Don Pendleton - Cold Snap

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.”