.

Others were not so lucky, as sailors were hurled into the frigid Antarctic waters. The poor men wouldn’t last long, twenty minutes if they managed to keep themselves afloat. Unfortunately broken arms and legs or deep concussions rendered those seamen helpless. Unable to hold their breath, several already were gone, breathing in ocean water and drowning instantly.

Four missiles took apart the Japanese whaler completely, bulkheads torn asunder. The 150-foot craft groaned in agony, the swelling oceans producing enough stress on the threadbare keel to snap it in two.

The Saburou Maru was merely the first of the Japanese research whaling craft to be lost in the space of three days. Three more, including one factory ship, were destroyed, lost at sea.

* * *

BARBARA PRICE STOOD at the center of the Computer Room in Stony Man Farm. She was surrounded by a sprawl of computer hubs, each built and personally designed by the four master information-gatherers that made up the Sensitive Operations Group’s cybernetic support crew. Between the four of them, if it could not be uncovered, it was beyond discovery.

Right now, Price was keeping her eye on the world map up on the video screen wall, also mirrored on her tablet computer.

In three days, four Japanese industrial ships had been lost. Casualties added up to nearly four hundred Japanese sailors; the rest of the whaling fleet being forced to abandon operations for the year. Already, the Tokyo stock market was reeling from the loss of manpower and matériel, even though no one had stepped forward to claim responsibility for the deadly attacks. The losses of the ships and manpower totaled up to $350 million U.S. dollars, adding another $24 million thrown into the mix due to the salaries of the crews not being paid out. At the thought of the damage wrought on four hundred different families, Price found herself feeling a little nauseated.

This was just the first round fired across the decks of the nation of Japan, and the carnage was on a scale of 9/11 to America, at least in loss of life. How many families would be forced into poverty and homelessness without wage earners? How many children would turn to crime to support themselves?

The effect on those people was of no interest to the twenty-four-hour cable-news cycles, no matter the political leaning of the network. Already cable news was bristling with the debate over the sinkings. On liberal channels, the mystery attackers were the vigilantes who finally struck a blow to end the barbaric practice of whaling. On more conservative channels, the debate turned toward unfair United Nations rules regarding national culture and business, as well as the economic impact on a national ally.

Aaron Kurtzman, Stony Man’s computer genius, motioned Price to his side.

“The team and I have developed some intel on the missiles,” Kurtzman told her.

Price took a look at the information as her tablet tapped into Kurtzman’s research. Already things were tangling into a twisted web of conspiracy. The Chinese missiles seemed to have been routed through Iran.

Akira Tokaido raised his hand. “We’ve got developments at the White House!”

Price grimaced and brought up Tokaido’s interface. Pennsylvania Avenue was alive and livid with anti-whaling protesters, all of whom were under surveillance by the army of Secret Service and Metro P.D. officers that secured the home of the leader of the Free World.

Of equal concern to Price was the fact that her superior and good friend Hal Brognola was also at the White House.

* * *

AMERICANS WERE BUZZING, especially since there was a Japanese delegation in Washington, D.C., visiting the White House. The President wanted to make a good impression upon the dignitaries, something that was made difficult by picketers parading across the lawn from the Oval Office, their placards decrying Japanese inhumanity to animals.

Harold Brognola, as usual, hung around the edges of the open meeting. As a major figure in the Justice Department, his presence usually went unnoticed, especially since he had the ear of the President across multiple administrations. His Justice Department position, however, was merely a smokescreen for his position as the liaison between the White House and the Sensitive Operations Group at Stony Man Farm.

The SOG was an extra-legal agency Brognola had helped to assemble person by person, carefully scrutinizing every support and field operative. While Stony Man operated outside the parameters of law enforcement or military, Brognola was aware that it would take a tight rein and an uncommon moral code to keep the ultra-covert agency from going the wrong way.

Indeed, Stony Man had battled not only foreign threats, but other agencies within the American establishment, rogue operations groups that didn’t have the concern for innocent bystanders or were fueled by blind, bigoted hatred or simply unchecked greed.

Right now, Brognola was especially interested in what the Japanese delegation wanted from the President. The attacks on their whaling operation were at the forefront of the conversation and there was more than sufficient tension in their voices to make Brognola worried.

Stony Man Farm was already on full alert, especially since the attack on the Japanese ships was carried out by high-technology craft and military-grade missiles. The cyber crew at the Farm had picked up on Australian naval investigations of the sinkings. The Australians had discovered surviving pieces of them that implicated both China and Iran.

The Farm was on full alert, ready to allocate its resources to tracking down the vigilantes. There was a good possibility the action was going to be the spearhead of an international terror campaign. Iran’s involvement already made Brognola tense.

“Hal?” Brognola’s wireless earpiece was connected to his secure smartphone. It proved to be a means to prevent interruption of high-level conferences while allowing him to keep his thumb firmly on the pulse of an international crisis. The voice was Barbara Price’s, the Stony Man mission controller.

“What’ve you got?” Brognola asked under his breath.

“We have the protesters under surveillance and a group of about twenty have wandered away,” Price answered. “So far, none of them look as if they’re armed, but confidence levels are low on that evaluation.”

“Wandered where?”

“Toward the secure exit from the White House grounds,” Price told him. “Secret Service chatter indicates they are aware of the potential threat.”

“Good to know the Farm has both sides on watch,” Brognola said. “Any idea of the identities of the protesters?”

“We’re looking at a mix of Greenpeace and PETA,” Price answered. “Known troublemakers for the group.”

“‘Breaking into chemical plants’ trouble?” Brognola asked.

“On the nose,” Price replied. “They have rap sheets, but none that actually equate to armed violence or bombings and sabotage designed to inflict injury. Still, there’s a first time for everything.”

“Keep me appraised,” Brognola said.

The Japanese delegation made the motions of leaving; standing, bowing their heads, offering hands for shakes. The White House press corps took plenty of pictures and video of the activity, most of which would be run constantly in the background as B-reel footage while pundits from either cable news camp spouted their usual vapid commentary.

Over the drone of reporters struggling to get to the front to ask their questions first, something popped in the distance. Brognola instantly recognized the distant crack of high explosives. He touched his earpiece.

“Barb, what was that?”

“Grenade and small-arms fire on the street with the protesters,” Price answered. “The group that started for the security entrance has been hit. Secret Service is on the lookout for grenade launchers and assault rifles.”

“Hitting the protesters?” Brognola asked.

“Metro P.D. is on the move and FBI Hostage Rescue is mobilizing,” Price stated. “White House security has been raised to maximum.”

“Any idea who opened fire?” Brognola asked, moving to a nearby window overlooking the scene. Wisps of black smoke curled into the sky, a grisly grave marker for where someone had struck with brutal violence.

Brognola had been to the site of such massacres, had gone through many more evidence photos, but was all too aware of the smell of spilled blood and burst organs, the moans and groans of the wounded and dying. Every instinct he had was to rush out there, but Brognola was not a young man, nor the fastest and fittest.

Younger men would—

A police car racing to the scene suddenly erupted, bursting apart under the force of a shoulder-mounted missile. Flames blew out through the glass on all sides, a billowing fire that vomited into the open. Brognola clenched his fists.

The gunfire continued. Secret Service guards at the gate took cover as automatic fire sizzled at the guardhouse. Bullet-resistant glass and built-in steel plating did little to alleviate the incoming torrent of bullets.

Brognola grimaced as the sudden flurry of violence abated.

This was not going to be the last shot fired in this war.

Not if Stony Man had anything to say about it.

CHAPTER TWO

The American Vanguard National Fund’s offices seemed like those of any other financial organization, though they were in downtown Baltimore, Maryland, only a few hours from Washington, D.C., rather than in physical proximity to Wall Street.

Of course, Rufus Schmied would not have wanted to be in New York City for the life of him. Baltimore itself was already stock-full of undesirable flesh trying to pose as humanity, but there was little chance that the 64 percent of the population who were black could ever hope to blend in with the society that Schmied sought to build. And the Jews held too much power in New York.

Schmied looked out the window on a city in which the rot was far too strong yet was a center of power in his state. Schmied didn’t want to leave behind Maryland, which for the most part was pure outside the rotten core known as Baltimore. He’d even leave the city’s demographics alone; after all, not counting the city, the state was fairly clean.

Big cities, with their “melting pots,” were sources of violence and corruption. Farther inland, on the other hand, where Americans were still Americans, things were so much different, so much kinder and simpler, so much easier. Schmied didn’t want to lose that.

After all, it wasn’t the blacks’ fault that they were crammed into housing projects that seemed specifically designed to make them accustomed to prison, or engaged in soulless, mindless rote learning that reduced their abilities to think constructively. Liberal policies, intended to give them a break, were nothing more than the morphine used to diminish opium or heroin addiction—the trade of one soul-crushing addiction for another.

The phone on his desk buzzed. “Mr. Schmied, your two o’clock is here.”

“Thank you, Inga,” Schmied replied, pressing the speaker button. “Please hold all calls.”

“Yes, sir.”

Schmied pulled the cable from the back of his desk phone. He opened a locked drawer and began to scan the room with a hand-held electronic device, even as the appointment walked through the door. Schmied put his finger to his lips, sweeping the area. He then took a small white-sound generator and pressed one of its speakers to the glass. The static vibrations would make even a laser microphone incapable of picking up their conversation.

“Don’t you think that’s a little much?” Warren Lee asked as he closed the door firmly behind him.

Schmied raised an eyebrow. “This from you?”

Warren Lee was tall, well-tanned, brown-eyed. If Schmied hadn’t known the man was half Chinese and half American, there would be little to give away that Lee was anything other than a white man. It was uncanny, but then, Schmied had little problem with Asians. After all, they had their ties to the true Aryan race, as well. For them, except for those who had fallen under the fetish of communism in mainland China, life was honor and discipline, unlike the poor rats that teemed in American cities.

“Don’t give me any of that,” Lee grumbled. “I have to congratulate you on this morning’s event.”

Schmied nodded. “It was not my personal work. I merely set the balls in motion.”

“And you threw a perfect strike,” Lee told him. “The pins are falling exactly where we want them.”

Schmied pointed to a seat for Lee, who sat across from him. Schmied poured a fresh cup of coffee for his visitor, leaving it black and setting it on the desk in front of Lee. He poured one for himself. Alcohol had proved the downfall of too many—the downfall of entire ethnic groups—so Schmied remained a teetotaler. Control was his drug. Anything that impaired his clarity was to be avoided like the plague.

“I’m pleased for your approval,” Schmied said. He took a seat and crossed his legs, steepling his fingertips. Lee began to talk about the project they had allied themselves to accomplish.

Schmied smiled pleasantly, channeling his amusement. “Precious” Lee thought he was trying to convince the Fund that he was somehow part of a Taiwanese “interest” looking for a means of discrediting the Japanese economy. If there was one thing the American Vanguard National Fund possessed, it was the resources to thoroughly vet any person walking through their doors with a scheme.

Sure, Lee’s bona fides seemed to be legitimate enough to survive moderate scrutiny, but Schmied had not transformed a hundred million dollars’ worth of methamphetamine and automatic weapon sale profits into a multibillion-dollar bank by only making moderate inquiries. Laundering the business of biker gangs into a respectable banking conglomerate took attention and caution equal to the audacity necessary to raise that cash.

Lee spoke eloquently, pointing out how the AVNF could further increase its earnings by investment into the project, but Schmied knew exactly what he was putting his work into.

Hiring a highly skilled group of young men from Gehenna, Texas, dressed up as consummate professionals and equipped with the best weaponry money could buy, turned the sniveling milksops of Greenpeace and PETA into victims and national heroes. The Gehenna crew struck and disappeared, utilizing every ounce of intel they could to appear like a corporate security force taking vengeance upon a group of rabble rousers.

Already, donations to both groups had doubled, and the liberal cable stations were demanding the renunciation of diplomatic ties to Japan. Schmied’s investments in Japanese businesses had quickly been sold off, filtered through dummy corporations, so that he wouldn’t take a bath in his own stock department. He’d turned that influx of money around deftly. Everything the AVNF made would stay firmly in the pocket of true American patriots. Let China’s SAD—the red Communist version of the CIA or the older KGB—continue to bluster and boast of the profits to be earned. It only confirmed the truth that the so-called socialists were simply common thugs, centralizing money and power for themselves. There was only greed, and SAD’s greed was going to sate itself on the wounded, floundering whale that had been Japan.

Schmied was enjoying the crumbs torn off into the water by scavengers tearing at the bloody carcass. Now that the blood was in the water, every opportunist in the ocean was circling, looking for a bite of that thick, succulent blubber.

Schmied blinked and laughed at himself. The allusion to the dying whale must have been unavoidable, given the targets of those first anti-shipping missiles.

“Mr. Schmied?” Lee asked.

“I’m sorry,” the “banker” answered. “I just had a mental image cross my mind.”

“Oh?” Lee inquired. “What mental image?”

“Japan as a wounded whale. And you and I, Mr. Lee, are the sharks waiting to dig in for the feast.”

Lee smiled. “I see.”

“I just want to know what we can do to tie in the Iranians to one side or the other,” Schmied said. “They will be an unavoidable link in the chain.”

“Trust me, Mr. Schmied,” Lee offered. “We have the perfect personages to take the fall for this.”

Schmied tilted his head. “Let me guess. Iran is currently one of the nations exporting liquid natural gas to Japan, having doubled it in 2013. Someone is attempting to hurt Iran’s petro-bucks, which means we can cast suspicion on Israel.”

Lee’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “How very perceptive...”

Schmied waved it off. “You sit behind a desk like this one, you know which way the money flows. Besides, one of the problems with Japan in international circles is its ignorance of Iranian sanctions. If anyone wanted to hurt Iran, taking a few points off the yen would be one of the best ways to do it.”

Lee chuckled. “Most canny.”

“Yeah.” If there was one thing Schmied didn’t appreciate, it was smoke being blown up his ass, and Lee seemed to have backed a foundry chimney between Schmied’s cheeks.

The business speak was on autopilot, all the while allowing the AVNF president to channel his thoughts into what dilemma he’d run into if he hadn’t kept the Chinese under tight wraps. So far, the Gehenna commandos were lost in the wind. It was a shame that a proud American warrior patriot had to take escape-and-evasion precautions in the land of his birth, but then Schmied realized that America, as it stood now, was very far from that. So-called conservatives were engaging in invasions of privacy and propriety that they accused their liberal counterparts of doing.

Schmied had an enemy of his country, moving in close, assuming that he was clueless.

So Schmied would feed the bastard all the rope he needed. And, in the process, an economic powerhouse that had drained American money for decades would end up crippled. He had little doubt a political rival would take the blame, forcing the United States to become stronger, to stand up under its own power.

“I suppose you’ll be needing something to show Iran as a victim, as well,” Schmied said.

“We have something in line for that,” Lee answered.

“Just make certain it’s clean,” Schmied told him. “We’re skating a dangerous edge here.”

The Chinese “businessman” nodded in agreement. “Don’t worry.”

Schmied bristled. “Don’t worry” was the lie spoken by a man seeking to undermine you; a deception intended to disarm and leave vulnerable. The day that Schmied wouldn’t worry was to be the minute he stopped breathing.

Lee’s breathing would end long, long before that.

* * *

THE D.C. METRO POLICE were all too cooperative with Carl Lyons, Rosario Blancanales and Hermann Schwarz as the three men of Able Team arrived on the scene. The flash of Justice Department Special Agent badges garnered cooperation from the police who’d turned this stretch of side street into a crime scene.

Lyons, the Able Team leader, was a big man; six feet in height, fair hair contrasting against weathered skin that was drawn tautly across a broad-shouldered, muscular frame. The former Los Angeles police officer had very little body fat and his jacket was cut perfectly so that he could conceal a pair of powerful handguns—a Smith & Wesson .45 auto in a shoulder holster and an alloy-framed, 8-shot .357 Magnum revolver tucked into a pancake holster—just behind his right hip. Lyons was not someone who was known for taking half measures, and though he regretted leaving the long guns behind in the Able Team van, the two big guns were backed up by two Airweight revolvers, a knife around his neck, with another folding blade in his trousers’ pocket and a Taser in a cross-draw holster.

Just because the violence had exploded and faded only a couple of hours before did not mean lightning would not strike twice.

Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz was smaller than Lyons, shorter by two inches, but lighter than the former football player by a good piece. Schwarz was the definition of average, everything spectacular about him hidden beneath slender limbs, brown hair and brown eyes. Schwarz had been part of the elite U.S. Army Rangers, but his physique was one of sleekness and efficiency. He had strength in his arms and legs, but it was not tied up in the same bulging, rippling mass of musculature that the Able Team leader’s bulk was carved from. Even so, Schwarz’s greatest ability was his mind. He was a certified genius, having a vast array of scientific skills, being versed in areas of expertise as diverse as nanotechnology and various Eastern Tao’s.

Lyons likened Schwarz to a hyperactive puppy, always throwing himself into each new project with glee and boundless energy. Whether it was designing a new homing system for a missile, hacking features in computer and telephone operating systems or discussing philosophy with Blancanales, Schwarz was rarely calm and still. Even when he said not a word, the genius was thinking, observing, applying his intellect with the skill and precision of a surgeon, dissecting the universe around him down to the last molecule.

Rosario Blancanales was the eldest of the three men. He looked older thanks to his weathered features, displaying more wrinkles than the others and his premature gray-white hair. However, doubts of the man’s fitness for duty were dispelled by watching him move with grace and energy. Smooth of tongue and easy in manner, Blancanales often served as the spokesman and the negotiator for Able Team, earning him the dubious title of “Politician.” Blancanales had been through the Green Berets’ Robin Sage, and while he was no slouch in the application of force and violence, he was also masterful in the use of diplomacy and conversation.

Able Team possessed a dynamic of mind, body and spirit that turned the trio into one of the finest covert action teams in the world.

Once more, Lyons looked at the chalk outlines of murdered brothers behind the badge. D.C. cops and Secret Service personnel had lost their lives while attempting to prevent the cold-blooded murders of a group of reactionary protesters irate at Japan’s appeal to the White House in the court of world opinion.

Lyons and Schwarz did not need to determine what to look for as they surveyed the site of the massacre. They’d been through this too many times, applying their knowledge, picking up hints and clues as to whom or what could have been behind the attack.

Certainly the Secret Service detail had given some details of the attackers, but Schwarz had military experience that allowed him to see things outside the box that law enforcement could think of. Hell, Schwarz had experience that allowed him to survey a battle and pick up almost impossible details thanks to his razor-sharp mind.

The whole universe was a box the genius could maneuver around and examine, peering into individual compartments and collating them with the barest threads of coincidence.

In the meantime Lyons had been to more than enough murder scenes to have an intuitive feel for the kind of attackers. Already he had a sense of focused rage. The men behind the attack were disciplined, firing short bursts, staying in cover and never staying still long enough to become a target. But there was something extra here. There was an underlying anger, a hatred of the protesters that went beyond the need to create dead bodies for the sake of a political message.

Lyons could tell just by looking at the wound patterns on the bodies in CSI digital photographs transmitted to his tablet.

It was one thing to shoot a man to end his life.

It was another to destroy the face of a human being, or to ravage the genitals of another with gunfire. There was both racial and sexual rage at work.

The three black men who were victims of gunfire—two protesters and one D.C. policeman—had been shot, but then also laid into with gunfire that shredded their genitalia. Lyons also noticed the destruction of the breasts of each of the women who had been shot. Five total. One woman survived by the grace of being hit from the side, the curve of her ribs deflecting bullets from her internal organs.

Lyons clenched his jaw.

The FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit investigators were going over the scene and Lyons stood with them. The back and forth showed a level of violence reserved for hate crimes. Whoever was involved in the shootings had wanted to emasculate the black men in their sights, but at least two of the shooters displayed a deep misogyny, attacking the most feminine parts of the female protesters’ anatomy.

Schwarz came closer to Lyons and the two Able Team investigators got to talking.

“This looks like a coordinated military assault,” Lyons said.

“Looks like it indeed,” Schwarz replied. “You’ve noticed the precision of the shooting, even in the instances where they’re punishing their targets of opportunity.”

Lyons nodded.

“The shooters have great marksmanship, but there’s cruelty in there,” Schwarz admitted. “This wasn’t typical combat. I’m betting you noticed the injuries on the blacks and the women?”

“BSU is in agreement,” Lyons told him.

Schwarz shook his head. “The vibe of this attack is all wrong for a hired kill. It’s something pretty damned sick. These aren’t ex-military, but they have been organized by a military mind. Their commander has found a hatred he could focus into a tool of opportunity.”

“Paramilitary group. Not private security—too many of them are actual military or police. Someone with this kind of bigoted rage is not going to last too long on a force or in the service with that bubbling below the surface,” Lyons said.

Schwarz shook his head. “For all the flack private military companies get, they have some strict psychological and background checks for their hires. Given the different cities, the different working conditions, bigots are not going to cooperate well with professionals no matter what their skin color.”

“I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be with them,” Lyons added. “Add money, training and skill, and we’ve narrowed down the field considerably.”

“White group. Definite cash. They’re using actual 5.56 mm, not civilian .223 Remington,” Schwarz noted. “And the missile looks like an FGM-172B.”

“English,” Lyons said.

“One of the two warheads developed for the SRAW—short-range assault weapon. It’s a multipurpose fragmentation munition designed for anti-personnel as well as use against thin-skinned targets,” Schwarz said. On his tablet, he called up the detonation of the police car as recorded on multiple surveillance cameras that watched the scene.

“We don’t have good visuals on the shooters. Their heads were covered, as were their eyes, and they were driving fast enough to not give cameras time to focus,” Schwarz added. “They could be any nationality short of Pakistani in skin tone. Also, no apparent tattoos visible, even with short sleeves.”

“Skinhead gangs, bikers and such trend toward that, but only if they’ve actually been in prison,” Lyons mentioned. “These could be free-born fanatics.”

“I was thinking the same,” Schwarz answered. “Like the Cosmic Church, which fostered the National Resistance.”

“Which in turn gave birth to our dear friends, the Aryan Right Coalition,” Lyons growled.

“We’ve got work to do on narrowing this down,” Schwarz said. “I’m sending the data we’ve collected through to the Farm.”

Lyons nodded. “Good. The sooner we get to smack answers out of someone, the sooner we get started.”

Schwarz managed a weak smile. “Anyone tell you that you’re sexy when you’re a bloodthirsty avenger?”

“Not this week,” Lyons answered. “But it’s only Tuesday.”

CHAPTER THREE

It was early evening when three members of Phoenix Force and Dragonfin went wheels up from Langley Air Force Base on board the C-17 Globemaster.

The C-17 was on loan from the United States Air Force Reserve, and the paperwork for the flight stated that the craft was taking supplies to MacMurdo Station, off the Ross Ice Shelf where the Saburou Maru had been attacked and sunk. With that cover, every subsequent trip would be off the books.

David McCarter overlooked the Dragonfin, running his fingers across its smooth, flat-black hull. The boat had originally been scheduled to auction after the Drug Enforcement Agency had captured it from drug smugglers. Its hold had carried two tons of cocaine. Even with all of that bulk, with its twin motors it was capable of 80 miles per hour. It was a new generation of cigarette boat.

Catamaran, McCarter reminded himself, not cigarette. The lads would have a fit over you misidentifying their little canoe.

His friends Calvin James and Rafael Encizo, both sturdy sailors—James tall and raw-boned, Encizo stocky and stout—had been overjoyed at the acquisition of a “go-fast” boat by Stony Man Farm.

Go-fasts were originally meant, and still utilized, in sports racing, but as with all things legal and legitimate, greedy men saw other uses for them. For years, drug smugglers had utilized the amazingly fast, low-profile craft for ferrying tons of drugs across international waters. While not as fast as a helicopter, “go-fasts” were still far swifter than any cutters or interceptor boats except for those craft also based on racing designs. For pure racing purposes, stripped down to cockpit, fuel cells and engines, the design on this particular catamaran hull projected a top speed of more than 200 miles per hour.

This particular beast had been specifically designed for long-haul smuggling and defense of its contraband. It was meant to counter U.S. Coast Guard Deployable Pursuit boats. To add to the survivability of cargo and space, Dragonfin was a twin-hulled craft. On the bottom there were two slim-line keels, where the Mercury drives were housed. Each was capable of 1,000 horsepower. For long range, the engines were equipped with four 200-gallon fuel cells. With a relatively sedate cruising speed, those cells would give it phenomenal range, but when it came to putting the throttle to full, they would tear along, as equipped, at more than 180 miles per hour. They sacrificed about thirty miles per hour with combat turrets for M-2 Browning machine guns, Mk 19 automatic grenade launchers and an M-242 Bushmaster 25 mm cannon, all operated by remote control.

With those weapons installed, Dragonfin could engage targets at up to almost two miles.

Aside from the turrets, Dragonfin had also been upgraded with a Kevlar polymer coating on the hull, which served to minimize the radar signature of the craft on top of the waves. Its sleek, almost space-fighter-looking design would also be hard to make out against the ocean, thanks to the dark blue mottled-camouflage patterns set into the coating. When they’d first seen it, it had been painted jet black by the smugglers, which almost was good enough.

Almost, however, hadn’t kept the boat from being captured or appropriated by Stony Man Farm.

Underneath, there were streamlined housings for torpedoes, and Dragonfin had four of those deadly fish held in reserve just in case their targets had more than two inches of rolled homogeneous steel armor. The most important addition, however, was a communications system that would keep them in satellite contact with Stony Man Farm, allowing them real-time satellite imagery and telemetry to track any target they needed.

The Globemaster would give them near-speed-of-sound transit around the planet if necessary in their hunt for the attackers of the Japanese whaling ship.

James, Encizo and McCarter were to be the three-man crew for this journey. While the burly Gary Manning and the young, athletic T. J. Hawkins would be going to Japan to investigate possible intrigue in that country. McCarter’s two friends, having spent years of their lives working with boats and diving, would be acting to help McCarter crew Dragonfin. It was a bit of a letdown, as both James and Encizo were adept at Japanese language and culture to some degree; James from the time he’d spent in Japan while in the United States Navy, Encizo from his close friendship with deceased Phoenix Force operative Keio Ohara.

As it was, Gary Manning had also had a good, close friendship with Ohara, often working hand in hand with the electronics expert; his skill with the language would be bolstered by a local asset of Phoenix Force’s, a man named John Trent.

It only made sense, the Stony Man action and cybernetics teams had determined, that if there was a plot afoot aimed at discrediting Japan’s credibility and destroying their ships, there would be clues to be garnered on Japanese soil. While McCarter and the Dragonfin crew went to the high seas to hunt and destroy the armed ships responsible for hundreds of sailors murdered, Manning, Hawkins and Trent would operate together and look for malicious agents on land.

McCarter didn’t envy Able Team. The three of them were going after a group of sadistic murderers who’d tried to make it look as if Japan was smothering dissent with their whaling program with hired killers. The team had a handle on who might have been hired to make the bloody assault only a few hundred yards from the White House, but once again, they’d be diving into the deadly, murky world of American white supremacist groups.

Not that life on Dragonfin would be fun and games. The Antarctic Ocean was a cold place and while the ship had amenities for long-distance travel, thanks to the cocaine smugglers before them, McCarter and his allies would be spending twenty-four hours a day in their immersion survival suits, like those worn on arctic fishing boats. They’d also have to eat MREs—meals ready to eat.

For now, though, McCarter and his partners would be heading to the Ross Sea and, hopefully, the trail of the ship killers would not have gone too cold.

McCarter grimaced at that thought. The Ross Sea is as cold as hell. An’ us lucky blokes have to find a needle in that haystack.

* * *

GARY MANNING WAS glad that this was a private jet, allowing him to spend time working on his tablet computer, checking stock news, paying particularly close attention to the Tokyo exchange. While the Farm’s cybernetics crew was giving a token effort toward monitoring any unusual purchases or sell-offs in relation to Japan’s economy, they were also working on trailing the money for the hired gunmen, analyzing intel on fugitives and scanning the Antarctic and Pacific oceans for signs of the marauders and their Iranian-owned, Chinese-designed, ship-killing missiles.

Manning knew that if there was one thing the members of the Stony Man action teams were chosen for, it was for more than just their raw ability to aim a gun and fire. The members of Phoenix Force and Able Team had among their numbers experts in multiple fields. Here, though they were a tad underutilized, Manning’s business acumen would come in handy.

He looked in parallel market listings, utilizing his data from the S&P Asia 50, which allowed him glimpses at Japan’s Topix and Nikkei 225, and the dozens of markets in Singapore, such as the FTSE group. Singapore would likely be the source of insider trading on any pan-Asian economic assault, since the FTSE had twenty markets in Southeast Asia itself, covering China as a proxy.

Being thorough, he also glanced at Australia’s S&P indexes. There were plenty of forces in the world market that would like to see Japan take a few shots to weaken the yen, and not all of them had to do with Communist China, which had its own trinity of indexes for international trade. Capitalism, Manning found, was still a major factor on what should have been the worlds behind the Iron and Bamboo curtains. Money and resources still made the world go around, still got things done, and no amount of socialist idealism—of which the Soviet Union was hardly an exemplar—changed the balance of supply and demand.

There was movement behind Manning and he looked into the face of the Texan joining him on this journey to Tokyo. Even Thomas Jackson Hawkins, with his staunch military background—as both a member of the 75th Rangers and the Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta—had skills far and beyond merely being a gunman. It had been a while since Phoenix Force had had an electronics expert on the team, and Hawkins was up to date on twenty-first-century communications technology, as well as being one of the finest parachutists and airborne deployment specialists in the world. Hawkins was also the youngest member of the team, the most recent addition to the five-man “foreign legion” of the Sensitive Operations Group.

Hawkins chewed on some gum, which Manning was glad for. Inside the jet’s cabin, Hawkins’s preference for a pinch of “chaw” would have made him more than a little nauseated. Fortunately, T.J.’s training and discipline allowed him to swap out the ugly chewing tobacco for something that didn’t smell so much, nor require a cup to spit the gooey sap into.

Gary Manning was the second oldest member of Phoenix Force, right after Rafael Encizo, but he looked as if he only had five years on Hawkins due to the fact that Manning was a fitness fanatic. Underneath Manning’s suit, tailored to make him inconspicuous and innocuous, his body was sculpted muscle from regular five-mile, early morning runs and weight-lifting sessions where he could bench press up to 515 pounds. At six feet, with close and neatly trimmed hair, Manning’s age was indistinguishable, even by friends who knew him closely.

“You have the body of an eighteen-year-old football player and the brains of a seventy-year-old banker, hoss,” Hawkins noted, looking at the trade numbers scrolling across Manning’s tablet screen. “You have to give me an app for that.”

Manning shrugged. “I didn’t become a millionaire by not knowing my way around the market, Hawk. And no, import-export was not a code name for drug dealing.”

Hawkins smirked. “Never crossed my mind, Gary. Picking up any trends?”

Manning frowned as he pored over the numbers. “Some of these economic moves are pretty damn subtle, so I have to go over months of data.”

Hawkins nodded. “Stop all this thrilling action. My heart can’t take it.”

“Did I mention I was a millionaire?” Manning asked. “I like going over data.”

Hawkins shrugged. “How many hours until Tokyo?”

“Ten,” Manning returned.

Hawkins sighed. “I’ll get some early sleep, then check out our gear.”

“Do what you have to,” Manning said, returning to the numbers and trends on the screen. He used his stylus to mark points that might have links to avenues of potential insider trading or hedging of bets toward the economic disruption of Japan. Attacking any of the G8 nations with intent to cause financial ruin was not merely a risky proposition, it was also potentially suicidal. Many of these manipulative plots could backfire, turning a profit into their own nosedive.

The Soviet Union had attempted such a plot against the United States’s economy and found itself taking a bath, destroying the integrity of its own monetary value.

Manning felt bad for Hawkins, as the Texan was a man of action. While the Canadian himself was someone who was equally adept in the rough and tumble of field operations, Manning’s talents could be used, at least in this instance. Like Hawkins, Manning’s brain was always in motion, always looking for patterns that would indicate hidden dangers, but inside the belly of a jet, there was only waiting, at least where Hawkins was concerned.

It couldn’t have been easy, but the Texan closed his eyes and was immediately off to slumber.

If he couldn’t keep his mind active, Manning knew he’d store energy, rest and prepare himself. They’d already been an hour on the plane and T.J. had read up on as much Japanese culture as he could endure, had enough refreshers on common Japanese phrases and been in on plenty of briefing on foreign intelligence services at work in Tokyo, their current destination.

Manning and Hawkins were “stuck” with the job of being boots on the ground in Japan for the certitude that there would be elements of the anti-Japanese conspiracy active in that country. Manning’s business knowledge would give the two of them a head start on looking for angles and leads.

Would it be good enough?

Manning dismissed that thought. It had been enough before. Stony Man worked simply because the covert agency, despite its incredibly small size, utilized every asset it could assemble.

Thinking outside the box, while being intimately aware of the makeup of said container, was one way in which the teams could intercede and defeat threatening forces.

So far, it had worked.

Manning didn’t intend to fail for lack of effort.

* * *

BARBARA PRICE WAS glad that Phoenix Force was off and away, and before the day was over, one half would be in the Ross Sea, seeking out the lethal marauders. Manning and Hawkins were on their way to Japan to seek out potential suspects working within the country. Able Team, at home, was on the hunt for those who’d staged a massacre mere hundreds of yards from the President and a contingent of diplomats.

As it was, the international scene and local press were talking about the White House crisis and how Japanese “big business” had the nerve to murder honest Americans in the middle of its capital city. That point of view was coming from the left, looking for a “good war,” while the right buckled down on how the U.S. administration was antibusiness and was using the crisis for the sake of painting “job makers” as the criminals.

Price wrinkled her nose. Once upon a time, there was such a thing as a news cycle, where events were reported and later analyzed to find meaning. But now, in the parade of propaganda, the truth was lost. American was pitted against American, leading the more paranoid of commentators to foresee a civil war. Such a fomentation of hostility, where one wing of philosophy saw the other as utterly evil, despite evidence of the truth, was an abomination that Stony Man sought to battle. Far too many times the teams had seen an attempt to manipulate public opinion to the point of fracturing societies, to inspire wars between nations. Such trickery was so commonplace, Price had developed an armor against leaping to unfounded accusations. She didn’t develop an opinion without conclusive facts.

The Stony Man intel would never be allowed into a court of law, but their evidence was always succinct and conclusive to the point that when they took action against the guilty, there would be no mistakes. Every time Able Team and Phoenix Force went into action, they battled with clear consciences. Their foes were not scapegoats, but those who actually acted to harm innocent noncombatants or the madmen who sought to secure profit and power from acts of terror and mayhem.

Then again, Price knew that her job wasn’t to sell commercial time to fatten the pockets of media moguls. Her job was to help protect America, her allies, the whole of the world at times. She and the cybernetics crew looked at raw data and events. They could tell that poverty and orphanhood were factors that gave violent gangs and terrorist groups thousands of recruits yearly for their personal shock troopers. Hamas soldiers didn’t stem from Israeli occupation, but from the poverty caused by the strife in the region. Poor and homeless, often growing up without fathers or mothers or both, these young people were ripe for transforming from “victims” into “avengers.”

Smart, devious bastards located a bumper crop of foot soldiers to twist to their cause, and they swooped in, forming modern-day groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Bloods, the Islamic Jihad. Give a man without life a target for his anger, a reason for his failures, and you could fill an army’s ranks. Trailer parks. Occupied slums. Inner cities ruled by drug lords. Nations deprived of education.

Because of this continuum of ignorance, of fanned prejudices and hatreds, Stony Man was perpetually at war.

There were billions of humans on the planet and hundreds of potential holes from which the greedy, the sociopathic and the murderous could draw upon. Finding dupes, already led astray by fake news and overhyped political commentary, turned the world into a factory for fanatics and maniacs.

Price sometimes wished that she could arrange for the cyber crew to crash some of these news stations, bankrupting them and obliterating their influence upon the American public. Liars of left and right persuasions would suddenly have nothing else to work with. Unfortunately such an act would be the ultimate in government censorship.

While the alarmists bellowed “Fire” in a crowded theater, pushing people to trample their neighbors in panic all for a profit, Price would not violate the Constitution in that manner. Freedom of speech also applied to blind stupidity, bigotry and prejudice, as well as lies.

“So we save the world from itself, one brushfire at a time,” Price muttered.

“Feeling disgusted by the news coverage?” Kurtzman asked. The wheelchair-bound genius had rolled past her to a coffeepot to refill his mug with a splash of the black, oily, high-octane gruel they jokingly referred to as coffee. It tasted terrible, but it packed the punch of a rocket launcher, enabling the cyber team to withstand hours of hacking and data research.

Price glowered.

“I know. I know. It’s not news,” Kurtzman amended. “But not everyone has access to raw data like we do.”

“No,” Price answered. “But that’s still not an excuse for willful deception of millions of viewers.”

Kurtzman shook his head, agreeing with her with a simple frown. Thickly bearded and with arms and a chest of solid muscle, the leader of the cyber team had earned the nickname “Bear” long before he’d taken a bullet to the spine. Price was reminded of the tales of Native Americans, granting bears great, nearly mystical wisdom, as well as patience. Kurtzman had a calming effect on her. “Unless we catch these people actively destroying Americans, we can’t go after them. But when they do, we’ll drop on them like a ton of bricks.”

Price took a deep breath. She poured herself a mug of the crap they called coffee. She’d need the energy, despite the fact that she had a thermos of homemade java, creamed and sweetened to her particular biases. “Sometimes, though, you have to wonder if these crazed morons aren’t just deliberately shoveling fuel onto the fire.”

“I know how you feel,” Kurtzman told her. “That’s why I always cast an eye toward that avenue. One day, we’ll strike gold.”

Price narrowed her eyes. “I’ll settle for last blood.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Rosario Blancanales drove the Able Team van, a mobile headquarters for the team that also served as armory, electronics locker, communications nerve center and occasionally the biggest hunk of cover that they could find. The van, on the outside, resembled any other generic professional van, complete with the stylish logo of an official-sounding company. Dark brown, with gold-colored lettering, the delivery vehicle was invisible and unnoticeable in residential and professional neighborhoods. The official term—aluminum walk-in van—had become so much a part of the public consciousness that the vehicles, for all intents and purposes, were ignored, unless rolling up for a specific delivery.

However, Able Team’s van was made of much more than aluminum. Inside the outer shell there were sandwiched layers of Kevlar weave and carbon fiber sheets. It wasn’t Chobham armor, but Carl Lyons and Stony Man Farm armorer John “Cowboy” Kissinger had fired at the interior plating with everything up to a .50 BMG rifle and the shell held together.

In terms of a communications suite and computer center, Hermann Schwarz and the rest of the Stony Man cybernetics crew had developed the “Suitcase.” Utilizing solid-state drives for instant startup and file access, as well as lack of vulnerability to electromagnetic interference, the case contained the most powerful satellite uplink in the smallest size possible. There were few places on Earth the team couldn’t reach twenty-four hours a day.

Combined with powerful processors and having a satellite computer link to the Farm, the case could provide real-time data and electronic intel from anywhere around the globe. A second variant of the Suitcase had been installed on Dragonfin, the rocket-fast catamaran Phoenix Force had taken to the Ross Sea.

Surveillance devices were stored in the van in out-of-the-way cabinets behind a camouflage made from cartons, wires and stray screws and bolts. Firearms and ammunitions were similarly obfuscated. The Able van was as close to a golf bag full of rifles as Blancanales once joked about. Sniper rifles, full-auto M-4s, grenade launchers, SMGs, shotguns and pistols were set up for each of the team members, including sufficient ammunition for each. The heavy armor was not merely for protecting the team if it came under attack, it was also to shield and protect cakes of high explosive and compact shoulder-mounted munitions.

The last thing that Stony Man Farm needed was a van equipped with so much firepower to take a wrong bullet or a bad hit and blow up half a city block. It helped that the high explosives were kept in a fireproof container and that modern plastic composition explosives didn’t detonate due to shock or to heat. The detonators were even better protected and would only generate sufficient force to activate the C-4 if inserted within the puttylike explosive.

Blancanales was not unarmed. He had his Able Team-issued sidearm, a Smith & Wesson MP-45 with a threaded muzzle addition and a knob to protect the threads. In a moment, if necessary, he could put a suppressor on the M&P and be ready for stealth without giving up stopping power. Since he was on driver duty, he wore it in a shoulder holster, balanced out by three 10-round magazine pouches on the other side under his jacket, with the option of swapping them out for 14-shot extended mags.

Blancanales had originally been a fan of the Colt Government Model .45 for his military career, but the MP’s thumb safety worked exactly the same as his locked-and-cocked Colt, held three more cartridges in the magazine than the Colt and was much lighter and handier than the steel-framed pistol. With the trigger made crisp yet reliable, the handgun was accurate. The only thing he’d given up was a half inch of barrel length, which was returned to the pistol by its suppressor-ready pipe.

It wasn’t a rifle, but Blancanales didn’t feel under-gunned with more than forty rounds of hot .45 ACP hollowpoints ready to launch at the flick of his thumb.

Tucked down next to his leg and well out of sight from anyone peering into the cab of the van, Blancanales had a longer range weapon: a KRISS submachine gun, also in .45 ACP. With the presence of its folded shoulder stock, it had the potential for better accuracy at longer range. In its stowed condition, it was the size of a small briefcase. With the stock snapped out, it was twice as long, but a stable, tack-driving weapon capable of hammering out bursts of heavy slugs that could knock down a target with authority out to 150 yards, much like the old Tommy guns and M-3 Grease guns of World War II, except in a lighter, more concealable package.

Out of sight, but not far from reach, was the main weapon Blancanales would employ if things went wrong. It was similar to the M-16 he’d utilized as a Ranger, but the official U.S. Army designation was the Squad Designated Marksman Rifle—SDM-R for short. It was not a compact weapon, complete with the full 20-inch barrel that originally rode on the M-16, which gave Blancanales confidence in its 5.56 mm rifle round. That length gave it an effective range of 660 yards, which the ACOG—advanced combat optical gunsight—on top could easily handle using its 1.5-6x magnification.

Having reached their destination, Blancanales hung back in the van, this firepower on hand, keeping overwatch for his partners, Hermann Schwarz and Carl Lyons, as they approached the small clubhouse. The two men were Caucasian, Schwarz with tousled brown hair and a thick mustache, Lyons tall, blond and blue-eyed. Even with his skin burned to a deep tan, Lyons was an Aryan’s dream.

However the men in the clubhouse were members of the Heathens Motorcycle Club, an all-white outlaw gang that stretched from Maryland to New York with more than five hundred members. Blancanales had learned all the facts about the Heathens thanks to Lyons’s nearly obsessive need to study up on their potential opposition.

The Heathens had formed ties with the White Family, another East Coast gang started within the prison system of Maryland. White Family members released from prison could always find a safe haven at a Heathens clubhouse if they couldn’t reach an appropriate Arrangement compound. The Arrangement was the name chosen by the Maryland “alumnus” of the federal prison system, and where they recruited young, disenfranchised white men and women to the cause of a “strong, free society.”

That wouldn’t have been a reason to hate them, but the Arrangement wanted a society where all Hispanics were treated as if they weren’t American-born citizens, like Blancanales’s younger siblings or other naturalized citizens such as himself. Yes, he and his family had come to America on a rubber raft, braving a rough, terrible ocean, but they’d immediately gone to the effort of achieving citizenship.

The Heathens were in a serious conflict with the Khan’s Hispanic biker gang from down the coast, so their allegiance with the Arrangement was their ticket toward armed conflict. The Arrangement benefited, as they were able to cook tons of meth that the Heathens readily distributed. The Heathens also were able to bring in the kind of weaponry the Arrangement could utilize in its war for national “purity.”

Lyons and Schwarz were each adorned with motion-picture-quality tattoo appliqués on their arms and necks, identifying them as part of the RLR West Coast gang Lyons had blown through on a prior mission—the Reich Low Riders. It was a risky proposition, but the two of them were rough and tumble, and had gone through this ruse before. The presence of the adhesive, skinlike swatches that made them look all inked up, would help. Few in law enforcement would actually attempt to wear prison tats.

And if things didn’t work out, well, Blancanales was Able Team’s designated marksman and well-equipped for the task.

But Able Team was there for information, not a body count.

* * *

ON POINT, CARL LYONS stank of sweat and gasoline. He was clad in dingy, dirt-ground jeans, scuffed boots and a hole-riddled T-shirt underneath the denim vest that sported his colors and Los Angeles “rocker.”

Hermann Schwarz had gone for a leather jacket rather than the denim vest. He also had spurs clamped to the heel of one of his boots. The stirrup that connected the spur to the boot was solid steel, as was the bar surrounding the multi-tined star on its axle.

Lyons knew men who wore spurs. A spin kick with one of those would slice a face in two or rend someone ear to ear. It was the perfect accessory for a biker thug, and Schwarz was adept with kicks. Even as they walked in, more than one set of eyes dropped to the jingling metal on Schwarz’s right boot. Cold recognition flared in their faces.

One man spoke up as the two Able Team undercover operatives entered. “RLRs? You’re far from home.”

“Would have thought this a safe harbor,” Lyons returned. He sized up the speaker, well more than six feet in height, with a reddish-blond beard and a scalp that was cleanly shaved, not even stubble on top. Lyons himself was a big man, but this guy had between twenty-five and forty pounds on him, depending on what he was like under his riding gear. Like Lyons, his arms were bare, displaying not only ink that told tales of his life as a biker and in prison, but muscles like knotted oak branches. Leather straps surrounded the man’s wrists and his green eyes glared with suspicion and hatred.

“Our berths are full, California,” the Heathens leader said. “But you can sit for a drink if you behave.”

Lyons sneered, looking the bald man over. “Behave?”

“No crippling, maiming or killing. You’ll get it back proper for every punch in the face,” the biker told him.

“You guys are no damn fun,” Lyons grumbled.

The leader laughed. “I’m Crunch.”

“Irons,” Lyons returned, holding out his hand. The two met halfway, tugging each other close with knuckle-cracking grasps and slapping each other on the shoulder. Conversations and music rose from the tension. “This is Geek.”

Crunch looked Schwarz over. “Why ‘Geek’?”

“Take your pick. I like chicken heads and I like radios,” Schwarz answered. “Why do your prospects look so squirrelly?”

Crunch rolled his eyes. “There’s heat coming down all around this part of the state since that shoot-up in D.C. An’ for some reason, the pigs think one of us might have been involved.”

“Heat over a buncha seal-humpin’ hippies?” Schwarz asked in his Geek guise.

Crunch shrugged. “I’d take a piece of that pussy action myself, but cops got smoked, too. Them’s the ones which got the bacon sizzling.”

Lyons shook his head, as if in agreement with the disgust over such a fuss over the protesters. Of course, being a lawman for most of his adult life left him with a queasy disdain for this smelly asshole Crunch and his slurs against fallen lawmen, especially those who had been gunned down in the performance of their duties.

Still, he was thankful to Crunch for reminding him that the men around them, despite their “welcoming” demeanor, were nothing less than thugs who had no regard for law or civilization.

“What brings you two here?” Crunch asked.

“We’re feeling too naked,” Schwarz answered. “Hoping for something more than pistols. A friend said this is a good place to go.”

Crunch narrowed his eyes toward Geek. “A friend?”

“Bones,” Lyons returned. “Heard of him?”

“He got pinched a while back,” Crunch said. “But he’s got some cred here in the east.”

Of course Bones has cred here, Lyons thought. I went over his rap sheet specifically in case I needed to infiltrate you animals ever again.

“How do you know him?” Crunch added as a question.

“I prospected under him,” Lyons said. “He jumped me in, too.”

Crunch nodded.

Lyons had done his homework on this particular thug, having placed him from the files he’d studied in preparation for this infiltration. Crunch had been born Alphonse MacCafferty. The Irish was evident in his beard and the few splotches of freckles that showed through the sleeves of tattoos up and down his arms. Crunch had plenty of tags for assault, but he’d managed to beat drug and arms traffic raps, thanks to Arrangement-supplied lawyers. He’d also been a person of interest in at least four murders, but nothing had stuck to the bald biker.

The .357 Magnum on his hip, a Blackhawk single-action revolver, showed he meant business in terms of ending a shootout with a minimum amount of stops. Lyons had his own Ruger, the double-action GP-100 with a six-inch barrel. Crunch eyed the revolver and nodded with approval, making Lyons feel nauseated. He didn’t allow it to show in his features, though. He’d spent time working as an undercover agent for the FBI after his stint with the LAPD, and his control was ironclad. But when it came time to break this little clubhouse open, Lyons had plenty of fuel for his berserker rage.

“Good to see at least one of you queer-coasters like American iron,” Crunch said, acknowledging the weapon on Lyons’s hip, then looking askance toward Schwarz and his shoulder-holstered Beretta, unmistakable for its magazine base pad and the lanyard ring behind it.

Carrying or riding anything that wasn’t American-made was forbidden among bikers, which was why they’d pulled up in a rented Jeep Cherokee rather than rented “rice burners” aka Japanese-built motorcycles. As big and brawny as Honda could make a motor bike, it still was not an American-made Harley-Davidson. There wasn’t one of these men who would spare more than a second glance at a foreign-made weapon or vehicle.

Schwarz had a Beretta M-9 A-1, which thankfully had Made in the U.S.A. scrawled on its slide, even though Lyons was fully aware that some might turn up their nose at him for carrying a gun with an Italian name.

“What part of ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ don’t you understand?” Schwarz asked nonchalantly. He twisted the cap off a beer and took a drag on it. “’Sides, good enough for Uncle Sam, good enough for me.”

Crunch shook his head. “Stupid European guns. Not even in a proper caliber.”

“So give us something,” Lyons returned. “We’ve got the cash.”

“What are you looking for?” Crunch asked.

“I’m not looking to screw around with follow-up shots,” Lyons answered. “I’m here for ‘fast-and-dirty and then get the hell home.’”

Crunch nodded. “You want 12-gauge air-conditioning, then.”

Lyons smirked. “You get me, brother. You really get me.”

“What about the guy with the pellet gun?” Crunch asked.

“He digs .22s,” Lyons said with an eye roll.

Crunch leered over at Schwarz. “Poodle shooters and pasta pistols. You need a new partner.”

“Despite his wimpy tastes, I’ll keep him,” Lyons returned. “He might have to shoot someone five or six times, but he always has my back.”

“That’s a good reason to keep him around,” Crunch said. “Listen, even our semi-only ARs are pulled for important stuff. I only have shotguns.”

Lyons narrowed his eyes. “Things that bad, eh?”

“You have no idea, and you never will,” Crunch returned. “Don’t dig in our business.”

Lyons shook his head. “I don’t shit where I eat.”

“That’s a rare admirable quality,” Crunch said. “Rucks, go get these two a couple of 870s from the locker. How much ammo you gonna need?”

Schwarz spoke up. “Twenty apiece. If we need more than that, we’re dead, anyway.”

“Says the faggot who needs fifteen in a clip,” Rucks chuckled.

Schwarz was not the biggest or strongest member of Able Team, but he moved with such fluid grace and swiftness that no one in the clubhouse even saw him go from lounging on his tilted chair, heels crossed on the table in front of him to standing over Rucks, pushing the biker’s head to the floor with one hand. Lyons knew the move that kept the smart-mouth pinned. He could see Gadgets’s two first knuckles up under Rucks’s Adam’s apple, the other two fingers extended and pressed against the nerve junction under his jawbone.

The Heathens wise-ass now had trouble breathing, his airway pressed down upon. The real paralyzing pressure, however, came from the ring finger and pinkie jammed against the cluster of nerves and juncture of blood vessels at that part of his body. Rucks’s eyes were wide, his mouth moving, gaping like a fish out of water.

“You better be talking about a cigarette,” Schwarz growled as he loomed over the biker.

Rucks croaked, the knuckles paralyzing his larynx, even as Lyons knew the blood flow to his brain was being interrupted. A few more moments and he’d be unconscious. It wasn’t as if Schwarz cared if someone thought he was gay, but in the role of a bad-ass, government-hating biker thug, the merest mention of his lack of manhood should have made him fly off the handle.

Anchoring a man to the floor by his throat with one hand wasn’t flying off the handle, but eyes widened all around the scene.

“Now you know why he only needs small stuff,” Lyons said nonchalantly. “Twenty sounds right.”

“Have your boy let my man go,” Crunch said.

Lyons nodded to Schwarz, who stood back. Rucks rubbed his throat, looking up at Schwarz.

No, Hermann Schwarz was not a big man, but he was a master of Monkey Style Kung Fu, which meant that he kept his body far more limber than anyone of his relative mass and fitness should have been. The Monkey Style was loose and agile, matching the speed and limberness of Schwarz’s mind and body. Sure, Lyons snapped dimension lumber with a single punch with his choice of Shotokan Karate, but he didn’t think of his friend as a weak link, either.

“You okay, Rucks?” Crunch asked. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Lyons. The bald biker was not going to give the undercover Able Team leader an opening due to a lapse of attention.

“Feel like I swallowed a pool ball,” the Heathen croaked.

“You’re lucky you didn’t swallow your own ball sack,” Schwarz told him.

“Someone get these two assholes their guns and ammo,” Crunch said. “I’m getting sick of looking at these left coast pricks.”

Lyons pulled a fat roll of bills from his jeans pocket.

“No. Screw it,” Crunch muttered. “The RLR will owe the Heathens.”

Lyons’s lip curled. “And we were getting along so nicely.”

True to Crunch’s word, a pair of 870s and several boxes of shotgun shells were loaded into a nylon bag.

“Now blow,” Crunch grumbled.

“That we’ll do,” Lyons returned, hefting the bag.

We’ll blow you straight to hell.

* * *

THOMAS JEFFERSON HAWKINS didn’t know which made him feel more naked: the lack of firearms concealed upon his person or the hostile glares when Tokyo citizens heard his Texan drawl, even if it was subdued. Both he and Gary Manning did their best to appear as innocuous as possible. So far, their mission was low-profile advanced intelligence gathering, seeking out signs of the conspiracy in Japan itself.

Unfortunately, Hawkins, even though he had a fairly good tourist vocabulary in Japanese, still had a tiny bit of that twang. Right now, the Land of the Rising Sun didn’t want to suffer the presence of Americans among them. Manning, on the other hand, was less conspicuous in his mannerisms and speech. He already had a voice that sounded neutral, more reminiscent of a voice-trained news announcer who buried drawls and speech shortcuts to be accepted nationwide. As a Canadian, it was no effort for him to return to a more thick-tongued, long-voweled “Great White North” pattern of speech that divorced him from the United States of America.

Even with that, Canada was scarcely a close ally of the Japanese in regard to research whaling, even though their interaction with the nation was minimal thanks to the U.S. and the Commonwealth of Independent States taking the brunt of any Japanese whaling in Arctic waters.

Hawkins might not have had a concealed pistol, but he was far from unarmed. Tucked inside a waistband sheath was a combat knife, while on a thong around his neck, blade up, was a talon-hooked Karambit knife.

The knife, sheathed and concealed at his waist, was an old U.S. Army Ranger favorite, the Fairbairn-Sykes. But rather than the weak-handled original, Hawkins went with the Emerson Knives’ version of the fabled Ranger fighting blade. Made from one whole piece of steel, the eleven-inch-long fighting tool was slim, flat, ideal for keeping hidden, yet swift into action. A 650-pound test para-cord made up the handle, providing a sure grip and, in a pinch, a length of cord that could hold Hawkins’s weight, plus that of and two other men. Double edged, with a point swelling then narrowing to a waspish waist, the F-S blade provided plenty of cutting edge for only six and a half inches of finely honed steel, and a spine tough enough to hammer through an automobile door.

The Karambit was curved like the letter J. The inner arc of the blade was serrated and sharpened all the way to the deadly, piercing tip at the end of its hook. As a tool, it reaped rice. As a knife, it adorned the personal battle kits of warriors as far spread as Thailand and the southern Philippines

Gary Manning, Hawkins’s Phoenix Force partner, had traveled the world in the course of his various business ventures and had fleetingly even been to Southeast Asia as part of an “armed observer” mission in the Golden Triangle for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Manning’s Japanese language and custom familiarity had been vastly enhanced by his close friendship with the late Keio Ohara.

Manning, on the experience of both Ohara and fellow Phoenix Force member Rafael Encizo, had chosen a traditional Japanese blade. Two in fact. The first was a full-length, six-inch Cold Steel Tanto knife. With a chisel point and a rigid, thick spine the Tanto had served Encizo in countless knife battles with unfailing reliability, strength and dexterity. A smaller version was on a nylon strap around Manning’s muscular, bull-like neck. Built with a two-inch blade, it looked as if the knife had been punched in the nose and had swollen to three times its normal thickness, but its edges were every sharp. As a backup fighter, it was sturdy yet unobtrusive, giving the burly Canadian more than enough deadly punch if necessary.

The two men, relatively secure with at least their fighting knives, still knew the best weapons in their arsenals were their alertness and the knowledge gained through dozens of ambushes and years of accumulated experience in the dark, dangerous back alleys of the globe. Right now, both men cautiously made their way through a literal alley in Tokyo, far from the neon-splashed streets that made the city synonymous with ultramodern and high technology. Here, just a few yards from automobiles run on lithium batteries and storefronts packed with the latest in electronics, streetlights came in the form of rare rice-paper lanterns lit from within by candles and security relied upon the alert nose and ears of a guard dog.

As assuredly as the two warriors of Phoenix Force were currently operating without benefit of firepower, history showed that the presence of assault rifles and shotguns would not be tamped by Japanese law. Tokyo was a city where air-soft replicas of the latest in front-line rifles was commonplace to the point where professional teams formed to engage in mass simulated gun battles. Hawkins and Manning simply knew they didn’t want to risk an engagement with an already edgy and on-alert Tokyo law-enforcement community. They could not risk the attention that guns would bring, not when they were here in a wholly unofficial status to meet with a NOC—a non-official cover agent for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Whoever was working the angles of ruining the Japanese international image and national economy had made certain to work within operational security parameters that precluded any form of electronic communication. The NOC, however, had raised a report about RUMINT—intelligence gathered by rumor, in the parlance of normal, non-spy folks. It was a slim lead, one that had only been spotted through the tireless perusal of Huntington Wethers. A former cybernetics professor at UCLA, Wethers was now one of the computer wizards back at the Farm. He was nothing if not meticulous in looking for every possible thread of information, especially those that frayed and fell by the wayside of official investigation.

In Phoenix Force’s line of work, they knew that sometimes rumors were true. The five members of this world-spanning team had become urban legends in their own right, often identified as either members of a CIA black operations group or a special SWAT team under the aegis of INTERPOL, both of which were far from the truth. It was the blurry line between official backing that allowed the Farm’s commandos to board U.S. military aircraft bound for war or to be assigned to federal law-enforcement task forces and “unsanctioned” operations that kept their hands from being tied as they did not fear the diplomatic fallout from bringing down corrupt “allies” or rogues from within the United States government. Stony Man Farm had been developed specifically to avoid the entanglements of agency jurisdictional pride or the public face of international allegiances with those to whom human rights violations or the support of criminal or terrorist enterprises was not a point of concern.

Phoenix Force and Able Team were highly agile, quickly deployable teams that answered to the law of their own consciences. While special interest groups turned congressional debate over resolving issues into an endless circle of inane logic and politically advantageous rhetoric, the Farm’s cybernetic apparatus could burn through the internet, seeking out the true trails of evidence leading to the guilty. Able Team or Phoenix Force, or often both, would then be dispatched to properly solve the problem.

Those solutions usually ended with cold-hearted, greedy or fanatical murderers torn asunder by precision gunfire, all while minimizing the risk to noncombatants and bystanders as befitting a Stony Man commando. It was far more than a matter of pride that none of the Stony Man operatives had ever intentionally harmed an innocent person in the course of a mission. Be it combat or grim laser-precise direct action, the only ones who died were those who had innocent blood on their hands.

“Something feels wrong,” Manning murmured under his breath. Fortunately the hands-free communicator built into his nearly invisible earpiece allowed him to be heard loudly and clearly by Hawkins.

The Texan himself was also aware of a feeling of dread, of a potential for doom that hung in the air. He’d picked up a familiar scent wafting through the night air as he and the Canadian had made their way toward the small house owned by the NOC. “You catch a whiff of that?”

Manning, in the dim light of a distant rice-paper lamp, frowned deeply, his features darkening in the lengthened shadows. “Dead body.”

Hawkins scanned the small cube home of their contact and noticed that one of the windows was cracked open only slightly. He moved closer to the sill and took a deep sniff. It was with a queasy certainty that he could tell the exact length of time the corpse had been moldering inside the house just by the faint odor leaking through a window left ajar. “Seven hours.”

Manning nodded agreement with Hawkins’s assessment. The brawny man went to the door and, deftly drawing the Tanto from its sheath, hammered the chiseled point into the doorjamb just off to the side of the door handle and lock combination. Against wood and brass, and focused by the sturdy knife, Manning was more than adequate to open the locked door with the sound of a sharp crack in the space of only a moment.

Hawkins had his knife out, the Karambit held with his trigger finger through the loop, the wicked talon of the blade sticking out from the bottom of his fist. The grip was rock-solid, making it nearly impossible to pry from his grasp. He also produced a powerful LED Surefire pocket-size flashlight. He was to take point and would only activate the switch when he absolutely needed to illuminate a target.

Neither Hawkins nor Manning had anticipated the need for night-vision goggles, so the less they used their flashlights, the better their natural senses would allow them to maneuver in the darkness. Less utilization of flashlights would also lower their profile.

Like it or not, if the Tokyo police showed up to a house with a corpse inside, Hawkins and Manning had both illegally broken into the dwelling. Suspicion over the death would fall on them.

Manning clicked his tongue and Hawkins glanced back at his partner. The Canadian had had the foresight to bring along latex gloves to minimize the chances of leaving behind fingerprints or DNA. Hawkins pocketed the knife and sheathed the Karambit swiftly to free up his hands for donning the gloves, then quickly rearmed and readied the light to scan the shadows if necessary.

“Won’t have much time,” Manning mused softly. “The door cracking open will have been heard by someone.”

“This doesn’t seem like an area with a lot of 9-1-1 callers,” Hawkins said, following his nose to the body.

The Texan came to a halt, seeing the outline of the body on the floor.

In life, her name had been Veronica Moone. At least, that was the name given to her nonofficial cover. She’d been there in the guise of a young college graduate traveling abroad, living in Japan, sometimes working as a translator and sometimes teaching American English to local students. The ruse had given her plenty of room to move around, allowing her to travel to different Japanese cities for schools or businesses needing English translators. Invariably she’d had an inside edge for identifying potential threats to those global corporations.

In her role, either speaking to the parents of grade-school students or conversing with young businessmen looking to make it easier for themselves internationally, she could pick up details and information with far greater precision than the most advanced satellite imagery.

Moone wasn’t the name she’d been born with, Hawkins doubted, any more than their cover names were real.

Seven hours and her body was still in rigor. Kneeling beside her, he used what little ambient light was available to look for signs of injury. Barring that, he cupped his fingers over the lens of the flashlight and the glow between his fingers and a gleam he let loose to splash over her body. Shielding the light from being visible through the windows gave him immediate illumination, both figuratively and literally.

A line of bruising on her throat, marked by a large knot of blackness over her windpipe, revealed the tool of her death as being a garrote.

Manning took a glance, then frowned. “Silk scarf with a coin knotted into the middle.”

“Or para-cord around a large chain link,” Hawkins said, though he didn’t really believe that. “Why in hell would someone kill her along the lines of a Thuggee killer?”

Manning’s shrug didn’t give Hawkins any good vibes. Unfortunately, Manning’s familiarity with the cultlike murder/assassination was only too much of an indicator of how often different killers resorted to techniques such as these. Hawkins hadn’t been on the team in one instance where the masterminds behind a new Thuggee cult had gone so far as to create an animatronic statue of the Thuggee’s deadly goddess Kali, complete with a compact microwave laser unit installed in her elaborate headdress that could kill with a single robotic glance.

“The Thuggee, the Assassins, the Ninja, they’re all effective, and the more they appear as something either cultlike or outré, the more layers of obfuscation fall between the murderer and the victim,” Manning said. “We’re likely the only two people in this city, or even Japan, who could have figured out that Veronica here was murdered because she was a CIA operative instead of just a poor unlucky victim of a death goddess fetishist.”

“Striker ran into some Thuggee like this a while back, too, only operating in the Middle East,” Hawkins returned. “And let’s not forget England and the so-called Ripper killer.”

“Makes you wonder if fifty to a hundred years from now, some hush-hush group disguises their disposal of witnesses as the work of a fiend with a machete and a hockey mask,” Manning mused.

Moone, her mousy-brown hair cut short, but not boyishly so, might have been more attractive if all the blood had not drained from the right side of her face, leaving it gaunt, and settled into the left side, rendering it bloated and discolored. Her hazel eyes glinted in the shielded light, her having died with them open.

“Not a real Thuggee. They always close the eyes of their victims,” Hawkins noted.

“Obfuscation, obfuscation,” Manning repeated grimly. He turned away from the scene and moved toward the back of the house. The front door was locked, and there might have been another exit.

Hawkins knew that the death she suffered would not have been easy or gentle. The coin in the center of the garrote would have crushed her windpipe, so even if the pressure had been released, she would have had no chance of getting another breath. The strangling cord had been pulled tight, but there were no signs of fists balled up against the underside of her mandibles, meaning that while she’d suffocated, her brain had received blood. Moone wouldn’t have passed out.

A crust of dried tears pooled at the corners of her eyelids. Her end had been slow. Cruel. Meticulous.

All to cover up a conspiracy. This woman, who genuinely had taught people a language they’d wanted to learn, had been murdered. She’d gained information about what might have been a clue as to why shiploads of Japanese whalers died in a salvo of ship-busting missiles. Hawkins normally had a low opinion of those who engaged in wanton murder, but so far the logic of these brutal deaths escaped him.

Certainly, Hawkins had more than a little passing concern for the smart, almost relatable giant mammals of the ocean. Even as a good-ol’-boy hunter, he believed in conservation, not sloblike slaughter. He couldn’t fathom the slaughter of an endangered animal just to make a rug or to simply get a piece of rhinoceros horn to enhance the strength of their own horn. Be that as it may, the Japanese sailors killed on the factory ships were not killers. They’d simply been working jobs to feed their families.

However, many in the world saw the deaths of “evil Japanese hunters” as a cause to rejoice. Those who simply wanted to protect an endangered species, and the lawmen who sought to protect their freedom of speech, had also been slaughtered.

Dead was dead, so it shouldn’t matter, but Hawkins was offended. He was raised with strong values of what was right and what was wrong. Being murdered for doing your job was in the wrong column, so he sympathized with the Japanese sailors, and even more for the widows, orphans, surviving siblings and parents of those who’d died at sea.

Moone was a covert operative; she’d known that any one of her investigations could have brought her to a violent death. But seeing her lying there, murdered in this manner, Hawkins felt a pang of guilt for her. She looked innocent. She’d tried to do right by her country. She was a sister in arms. A face to which he could attach the statistics of those murdered.

Movement out in front of the house brought Hawkins’s attention back to the present and he rose from beside the dead girl. The light had instantly been smothered by his hand and he made certain the toggle switch was turned off. “Gary?”

“I’m out in the alley,” Manning answered over his hands-free com.

Hawkins padded in the direction his friend had gone. “Movement through the front door.”

“I’ll circle around,” the Canadian returned. “Stay put unless it’s a badge.”

“Yes, sir,” the Texan replied. He perched in the shadows by the back door, making certain that his presence was unseen in the frame of the partially open entrance.

Tense, he waited to see who would show up on the doorstep of a murdered girl. And just in case, he had both knives out and ready, hoping to greet the assassin.

CHAPTER FIVE

The door swung clumsily on its hinges, the shattered lock giving no resistance as it was pushed open and reached the apex of its usual swing with a slam. No flashlights sprayed their glare, no echo beyond the entrance to Moone’s kitchenette. T. J. Hawkins was familiar enough with police procedure to know that cops would not enter a darkened house without lights. Sure, the glare would make them an obvious focus, but in dim conditions as in Moone’s almost empty home, the blaze of LED bulbs would actually do more to blind an ambusher than anything else.

As well, police officers would also call out to inquire if anyone was in trouble within.

The bastard or bastards at the door were most likely not cops.

That meant that he and Manning had made contact with an enemy. Hawkins subvocalized confirmation to his partner. “Close them off.”

“On it,” Manning returned.

Two syllables and Hawkins knew there was nothing that would stop the big Canadian from coming to his aid short of a wall of blazing death. And even then, Manning’s combination of genius and brawn would likely find a way to punch through that barrier, as Hawkins had come to know the Phoenix Force veteran.

Even as Hawkins thought of the difference between how police and criminals would enter a house with a broken door, he replaced the small Karambit in its sheath, drawing the pocket flashlight, thumb over the cap switch. The tiny light would prove useful, not only in the prevention of mistaking Moone’s CIA contact with a murderer, but also blinding them in the darkness if they truly were here with murderous intent.

The first figure lurched into view and Hawkins hit the switch, blasting him in the face with 320 lumens of brilliance. The painful blue blaze made Hawkins’s target throw his hands up to shield his eyes and, in a moment, Hawkins could discern the brief flash of Korean features as the man backpedaled. Hawkins could also make out the gleaming silver finish of a Desert Eagle in the intruder’s hand. Normally this would have been all the justification any member of Phoenix Force would need to use their weapon to kill the armed opponent, except for two things.

T. J. Hawkins was a member of Phoenix Force, and had been chosen not just for his willingness and ability to kick ass, but also his quick wits and swift decision-making. While Hawkins had allies who regularly used the Desert Eagle magnum autoloader—Mack Bolan and Gary Manning chief among them—he had yet to see a five-foot-one Korean woman pick such a large and unwieldy weapon as her primary weapon. Hawkins held off on utilizing the Ranger knife, instead using the flat of the blade as leverage to hook the woman’s gun wrist and tug powerfully.

Her grip on the pistol broke, and instead of the clunk of heavy, high-quality steel impacting the wood flooring, it was something lighter. Hawkins also realized that the gun in the woman’s hand was not cocked. The Desert Eagle was a single-action design, with a slide-mounted safety. Carrying the gun with the hammer down was no way to use it, not without clumsily thumbing back the hammer to make it fire.

The woman had been given an air-soft replica of the pistol, likely in an effort to get her shot to death. Hawkins killed the flashlight, then swept the girl behind him. The last thing Hawkins wanted to do was to bring harm to an innocent bystander. Even as the woman dropped to the floor, the Texan was aware that she’d discovered the dead body.

“Veronica!”

The figure behind her was five-foot-six, judging by the size of his shadow, and there were yet two more in the group, both about the same height as the man in the lead. Hawkins had about five inches on all of them, and from the looming shadow behind them, Manning was about to be on hand immediately.

There was a grunting curse and Hawkins could only make it out to be an Oriental dialect. It didn’t matter what the source of the epithet was; he saw the unmistakable motions of someone raising a pistol to shoot. Hawkins clicked his flashlight on and in an instant this man, armed with what looked like a SIG-Sauer P-228, winced and half turned away from the brilliant glare of the light. The man must have had his finger on the trigger as the crack of a 9 mm round added an extra bit of flash to the darkened room.

This bastard was armed and intended to kill. With a flick of his wrist, Hawkins lunged. The broad point of his dagger hit the man just off center of his nose. The crackle of face bones and the sudden surge of paralysis striking the gunman informed the Texan his aim was true. Six inches of steel embedded into the killer’s brain. Unfortunately the blow was so powerful it lodged the knife there, ripping it from Hawkins’s grasp.

Behind the dying man, Manning grabbed one of the other two in a head-scissoring arm lock. The smaller Asian gurgled, sputtering, attracting the attention of the center man, who suddenly realized he was not beset on both sides by relative giants.

Hawkins didn’t go for the Karambit on its thong around his neck. There was a good chance these killers might have good intel on what was going on, on why it had been so vital to murder an American English teacher. Rather, he punched forward with the end of his flashlight. The Surefire model that Hawkins carried had a crown around its lens, a high-impact aluminum ring that not only could be used for protecting the lens of the flash, but also could be used as an impact weapon. The crown design, with semicircular scallops taken out of the perimeter, had been designed to snag skin rather than slip off, as well as to increase the force of the punch.

Hawkins slammed it at the corner of the man’s jaw, spiking into the juncture of nerves and blood vessels running through the neck to feed the man’s brain. With a single blow, the Texan laid him out.

In the meantime Manning had taken his opponent in a sleeper hold. Deprived of fresh blood and oxygen to the brain, his man had also passed out.

It was all over and done, but time was no longer on Phoenix Force’s side. The first of the men had fired a gunshot. If the bursting of Veronica Moone’s front door hadn’t inspired this neighborhood to call the police, that act of violence would.

“My knife is stuck in his face,” Hawkins told Manning. The Phoenix veteran nodded and applied his strength and leverage to the task of retrieving the weapon as the Texan turned to the Korean girl.

“Don’t hurt me,” she whimpered.

“It’s okay,” Hawkins replied with a soothing drawl. “I don’t want to see you hurt, either. Are you all right?”

“They killed Ronnie,” the woman said. She was numbed.

Hawkins rested an arm around her shoulders. “We need to go. Can you come with us?”

She nodded.

“You speak Korean?” Hawkins asked. It wasn’t a foolish question. There was a population of Koreans who lived in Japan as a minority, but some of them might not have kept true with their ethnic origins. Back in Texas, Hawkins had met enough Hispanics who denied their cultural heritage, preferring to live within the flow of Texan ethnicity. They were third-and fourth-generation Americans.

“Yes,” she answered. “They gave me a gun...”

“I know,” Hawkins said, helping her to her feet.

“Hey,” Manning whispered. Hawkins turned and found his knife being handed to him, handle first, the blade wiped clean. “Their car is outside.”

“Enough room for us?” Hawkins asked, sheathing his knife.

“Just four,” Manning responded.

“Take her. I’ll catch up on foot,” Hawkins replied. He turned to the Korean girl. “Follow this man. We both want to protect you.”

She looked doubtful at first, but when Manning threw one of the goons over his left shoulder, then picked up the other unconscious man as if he were a duffel bag, she nodded.

“Don’t dawdle,” Manning suggested to his younger partner.

Hawkins shrugged. “Just enough to throw them off your trail.”

Manning nodded, knowing what his friend intended.

With that, Manning and the girl were out the front door. They piled into a minivan, emphasis on “miniature.”

All need for stealth past, Hawkins turned on the lights and examined the small home, now the worse for a second corpse. He couldn’t help but think that he’d failed Veronica Moone, but was also aware the young woman would have secured information somewhere. He mentally went over all the trade craft he’d learned and developed since becoming an operative for Stony Man Farm. The CIA NOC would have had to secure what notes she’d assembled in a place that would not be obvious, even to trained intelligence agents, but could be accessed quickly in the event of an emergency or a swift exit.

When the Koreans came to kill her, one of her first thoughts would have been about the information she’d stored away. He examined the room once again and then looked at the dead woman’s posture on the floor. She’d been dragged into the kitchen by the garrote that had crushed her windpipe. One of her shoes was in the living room, on a small rug. Hawkins thought that maybe she’d hidden her info somewhere in the relatively Spartan living area, but immediately dismissed that. She had been moving away from the kitchenette. Hawkins turned and scanned the shelves.

Two bags of rice caught his attention. One was open, partially used. The other didn’t look as if it had been opened, but the sack holding the rice had been taut, pillowlike. Hawkins went for the more stuffed bag and saw that its top flap had been secured by a swatch of duct tape.

“If your cell phone ever gets wet, put it in a container of rice to dry it out,” Hawkins murmured aloud. Considering Japan was a nation that had experienced its fair share of traumatic tidal waves, it would also prove a smart place of storage for small electronics that could hold data... He tore open the bag and sifted through. After a few moments he felt something inside. It was a PDA. Just to make certain, he rummaged through the rice some more and came away with four thumb drives.

Hawkins pocketed the items, then frisked the corpse of the murderous Korean who’d nearly shot him. There were no pieces of identification on the man, not even clothing tags. There were, however, two spare magazines for the Norinco copy of the SIG-Sauer P-228. He pocketed them, picked up the pistol and depressed the decocker, lowering the hammer and returning initial trigger pull to a drop-safe, flinch-resistant twelve pounds of weight. He pocketed the pistol and noticed the flicker of red-and-blue flashes through the open door.

The time to leave was now and he opened the back door into the alley. Hawkins’s sudden arrival startled two cats in flagrante delicto and the animals leaped away from each other, yowling in protest. It almost would have been funny, but the feline racket and their flight sent garbage can lids toppling with a gonging clatter. The police out front would no doubt have heard the noise.

Hawkins produced the NP-228 and fired two shots into the kitchen floor through the doorway. That racket would most assuredly have drawn attention, but it would also freeze the Japanese policemen where they stood. Once again, the Texan’s familiarity with police procedure, most specifically Japanese procedure, meant that he would not have to worry about inciting an international incident. The cops out front would be loath to open fire immediately, for fear of harming a possible hostage or out of concern that bullets would cut through one building and harm someone in a nearby structure.

With that lead going for him, Hawkins made the pistol safe and took off down an alley between two houses. Vaulting short fences was little effort for him, and he wove through the neighborhood as fast as he dared without attracting further attention to himself. It took him twenty minutes before he allowed himself on the main street, circling back to where he and Manning had parked their rental vehicle. The wisdom that kept them from parking too near to where they were going had served them well. The car was undisturbed, even though it was likely a half dozen police cars had driven past it.

Hawkins slid behind the wheel, fired up the engine and took to the streets back to the safe house that had been set up for him and Manning. Along the way, he took care to ensure that he wasn’t trailed, either by the law or by whichever Korean murderers had been waiting in reserve. The three men might have been bowled over by the pair of Phoenix Force veterans, but that didn’t mean they were incompetent. There could easily be backup agents elsewhere, but so far, Hawkins seemed to have lucked out.

Even so, he engaged in evasion techniques twice during the drive to the Phoenix safe house. Getting sloppy and complacent was a certain path to being shot dead. It was attention to details that had allowed the two members of the team to capture prisoners and to find a friend of the murdered CIA agent.

“That’s the assumption,” Hawkins mused. He would have to plug the devices into their sat case—a briefcase-size computer unit with USB and fire-wire ports and several sizes of flash-card data reader slots—to be sure. Through it, Able Team or Phoenix Force could instantly transmit data to Stony Man Farm for investigation. Built-in filters would catch any viruses or logic bombs hidden in potentially sabotaged data, just in case the Koreans had wanted Hawkins and Manning to find the drives and PDA.

“What’s your status?” Hawkins asked through his hands-free communicator.

Manning’s response was swift. “Prisoners secure. Girl quiet. No law-enforcement interception. No tails.”

“Good news,” Hawkins replied. “Found the agent’s stash of data and her secure device. No tails here.”

“Remain sharp,” Manning told him.

It would take a while for Hawkins to arrive at the safe house, but that allowed him time to continue searching for possible enemies. While he would have liked to forward Veronica Moone’s intel to the Farm, haste would not just make waste, it also would leave him more vulnerable to being wasted.

When he finally pulled up to the safe house—actually an abandoned store along the waterfront—he made sure the car was well hidden. The minivan was also there, empty and locked down.

Hawkins looked over the appropriated pistol. He still hadn’t taken off the latex gloves he’d been given when he and Manning had discovered the crime scene. He didn’t remove them, hopeful that he’d find fingerprints of the dead man on the gun itself. His instincts told him the three men might have been North Korean agents, especially since they’d reverted to what he assumed was Korean when they’d cursed in surprise at Hawkins’s attack. There was still a possibility that the three men might have been South Korean, as well.

If there was one truism in Southeast Asia, old grudges clung to the peoples as if they were strangling vines. Though World War II was years before, Koreans still held an enmity toward Japan and the violations of human rights inflicted upon the whole of the peninsula during their imperial expansion. People had been reduced to slave labor; thousands had been tortured or had died of overwork. In Korea, as well as China, the Japanese military had sated whatever desires their troops had had with gigantic rape camps. The men didn’t need to be North Korean to hold a grudge against Japan.

Hawkins stuffed his hand into his jacket pocket, where he kept the appropriated combat pistol. He doubted that three people could get the drop on someone as strong and smart as Manning, but he didn’t want to take any chances.

“It’s me,” Hawkins called out as he entered, unlocking the door ahead of him. As soon as he was through, he closed the door firmly and reset the locks. He saw Manning standing, arms folded. “No trouble with the prisoners?”

Manning shook his head. “One did try to escape. I put him to sleep.”

“Good,” Hawkins replied. He pulled the NP-228 from his pocket and laid it on a nearby table. “I’m going to strip this, open up some liquid cement and see if I can find any good fingerprints.”

“Smart idea. I’ve got the prints from the others in the ether back to Stony Man,” Manning replied.

“Can’t hurt to be completest,” Hawkins added.

Manning looked back. “The girl’s name is Min-seo Geum.”

Hawkins already had the SIG stripped down to parts. He poured a small cap of Super Glue and placed it under a trash-bag-improvised tent. The process was an old forensic trick at gleaning fingerprints from most surfaces. The oils that caused the surface transfer that formed a latent print would attract the fumes from the glue, producing a visible pattern that could be photographed. Hawkins hoped the flat sides of the pistol’s magazine or the outside of the slide would provide enough for identification, but just to be certain, he stripped the bullets from the magazine.

People might think of putting on gloves for firearm handling, but few professionals were paranoid enough to wear gloves while feeding ammunition into their appropriate magazines on a clandestine operation.

Hawkins turned away from his fingerprint-gathering project and produced the PDA and thumb drives that he’d discovered. “Is she all right?” Hawkins asked.

Manning nodded. “She’s been having a good cry over her friend. She was a teacher at the same school. They were once very close.”

Hawkins raised an eyebrow. “Roommates?”

Manning nodded. “And quite a bit more.”

Hawkins sighed. “And I threw her on top of a woman she loved...killed like that...”

“The other option was to let her get shot in the back,” Manning offered. He took the thumb drives and looked over the PDA. “I have a wire for this device on the sat case.”

“All the better,” Hawkins replied. “The more we know, the more we can get to taking down the fucker who killed Veronica.”

Manning glanced at him. “We never knew her.”

“She was working for our side,” Hawkins replied.

Manning nodded, then rested a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t let it get too personal.”

Hawkins frowned. “I’ll keep my head. But that doesn’t mean I won’t take satisfaction in taking theirs...”

The Canadian Phoenix vet left the younger man to his task. Manning had faced his losses over the years and had made enough missions personal. Every member of the team had. And sometimes, that personal investment was enough to take an impossible battle and push them over the top to victory.

But in the end, it still never quieted the ghosts they vowed to avenge.

CHAPTER SIX

Blancanales shadowed Schwarz and Lyons as they drove away from the clubhouse, giving his friends a head start just in case the paranoid Heathens club members sent someone to trail them. He’d waited and, through use of the rear-mounted camera, made certain he was not being followed.

The last thing they needed was to be ambushed as they reassembled and prepared for a hard entrance.

Blancanales had been tuned in to his friends as they’d made their infiltration of the clubhouse; he’d heard everything, thanks to built-in, Schwarz-designed zero-profile microphones and the surveillance equipment intrinsic in the Able van. His teammates wouldn’t have been able to hear him, but there was not an interaction that didn’t resound loud and clear in Blancanales’s ears.

Had things gone wrong, he was on sniper overwatch, ready to provide cover for his partners. Now, he was providing further support for his brothers in arms as they fell back to begin their assault.

When Blancanales opened the rear doors of the van, Schwarz was already tearing off the latex of his false tattoos from his neck and shoulder, crumpling the mass up in one fist. He whipped them into a small waste basket with a grimace.

“Bad mood?” Blancanales asked.

“Having to sound like one of those homophobic assholes?” Schwarz growled. “I feel like puking my guts out.”

“They’ve got the shooters locked down in their headquarters,” Lyons said. “They kept too calm a profile. Even when Gadgets made a move against one of their own, and not a prospect, Rucks had full rockers and patches.”

“The prospects outside were edgy and stayed close to more than a couple of trash barrels out front,” Blancanales returned. “Those were the right height for stowing some ARs, especially if they were clean on the bottom.”

“Lid in place, yeah,” Schwarz noted. He went to one of the banks and opened the digital surveillance files. He maximized the thermal imaging camera and made a quick count. Thirty prospects were outside the clubhouse, surrounding it. Inside, it was a little more difficult to see true heat signatures through the walls. Even so, he got general numbers and groups off the colored blobs.

“What odds are we looking at?” Lyons asked, looking over Schwarz’s shoulder.

“The place, from your and my observations, should only have about twenty guys inside. But there are major concentrations of heat sources in the basement and on the third floor,” Schwarz said.

“They split the shooters into two groups?” Lyons inquired.

“Or they have much more than a safe house set up in the clubhouse,” Schwarz said. “The top floors can either be a grow house—in which case, it’s highly unlikely that any shooters are going to be kept on the premises—or a server farm.”

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