Cold Snap

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

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

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

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

“Yes, sir.”

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

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

Schmied raised an eyebrow. “This from you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mr. Schmied?” Lee asked.

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

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

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

Lee smiled. “I see.”

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

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

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

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

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

Lee chuckled. “Most canny.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lyons clenched his jaw.

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

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

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

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

Lyons nodded.

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

“BSU is in agreement,” Lyons told him.

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

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

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

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

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

“English,” Lyons said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER THREE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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