STONY MAN

They’re the world’s best military warriors and cyber specialists, and they belong to a top secret black ops group that answers to the President of the United States. The Stony Man team is dedicated to striking down terrorism wherever it may be, even if it means paying the ultimate price.

DEATH MARKET

Terrorists from around the world have gathered in Hawaii to bid on stolen missiles. Whoever wins will have a weapon powerful enough to destroy an aircraft carrier with a single shot. With the clock ticking, Able Team goes undercover to stop the auction and take down the arms dealer who set up the buy. Meanwhile, Phoenix Force is on the hunt to retrieve the missiles and do whatever is necessary to eliminate the shadowy group behind the theft.

LYONS PUMPED A SINGLE ROUND INTO THE FALLEN ATTACKER’S SKULL

The man at the end of the hallway paused and turned at the sound of the finishing shot. He had one more round in his big revolver, and he raised it toward Lyons. The Ironman wasn’t risking the spread of buckshot reaching him. He pumped three rounds into the outlaw biker, catching him in the upper chest.

The gunman’s revolver blasted a storm of lead into the ceiling above him as he crashed backward, ribs broken, lungs torn apart by the fat 230-grain mushrooms of lead and copper.

Lyons swept closer, his Colt leveled at the man’s head.

In an instant, guards were running everywhere. Lyons lowered the pistol, muzzle aimed at the carpet. The uniformed men regarded him cautiously, then looked at the body on the ground.

“Try not to get any more blood on the walls,” one guard grumbled. “We’ll send up someone from maintenance to fix whatever they shot up.”

Lyons took a deep breath, then nodded.

Their first morning at the weapons auction, and someone had already tried to kill him.

Death Dealers

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

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

Blackness engulfed Dr. Robert Baxter’s vision as what felt like the weight of a mountain range lay upon his back. He tried to shift himself, squirming his way through the cracks that surrounded him. It was midnight-black in there, and as he tried to take a breath, he could feel the pressure of the rubble around him. Fear gripped him, but he flexed his fingers, dug his toes in and inched along.

He could feel the scrape of pebbles and dust against his bare chest. Somewhere in the explosions that had rocked him and the rest of the Naval Weapons Testing Ground, he’d lost his shirt and laboratory coat. His glasses were gone, so even if there were light, he couldn’t have seen much farther than the crook of his elbow.

He was forced to stop when he encountered a hunk of reinforced concrete that was far too big to move. Baxter wished that he had the strength to shove such things aside or to flatten himself like putty and slip between the gaps. Hell, at this point, he would have been happy just to be able to see anything

Come on, Baxter, you’re a rocket scientist. Use your goddamn brain.

The trapped man ran his fingers along the flat surface, testing and touching it. He reached up, following the face of what seemed to be a wall. Fingertips jammed into the corner and Baxter winced as he pulled his hand back across the slope, feeling his knuckles scoured and abraded by whatever was there. However he could tell that there was at least a few inches more room in that gap. There was a section of rebar exposed on the ground, so he clamped both fists around it, pulling himself out of the crevice holding him tightly.

Tugging himself out was arduous and he could feel his slacks tugged, snagged. His back and shoulders, his stomach and chest, all felt the snarled hooks, the poking and gripping talons of what must have been a million little nails gouging at his naked skin. Finally he was loose. He slumped into the rut next to the flat slab.

It must have been a column. If it were wall, he’d have felt the seams between the cinder blocks.

If something could knock down a column that thick, then whatever had struck the building must have been incredibly powerful. He started pulling himself farther along. His legs were still in the crack behind him. Baxter had turned enough that his shoulders could get to their full breadth, his back pressed against the flat, smooth concrete behind him. He had to get his feet loose, and the snarls and splinters that bedeviled his chest and back were now ripping his slacks. One shoe was already gone and the other now popped off, snagged on some outcropping.

Baxter folded his knees to his chest, feet finally freed from the sandwiching weight he’d slithered away from. He let his legs extend beneath him, enjoying the relative roominess of his new prison. Here, he was able to breathe; he could reach down and up. The space ahead seemed to tilt slightly higher, broadening, giving him more than sufficient room to begin crawling anew, but Baxter wanted to wait, to catch his breath.

However he knew that waiting here until he gathered up more of his strength was just him not wanting to make the effort. This place was safe, it was cozy, but it was merely the illusion of comfort. He needed to get out into the open air.

Baxter rested his forehead against his wrist, swallowing. The rocket scientist was not a people person, living inside his skull most of the time, applying his formidable intellect to the calculations necessary to produce the kind of high-efficiency engines that would make the U.S. Navy’s missiles into the fastest things in the air. His latest effort had broken Mach 10 with a simulated 235-kilogram military-grade Pentolite warhead. At 7000 miles per hour, there were few things that could intercept such a projectile, especially given his comrade’s work on computer guidance and threat-avoidance algorithms.

Since Exocets had proved capable of devastating warships with warheads lighter by 70 pounds, the new design would be more than adequate to take on an enemy navy, everything up to an aircraft carrier.

That kind of math was a deeply internal thing; it was his haven, his safety. It was akin to this little slot underneath tons of rubble, a concrete shell that cradled and sheltered him in blissful darkness and silence. When dealing with other humans, he was much more at the mercy of prejudices, biases, illogic. The variables introduced in such interactions were not neat, tidy, like physics and mathematics. The laws of Newton were something he turned back to when the concept of networking was simply controlled madness and appeasing those without vision that penetrated down into the truth of reality.

Baxter couldn’t help but think of how he looked right now. Reduced to slacks that were shredded and torn, totally distressed, he looked like one of his childhood heroes. Disheveled, mousy-brown hair, long, scrawny limbs, barefoot and shirtless, Baxter was likely a dead ringer for a certain purple-trousered nuclear scientist, freshly awoken from his alter ego’s gamma-powered rampages. The rocket scientist regretted having gotten so far into science, though.

“Get moving,” Baxter barked to himself. He began squirming along. He set rocks to mark the distance he moved through the crawl space, measuring his height against the distance he moved, counting the seconds necessary to make such a journey. It took twenty seconds to crawl five feet, the distance from his shoulder to his foot, so he estimated his approximate position in the base.

Math was his refuge. He wished that he could rely on something more, something better, actual sight with which to measure, but at least the counting of seconds, the counting of lengths of his body, kept his mind occupied. With focus, he would not give in to fear and despair. Baxter knew that the best means of coping was to concentrate on what could be changed.

Slowly, surely, the space he crawled through grew larger, roomier. He laid himself flat on his belly, pausing and cradling his head between his forearms. Baxter let his thoughts drift to the sight of a man walking on coals of flame, with the caption “doable.” A contrasting image, another man walking on strewed children’s building blocks, was captioned “impossible.”

“Great,” he murmured. He rolled onto his side, finding all new misshapen rocks that poked and prodded his ribs. He grit his teeth, wishing for release.

Just one moment. I don’t care that the science sucks. Just one instance of gamma strength.

He pushed against the roof above him. Suddenly it began to shift and his heart rate shot into high gear. This wasn’t a delusion that he was somehow hefting the weight of the rubble atop him; it was panic in the horror that somehow he’d upset a delicate balance and was now going to crush himself into a fine paste.

“No!” Baxter screamed.

Light streamed down, burning his unaccustomed eyes. He folded up, waiting for the irresistible, implacable weight crushing his bones, squeezing the juices from him. Nothing came through, though. No pressure increased upon him; even through clenched eyelids, he could see the gleaming light of midday.

“We found him!” a voice shouted.

Baxter tried to open his eyes, but the sun was too bright. He could only squint, but gloved hands hooked under one of his arms, dragging him to his feet.

“Dr. Baxter?” He heard the voice in his left ear.

“Yes,” he answered, coughing. The ground felt wobbly beneath him. “Yes, I’m Robert Baxter.”

“We found him!” someone shouted again.

“You’ll be all right,” the man told him, draping something over his shoulders. The ravages upon his back and shoulders were not too rough that he couldn’t tell a blanket. It was unusual to feel so bare and cold in the desert, but it was winter. The winds were brisk, whipping around him.

“We’re getting you on a helicopter, sir,” the man added, guiding him along. He tried to get a better look at the soldier helping him out. Stark shadows showed over the man’s face, down the length of his body. This wasn’t the light of the sun and he remembered, before the churning darkness, that it was night when the explosions rocked the testing facility. Even so, he kept walking.

This was a nighttime rescue.

“How did you find me?” Baxter asked.

“You have a subcutaneous RFID chip embedded in your skin,” the soldier told him, helping him step up and onto a helicopter. Baxter felt the cushions compress beneath him and he leaned against the back of his seat. The knowledge of a chip in his body stunned him, he couldn’t remember when he would have had such a device introduced, unless it was part of the physical he’d had.

“Rob?”

Baxter could barely make out the sound of his name being spoken, had only a hint of what the voice sounded like, but even through the rumble of the helicopter’s engines and the slap of rotors against the air, he could tell it was a woman speaking to him. He forced his eyes open wider, looking to see another bundled figure sitting across from him inside the cabin of the aircraft.

Her normal flip now hung down, stringy and matted, from sweat and distress. Her blue eyes were veined in red, bags hanging beneath them. And yet the sight of Beatrice Chandler, the computer wizard whose guidance systems were the other vital ingredient in the Mach 10 missile prototype, still stirred Baxter’s feelings. As worn out, as out of sorts as she was, she was a beautiful, wonderful sight. His heart tripped, skipping a beat, and he reached out a hand to hers. She wrapped her delicate fingers around his. “Bea!”

Baxter turned to the soldier who’d guided him into the helicopter, then nodded toward the seat next to the woman.

“Go ahead!” the soldier shouted over the din of the chopper.

Baxter switched seats and snuggled against her. He lifted a part of his blanket, like a mother bird extending her wing, and enclosed Chandler’s shoulders, pulling her closer to him. Her hair was stiff and salty with sweat, but he still kissed the dome of her head, still pressed his cheek against her greasy locks. She slid one arm around his waist, laid one hand on his chest.

For a man who didn’t have much in terms of people skills, the contact between his body and hers was a godsend. Beatrice was a fellow scientist. She, too, lived a life of order, of logic and reason, and for that very reason, he could never feel alienated by her, never be betrayed by a sudden shift of whimsy.

“What happened?” Beatrice asked into his ear, the caress of her lips so close and intimate it distracted him from the situation at hand. Chandler had asked him a question, though, and as a scientist it was Baxter’s duty, his drive in life, to provide an answer to any question to which he could respond.

“The base was attacked. Something moving at a similar velocity to our prototype design, perhaps several, penetrated the testing center’s antiballistic defenses,” Baxter replied. “I was in Radar Twelve, calculating the velocity and course of our test motor when one of the first struck.”

Chandler looked up at him, her blue eyes wet and welling with tears. “You’re hurt.”

Baxter looked down at his chest, noting the crisscrosses of crimson lines, as if some inept, maddened artist had tried to add detail to him with a red marker. “Fortunately when the roof came down, I was placed such that I would not be crushed. Unfortunately conditions conspired so that any passage I made necessitated the shedding of clothing.”

Chandler managed a weak smile and then rested her head against the crook of his neck.

It was so comfortable with her this way, Baxter almost didn’t notice the soldier’s movements across from him. The man pulled a hypodermic needle from a small box in his lap.

Now, inside the chopper, with the interior lights of the aircraft providing clearer illumination, he was able to ascertain the appearance of the man. The attention to detail that grew from his intellect and aspirations to being a rocket scientist showed him that the camouflage pattern worn by this infantryman was all wrong for the Naval Weapons Testing Institute’s uniforms. If this was someone from outside the Navy, perhaps an Air Force pararescue team, then why were the patches on the man’s sleeves so studiously identical to the normal naval infantry assigned to the base?

Also, he noted, the features of the man were Chinese, not Caucasian. Baxter thought back, trying to recall inflections of the soldier’s English, seeking out further incongruities.

“Who are you?” Baxter asked, stiffening. He was now on full alert. Though he sat straighter, he knew it was nothing more than the bluff of an animal making itself seem larger to deter predators from attacking. Strength ebbed from his limbs, what musculature there had been already strained to the limits by crawling through the cracks in the rubble of the collapsed Radar Twelve center.

“We’re taking you somewhere safe,” the soldier with the hypo stated. “Now, I’ll be putting this in you just to keep you calm. There’s no point in allowing you to be distressed for the upcoming journey.”

“To where? China?” Baxter asked.

The soldier smirked. “What gave it away?”

“The digital camouflage,” Baxter said.

Chandler stirred at his side, looking back and forth between Baxter and the soldier.

Another pair of men stepped through the side doors of the helicopter, effectively bracketing them in.

“Rob, what are you talking about?” she asked.

“We’re being kidnapped,” Baxter told her.

Chandler’s eyes went to the faces of all three of their rescuers.

Ethnic diversity in the United States’ military was one thing, but with each of these men being Asian and wearing the wrong digital camouflage patterns, Baxter’s mind was now clearly focused. He tried to assemble plans of escape, but none of them would work without a sudden infusion of at least fifty pounds of muscle mass; even then, most of them would also entail gunfire chasing him and likely striking Chandler.

Baxter extended his arm, lowering his gaze. Chandler straightened in her seat. “Can’t we do anything?”

“They’re trained and they’re armed,” Baxter told her. “We’re both defenseless, thanks to military protocol regarding civilian contractors on government premises. Even if I had enough energy in me left to disarm one of these men, the others would stop me. And harm would likely come to you, as well.”

“So what do we do?” Chandler asked.

“Submit. And hope someone comes to search for us,” Baxter said.

He felt the bite of the hypodermic needle press into his arm. Waves of numbness emanated from that epicenter, spreading up to his shoulder then splaying out. His heartbeat calmed, slowed, and his head grew fuzzy, the world around him more and more indistinct.

They’ll try to get the engine designs out of you. That was his first thought as his consciousness slithered along the slope of oblivion that engulfed him, tugging him back down into the darkness he’d only escaped minutes ago.

Why would they need our designs? Baxter’s mind, even in the last stages, the final throes of consciousness, was sharp and keen as ever. The attackers on the base would not need to utilize his engine designs because the missiles that had struck the base were approximately two-thirds the velocity of the ones he’d worked on. It was under Mach 7, still slower than a thirty-four-foot mammoth such as the Indian Shaurya missile, which could blow past 5700 miles an hour. There would be no doubt that such a weapon, with a payload of more than one ton of explosives, would easily devastate anything on the sea or land using a conventional warhead. There was also the ability to carry small nuclear tips.

The only problem with the Shaurya-size missile was the launch. It required either a transporter erector launcher such as the Soviet MAZ 7917—a truck whose civilian nickname was “Volat” or “Giant” in Belorusian—or an underground silo.

The one the U.S. Navy was working on was to be, at most, two-thirds the length and weight, and transportable on the decks of fast-attack boats as small as 200 tons.

Baxter’s thoughts turned toward the Chinese and their proposed super ship killer, and that these soldiers were Chinese.

Questions about the Asian kidnappers wisped away like smoke. There was nothing left to come to mind as he blanked into unconsciousness, hefted into the night sky on a helicopter.

CHAPTER TWO

The ceiling fan rotated slowly and Carl Lyons’s night vision had accustomed to the shadows so that he could even make out the wicker patterns inlaid into the paddles as he lay on his back. The Hawaiian night was full of the songs of insects and birds outside the open windows, but their tunes carried from the surrounding jungle, making this calm, warm night, silvery-blue moonlight cascading through gossamer drapes, seem far more warm and welcoming than it had any right to be. He was in this hotel under the name of Karl Long, also known as Stone among the Heathens Motorcycle Club of California.

This was an undercover operation for Stony Man Farm, and Lyons wasn’t here solo. In other hotel rooms were his two partners: fellow Able Team member Hermann Schwarz and Phoenix Force’s Thomas Jefferson Hawkins. Lyons would have felt more comfortable here in Hawaii with Able Team as a whole, cohesive unit, with the third member of the squad, Rosario Blancanales, as part of this deception. However, as Lyons was supposed to be a former member of the Heathens, and an up-and-coming bit of new blood in the Arrangement, hanging out with a Hispanic man, even if he was a blue-eyed “true Spaniard,” would have been suspicious. So Able Team had brought in Hawkins as a replacement.

All three men would be quite passable as members of a white supremacist movement. Lyons was tall, blond and Nordic. A twenty-first-century Viking warrior with a day’s worth of rough stubble on his chin and the faded tattoos running down his neck, arms and chest proclaiming his allegiance to the white race. The tattoos were fake, etched into his skin with a biological dye that would fade to nothingness after a month. Until then, the big blond ex-cop would have to endure the presence of obscene hatred and twisted, almost-blasphemous religious symbolism scoured across his skin.

That was part of why he couldn’t sleep tonight, why he allowed himself to be absorbed into the slowly rotating fan blades as they barely churned the night air in his room.

This was far from the first time Lyons had gone undercover, and also far from the only time he’d ever had to don the hideous mannerisms of a bigot to do his job. What kept him awake was more than disgust for the identity he’d slipped into, and more than paranoia that made him keep a Colt Python under his pillow, within easy reach of his right hand.

It wasn’t paranoia if you were surrounded by representatives from dozens of gangs around the world, all assembled for a global auction by handwritten invitation—one that Able Team had uncovered while cleaning up loose ends from a prior crisis. It had looked handwritten but in truth had been merely printed, the cursive script the product of a font. No one would be able to perform a handwriting analysis on the mechanized scribbling on paper, and there were also no fingerprints except for those of Kevin Reising, the man who’d received the letter.

Reising was currently still listed among the living, but in hiding. The truth of the matter was that his corpse was nothing but charred ashes, with a .45-caliber slug where the brainpan should have been. The announcement of the man’s death would not be released until after there was no longer a need for the current undercover identities of Karl Long, Herman Shore and Thomas Presley.

By then the organizers of this event, a sale for everything from handguns to long-range missiles, would be dead and gone. The host organization of this auction went by the name of Abalisah, and this hotel was far from the beaten trail, on a small island of the archipelago. With a title that was Arabic for devils, it was a sure sign that things were not going to be safe and calm. The man who was the face of the auction was a tall man who could have been anything from European to Middle Eastern. His skin was well tanned, but he had no accent, no truly identifiable features. He was called Jinan.

“Do what you will,” Jinan had said over a loudspeaker, his voice distorted by a modulator. At least it might have been, but it also could have been a simple computer program or just a schmuck hired to read a sheet of paper put before him. “You have been allowed to keep your sidearms, your knives, your poisons. I merely wish your money, so if you cannot outbid your enemy, perhaps you can steal from him or perhaps murder him. The only things that I forbid are attempts to steal my property or attacks upon my personal staff.”

Anything goes, Lyons thought, sliding his fingers under his pillow and around the handle of Colt Python, feeling the diamond-checkered grips against the palm of his hand. Surrounded by enemies, dozens of whom Lyons recognized from their Interpol profiles accessed at Stony Man Farm, he and his partners were in deep.

There was a rap at the door and Lyons sat up. He looked over and saw that it was closing in on three in the morning. He hadn’t placed any orders with room service. By the same token, he couldn’t imagine why someone out to blow him away would knock politely at his door. Out in the hall, he heard more knocks on different doors and softly spoken words even as they were opened.

Lyons got out of bed, not bothering to put on pants or underwear. It was perfect weather for lying in bed, no covers, naked and enjoying the sea breeze wafting through the window. A pair of undershorts wouldn’t make him any less vulnerable to gunfire or a knife. Still, his cop training took hold as he stood behind the doorjamb while he turned the knob to his door. If a bullet were to cut through the door at his moment, it would slice into empty air, not his chest.

The door swung open, silent on well-oiled hinges, and Lyons caught a hint of jasmine in the air as he looked into the hall. It was lit, but not so bright that it made his eyes hurt as they adjusted. Instead of a killer in the hall, there was a woman standing there. He couldn’t tell her age as she stood in front of him in the doorway.

Her skin was deeply bronzed, bare shoulders in sharp contrast to the cream-hued cloth that looped around her neck and then came down to cradle her full, soft breasts. The fabric draped to one side and knotted over her hip, exposing the curve of silken flesh beneath. The light caught a glint of gold from a small ring that adorned her navel while that same light cast an undeniable silhouette, leaving no doubt that the filmy fabric was the only thing between her bare skin and the sultry evening air.

Once more, Lyons hated the skin he was forced to wear, the tattoos of white power with hateful slurs branded, if only for a month, on his flesh. However, as he returned his gaze to her face, he saw that she wasn’t a black woman. He tried to place her, either as Hispanic, or perhaps a Pacific Islander, but her large brown eyes and full sensual mouth were most definitely not Asian or Caucasian.

“Mr. Long, my name is Sanay,” she said. Her accent was as unidentifiable as her features, and Lyons couldn’t help but think that the branches of her family tree had roots in different parts of the forest. There was a hint of British in it, but her voice was as elusive in its origins as her appearance. “I am your gift for tonight from Master Jinan.”

“Master Jinan,” Lyons repeated, looking her up and down. Was this some kind of test? After all, Karl Long was an Aryan thug, an outlaw motorcyclist whose racist pedigree had been cemented with a violent assault on a La Sombra prisoner that had left him brain damaged and with an amputated arm. It wasn’t murder, which would have meant that Long could never leave prison, but it was a show of strength and unity among the Arrangement. “What makes your boss think that I’d have interest in a little brown thing like you?”

Lyons smirked, hating the words that poured from his lips but also knowing full well that Long was spending prison time for the assault and rapes of Filipino, Polynesian and Hispanic women. Even her age, a little north of thirty, and her diminutive five-foot height, matched Long’s taste in victims.

Abalisah’s researchers were good, uncannily so, to have pulled up those kinds of facts about him. So even as Lyons made his dismissive challenge to the girl, Sanay stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. She glanced down to the cocked pistol in Lyons’s hand and then to the growing arousal obstinately making itself known despite his bravado. Her dark, slender fingers gave him a light brush, the tips of her nails tracing lines over his tightly packed abs before she cupped her palm over his pectoral muscle.

“Abalisah knows all the darkness in this hotel. Yours. Mine. Everyone’s,” Sanay whispered, pressing closer to him. Her other hand glided over Lyons’s hip and she explored his body in the darkness.

She was barefoot and she rose to the tips of her toes, lips barely able to press against his collarbone, brushing lightly, tongue darting out to taste his skin.

Lyons hooked his arm under hers, and he flexed, lifting her higher. He was able to hold her up with only one arm, bring her mouth to his, lips so soft and inviting that Lyons could easily forget himself as he carried her toward the bed. Sanay helped Lyons, bracing her thighs against his hips, her slender arms draped around his neck.

The Able Team commander still couldn’t get rid of a knot of dread in his stomach, even as he joined with Sanay, exploring her wonderful caramel skin, her dark, firm nipples, velvety soft lips and warm, tender tongue in her mouth.

* * *

THE LIGHT OF dawn would not pour through Lyons’s westward-facing balcony, but he did notice the graying skies as sunrise approached.

He lay still, Sanay, the exotic, beautiful woman entangled around him, a trickle of wet drool having dried and crusted on his chest. He couldn’t see her; his eyes were mere slits, only open enough to register the increasing light of day.

Lyons could feel her moving, stirring from his chest and crawling off him. He continued breathing deeply, as if asleep.

Maybe the women were sent to these rooms as spies.

Sanay quietly moved to the nightstand, where he’d placed his pistol the night before, and lifted the revolver. When Lyons heard her check to see if the weapon was loaded, he acted without thinking. He clamped his hand down hard over hers, pinning her finger inside the trigger guard. He heard the ugly pop of her index finger, but even as that happened, he drove the heel of his palm against her jaw in a Shotokan karate stroke.

The blow knocked her to the hardwood floor with a sharp crack. The revolver was locked now in Lyons’s left fist, and he watched as a trickle of blood seeped from her cheek onto the rug. Even as he looked down at the grisly damage he’d wrought in the space of a few moments, he noticed something else on the rug at his feet.

Sanay had removed the rounds from the revolver, rendering it useless even before she’d pointed it at him.

Lyons did a press check; the weapon’s barrel was empty. She’d made it seem as if she were about to attack him, but it had been a ruse. Once more, he had an uneasy feeling wash over him. The tattoos on his flesh seemed to come alive, their hints and promises of intolerance and rot audible in their gnawing on his soul.

“Why’d you let me almost kill you?” Lyons growled, taking her by the wrist and pulling her into a sitting position. His cold blue eyes must have flashed with lightning-bright anger because she winced, recoiling at his touch.

“Because...Jinan would not believe your story...” Sanay whispered. Blood now stained the side of her neck; there was a gash down one cheek. Her big brown eyes were glimmering with tears. “He would kill you.”

Lyons loosened his iron grasp on her wrist.

“No...don’t stop. He’ll kill you,” she whispered.

Lyons sat on the mattress. Karl Long was a rapist. He wouldn’t make gentle love to the kind of women he’d been in prison for violating. The Able Team commander had stumbled dead into a trap, dropping evidence that he was not the sexual predator, the destroying creature, whose identity he’d assumed.

Too many years on the LAPD had taught him that rape had very little to do with sex, with sensuality, with lovemaking. And yet, that tiny bit of information had failed him as he’d given in to his body’s normal, human sexual desires, bonding with Sanay, tending to her tender little form the way she’d explored his hard physique. Already, the lips of the laceration on her cheek puffed up, darkening. Her jaw was also deepening its hue, red and raw from where he’d punched her.

“I needed you to do that,” Sanay repeated softly. “He’ll kill you if you don’t.”

Lyons cupped the tip of her chin, looking into her eyes. “Why would you do this?”

“Because you’re kind. You’re a good man,” Sanay answered. She lowered her head, scrunching her shoulders up around her neck. “A man like that doesn’t deserve to be treated like...”

Lyons bit his lower lip. At once, he was ashamed of his violent reflexes, but at the same time, they’d intervened and protected him despite himself. The girl had leveled a gun at him.

“You took a damn chance,” Lyons growled. He helped her up, a hand under each armpit, then sat her beside him on the mattress. “What if I’d shot you? What if I beat you to death?”

“Then this would be over,” Sanay answered.

In the ever-growing light, Lyons could see that Sanay’s skin wore her years with nearly as much character as he’d earned in his years of battle. Cigarette burns, healed cuts and freckles were now visible as the concealer makeup she’d worn had been scrubbed away by their vigorous lovemaking. Her whole life was a wrought tale carved into her flesh, hidden by that caramel coating.

And Lyons hated himself for having gone full karate on her. He knew that his palm-heel stroke would leave hairline fractures along Sanay’s mandible, and she was still in pain right now. It would stay with her as a constant, sharp ache for months, acting up every time she bit down hard. He just knew that she’d be taking an extra painkiller or two to numb herself further against the lifetime of punishment she’d received.

Lyons gently dabbed the blood from her cheek, careful not to apply pressure to the swollen edges of her laceration. Sanay’s welling tears didn’t fill her eyes quite enough to trickle down her face, but Lyons could see into her dark, soulful eyes, spotting a small spark. A tint of hope gleamed in them. He could see that he was the first in a long time who had treated her like a human.

“Don’t,” Lyons told her, his deep voice having a slight crack in it. He’d been here before, with brave women, those who knew how to fight and survive.

“Don’t what?” Sanay asked.

“Don’t risk yourself for me,” Lyons ordered.

“Jinan said to expect to be raped, to be hurt, to be destroyed,” Sanay whispered. “But he said that if I made it, he would give me all the opium I needed. Enough to ride away into eternity.”

She looked down at herself, sinking her upper teeth into her soft, cushiony lower lip. “This...this isn’t enough. You’ll—”

A knock at the door cut her off. Sanay froze, her sadness-brimming eyes finally bursting like a dam as she shot a glance at the door. Lyons moved with the speed of a cobra, scooping up his Colt Python and readying it for action.

Still standing at the jamb, using it as a shield, he tore open the door. “What the hell do you want?”

Lyons was eye to eye with a man who looked too wide to even step through the hotel doorway. He could see brawny muscles rippling in the newcomer’s neck, shoulders, upper arms and chest. However the farther down he looked on the ever-broadening form, those muscles ebbed, slipping under a layer of fat that, at a distance, would have most fools thinking him to be a ball of blubber. Fortunately, Lyons had run into many of this type of man, as well. He called them “hard fat,” men who would never display a set of washboard abs, but had endless reserves of strength and endurance, capable of tossing around throngs of bodybuilders as if they were rag dolls. The Lump, as Lyons named the man, glowered in reaction to Lyons’s hostility.

“Picking up the bitches. Or what’s left of them.”

The man had no accent, though his features were solidly Polynesian. He also didn’t show the slightest bit of intimidation at the sight of the Colt in Lyons’s fist. He turned to Sanay and barked. “Here! Now!”

Sanay sprung to her tiny feet and darted from the bed to the doorway. She hadn’t bothered to pick up the folds of flimsy cloth that Lyons had torn off her the night before.

“Was expecting you a little more ripped up,” the Lump said.

Lyons glowered at him. “Jinan said not to kill the staff.”

The round ball of disguised muscle tugged Sanay into the hallway, looking at her closer, his gaze falling on the darkening bruises of her face.

“Well...” Lyons added, letting a little sheepishness creep into his voice. “I remembered that eventually.”

The Lump swiveled his head atop that tree trunk of a neck, ropes of tendon and sinew stretching from it and into his shoulders like the gnarled roots of a hideous tree. “She ain’t staff. She’s party favors.”

The Lump pulled on Sanay’s wrist. “Come on. I’ll get you some fresh...”

Lyons growled, cutting off the slab of humanity in the hallway. “Screw that. I want her back. The bitch sits up and begs when I cough. Don’t want to have to train something else like that.”

Lump glanced from Lyons to the frightened girl. Sanay looked like a rabbit caught between a wolf and a mountain lion. The slab glanced back to Lyons, standing there naked—the only thing he wore was a scowl of annoyance—accessorized with a menacing Colt.

“I’ll have her cleaned up, just like last night,” Lump told him.

Lyons nodded, standing by helplessly as Lump tugged Sanay after him. She looked at him, confused.

Lyons slammed the door shut, resting his head against the doorjamb. He looked at the reflection of his face in the chrome of the door chain’s slot.

He hated what he saw.

CHAPTER THREE

Barbara Price stood in the center of the Stony Man Farm Computer Room, looking between the touch-screen tablet device in her hand and the gigantic global map stretched out on the wall. Around her were the computer workstations of the four technological geniuses of the cyber crew: Aaron Kurtzman, Carmen Delahunt, Huntington Wethers and Akira Tokaido.

As mission controller, Price was staying on top of all open correspondence channels and keeping track of her field operations. Currently the cyber team was trying to locate Robert Baxter and Beatrice Chandler, scanning the world for their RFID chips. Given the ferocity of the attack, most people would have considered both scientists dead, but there had been a passive signal as leaving the perimeter of the base.

A global search would be much more difficult. One intruder had been located on the base, a disguised commando, Chinese in ethnicity, with forged identification papers, unit patches and dog tags that, if Stony Man looked really hard, could be traced back to Shanghai and the Ministry of State Security. This would have proved to be convincing evidence, if only for the fact that the intruder had been killed with the same U.S.-issue weapons and ammunition as the attacking commandos had likely carried. Indeed, that the man’s Beretta and rifle were found—and had been traced to stolen American arms lost in the Gulf War—only made Price more suspicious about the red herring dropped in the desert.

That was why Akira Tokaido was currently checking every ounce of digital traffic coming out of the People’s Republic of China, looking for incidents of a similar attack in-country. She didn’t know if there would have been enough coordination for two teams to make concurrent attacks, but there were signs that four days prior to the attack in the American Southwest there had been a similar missile misfire on a base in the Gobi Desert, 275 miles northwest of Beijing, 20 miles north of Hohhot. The detonation of a missile that should have been deactivated was given as the reason for the catastrophe that had left dozens dead and a hundred more injured.

Of course, that was merely the official story out of China. The truth, however, would be much more arcane, and naturally that is what Price assumed happened. Right now, the real facts were sketchy, which was why Tokaido was busy raiding PRC military databases.

Price turned her attention to her tablet, pulling up the information on the missing scientists, Baxter and Chandler. The Stony Man mission controller made careful note that there was evidence of a more than genial relationship between the two, and that it was likely that any effort at taking one might have been a guarantee of capturing the other. Price was well aware of the kind of emotional manipulation the peril to a loved one could hold over a person. Right now, there was an excellent chance of recovering the pair.

Baxter and Chandler were the only two missing from the base; other bodies had been uncovered, accounting for nearly a hundred murdered victims. Most had died at ground zero of one-thousand-kilogram-warhead detonations; others were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, shot through the head while wounded. Even so, the commandos who’d made the attack had been careful not to damage still-operating security cameras, so that the U.S. government would get a good look at what appeared to be PRC soldiers disguised as Americans attacking a base in New Mexico.

Tokaido quickly sent a note to her tablet, the information showing up in a new panel.

Air Force dispatched, seeking out attackers. Searched one-thousand-mile radius utilizing AWACS, found no sign of assaulters’ helicopters. Missiles showed up on radar only moments before attack, again, launched from location unknown.

Price nodded to Tokaido, acknowledging the preliminary information. The youngest member of the cyber crew wouldn’t stop until he could deliver every detail necessary so the skills of the Stony Man action team could be applied with deadly laser focus. Indeed, though the cyber team was merely a support to the commandos in the field, it was with these keyboard rangers that Able Team and Phoenix Force could be deployed to locate and destroy threats to innocent lives and world peace.

It had been three days since the first incident in China, and only by the sheerest of luck had Able Team come across Kevin Reising and his compatriots. They’d been based in Los Angeles awaiting a message and a destination. This was the day before the American incident.

Hunt Wethers fired a report to Price’s tablet. It was from one of the Navy AWACS birds that regularly patrolled just outside Chinese airspace and over international waters. The craft had timed its patrol and observation of the Leizhou Peninsula specifically, knowing there was going to be a test firing of a new genus of the Dong-Feng 21 antiship ballistic missile.

Not coincidentally, the DF-21 variant was purported to possess a maximum velocity of Mach 10. At 35 feet long and 16 tons in weight, not only could it carry enough explosives to kill an aircraft carrier in one shot, it also had nuclear warhead capabilities and a range of 1100 miles.

Of course, the difference between a silo-launched ballistic missile and a more portable option such as the American design was phenomenal. Huge warhead capacities and high speeds were vital ingredients to altering a military balance. The Dong-Feng antiship variants were meant to provide the Chinese navy with utter superiority when it came time to reclaim the island nation of Taiwan. One missile could break an allied carrier apart; its nuclear variant could flash fry an entire carrier group.

Both ways were means of overwhelming any defense against Chinese military expansion.

The American missile system could be mounted on cruisers and fast-attack crafts, land-launched or carried on fighter-bombers. Just because both weapons systems had the ability to break Mach 10 was no reason to try to combine them. DF-2Xs reached Mach 10 because they rode on midrange ballistic missiles, rocket engines that were more than capable of launching satellites into orbit or delivering an MRV warhead. The American design was meant to deliver its warhead at such a high speed, and with such agility and accuracy, that the mass of the missile would provide penetration through even the thickest of hulls.

Of course, with the presence of an auction promising the latest and deadliest hardware, including just the things necessary to take out enemy fleets, Price couldn’t help but feel that more than coincidence was at work here. “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

“Quoting Ian Fleming?” Aaron Kurtzman mused.

“Just trying to make certain I did the right thing allotting a Stony Man crew to this auction,” Price said.

“Two separate styles of carrier-killer test programs are attacked, and then someone advertises it?” Kurtzman asked. “You’ve got good instincts on this, Barb.”

She nodded, looking down at the screen of her tablet. So far, Stony Man had been fully capable of gathering all the information they could about the New Mexico attack, if only because the Sensitive Operations Group had many federal connections, both inside and outside conventional channels. China, however, was a very different situation, and tapping into their information had taken effort and penetration of high-security government systems. That Tokaido had located so much thus far was a sign of his skill and the power of the Farm’s cyber systems.

The auction had been confirmed through multiple sources, as well. Not only did Kevin Reising have his invitation, but there had been a rise in digital currency exchanges—peer-to-peer payments that didn’t pass through legitimate banking functions. That data-cash was being funneled to a website called the Arsenal Europa, which had been touting the auction. Discovering the auction had been the combined efforts of Wethers and Delahunt, both of whom utilized their particular, individual instincts to narrow the search to its confirmed presence.

They’d also managed to home in on a large supply of data-cash in storage under Reising’s accounts. The sums were substantial, well over fifty million dollars, allowing for more than a few high-tech, high-impact weapons. What a soldier for the Heathens outlaw motorcycle club would do with such a supply of cash made Price shudder.

Of course, a previous Able Team operation had established links between the Heathens and the Aryan Right Coalition, a white supremacist group that was actually the action arm of an even more shadowed organization that called itself the Arrangement.

The Arrangement had lost scores of men and millions of dollars in that conflict, but apparently that hadn’t been enough to set back the mystery group. Not if they could pony up that amount of funding to rearm and rebuild their shattered army.

“Hunt, do you have any more information about where Reising’s money came from or where it’s sitting right now?” Price asked.

The tall, slender, black professor looked up from his workstation. “Negative. Trying to dig into this data-cash network utilized by Reising is difficult, which is precisely why he chose it.”

“How so?” Price asked.

“Normally, I’d hope to find a centralized store of information, but the network itself is decentralized. It’s a mobile, mercurial entity. You need to have proper keys to locate your own money and allow transfer of funds. However, even going through those particular encryptions, you cannot access anything else. It’s like sticking your head into a disconnected pond and hoping to find a river to the nearest ocean,” Wethers explained.

“So, we’re up against, essentially, the Mississippi River Delta rather than looking for Lake Michigan,” Price said. “Instead of a box, we’re stuck with just a tube, which in itself doesn’t necessarily lead to another tube, even though it’s all one ever-increasing, ever-branching main artery.”

“Correct. This is the capillary system, which is useless without the arteries and veins, but while we can see an individual capillary, there’s no direct link, so we’re not even certain there is a heart. We could be in any organism,” Wethers explained.

Price winced. “Keep trying. This is the best we’ve got. I want to be able to figure out who Reising wanted to pay, but I also want to know where the money came from.”

“You will find no more tireless crusader and seeker of this information than I,” Wethers told Price.

Price looked at the clock in the corner of her tablet display. It was almost time to talk to Hal Brognola, the big Fed who’d helped to assemble the Sensitive Operations Group, alongside Mack Bolan, and who gave the Farm its legitimacy thanks to his high rank at the Department of Justice. Though not a cabinet secretary, Brognola often had the advantage of the President’s ear.

With that knowledge, she gave her cybernetic crew a quick goodbye and exited the Computer Room.

She opened the encryption on her tablet, clearing the rest of the data from both the screen and its random access memory. It was a paranoid habit, sterilizing the device of the full data she’d been accessing just for a telephone call, but the Farm had battled against major intelligence agencies and conspiracies with considerable hacking abilities.

“Barb,” Brognola said as his video call came through on her tablet.

“Hal.... So far, the capsules inside Carl, Gadgets and T.J. are still reporting normal vital signs,” Price informed him right off the bat.

Brognola had known Lyons and Schwarz for a long time, since even before the founding of the Sensitive Operations Group.

“These are the passive sensors, correct?” Brognola asked.

Price nodded. “We’ve got their location, as well. They simply can’t talk to us and we cannot warn them. Other than that—”

“Remember.” Brognola cut her off. “If things go to hell, you just have to remember, that’s Able Team and Phoenix Force already on the ground. To them, being surrounded just means they don’t have to watch their fire.”

Price smirked. “That’s one positive way of looking at it.”

“What about Blancanales and the rest of Phoenix?” Brognola asked.

“They’re currently in Hong Kong, checking in with David’s old girlfriend, Mei Anna,” Price said.

“Which is very iffy, considering China is an enemy state,” Brognola mused. “Though, technically, we’re working alongside them here.”

“The Ministry of State Security doesn’t know that, and even if they did, there’s still going to be a bit of bad blood between our two agencies if they figure out who McCarter and company are,” Price said. “Just a couple of weeks ago, Phoenix intercepted an MSS ‘fund-raising shipment’ of heroin and destroyed it.”

“If the MSS has more than a rumor of Phoenix Force’s existence, that would be bad. Very bad,” Brognola stated. “But there was no evidence of whom and what attacked that shipment, correct?”

“Correct,” Price returned. “It’s my job to see the worst-case scenario, however. So forgive me if I give you these kinds of cues.”

“It’s a shame that both teams are already deployed. I’d have loved to have someone on the ground in New Mexico just to get some hard data on the actual raid,” Brognola said.

Price could imagine Brognola’s jowled face turning into a grim frown. “So far, the Department of Defense investigators seem to be doing quite well on their own. We’re monitoring evidentiary data and field reports, and doing what we can to track down leads based on that data and feeding it back into the investigation. If something requires a ground response, we can always pull Phoenix off the current operation, or we can see if Striker is available.”

“We don’t usually get that opportunity,” Brognola returned. “But it’s worth a try. Anything on the China attacks?”

“The Gobi desert facility that was struck was the same one that test-fired the Dong-Feng-21 variant in 2013,” Price told him. “So we’re currently operating on the idea that the attackers were after the experimental ballistic missile designs. There’s a bit of disjoint, however.”

“The DF-21 and the American engine prototypes are incompatible,” Brognola concluded.

“Right. The DF gets so fast because it is riding atop an engine that can reach low orbit, while the American design is intended for nap-of-the-earth or wave-lapping altitude at Mach 10, necessitating the complex guidance systems,” Price affirmed. “The cybernetic team is currently aware of this disparity and is looking to see what else might have been there.”

Brognola grunted his receipt of the message. “I hope it’s just a missile system.”

“Just a missile system? The Dong-Fengs are nuclear capable,” Price stated.

Brognola’s grumble of worry was deeper now. “It’s not nuclear warheads that concern me. It’s something that sounds like it’s out of a James Bond novel.”

Price narrowed her eyes for a moment, trying to think of what Brognola was referring to. Then it hit her. “The BWMO—Beijing Weather Modification Office? That does sound like something out of the movies.”

“Like it or not, however, they’ve gotten very good at seeding clouds to produce rainfall,” Brognola stated. “All for the purposes of dispelling hailstorms and counteracting the advent of dust storms that affect Beijing itself.”

Price resisted the urge to open the Stony Man databases while on an outside call. What she did recall from the facts she knew, was that the BWMO utilized missile systems and cannons to seed clouds. With those shells and warheads, they’d been able to irrigate miles of arable land and protect it from hail damage utilizing materials such as aluminum oxide, barium or silver iodide.

Barium—that locked in Price’s mind. The material was naturally radioactive and, while it generally was not hazardous in a radiological manner or carcinogenic in water-soluble form, it was potentially poisonous. Its effects on the nervous system and muscle fibers were well documented, but as a serious weapon, the barium in even a concentration of seeder missiles or shells would prove wanting.

Seeded clouds could also be loaded with other hazardous materials, however. Price also couldn’t help but think that much of the concern over man-made climate change had no better source than manipulation of the weather of a half-million-square-mile area, barring pollution and natural volcanic ejecta.

“When I get in touch with David, I’ll have him check on that factor,” Price stated. “Either way, be it a MaRV warhead or weather manipulation, the potential for damage for each can be huge.”

“We’re not sure what was taken in China. Just that they released the cover story of a misfired missile,” Brognola reminded her. “It could have been something akin to what happened in New Mexico, where the inventors were taken. The wreckage is still being sorted through, isn’t it?”

“No assumptions are being made. Just keeping an eye on what could be coming down the pipe.”

“Let me know if anything pops up with Anna,” Brognola reminded her.

Price killed the connection and returned to the Computer Room. “Guys, one of you take a look into the Beijing Weather Modification Office to see what kind of materials and munitions they have on hand. Things might just get a lot more complicated now.”

“Weather modification,” Wethers mused out loud. “No stranger than Frankenstein-like organ hijacking, various forms of zombies and cannibal-psychosis-producing fungi.”

Tokaido cleared his throat. “Remember the time we saved the world from that weird shit?”

Delahunt smirked. “Remember? We call that Wednesday morning.”

“Enough shots from the peanut gallery. Carmen, you got the weird detail,” Kurtzman called out. “Barb, Phoenix is making contact now.”

Price nodded.

Hong Kong appeared on their computer screens. Kurtzman was watching local law-enforcement communications and Tokaido was checking for signal chatter among the more secretive groups. If things went to hell, Stony Man could watch. But only Phoenix Force could fight its own way out.

CHAPTER FOUR

David McCarter was alone on the streets of Hong Kong. While the initial plan was to have Phoenix Force act as cover and overwatch, that plan was not going to come to fruition. Five men, moving in a coordinated manner, would simply attract too much attention. Encizo and Blancanales were traveling as Argentine businessmen on a “busman’s holiday.” Manning and James were also in the role of tourist, this time both of them acting as Canadians.

Phoenix Force’s presence in the city was to be kept as low profile as anything, especially in regard to their operation on the Hong Kong docks, intercepting a shipment of heroin intended for American shores. Though the Stony Man computer crew looked for signs that the team had been recognized and was on watch lists, McCarter was still in a paranoid mood. It had been a classic Phoenix Force raid, full of fire and thunder, ending with his team disappearing into the shadows like smoke.

The Ministry of State Security had been both ally and enemy in the past, as corrupt entities within the agency had been keen on getting funding that didn’t tie directly to Chinese taxpayers. The destruction in society caused by drug-related crime was merely a side benefit. As Phoenix Force’s leader, McCarter had encountered enough American and British-run rogue operations to know that “his side” was no more innocent than the Red Chinese. Even so, the MSS was primarily concerned with the state, not the countries in competition with them, and certainly not foreign citizens.

McCarter finally reached the bar where he planned to meet Mei Anna. Ever since first working together in a mission to Hong Kong a few years ago, McCarter and Mei had been attracted to each other and had maintained a long-distance romance. It was one of the longer intimate relationships the Briton had engaged in, made slightly more difficult because of Mei’s professional obligations, not to mention McCarter’s constant vigilance and need as a member of Phoenix Force. Even so, Mei proved to be invaluable in dealing with Chinese situations; her linguistic skills were, naturally, better than McCarter’s own smattering of understanding.

He sidled up to the bar and ordered a bottle of Tsingtao for himself. While on the scene in Hong Kong, none of the team was armed, at least in terms of firearms. McCarter still had a folding pocket knife, as well as various flat, polycarbonate utensils. One was a D-shaped hand device that had a smaller projection straight out the back of the D. When McCarter wrapped his hand around it, a short cylindrical point jutted between his middle and ring fingers. That tip would concentrate the force of the Briton’s punch to the point where it could shatter bone. Neither it nor his concealed knife would be a match for an AK-47 blazing away at him, but if McCarter couldn’t go toe to toe, he’d fight from ambush and concealment. One broken trachea could equal a rifle and thirty rounds in his hands to even up the odds.

It was an absolute worst-case scenario, but Phoenix Force was always called in when the worst went down anyway. It was intellect, preparation and prowess that made up for lack of manpower and firepower in these desperate instances.

“Hey, stranger.” A soft, gentle voice spoke to his right.

McCarter swiveled on his seat, broadly grinning, his smile a beam as he beheld Mei Anna. She was deceptively small and sweet-looking, her hair in a pixie cut, a shoulder-padded jacket hanging open to reveal the silk slip that displayed her décolletage and would likely draw eyes away from what surprises she had on hand for an emergency. He slipped off the stool and slid his arms under hers, stooping so that their lips met, briefly yet intensely.

McCarter rose from the kiss and she followed it with a tight hug. In an instant his jacket pocket grew heavier and Mei gave him a quick wink.

“What’s new, Tiger Lily?” McCarter asked with a grin. On the few moments when they either weren’t working together or lost in the throes of intimacy, Mei and the Briton took a little time together to watch favorite movies. The rewritten espionage thriller redubbed as a comedy that McCarter referenced was one of those. So much so, it had become their unofficial greeting.

Mei climbed onto the stool next to McCarter, raised two fingers and didn’t even have to voice her order. McCarter returned to sitting, as well, taking a sip from his beer. The bartender returned with a pair of cocktails and an extra bottle of beer.

“You know these are delicious, so I can’t tell you they are new,” Mei said, lifting her cocktails. “Bring your beer, we’ll head to a booth.”

The bar itself was active but not crowded. There was certainly a good screen of background noise, but with no throng of bodies pressed together, the two of them could move easily to a quiet booth and not fear that the press of humanity could listen in on them.

As soon as they scuttled into the booth, side by side so that McCarter could wrap his arm around her shoulders, so he could feel the warmth of her against him, he set a quick kiss on the top of her head, enjoying the smell of her hair. She looked up at him, almond-shaped, deep brown eyes regarding him with affection. He could also feel a tension in her.

“What’s new is some seriously screwed-up stuff,” Mei said softly. “I’m assuming this sudden date is because of the troubles near Beijing?”

“Gobi Desert testing institute,” McCarter said. He reached into the pocket that Mei had filled and felt the outline of a small revolver, already snugged into a pocket holster. Hook and loop material clutched the inside of the jacket pocket so he couldn’t draw the revolver and look like an idiot pulling the leather sheath with it. “Thanks, by the way.”

Mei wrinkled her nose. “I couldn’t bring a Hi-Power...couldn’t fit it in my clutch.”

“So what happened up north?” McCarter asked.

Mei held her tongue for a moment, looking as if she didn’t want to say exactly. “Have you heard of the Beijing Weather Modification Office?”

“Yup,” McCarter answered. He didn’t say that Price had thrown him an encrypted text mentioning the possible involvement of the agency before he arrived at the bar. “Personally, I always wondered why they assigned almost forty thousand blokes to a rainmaking operation.”

“They are effective,” Mei returned. “They’ve done a hell of a lot of work.”

“And some of it might just be weaponized weather?” McCarter asked.

Mei nodded.

“Far be it from me to be skeptical, especially in the wake of taking out the Dragon’s Eye, a laser that could have leveled Taiwan, but how can cloud seeding and hailstorm busting be that much of a threat?” McCarter asked. “I realize that playing around with the climate on the scale of the nation of China could affect world climate patterns, but no rainstorm is going to take out an aircraft carrier group.”

“No, you would need something along the lines of a hurricane,” Mei returned.

That hit McCarter like a lump of iron slag in the stomach. “Hurricane? How?”

“In Taiwan, we were aware of the possibilities that China was working on a Massive Ordnance Air Burst explosive as a possible aircraft-carrier-killing missile. Enough to destroy the ship and perhaps cripple the support craft around it, without being an actual nuclear attack,” Mei said.

McCarter was familiar with the MOAB, a thermobaric explosive that came in two parts. One being a burst that diffused inflammable fuel or explosive dust over a large area, while the second ignited the aerosolized cloud, which itself would detonate. With a large dome of fire detonating, it would produce enormous pressure. In the twentieth century, they’d called the bomb a Daisy Cutter, since the detonation would cut every living thing down in the area, all the way down to the daisies. “I’ve had Gary make one or two of those.”

“I figured,” Mei responded. “Are you here alone?”

“I left them behind. I don’t need a bloody set of chaperones for a date with my girl,” McCarter answered.

Mei smiled. “You know that I have my own support crew around the place.”

“Especially the bartender,” McCarter noted. “Unless Taiwan took over the Russians’ telepathic research.”

Mei stuck out her tongue. It was meant to be a defiant gesture, but to David it was just unbearably cute. He leaned in and took a quick taste, lips crushed against hers. He didn’t want to break the kiss, but there was still business to attend to.

Mei cleared her throat. “The Dong-Feng can carry Multiple Individual Reentry Vehicles—I’m sure you remember MIRVs from the days when the USSR and dinosaurs roamed the Earth.”

McCarter gave her a poke in her stomach. “Was that an age joke?”

Mei chuckled. “Just making certain you’re paying attention and not undressing me with your eyes.”

“My eyes and ears can work independently, love,” McCarter said. “Right now, my eyes are snogging the hell out of your naked self.”

Mei smiled, then poked him in the center of the forehead. “Well, ears, pick this up. MIRVs can have any sort of warhead. Nuclear. Conventional. MOAB. Cloud seeder.”

McCarter suddenly felt himself focus, sitting a little straighter. “Seed the clouds over the ocean. And then do something that could increase the water temperature over a vast area.”

“Like, say, the thermobaric cloud from a MOAB,” Mei said. “What isn’t superheated gets vaporized by the blast, adding to the humidity. The sudden lack of air pressure sucks in more air...”

McCarter frowned. “Boom! One hurricane bomb.”

“Made from readily available materials, not just the Dong-Feng family of missiles,” Mei said. “The mathematics and physics of it are just way outside of my limits.”

“But if you hire thirty-seven thousand weather scientists and mathematicians, they could do the grunt work,” McCarter returned. “Damn.”

He started thinking about why the marauders would have wanted a Mach 10–capable engine and a guidance system meant to defeat radar when it clicked with him.

If you fired a ballistic missile, it would definitely show up on radars around the world. But, if you could take the individual components of different warheads and put those on the ends of the rockets, you could deliver all that firepower without giving away the fact that an ICBM was launched toward you to drop a hurricane on your doorstep, or let your original location be known. That had been one of the most troublesome contentions of tracking the origin of the two different attacks, as the missile blasts preceding them had followed a nap-of-the-earth course.

He’d have to run the general idea past people who were far smarter than him. McCarter was smart, but he was far from being a rocket scientist. These things sounded possible, and there was a United Nations resolution and treaty to prevent the weaponization of weather. Unfortunately, the United States was not a signatory, and neither were many other countries.

While all of this ran through his mind, he finished the cocktail that Mei had bought for him—his taste buds agreeing with her that it was delicious. He stroked her hair, squeezed her hand and hugged her tighter off and on. The time he put into thinking about the possibilities of the Chinese and American weapons systems combined felt all too long, and he was coming nowhere close to a solution, while the time he spent reveling in the warmth and human contact he shared with Mei was like the flicker of an instant.

He recalled what Gary Manning had said about Einstein and time relativity. “A second with your hand on a hot stove is like an eternity. A day with a girl you love is like a fleeting instant.”

Of course, McCarter liked the pool-table description of time and space interacting, too.

“So, why did you give me the pocket rocket?” McCarter asked.

Mei smirked. “Don’t I always... Oh, the revolver.”

“Cheeky girl,” McCarter chuckled.

“The informant who relayed the tidbits about the ‘hurricane’ missile was reported as having committed suicide,” Mei said. “He threw himself out of a fourth-story window. And when that didn’t work, he curb-stomped himself.”

“Curb-stomped. Figuratively?”

“Literally,” Mei answered.

McCarter wrinkled his nose. The literal act of a curb stomp was to set someone’s head and upper jaw against a hard, raised surface. Then, the person was either kicked in the neck, or a foot was brought heavily down. The result ended with torn cheeks, a crushed lower jaw and a skull messily separated from neck vertebrae. It was one of the most brutal means of murder McCarter had ever seen, one that even he hadn’t used in battle.

“You’re covered, right?” McCarter asked.

Mei nodded. “I’m paranoid as hell. And I’m surrounded by my people.”

McCarter could see the flicker of fear in those dark, almond eyes. He knew from personal experience that only the most brash of fools was never afraid.

“I’ll do you a solid, love,” McCarter murmured, lips close and brushing her ear.

“You’re not going to make yourself bait,” Mei said. “That’s insane.”

“Insane is my middle name,” McCarter countered. “Besides, if I can find the bastards who killed that informant, I could get a better handle on who made the theft.”

“And what if it’s MSS plugging a leak?” Mei asked.

“Then the Commie buggers have it coming for building a goddamn fleet-killing hurricane bomb.”

McCarter took out his phone and transmitted a file to her device.

“Call my lads,” McCarter told her.

“And what do I say?” she asked.

McCarter stood and adjusted his jacket, making certain the revolver was still firmly in its pocket holster. “Hunting season is open.”

* * *

ROSARIO BLANCANALES leaned on his cane, standing and admiring the Cenotaph, a memorial to the honored dead of both World War I and World War II. The 1940s had been a vastly different time, when Hong Kong was more or less homogeneous and still clung to a mix of old ways and new British fads that filtered in with Great Britain’s protection as a colony in Her Majesty’s empire. During the second conflict that the Cenotaph commemorated, Hong Kong had suffered greatly from Japanese incursion. Citizens starved, medics even under the neutral protection of the Red Cross had been murdered, and more than ten thousand women and girls had been brutally raped. Those names were not carved into this tower of stone, but there was still a brief, powerful prayer for them.

“May their martyred souls be immortal and their immortal spirits endure.”

He could not read the Chinese characters in which the inscription were made, but he knew the meaning. Standing there, he could see that spirits did endure.

Because of all the corporations that called Hong Kong home, because of the cultural impact that it had on the world, even the 1997 transfer of sovereignty to the People’s Republic of China had done little to dim the neon, the glory and the wild mayhem that was this grand old city. On every level, from the lowest of underground crime to the peaks of wealth and power, the city was simply too vibrant, too energetic, to have been tamped down by Communist rule, to the point where fried chicken and pizza had infiltrated the mainland.

Blancanales’s phone came to life. He answered it. “Hola, amigo!”

“What’ve you got for me?” He heard McCarter on the other end.

“Just a bit more news about the weather,” Blancanales replied. Over their secure, encrypted devices, the two had mapped out the way this conversation had to go. They then switched to disposable cell phones for the sake of seeming secure, all the while leaving their conversation open to prying ears.

The two were acting as bait, especially since McCarter had told him of the efforts to silence those in the know about the raid on the Weather Modification Office’s technology test area along the Gobi Desert.

There was a good chance it might have been the government who killed the man, but his manner of death was brutal and hand-to-hand, the work of someone who knew better than to pack firepower in this country. Someone who did not want the handiwork traced back to them. That didn’t make sense, even for the Ministry of State Security, who would have no problem shooting someone for the crime of treason.

No, crushing someone’s skull with a boot stomp was the act of their enemy, killing without leaving signs of weapons or nationality.

So Blancanales and McCarter traded discussion. The Phoenix Force leader had been seen leaving the contact of the murdered man: Mei Anna. They were hoping that someone would be on his scent, listening to his phone calls, something that could be done with a phone-cloner unit, a device small enough to slide into a pocket.

Right now McCarter was approximately ten blocks away, walking in Blancanales’s direction.

And Blancanales, despite his salt-and-pepper hair and the cane he leaned on, looked good playing the part of an old man. The cane was a martial arts weapon. Blancanales was an experienced practitioner of bojutsu—not jitsu but jutsu—the practice of the use of the short staff or cane in actual combat, not the art.

To be certain, Blancanales did have a firearm on his person, but a very flat, concealed weapon. He didn’t relish getting into a gunfight in Hong Kong, not when the police would fall upon him armed to the teeth.

They kept talking, trading vague references about missile technology and the weather manipulation systems, going for length of call, making certain their opposition could home in on them.

It was a risky gambit. Blancanales kept tensing at the sight of official-looking cars, glad that they were mostly the same Hong Kong park maintenance vehicle, and the occasional passing police car. This kind of loose talk could drop a lot of heat on them.

Blancanales recalled the motto of David McCarter’s old unit, the British Special Air Service: Who Dares, Wins.

That’s when Blancanales noticed a van pull to a stop and disgorge two tall men dressed in black. They didn’t appear to be armed, but they didn’t need to be. They were both taller than Blancanales, and the leather gloves they wore over their ham-size fists were quiet proof that this dare had drawn a response.

Blancanales leaned a little harder against his cane.

Let the hunt begin.

CHAPTER FIVE

David McCarter walked at a brisk pace, the disposable cell phone to his ear, continuing his conversation with Rosario Blancanales, letting the words come out as something only slightly above gibberish. Luckily, he and the other man were working from a script they’d memorized. They needed only to hit proper keywords to attract attention, and the use of a prepared script allowed them to concentrate on their surroundings. The trouble with playing bait was not that they were consciously in the line of fire, but that they had to be aware where that line started. He heard Blancanales’s tone change.

“Hunt,” the Able Team veteran said, and the phone clicked off.

The word “hunt” was not in reference to Huntington Wethers back at Stony Man Farm, but that their objective as bait had succeeded. Someone had showed up. McCarter’s eyes kept sweeping the street and sidewalk around him. No one had come toward him yet, though he had an itch at the base of his neck, a tingle of danger that wasn’t exactly on a conscious level. McCarter had survived enough operations to realize that the unfocused discomfort was not a sign of his instincts misfiring, but actually picking up on some subtle hints that he was being stalked.

McCarter had his hands in his jacket pockets, his right hand’s fingers wrapped around the handle of a .22 Magnum Taurus. Even out of a short barrel like the snubby, it had nearly the energy of a 9 mm bullet, and there were eight of them in the cylinder. McCarter also had his knuckle load, the deadly spike capable of killing, though in this instance, he was more interested in stunning his foe.

Questioning a corpse would not be the easiest of things, but if worse came to worst, McCarter could at least rifle through a dead man’s pockets and make observations about the state of his body. He’d also get photographs and fingerprints of the dead man, but right now, he wanted someone who could speak.

Even as he dangled himself as bait, there was also a section of him worried about Mei Anna and her people back at the bar. That tingle of warning at the base of his skull told him that it was likely he had drawn the wolves away from her door. As it was, the bar was on a tight lockdown, to the point where Mei had literally stuffed the revolver into McCarter’s pocket the minute they saw each other. Attacking her now to cut off the seep of information would be too risky and foolhardy. Even if they somehow succeeded in attacking her in her own headquarters, the cost in manpower and the attention the violence would bring would undo any efforts at cover-up.

There. McCarter’s instincts rose in reaction to a sight out of the corner of his eye. As was the case with most instinctual responses, McCarter’s conscious mind wasn’t quite certain of what had popped up on his radar, but he knew where the threat was. He knew the distance to what triggered his surge of fight or flight. The sidewalks around him were packed with people, all of varying heights, even though the six-foot McCarter loomed over many of the Chinese in the crowds.

There were other six-footers sprinkled here and there, but none of them appeared to be trailing him nor showing aggression. Then again, McCarter was keener to stay low profile when trailing someone, and if their enemy was assassins out to protect their conspiracy, they would not make a lot of noise, not until they were within striking distance.

No, McCarter’s opponent was quiet and had only betrayed something small that tripped his instincts, but had kept him from actually noticing the attacker. He fought against the urge to concentrate on memories and input. The best result he had in reaction to ambush was not to concentrate on what could be wrong; instead, he should just look for the whole picture. His reflexes worked finely because he didn’t distract himself from the totality of input being picked up by sight, sound and touch.

And that was when McCarter saw the person shoved out of the way, just out of the corner of his eye, an instant before he whirled in swift, certain response. McCarter folded his arm and brought the “chicken wing” down tight against his side, suddenly blocking the punch that swung at him, low and aiming at his kidney. Britain’s Special Air Service taught that an attack on an opponent’s kidneys was the surest path to incapacitating them with a minimum of fuss. A knife would cause instantly lethal renal shock, but a punch would crumple a man like a discarded newspaper.

McCarter’s elbow took the force of the stunning punch, pain jolting up through his shoulder. But the pain was not indicative of broken bone or dislocated joint because his fist still remained clenched and ready. McCarter extended his arm, snapping his fist at the foe who struck at him, but the enemy was swift. Knuckles scraped the nearly bald head of the compact fireplug of a man, but the brunt of his punch was slipped by a quick movement of his head.

The bald attacker whipped out his other fist, a punch that should have hooked around to strike McCarter at the base of his spine, but the Briton was also moving, turning to bring his other arm in front of him as a means of shielding himself. That left hook from the bulldoglike man snapped into McCarter’s own arm, blunting that strike. The ex-SAS commando lashed out with his left boot, striking toward the ambusher’s knees, but the enemy’s footwork was swift and he seemingly danced away from the initial assault.

Now that they were face-to-face, McCarter could see that this guy was some form of European, though matching the diminutive height of the rest of the Chinese populace average around him. What he lacked in height, he made up for in bulk, arms sausaged into windbreaker sleeves with big fists poking out. The Phoenix Force commander could see the deformation of his foe’s knuckles, showing that this guy had trained long and laboriously to make his hands hardened clubs devoted to pain.

The squat killer moved in again, and McCarter switched feet, stabbing out with his right to try to catch the man under his sternum. Those meaty cudgels crossed, blocking the attack, and the Briton retracted his kick even as blunt fingertips clawed at the slack around his shin. That didn’t slow the bald assassin’s onrush. McCarter kept his feet at right angles to each other, forming the tactical T that ensured it would be difficult to push him off balance. It was ingrained into his reflexes, so that even as he backed away from another snapping fist, the Briton’s footing was certain.

The sudden eruption of martial arts combat on the sidewalk made people scatter, which thankfully allowed McCarter some breathing room. He didn’t have to worry about bystanders wandering into the melee and becoming injured. McCarter slap-deflected another assault, and went on the attack, whipping his elbow around to catch his foe in the face. With both of their forward momentum combined, McCarter felt his humerus spark with the jolt of “funny bone” reactions, but was rewarded with his opponent staggering backward.

McCarter kept on the attack, only to catch a snap kick that barked off his shin, knocking the support from beneath him. The Briton staggered to his other foot to maintain his balance, spearing at the attacker with a knife hand. Fingernails gouged at forehead, bushy eyebrows and down into the enemy’s eye, McCarter making as much use of his increased reach as he could. Even as that raking slash connected, a powerful hammer struck him in his exposed side.

In his lunge, McCarter had left himself open. Ordinarily such a mistake would have come and gone too quickly for an opponent to take advantage. This time, however, the punch knocked the wind from the Phoenix Force commander and he stumbled to one knee. The squat attacker rubbed his eyes across his forearm, blinking blood away that seeped from his torn skin. The club-fisted warrior lunged in, but McCarter kicked off with all of his strength, lunging headfirst into his foe’s stomach. Fists that had been aimed for his head or neck instead fell upon his heavily muscled back and ribs. The impacts were painful, but not fatal, while McCarter lifted the killer off his stubby legs.

The Briton hooked the back of his foe’s thighs and then allowed himself to topple forward, wrenching the assassin down to the sidewalk. The man released a pained grunt before his knees wrenched upward, dislodging McCarter from his position. The Phoenix commander hammered off a side punch, unable to target his foe’s kidneys, but the body blow went further toward emptying the bald attacker’s lungs.

McCarter fired off a second punch, striking below his enemy’s belt buckle, the blow stabbing deep into the man’s groin muscles. He cupped his hand over the assassin’s knee and pushed it out hard to the side, exposing the soft inner crease that McCarter wailed a second punch into, this time aiming for the inner thigh to disrupt the femoral artery. His foe wailed in pain when that blow connected, but McCarter was not through. The Briton tangled his arm with the attacker’s lower leg, then wrenched hard.

The bald little fighter’s knee popped with an ugly sound, driving his voice into a higher octave of pain. Twisting his ankle forced the guy to flop to his stomach. This wasn’t a mixed martial arts ring fight. There would be no tapping out. McCarter slammed the guy in the kidney with everything he still had in the tank. With that final chop, there wasn’t any sign of further violence from his foe.

McCarter tested his weight on the kicked leg and felt lucky that it had merely been a glancing kick. There was no seeming fracture, and he could move his foot. That was more than his ambusher could say.

The Phoenix leader grabbed him up by his collar. As soon as McCarter had him ready to move, Gary Manning brought his minivan to the curb, honking the horn.

With a hearty heave, he slammed the bald, club-fisted assassin into the back of the van, then climbed in and slid the side door shut.

“I thought you would have had this one done long before I got here,” Manning quipped.

McCarter shrugged. “I played it out because I know how much of a bitch Hong Kong traffic is.”

Manning looked over his shoulder at McCarter. Even in the dim interior of the van, he could see the Briton had been through a hell of a fight. The Phoenix commander cinched the guy’s wrists together behind his back with cable ties, more than one just to make certain the restraints would hold the thick-shouldered killer.

The thug looked up from the floor at the two men, and McCarter rested the sole of his boot against his throat.

“Gettin’ yer throat stepped on is a slow, ugly way to die,” McCarter growled. “You might have a chance not to die if you sit still.”

“Leg.” The man spoke. The word was too short for any hint of accent to arise, but McCarter looked more closely at his appearance, pulling out his pocket flashlight and his personal cell device. With a click of the button, the commander had his prisoner’s photograph taken. A few motions with his thumb and the photograph was on its way to Stony Man Farm.

“I know your pin took a twistin’. I did it, mate,” McCarter told the prisoner. “You going to tell me who you are or where you came from?”

“Eat the dicks.” The attacker spit.

McCarter sighed. “Then just lay there and shut up.” To emphasize his point, the Phoenix Force leader pulled the revolver from his jacket pocket and leveled it at the man’s face.

“Only a .22,” the prisoner said. “It’ll roll right off my skull.”

McCarter smirked. “But it’ll take out both of your eyes and mutilate your face. I’ll leave plenty for you to talk with, but you’ll be blind and hideous for the rest of your miserable existence.”

That quieted the assassin.

Now to find out how Blancanales was doing with his hunt.

* * *

THE BRUISERS GREW closer to Rosario Blancanales as he leaned heavily on his cane. They regarded him with stony, hate-filled glares. Both were taller than Blancanales, and seemed to have been chosen for the sake of the width of their shoulders and thickness of their limbs. That didn’t mean they didn’t possess skill, but Blancanales was hedging his bets on keeping them mentally disarmed. As he stood, using the cane as a crutch, and dressed in loose, baggy clothing, he tried to cast the image of an old man trying to play a young man’s game.

Both of them were European, possessing Slavic features. At least they were smart enough not to wear sunglasses at night, but now, the Able Team veteran was on the alert that these two guys could be so much more than just bags of cement with fists.

“Gentlemen?” Blancanales greeted them as they got within a few yards of him. “I’m afraid you found me out.”

Neither spoke as he scanned Statue Square, the park where Blancanales had been observing the Hong Kong cenotaph. They were making certain they hadn’t been drawn into a trap with human bait. This spread-out tourist attraction would provide plenty of places for Blancanales’s backup to hide and there were rooftops that could be used for sniper overwatch.

One of the men had yellow scrub for hair. The other, with a rust-colored scouring pad for his top, Blancanales noted, stepped right up to him and looked down upon him.

“Your friend, he will not be speaking to you again,” Blondie said.

Blancanales looked down, sighing. “He was a good man.”

“We will need to ask you some questions.” Blondie’s big hand wrapped around Blancanales’s shoulder and squeezed hard. Those fingers, thick as sausages, clamped down with painful precision, making Blancanales stand straighter, no acting required to twist his features into agony. The blond Russian reached down to take away Blancanales’s fighting cane.

You underestimated them, Blancanales thought the moment before he slashed the hardwood cane against the side of his oppressor’s knee. Through his knowledge of human anatomy and his years of not only training but field experience with the fighting stick, the simple slice suddenly toppled the brawny Russian, forcing him to release the Able Team veteran’s shoulder.

Blancanales stepped back, already feeling the bruises forming from the monstrous claw that had threatened to crush his shoulder joint. He whipped the cane up and was ready to destroy the blond man’s face when Red lurched toward him, moving with all the power and speed of a charging buffalo.

Blancanales threw himself aside as 250 pounds of freckled muscle surged past him, breaths and ponderous footfalls making him sound like a locomotive. The hurt Russian grit his teeth and sprung off his remaining leg, fingers hooked like talons to tear at Blancanales’s flesh. The Able Team warrior speared out, the brass tip of his cane striking the blond in his Adam’s apple before sliding down into the notch of his collarbone. The brawny thug gurgled, but Blancanales could feel his opponent altering his course, minimizing the jarring effect of being jammed in the throat.

Even so, Blondie gasped, sliding into the grass and taking a moment to clasp his hands around his dislocated knee.

Blancanales barely had a moment to look for the other man before a thick rope of muscle wrapped in black leather lashed toward his head in his peripheral vision. Blancanales dipped his head. The clothesline maneuver mussing his salt-and-pepper hair. Muscles glancing off his skull informed him that he’d have lost his head to the strike. Blancanales pivoted the cane in his hands, slicing at his foe’s hip, but the collision between man and wood spun both combatants.

Blancanales stepped quickly to recover his balance and looked with dismay upon the Red-topped ape that merely dropped one of his meaty paws to rub the sore spot on his side. Green eyes glared from under a beetled brow, and Blancanales couldn’t see a hint of humanity in those features now. This thing before him was a raging beast, and somehow those shoulder muscles seemed to spread even wider, like something out of a werewolf movie. Spittle frothed at the corners of the Russian’s mouth, and he surged forward at the Able Team warrior.

Blancanales charged, as well, pressing the attack and stabbing forward as if his cane were a sword. The brass cap struck rippling chest muscles and dragged heavily off the Russian’s leather jacket. It hit a wrinkle and suddenly it was as if Blancanales rode a tidal wave, being shoved backward off his feet. His red-haired opponent continued steaming toward him, but Blancanales’s grasp on his cane kept him just out of reach of a gigantic hand.

Blancanales slammed his feet into the grass behind him, throwing all of his weight and strength into slowing his freight train of an opponent. Sod wrinkled and tore under the soles of his boots, and the Russian let out a bellow of pain as the hardwood cane snapped in two.

Blancanales’s only weapon shattered, he lurched aside as the beast stormed past him, striking a cobblestone walkway chin-first. If that brute could snap his battle cane, then there was no way that Red could have come away from that crash without a broken rib or three. Still, Blancanales rushed to the big thug’s fallen form and jumped onto his broad back, coming down on both knees. He put all his weight into the attack, hoping to further stagger the man.

Blancanales saw those thick arms lift, hands flattening against the ground to raise his ponderous bulk and return to combat. The Russian’s haircut was too short to get a sufficient grasp on it, but there was no trimming his ears. Blancanales grabbed the twin dishes of flesh and cartilage on either side of Red’s head and pushed forward hard, mashing the man’s face into the sidewalk. With brutish energy, the Russian reared up like an untamed stallion, seeking to wrest Blancanales from his back.

The Able Team warrior slammed his knee between the attacker’s shoulder blades and wrenched back hard. Both ears were torn from the sides of his skull, skin ripping away along his scalp, eliciting thunder from deep within the man-beast’s breast. Red bent away from Blancanales’s knee, giving the wily Able Team fighter enough room to bring up his other leg and push down hard. Bones cracked as the Russian’s face struck cobblestone, blood spurting from a burst nose.

The blond was back, gingerly favoring his injured knee, but still on two feet and ready to step in to make up for the loss of his partner in this conflict.

Blancanales was breathing heavily, but he stood his ground, glaring at the blond Russian, standing astride the corpse of his even more brutish partner. Blancanales lifted his hand, borrowing from one of Hong Kong’s greatest breakout action heroes, folding his hand toward himself in challenge. The Able veteran figured that he had a good chance if this fight continued, as he still maintained his full mobility, while Blondie was limping. Bulk and power were nothing in comparison to skill and intellect.

In a heartbeat, hands took the blond by either arm, and the twin meaty impacts of knuckles against a leather-clad torso caused the big Slav to collapse to both knees. Between the dual kidney punches and landing so heavily on his injured knee, the Russian folded at the waist and curled into a fetal position on the grass.

Calvin James and Rafael Encizo were breathing deeply, evenly, evidencing their mad rush across Statue Square to Blancanales’s aid. On the edge of the park, a minivan screeched to a halt, the side door slamming open.

“Oy! Time to move!” McCarter’s bellow crossed the square.

“Want this one?” James asked Blancanales.

“We’re not moving fast dragging him along,” he returned. “Dump him and let’s move!”

As one, the two Phoenix Force commandos and the Able Team warrior raced across the park to Manning and McCarter in the rented van.

Within a few moments the Stony Man operatives would lose themselves in Hong Kong traffic, disappearing from the scenes of battle as far as the police would be concerned.

But they had a prisoner; a skilled killer who was trying to silence information about the attack on the Gobi Desert base.

For Blancanales, it was worth the broken cane and stiff, sore arm.

CHAPTER SIX

Carl Lyons was ready the moment there was a knock at the door, rising to his feet. He’d dressed and had his .357 Magnum Colt Python in its waistband holster. Opening the door, he ushered in Hermann Schwarz and T. J. Hawkins.

“Did you get a party favor last night?” Lyons asked.

Schwarz tilted his head. “What did you get?”

Lyons could see that Schwarz looked tired. He smelled the chemical stink of methamphetamine hovering around him like a fog. “I’m guessing we all got our vices. What did you do?”

“I lit up my shit,” Schwarz explained. “So I been tweaking all night.”

As he said so, he made a small hand gesture informing Lyons that he hadn’t inhaled. Lyons knew that faking smoking was a little bit easier, but even so, he’d exposed himself to the smoke from a neurotoxic drug. Even that seemed to have left Schwarz a little burned out this morning. Hawkins had heavily lidded eyes and looked more than a little sheepish.

“We’re here on business,” Lyons growled. “You get baked, and you end up tweaking?”

“I turned my radio into a Taser,” Schwarz answered with a shrug.

Hawkins frowned. “My mouth is all raw from chip mouth.”

Lyons rolled his eyes and then turned away.

He had to act the part, which meant having a razor’s edge thin line between temper and control. So far, the bloodied Sanay had proved Lyons’s cover, but that had been her playing on his reflexes. Right now, he realized that those blind instincts and reflexes had likely saved his life and those of his friends.

* * *

THOMAS JEFFERSON HAWKINS hoped he’d put on a good enough show as the pot-smoking-and-dealing rookie biker for the Reich Low Riders brought up to the big leagues of “the race war.” His Texan accent, in most cases, would have been more than sufficient to sell himself as a bigoted thug in some “Left Coast” cities.

Those opinions of his method of speech, his history as an elite Airborne Ranger, just the places of his birth, were merely projections of bigotry from others. Even before he joined the Army, Hawkins hadn’t given a damn about race or creed. As with the rest of the world, as with most of America, Texas was a melting pot, and growing up meeting, going to school with and just making friends with a few dozen Hispanics by age ten was easier than tripping over your own feet.

Even more insulting to the Texan was that his military career had ended when he’d disobeyed a United Nations peacekeeping force and superior officer to prevent the massacre of villagers in Somalia. Hawkins came from a long lineage of soldiers, so career and service were a part of his DNA. When Hawkins had taken his oath of service, there’d been nothing about only protecting white Americans from enemies foreign or domestic. When he placed his life on the line across dozens of missions with Phoenix Force, it wasn’t just for the sake of one skin or one state over another.

Like Schwarz, he’d taken a few hits off the pot he’d been given. He’d actually imbibed more than Schwarz had, if only because Hawkins knew that there was far less likelihood of negative health effects off marijuana than methamphetamine. The little that Schwarz had smoked showed on the Able Team genius’s features, the bags under his eyes, the half step slower in his stride, even the sounds of his words. A minor taste of the meth, and staying up all night duplicating the activities of a tweaker, had left Schwarz looking as though he’d been run over by a truck.

Still, a half step slower for Schwarz was a sight quicker than most other men. Hawkins himself felt a bit more tired, but he was glad he didn’t have a background in meth. Munchies and a lowering of his energy this morning was much better than inhaling a neurotoxin and muscle stimulant.

He knocked back some coffee, then checked his watch. According to the agenda, there was going to be a sample mall for this convention of crazies. Tables would be stacked with the smaller, man-portable goods and there would be videos for larger items.

The mall would open in an hour.

In the meantime, Hawkins, like the other members of his undercover team, had been keeping his eyes peeled for what security was around the place. They could never break character, not certain if there were any spaces not covered by security cameras or hidden microphones. Even if Schwarz could use his electronic skills, there was a good chance that interfering with these observations would only draw far more attention. And so, Lyons continued to act like a grouch.

Hawkins stayed on script. He had a job to do, and they could wait until this mission was over to mentally and emotionally unwind. In the meantime, he kept his eyes peeled and ears tuned. Finding electronics was one thing. Sizing up the security and their competition was something very different. Hawkins could already tell that plenty of the guards were professionals of various stripes. The guy who came through and had hung out at Lyons’s door, for example, was a Samoan who Hawkins estimated at six foot two inches and 325 pounds. A lot of it looked like fat, but the man moved as if he were easily half that size, with canny, sharp eyes that paid attention like an eagle scanning for prey on a prairie.

Hawkins observed him through the peephole, having spent more than enough time looking through such fish lenses to have a good sense of what was going on even with the curved distortion of the glass aperture. Measuring the Samoan against Lyons provided a good scale to work with.

Hawkins announced that he was leaving the hotel room, going to see what was up and about. It might not have been the best of ideas to wander away alone. Sitting and waiting was fine under the auspices of being immobile and observing enemies, but sitting in a hotel room was something completely different. At least outside, he could observe. He could fill his anxious nerves with input.

Hawkins didn’t intend to engage an opponent, though he did have a pair of small Smith & Wesson M&P 360 revolvers, both in .357 Magnum and loaded with 125-grain semijacketed hollowpoints. Out of the stubby 1.9-inch barrels of the lightweight pistols, the high-velocity slugs reached over 1160 feet per second, bringing 375 foot-pounds of energy on a target. Hawkins didn’t intend to pull out both revolvers at once, just use one as a swift reload for the other. The 360s were made of an alloy stronger than titanium, making the weapons exceedingly light. That lack of weight meant they would recoil even harder against his hand. He’d tried utilizing one of the little revolvers with its as-issued grips, but the gun had smashed into the web of his hand and the ball of his thumb like a torturer’s hammer. Fortunately, changing the grip profile of a revolver was as simple as using a screwdriver.

The little lightweight twins had Pachmeyer Compacs, which had a vital quarter inch of cushioning, recoil-spreading rubber around the back strap of the revolver. Now it was a blunt thump, not a claw-hammer chop. He could burn off five rapid shots into a target, even with the heaviest loaded rounds. With the stubby .357 Magnums, he could more than defend himself if things came to a head in a conflict, but by their very nature, the revolvers were meant for close, nasty work, though he had trained beside Lyons and Manning to be able to hit a man-size target all the way out to 100 yards. It wasn’t easy, so that was why Hawkins trained hard and often.

Hawkins returned his attention to the guard force. The Samoan was likely drawn from local resources. The man showed canny situational awareness, as had every other guard on hand. The security force themselves were well equipped.

Those who carried long arms wore body armor, eye protection and had hearing protection on lanyards dangling from behind their neck. The choice in big guns was between AK-12 assault rifles—some of the newest variants on the classic and proved Kalashnikov line—and Benelli M-4 Super-90 shotguns. Considering that current Russian military issue was still the AN-94, since 1997 in fact, the AKs were not military surplus or “fallen off the truck” to fill the wallets of Russian officers. The Benelli was also standard military issue from the Los Angeles Police Department to the United States military under the classification M-1014.

Judging by the shape of the magazines, the AK-12s were either 7.62 mm or the 5.45 mm replacement. The guards had their spare magazines in pouches on their body armor, and the pouches were kept shut. Either way, these rifles could lay down long streams of lead at 600 rounds per minute, or put out concentrated tri-bursts at 1000 rounds per minute per pull of the trigger. The Benelli M-4s were equally devastating, chambered for 12-gauge and could hold seven plus one in the chamber. That kind of firepower was meant for keeping the various factions at this auction in line.

No one in their right mind would want to face down either a blast of buckshot or a swarm of 5.45 mm slugs. Hawkins had been on both ends of these particular weapons, and knew they were both quite reliable and devastating in trained hands.

The hard men with the body armor also had sidearms on their hips. From the smooth lines of the grips, Hawkins wasn’t quite sure, but they might have been armed with Caracal F service pistols, which were top of the line and current service weapons of the United Arab Emirates and four other Middle Eastern nations. Again, Hawkins could only make out the model, not the caliber, but since he hadn’t seen many in .40 or .357 calibers, he assumed 9 mm, which gave the guards nineteen shots before reloading. In the heavier calibers, there’d still be a full 17 rounds.

Hawkins looked over the gear of one of the men with a Benelli shotgun. He put on his full-on drawl and approached. “Good mornin’, hoss.”

The man, a white, looked the undercover Phoenix over. “American?”

Those words came with a Slavic accent. Hawkins smirked. “Ayup. Texas.”

“Ah. Cowboy. Pew-pew,” the Russian said. He had a beard, but it was kept trimmed, and split to reveal a bright white smile.

Hawkins chuckled. “I don’t ride no horse unless it’s made o’ iron.”

The Russian nodded, looking at the tattoos that sleeved his arms down to the wrist. Instead of being repulsed by the lightning-bolt-shaped SSs that represented the Reich Low Riders of California, the Russian actually smiled even more broadly. He tugged up the cuff of his uniform sleeve and showed off his own neo-Nazi insignia. “Brothers in arm. Literally.”

Hawkins fought the urge to scowl, instead allowing himself a laugh to echo his newfound friend’s. In the Russian Federation, the horrors inflicted by Nazi Germany had long been forgotten. With the country receiving huge influxes of immigrants, stealing jobs in an already tight employment market, neo-Nazism had surged. This man was one of them, and suddenly found a comrade. Though the biodegradable ink would fade within a few weeks, Hawkins never wanted to hide his bare arms so much before, as if he were displaying diseased flesh.

“Slap me and call me a groundhog!” Hawkins spoke with a pride and fellowship he didn’t feel in his gut. At least he had a means of sparking a conversation with this guy, and now he could see just what local security was like.

He noted that the security force was using 9 mm autoloaders and 5.45 mm rifles. He watched Yuri’s eyes widen at the sight of a “high-tech” American Magnum as small as a Makarov. Hawkins also learned that Yuri wasn’t the only member of his militia present here in Hawaii, but the Russian was smart enough not to mention numbers, which in itself was informative to the Phoenix Force pro.

Hawkins did know that there were three shifts of guards, meaning that even if he counted every one of them, he’d still need to do some math, especially since it didn’t look as though they would all take off from their shifts at the same time. A smart leader would stagger who went off duty and who came on duty at varying segments, so that there was always the same number on the field, even double in a particular area at certain times.

Hawkins also noted that while there were sections of the hotel and surrounding resort facilities that seemed unfinished, there were definitely off-limit areas. Through his conversation with Yuri, trading stories about motorcycles and favorite shooting trips, Hawkins also managed to burn up the minutes that normally would have dragged on as he waited to see what would be on display. Also, as he talked, he made note of different men.

He even recognized several who were on most-wanted lists, both for Interpol and Homeland Security. This was truly a global assembly. Asians. Middle Easterners. Europeans. Africans.

All were clean and well dressed, and there was plenty of iron on display, both in terms of handguns in open and concealed holsters, as well as knives. This was a den of many wolves, and Hawkins could see that one mistake would serve him and the rest of Able Team up as appetizers to a bloody feast.

Hawkins wrapped his fingers tightly around the rubber grip of his pocket Magnum as the ballroom doors opened in three spots along the hallway. Curious criminals and terrorists lined up, invites checked, and filtered into the showroom.

Hawkins passed through the doors and stopped cold, his jaw dropping as he saw a ten-meter-long Dong-Feng missile sitting on a support scaffold. Huge, ominous, it was an unmistakable display of the vulgar firepower the auctioneer Jinan had assembled.

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