Don Pendleton - Cold Snap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Now blow,” Crunch grumbled.

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

We’ll blow you straight to hell.

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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