Cold Snap

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

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

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

“On it,” Manning returned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Veronica!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t hurt me,” she whimpered.

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

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

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

She nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

“Just four,” Manning responded.

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

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

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

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

Manning nodded, knowing what his friend intended.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Remain sharp,” Manning told him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hawkins raised an eyebrow. “Roommates?”

Manning nodded. “And quite a bit more.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER SIX

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

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

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

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

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

“Bad mood?” Blancanales asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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