Читать книгу Cold Snap - Don Pendleton - Страница 8

CHAPTER THREE

It was early evening when three members of Phoenix Force and Dragonfin went wheels up from Langley Air Force Base on board the C-17 Globemaster.

The C-17 was on loan from the United States Air Force Reserve, and the paperwork for the flight stated that the craft was taking supplies to MacMurdo Station, off the Ross Ice Shelf where the Saburou Maru had been attacked and sunk. With that cover, every subsequent trip would be off the books.

David McCarter overlooked the Dragonfin, running his fingers across its smooth, flat-black hull. The boat had originally been scheduled to auction after the Drug Enforcement Agency had captured it from drug smugglers. Its hold had carried two tons of cocaine. Even with all of that bulk, with its twin motors it was capable of 80 miles per hour. It was a new generation of cigarette boat.

Catamaran, McCarter reminded himself, not cigarette. The lads would have a fit over you misidentifying their little canoe.

His friends Calvin James and Rafael Encizo, both sturdy sailors—James tall and raw-boned, Encizo stocky and stout—had been overjoyed at the acquisition of a “go-fast” boat by Stony Man Farm.

Go-fasts were originally meant, and still utilized, in sports racing, but as with all things legal and legitimate, greedy men saw other uses for them. For years, drug smugglers had utilized the amazingly fast, low-profile craft for ferrying tons of drugs across international waters. While not as fast as a helicopter, “go-fasts” were still far swifter than any cutters or interceptor boats except for those craft also based on racing designs. For pure racing purposes, stripped down to cockpit, fuel cells and engines, the design on this particular catamaran hull projected a top speed of more than 200 miles per hour.

This particular beast had been specifically designed for long-haul smuggling and defense of its contraband. It was meant to counter U.S. Coast Guard Deployable Pursuit boats. To add to the survivability of cargo and space, Dragonfin was a twin-hulled craft. On the bottom there were two slim-line keels, where the Mercury drives were housed. Each was capable of 1,000 horsepower. For long range, the engines were equipped with four 200-gallon fuel cells. With a relatively sedate cruising speed, those cells would give it phenomenal range, but when it came to putting the throttle to full, they would tear along, as equipped, at more than 180 miles per hour. They sacrificed about thirty miles per hour with combat turrets for M-2 Browning machine guns, Mk 19 automatic grenade launchers and an M-242 Bushmaster 25 mm cannon, all operated by remote control.

With those weapons installed, Dragonfin could engage targets at up to almost two miles.

Aside from the turrets, Dragonfin had also been upgraded with a Kevlar polymer coating on the hull, which served to minimize the radar signature of the craft on top of the waves. Its sleek, almost space-fighter-looking design would also be hard to make out against the ocean, thanks to the dark blue mottled-camouflage patterns set into the coating. When they’d first seen it, it had been painted jet black by the smugglers, which almost was good enough.

Almost, however, hadn’t kept the boat from being captured or appropriated by Stony Man Farm.

Underneath, there were streamlined housings for torpedoes, and Dragonfin had four of those deadly fish held in reserve just in case their targets had more than two inches of rolled homogeneous steel armor. The most important addition, however, was a communications system that would keep them in satellite contact with Stony Man Farm, allowing them real-time satellite imagery and telemetry to track any target they needed.

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.

It couldn’t have been easy, but the Texan closed his eyes and was immediately off to slumber.

If he couldn’t keep his mind active, Manning knew he’d store energy, rest and prepare himself. They’d already been an hour on the plane and T.J. had read up on as much Japanese culture as he could endure, had enough refreshers on common Japanese phrases and been in on plenty of briefing on foreign intelligence services at work in Tokyo, their current destination.

Manning and Hawkins were “stuck” with the job of being boots on the ground in Japan for the certitude that there would be elements of the anti-Japanese conspiracy active in that country. Manning’s business knowledge would give the two of them a head start on looking for angles and leads.

Would it be good enough?

Manning dismissed that thought. It had been enough before. Stony Man worked simply because the covert agency, despite its incredibly small size, utilized every asset it could assemble.

Thinking outside the box, while being intimately aware of the makeup of said container, was one way in which the teams could intercede and defeat threatening forces.

So far, it had worked.

Manning didn’t intend to fail for lack of effort.

* * *

BARBARA PRICE WAS glad that Phoenix Force was off and away, and before the day was over, one half would be in the Ross Sea, seeking out the lethal marauders. Manning and Hawkins were on their way to Japan to seek out potential suspects working within the country. Able Team, at home, was on the hunt for those who’d staged a massacre mere hundreds of yards from the President and a contingent of diplomats.

As it was, the international scene and local press were talking about the White House crisis and how Japanese “big business” had the nerve to murder honest Americans in the middle of its capital city. That point of view was coming from the left, looking for a “good war,” while the right buckled down on how the U.S. administration was antibusiness and was using the crisis for the sake of painting “job makers” as the criminals.

Price wrinkled her nose. Once upon a time, there was such a thing as a news cycle, where events were reported and later analyzed to find meaning. But now, in the parade of propaganda, the truth was lost. American was pitted against American, leading the more paranoid of commentators to foresee a civil war. Such a fomentation of hostility, where one wing of philosophy saw the other as utterly evil, despite evidence of the truth, was an abomination that Stony Man sought to battle. Far too many times the teams had seen an attempt to manipulate public opinion to the point of fracturing societies, to inspire wars between nations. Such trickery was so commonplace, Price had developed an armor against leaping to unfounded accusations. She didn’t develop an opinion without conclusive facts.

The Stony Man intel would never be allowed into a court of law, but their evidence was always succinct and conclusive to the point that when they took action against the guilty, there would be no mistakes. Every time Able Team and Phoenix Force went into action, they battled with clear consciences. Their foes were not scapegoats, but those who actually acted to harm innocent noncombatants or the madmen who sought to secure profit and power from acts of terror and mayhem.

Then again, Price knew that her job wasn’t to sell commercial time to fatten the pockets of media moguls. Her job was to help protect America, her allies, the whole of the world at times. She and the cybernetics crew looked at raw data and events. They could tell that poverty and orphanhood were factors that gave violent gangs and terrorist groups thousands of recruits yearly for their personal shock troopers. Hamas soldiers didn’t stem from Israeli occupation, but from the poverty caused by the strife in the region. Poor and homeless, often growing up without fathers or mothers or both, these young people were ripe for transforming from “victims” into “avengers.”

Smart, devious bastards located a bumper crop of foot soldiers to twist to their cause, and they swooped in, forming modern-day groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Bloods, the Islamic Jihad. Give a man without life a target for his anger, a reason for his failures, and you could fill an army’s ranks. Trailer parks. Occupied slums. Inner cities ruled by drug lords. Nations deprived of education.

Because of this continuum of ignorance, of fanned prejudices and hatreds, Stony Man was perpetually at war.

There were billions of humans on the planet and hundreds of potential holes from which the greedy, the sociopathic and the murderous could draw upon. Finding dupes, already led astray by fake news and overhyped political commentary, turned the world into a factory for fanatics and maniacs.

Price sometimes wished that she could arrange for the cyber crew to crash some of these news stations, bankrupting them and obliterating their influence upon the American public. Liars of left and right persuasions would suddenly have nothing else to work with. Unfortunately such an act would be the ultimate in government censorship.

While the alarmists bellowed “Fire” in a crowded theater, pushing people to trample their neighbors in panic all for a profit, Price would not violate the Constitution in that manner. Freedom of speech also applied to blind stupidity, bigotry and prejudice, as well as lies.

“So we save the world from itself, one brushfire at a time,” Price muttered.

“Feeling disgusted by the news coverage?” Kurtzman asked. The wheelchair-bound genius had rolled past her to a coffeepot to refill his mug with a splash of the black, oily, high-octane gruel they jokingly referred to as coffee. It tasted terrible, but it packed the punch of a rocket launcher, enabling the cyber team to withstand hours of hacking and data research.

Price glowered.

“I know. I know. It’s not news,” Kurtzman amended. “But not everyone has access to raw data like we do.”

“No,” Price answered. “But that’s still not an excuse for willful deception of millions of viewers.”

Kurtzman shook his head, agreeing with her with a simple frown. Thickly bearded and with arms and a chest of solid muscle, the leader of the cyber team had earned the nickname “Bear” long before he’d taken a bullet to the spine. Price was reminded of the tales of Native Americans, granting bears great, nearly mystical wisdom, as well as patience. Kurtzman had a calming effect on her. “Unless we catch these people actively destroying Americans, we can’t go after them. But when they do, we’ll drop on them like a ton of bricks.”

Price took a deep breath. She poured herself a mug of the crap they called coffee. She’d need the energy, despite the fact that she had a thermos of homemade java, creamed and sweetened to her particular biases. “Sometimes, though, you have to wonder if these crazed morons aren’t just deliberately shoveling fuel onto the fire.”

“I know how you feel,” Kurtzman told her. “That’s why I always cast an eye toward that avenue. One day, we’ll strike gold.”

Price narrowed her eyes. “I’ll settle for last blood.”