Don Pendleton - Death Dealers

“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.