Death Dealers

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.

There were other six-footers sprinkled here and there, but none of them appeared to be trailing him nor showing aggression. Then again, McCarter was keener to stay low profile when trailing someone, and if their enemy was assassins out to protect their conspiracy, they would not make a lot of noise, not until they were within striking distance.

No, McCarter’s opponent was quiet and had only betrayed something small that tripped his instincts, but had kept him from actually noticing the attacker. He fought against the urge to concentrate on memories and input. The best result he had in reaction to ambush was not to concentrate on what could be wrong; instead, he should just look for the whole picture. His reflexes worked finely because he didn’t distract himself from the totality of input being picked up by sight, sound and touch.

And that was when McCarter saw the person shoved out of the way, just out of the corner of his eye, an instant before he whirled in swift, certain response. McCarter folded his arm and brought the “chicken wing” down tight against his side, suddenly blocking the punch that swung at him, low and aiming at his kidney. Britain’s Special Air Service taught that an attack on an opponent’s kidneys was the surest path to incapacitating them with a minimum of fuss. A knife would cause instantly lethal renal shock, but a punch would crumple a man like a discarded newspaper.

McCarter’s elbow took the force of the stunning punch, pain jolting up through his shoulder. But the pain was not indicative of broken bone or dislocated joint because his fist still remained clenched and ready. McCarter extended his arm, snapping his fist at the foe who struck at him, but the enemy was swift. Knuckles scraped the nearly bald head of the compact fireplug of a man, but the brunt of his punch was slipped by a quick movement of his head.

The bald attacker whipped out his other fist, a punch that should have hooked around to strike McCarter at the base of his spine, but the Briton was also moving, turning to bring his other arm in front of him as a means of shielding himself. That left hook from the bulldoglike man snapped into McCarter’s own arm, blunting that strike. The ex-SAS commando lashed out with his left boot, striking toward the ambusher’s knees, but the enemy’s footwork was swift and he seemingly danced away from the initial assault.

Now that they were face-to-face, McCarter could see that this guy was some form of European, though matching the diminutive height of the rest of the Chinese populace average around him. What he lacked in height, he made up for in bulk, arms sausaged into windbreaker sleeves with big fists poking out. The Phoenix Force commander could see the deformation of his foe’s knuckles, showing that this guy had trained long and laboriously to make his hands hardened clubs devoted to pain.

The squat killer moved in again, and McCarter switched feet, stabbing out with his right to try to catch the man under his sternum. Those meaty cudgels crossed, blocking the attack, and the Briton retracted his kick even as blunt fingertips clawed at the slack around his shin. That didn’t slow the bald assassin’s onrush. McCarter kept his feet at right angles to each other, forming the tactical T that ensured it would be difficult to push him off balance. It was ingrained into his reflexes, so that even as he backed away from another snapping fist, the Briton’s footing was certain.

The sudden eruption of martial arts combat on the sidewalk made people scatter, which thankfully allowed McCarter some breathing room. He didn’t have to worry about bystanders wandering into the melee and becoming injured. McCarter slap-deflected another assault, and went on the attack, whipping his elbow around to catch his foe in the face. With both of their forward momentum combined, McCarter felt his humerus spark with the jolt of “funny bone” reactions, but was rewarded with his opponent staggering backward.

McCarter kept on the attack, only to catch a snap kick that barked off his shin, knocking the support from beneath him. The Briton staggered to his other foot to maintain his balance, spearing at the attacker with a knife hand. Fingernails gouged at forehead, bushy eyebrows and down into the enemy’s eye, McCarter making as much use of his increased reach as he could. Even as that raking slash connected, a powerful hammer struck him in his exposed side.

In his lunge, McCarter had left himself open. Ordinarily such a mistake would have come and gone too quickly for an opponent to take advantage. This time, however, the punch knocked the wind from the Phoenix Force commander and he stumbled to one knee. The squat attacker rubbed his eyes across his forearm, blinking blood away that seeped from his torn skin. The club-fisted warrior lunged in, but McCarter kicked off with all of his strength, lunging headfirst into his foe’s stomach. Fists that had been aimed for his head or neck instead fell upon his heavily muscled back and ribs. The impacts were painful, but not fatal, while McCarter lifted the killer off his stubby legs.

The Briton hooked the back of his foe’s thighs and then allowed himself to topple forward, wrenching the assassin down to the sidewalk. The man released a pained grunt before his knees wrenched upward, dislodging McCarter from his position. The Phoenix commander hammered off a side punch, unable to target his foe’s kidneys, but the body blow went further toward emptying the bald attacker’s lungs.

McCarter fired off a second punch, striking below his enemy’s belt buckle, the blow stabbing deep into the man’s groin muscles. He cupped his hand over the assassin’s knee and pushed it out hard to the side, exposing the soft inner crease that McCarter wailed a second punch into, this time aiming for the inner thigh to disrupt the femoral artery. His foe wailed in pain when that blow connected, but McCarter was not through. The Briton tangled his arm with the attacker’s lower leg, then wrenched hard.

The bald little fighter’s knee popped with an ugly sound, driving his voice into a higher octave of pain. Twisting his ankle forced the guy to flop to his stomach. This wasn’t a mixed martial arts ring fight. There would be no tapping out. McCarter slammed the guy in the kidney with everything he still had in the tank. With that final chop, there wasn’t any sign of further violence from his foe.

McCarter tested his weight on the kicked leg and felt lucky that it had merely been a glancing kick. There was no seeming fracture, and he could move his foot. That was more than his ambusher could say.

The Phoenix leader grabbed him up by his collar. As soon as McCarter had him ready to move, Gary Manning brought his minivan to the curb, honking the horn.

With a hearty heave, he slammed the bald, club-fisted assassin into the back of the van, then climbed in and slid the side door shut.

“I thought you would have had this one done long before I got here,” Manning quipped.

McCarter shrugged. “I played it out because I know how much of a bitch Hong Kong traffic is.”

Manning looked over his shoulder at McCarter. Even in the dim interior of the van, he could see the Briton had been through a hell of a fight. The Phoenix commander cinched the guy’s wrists together behind his back with cable ties, more than one just to make certain the restraints would hold the thick-shouldered killer.

The thug looked up from the floor at the two men, and McCarter rested the sole of his boot against his throat.

“Gettin’ yer throat stepped on is a slow, ugly way to die,” McCarter growled. “You might have a chance not to die if you sit still.”

“Leg.” The man spoke. The word was too short for any hint of accent to arise, but McCarter looked more closely at his appearance, pulling out his pocket flashlight and his personal cell device. With a click of the button, the commander had his prisoner’s photograph taken. A few motions with his thumb and the photograph was on its way to Stony Man Farm.

“I know your pin took a twistin’. I did it, mate,” McCarter told the prisoner. “You going to tell me who you are or where you came from?”

“Eat the dicks.” The attacker spit.

McCarter sighed. “Then just lay there and shut up.” To emphasize his point, the Phoenix Force leader pulled the revolver from his jacket pocket and leveled it at the man’s face.

“Only a .22,” the prisoner said. “It’ll roll right off my skull.”

McCarter smirked. “But it’ll take out both of your eyes and mutilate your face. I’ll leave plenty for you to talk with, but you’ll be blind and hideous for the rest of your miserable existence.”

That quieted the assassin.

Now to find out how Blancanales was doing with his hunt.

* * *

THE BRUISERS GREW closer to Rosario Blancanales as he leaned heavily on his cane. They regarded him with stony, hate-filled glares. Both were taller than Blancanales, and seemed to have been chosen for the sake of the width of their shoulders and thickness of their limbs. That didn’t mean they didn’t possess skill, but Blancanales was hedging his bets on keeping them mentally disarmed. As he stood, using the cane as a crutch, and dressed in loose, baggy clothing, he tried to cast the image of an old man trying to play a young man’s game.

Both of them were European, possessing Slavic features. At least they were smart enough not to wear sunglasses at night, but now, the Able Team veteran was on the alert that these two guys could be so much more than just bags of cement with fists.

“Gentlemen?” Blancanales greeted them as they got within a few yards of him. “I’m afraid you found me out.”

Neither spoke as he scanned Statue Square, the park where Blancanales had been observing the Hong Kong cenotaph. They were making certain they hadn’t been drawn into a trap with human bait. This spread-out tourist attraction would provide plenty of places for Blancanales’s backup to hide and there were rooftops that could be used for sniper overwatch.

One of the men had yellow scrub for hair. The other, with a rust-colored scouring pad for his top, Blancanales noted, stepped right up to him and looked down upon him.

“Your friend, he will not be speaking to you again,” Blondie said.

Blancanales looked down, sighing. “He was a good man.”

“We will need to ask you some questions.” Blondie’s big hand wrapped around Blancanales’s shoulder and squeezed hard. Those fingers, thick as sausages, clamped down with painful precision, making Blancanales stand straighter, no acting required to twist his features into agony. The blond Russian reached down to take away Blancanales’s fighting cane.

You underestimated them, Blancanales thought the moment before he slashed the hardwood cane against the side of his oppressor’s knee. Through his knowledge of human anatomy and his years of not only training but field experience with the fighting stick, the simple slice suddenly toppled the brawny Russian, forcing him to release the Able Team veteran’s shoulder.

Blancanales stepped back, already feeling the bruises forming from the monstrous claw that had threatened to crush his shoulder joint. He whipped the cane up and was ready to destroy the blond man’s face when Red lurched toward him, moving with all the power and speed of a charging buffalo.

Blancanales threw himself aside as 250 pounds of freckled muscle surged past him, breaths and ponderous footfalls making him sound like a locomotive. The hurt Russian grit his teeth and sprung off his remaining leg, fingers hooked like talons to tear at Blancanales’s flesh. The Able Team warrior speared out, the brass tip of his cane striking the blond in his Adam’s apple before sliding down into the notch of his collarbone. The brawny thug gurgled, but Blancanales could feel his opponent altering his course, minimizing the jarring effect of being jammed in the throat.

Even so, Blondie gasped, sliding into the grass and taking a moment to clasp his hands around his dislocated knee.

Blancanales barely had a moment to look for the other man before a thick rope of muscle wrapped in black leather lashed toward his head in his peripheral vision. Blancanales dipped his head. The clothesline maneuver mussing his salt-and-pepper hair. Muscles glancing off his skull informed him that he’d have lost his head to the strike. Blancanales pivoted the cane in his hands, slicing at his foe’s hip, but the collision between man and wood spun both combatants.

Blancanales stepped quickly to recover his balance and looked with dismay upon the Red-topped ape that merely dropped one of his meaty paws to rub the sore spot on his side. Green eyes glared from under a beetled brow, and Blancanales couldn’t see a hint of humanity in those features now. This thing before him was a raging beast, and somehow those shoulder muscles seemed to spread even wider, like something out of a werewolf movie. Spittle frothed at the corners of the Russian’s mouth, and he surged forward at the Able Team warrior.

Blancanales charged, as well, pressing the attack and stabbing forward as if his cane were a sword. The brass cap struck rippling chest muscles and dragged heavily off the Russian’s leather jacket. It hit a wrinkle and suddenly it was as if Blancanales rode a tidal wave, being shoved backward off his feet. His red-haired opponent continued steaming toward him, but Blancanales’s grasp on his cane kept him just out of reach of a gigantic hand.

Blancanales slammed his feet into the grass behind him, throwing all of his weight and strength into slowing his freight train of an opponent. Sod wrinkled and tore under the soles of his boots, and the Russian let out a bellow of pain as the hardwood cane snapped in two.

Blancanales’s only weapon shattered, he lurched aside as the beast stormed past him, striking a cobblestone walkway chin-first. If that brute could snap his battle cane, then there was no way that Red could have come away from that crash without a broken rib or three. Still, Blancanales rushed to the big thug’s fallen form and jumped onto his broad back, coming down on both knees. He put all his weight into the attack, hoping to further stagger the man.

Blancanales saw those thick arms lift, hands flattening against the ground to raise his ponderous bulk and return to combat. The Russian’s haircut was too short to get a sufficient grasp on it, but there was no trimming his ears. Blancanales grabbed the twin dishes of flesh and cartilage on either side of Red’s head and pushed forward hard, mashing the man’s face into the sidewalk. With brutish energy, the Russian reared up like an untamed stallion, seeking to wrest Blancanales from his back.

The Able Team warrior slammed his knee between the attacker’s shoulder blades and wrenched back hard. Both ears were torn from the sides of his skull, skin ripping away along his scalp, eliciting thunder from deep within the man-beast’s breast. Red bent away from Blancanales’s knee, giving the wily Able Team fighter enough room to bring up his other leg and push down hard. Bones cracked as the Russian’s face struck cobblestone, blood spurting from a burst nose.

The blond was back, gingerly favoring his injured knee, but still on two feet and ready to step in to make up for the loss of his partner in this conflict.

Blancanales was breathing heavily, but he stood his ground, glaring at the blond Russian, standing astride the corpse of his even more brutish partner. Blancanales lifted his hand, borrowing from one of Hong Kong’s greatest breakout action heroes, folding his hand toward himself in challenge. The Able veteran figured that he had a good chance if this fight continued, as he still maintained his full mobility, while Blondie was limping. Bulk and power were nothing in comparison to skill and intellect.

In a heartbeat, hands took the blond by either arm, and the twin meaty impacts of knuckles against a leather-clad torso caused the big Slav to collapse to both knees. Between the dual kidney punches and landing so heavily on his injured knee, the Russian folded at the waist and curled into a fetal position on the grass.

Calvin James and Rafael Encizo were breathing deeply, evenly, evidencing their mad rush across Statue Square to Blancanales’s aid. On the edge of the park, a minivan screeched to a halt, the side door slamming open.

“Oy! Time to move!” McCarter’s bellow crossed the square.

“Want this one?” James asked Blancanales.

“We’re not moving fast dragging him along,” he returned. “Dump him and let’s move!”

As one, the two Phoenix Force commandos and the Able Team warrior raced across the park to Manning and McCarter in the rented van.

Within a few moments the Stony Man operatives would lose themselves in Hong Kong traffic, disappearing from the scenes of battle as far as the police would be concerned.

But they had a prisoner; a skilled killer who was trying to silence information about the attack on the Gobi Desert base.

For Blancanales, it was worth the broken cane and stiff, sore arm.

CHAPTER SIX

Carl Lyons was ready the moment there was a knock at the door, rising to his feet. He’d dressed and had his .357 Magnum Colt Python in its waistband holster. Opening the door, he ushered in Hermann Schwarz and T. J. Hawkins.

“Did you get a party favor last night?” Lyons asked.

Schwarz tilted his head. “What did you get?”

Lyons could see that Schwarz looked tired. He smelled the chemical stink of methamphetamine hovering around him like a fog. “I’m guessing we all got our vices. What did you do?”

“I lit up my shit,” Schwarz explained. “So I been tweaking all night.”

As he said so, he made a small hand gesture informing Lyons that he hadn’t inhaled. Lyons knew that faking smoking was a little bit easier, but even so, he’d exposed himself to the smoke from a neurotoxic drug. Even that seemed to have left Schwarz a little burned out this morning. Hawkins had heavily lidded eyes and looked more than a little sheepish.

“We’re here on business,” Lyons growled. “You get baked, and you end up tweaking?”

“I turned my radio into a Taser,” Schwarz answered with a shrug.

Hawkins frowned. “My mouth is all raw from chip mouth.”

Lyons rolled his eyes and then turned away.

He had to act the part, which meant having a razor’s edge thin line between temper and control. So far, the bloodied Sanay had proved Lyons’s cover, but that had been her playing on his reflexes. Right now, he realized that those blind instincts and reflexes had likely saved his life and those of his friends.

* * *

THOMAS JEFFERSON HAWKINS hoped he’d put on a good enough show as the pot-smoking-and-dealing rookie biker for the Reich Low Riders brought up to the big leagues of “the race war.” His Texan accent, in most cases, would have been more than sufficient to sell himself as a bigoted thug in some “Left Coast” cities.

Those opinions of his method of speech, his history as an elite Airborne Ranger, just the places of his birth, were merely projections of bigotry from others. Even before he joined the Army, Hawkins hadn’t given a damn about race or creed. As with the rest of the world, as with most of America, Texas was a melting pot, and growing up meeting, going to school with and just making friends with a few dozen Hispanics by age ten was easier than tripping over your own feet.

Even more insulting to the Texan was that his military career had ended when he’d disobeyed a United Nations peacekeeping force and superior officer to prevent the massacre of villagers in Somalia. Hawkins came from a long lineage of soldiers, so career and service were a part of his DNA. When Hawkins had taken his oath of service, there’d been nothing about only protecting white Americans from enemies foreign or domestic. When he placed his life on the line across dozens of missions with Phoenix Force, it wasn’t just for the sake of one skin or one state over another.