Don Pendleton - Cold Snap

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.

Manning knew that if there was one thing the members of the Stony Man action teams were chosen for, it was for more than just their raw ability to aim a gun and fire. The members of Phoenix Force and Able Team had among their numbers experts in multiple fields. Here, though they were a tad underutilized, Manning’s business acumen would come in handy.

He looked in parallel market listings, utilizing his data from the S&P Asia 50, which allowed him glimpses at Japan’s Topix and Nikkei 225, and the dozens of markets in Singapore, such as the FTSE group. Singapore would likely be the source of insider trading on any pan-Asian economic assault, since the FTSE had twenty markets in Southeast Asia itself, covering China as a proxy.

Being thorough, he also glanced at Australia’s S&P indexes. There were plenty of forces in the world market that would like to see Japan take a few shots to weaken the yen, and not all of them had to do with Communist China, which had its own trinity of indexes for international trade. Capitalism, Manning found, was still a major factor on what should have been the worlds behind the Iron and Bamboo curtains. Money and resources still made the world go around, still got things done, and no amount of socialist idealism—of which the Soviet Union was hardly an exemplar—changed the balance of supply and demand.

There was movement behind Manning and he looked into the face of the Texan joining him on this journey to Tokyo. Even Thomas Jackson Hawkins, with his staunch military background—as both a member of the 75th Rangers and the Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta—had skills far and beyond merely being a gunman. It had been a while since Phoenix Force had had an electronics expert on the team, and Hawkins was up to date on twenty-first-century communications technology, as well as being one of the finest parachutists and airborne deployment specialists in the world. Hawkins was also the youngest member of the team, the most recent addition to the five-man “foreign legion” of the Sensitive Operations Group.

Hawkins chewed on some gum, which Manning was glad for. Inside the jet’s cabin, Hawkins’s preference for a pinch of “chaw” would have made him more than a little nauseated. Fortunately, T.J.’s training and discipline allowed him to swap out the ugly chewing tobacco for something that didn’t smell so much, nor require a cup to spit the gooey sap into.

Gary Manning was the second oldest member of Phoenix Force, right after Rafael Encizo, but he looked as if he only had five years on Hawkins due to the fact that Manning was a fitness fanatic. Underneath Manning’s suit, tailored to make him inconspicuous and innocuous, his body was sculpted muscle from regular five-mile, early morning runs and weight-lifting sessions where he could bench press up to 515 pounds. At six feet, with close and neatly trimmed hair, Manning’s age was indistinguishable, even by friends who knew him closely.

“You have the body of an eighteen-year-old football player and the brains of a seventy-year-old banker, hoss,” Hawkins noted, looking at the trade numbers scrolling across Manning’s tablet screen. “You have to give me an app for that.”

Manning shrugged. “I didn’t become a millionaire by not knowing my way around the market, Hawk. And no, import-export was not a code name for drug dealing.”

Hawkins smirked. “Never crossed my mind, Gary. Picking up any trends?”

Manning frowned as he pored over the numbers. “Some of these economic moves are pretty damn subtle, so I have to go over months of data.”

Hawkins nodded. “Stop all this thrilling action. My heart can’t take it.”

“Did I mention I was a millionaire?” Manning asked. “I like going over data.”

Hawkins shrugged. “How many hours until Tokyo?”

“Ten,” Manning returned.

Hawkins sighed. “I’ll get some early sleep, then check out our gear.”

“Do what you have to,” Manning said, returning to the numbers and trends on the screen. He used his stylus to mark points that might have links to avenues of potential insider trading or hedging of bets toward the economic disruption of Japan. Attacking any of the G8 nations with intent to cause financial ruin was not merely a risky proposition, it was also potentially suicidal. Many of these manipulative plots could backfire, turning a profit into their own nosedive.

The Soviet Union had attempted such a plot against the United States’s economy and found itself taking a bath, destroying the integrity of its own monetary value.

Manning felt bad for Hawkins, as the Texan was a man of action. While the Canadian himself was someone who was equally adept in the rough and tumble of field operations, Manning’s talents could be used, at least in this instance. Like Hawkins, Manning’s brain was always in motion, always looking for patterns that would indicate hidden dangers, but inside the belly of a jet, there was only waiting, at least where Hawkins was concerned.