Death Dealers

“My eyes and ears can work independently, love,” McCarter said. “Right now, my eyes are snogging the hell out of your naked self.”

Mei smiled, then poked him in the center of the forehead. “Well, ears, pick this up. MIRVs can have any sort of warhead. Nuclear. Conventional. MOAB. Cloud seeder.”

McCarter suddenly felt himself focus, sitting a little straighter. “Seed the clouds over the ocean. And then do something that could increase the water temperature over a vast area.”

“Like, say, the thermobaric cloud from a MOAB,” Mei said. “What isn’t superheated gets vaporized by the blast, adding to the humidity. The sudden lack of air pressure sucks in more air...”

McCarter frowned. “Boom! One hurricane bomb.”

“Made from readily available materials, not just the Dong-Feng family of missiles,” Mei said. “The mathematics and physics of it are just way outside of my limits.”

“But if you hire thirty-seven thousand weather scientists and mathematicians, they could do the grunt work,” McCarter returned. “Damn.”

He started thinking about why the marauders would have wanted a Mach 10–capable engine and a guidance system meant to defeat radar when it clicked with him.

If you fired a ballistic missile, it would definitely show up on radars around the world. But, if you could take the individual components of different warheads and put those on the ends of the rockets, you could deliver all that firepower without giving away the fact that an ICBM was launched toward you to drop a hurricane on your doorstep, or let your original location be known. That had been one of the most troublesome contentions of tracking the origin of the two different attacks, as the missile blasts preceding them had followed a nap-of-the-earth course.

He’d have to run the general idea past people who were far smarter than him. McCarter was smart, but he was far from being a rocket scientist. These things sounded possible, and there was a United Nations resolution and treaty to prevent the weaponization of weather. Unfortunately, the United States was not a signatory, and neither were many other countries.

While all of this ran through his mind, he finished the cocktail that Mei had bought for him—his taste buds agreeing with her that it was delicious. He stroked her hair, squeezed her hand and hugged her tighter off and on. The time he put into thinking about the possibilities of the Chinese and American weapons systems combined felt all too long, and he was coming nowhere close to a solution, while the time he spent reveling in the warmth and human contact he shared with Mei was like the flicker of an instant.

He recalled what Gary Manning had said about Einstein and time relativity. “A second with your hand on a hot stove is like an eternity. A day with a girl you love is like a fleeting instant.”

Of course, McCarter liked the pool-table description of time and space interacting, too.

“So, why did you give me the pocket rocket?” McCarter asked.

Mei smirked. “Don’t I always... Oh, the revolver.”

“Cheeky girl,” McCarter chuckled.

“The informant who relayed the tidbits about the ‘hurricane’ missile was reported as having committed suicide,” Mei said. “He threw himself out of a fourth-story window. And when that didn’t work, he curb-stomped himself.”

“Curb-stomped. Figuratively?”

“Literally,” Mei answered.

McCarter wrinkled his nose. The literal act of a curb stomp was to set someone’s head and upper jaw against a hard, raised surface. Then, the person was either kicked in the neck, or a foot was brought heavily down. The result ended with torn cheeks, a crushed lower jaw and a skull messily separated from neck vertebrae. It was one of the most brutal means of murder McCarter had ever seen, one that even he hadn’t used in battle.

“You’re covered, right?” McCarter asked.

Mei nodded. “I’m paranoid as hell. And I’m surrounded by my people.”

McCarter could see the flicker of fear in those dark, almond eyes. He knew from personal experience that only the most brash of fools was never afraid.

“I’ll do you a solid, love,” McCarter murmured, lips close and brushing her ear.

“You’re not going to make yourself bait,” Mei said. “That’s insane.”

“Insane is my middle name,” McCarter countered. “Besides, if I can find the bastards who killed that informant, I could get a better handle on who made the theft.”

“And what if it’s MSS plugging a leak?” Mei asked.

“Then the Commie buggers have it coming for building a goddamn fleet-killing hurricane bomb.”

McCarter took out his phone and transmitted a file to her device.

“Call my lads,” McCarter told her.

“And what do I say?” she asked.

McCarter stood and adjusted his jacket, making certain the revolver was still firmly in its pocket holster. “Hunting season is open.”

* * *

ROSARIO BLANCANALES leaned on his cane, standing and admiring the Cenotaph, a memorial to the honored dead of both World War I and World War II. The 1940s had been a vastly different time, when Hong Kong was more or less homogeneous and still clung to a mix of old ways and new British fads that filtered in with Great Britain’s protection as a colony in Her Majesty’s empire. During the second conflict that the Cenotaph commemorated, Hong Kong had suffered greatly from Japanese incursion. Citizens starved, medics even under the neutral protection of the Red Cross had been murdered, and more than ten thousand women and girls had been brutally raped. Those names were not carved into this tower of stone, but there was still a brief, powerful prayer for them.

“May their martyred souls be immortal and their immortal spirits endure.”

He could not read the Chinese characters in which the inscription were made, but he knew the meaning. Standing there, he could see that spirits did endure.

Because of all the corporations that called Hong Kong home, because of the cultural impact that it had on the world, even the 1997 transfer of sovereignty to the People’s Republic of China had done little to dim the neon, the glory and the wild mayhem that was this grand old city. On every level, from the lowest of underground crime to the peaks of wealth and power, the city was simply too vibrant, too energetic, to have been tamped down by Communist rule, to the point where fried chicken and pizza had infiltrated the mainland.

Blancanales’s phone came to life. He answered it. “Hola, amigo!”

“What’ve you got for me?” He heard McCarter on the other end.

“Just a bit more news about the weather,” Blancanales replied. Over their secure, encrypted devices, the two had mapped out the way this conversation had to go. They then switched to disposable cell phones for the sake of seeming secure, all the while leaving their conversation open to prying ears.

The two were acting as bait, especially since McCarter had told him of the efforts to silence those in the know about the raid on the Weather Modification Office’s technology test area along the Gobi Desert.

There was a good chance it might have been the government who killed the man, but his manner of death was brutal and hand-to-hand, the work of someone who knew better than to pack firepower in this country. Someone who did not want the handiwork traced back to them. That didn’t make sense, even for the Ministry of State Security, who would have no problem shooting someone for the crime of treason.

No, crushing someone’s skull with a boot stomp was the act of their enemy, killing without leaving signs of weapons or nationality.

So Blancanales and McCarter traded discussion. The Phoenix Force leader had been seen leaving the contact of the murdered man: Mei Anna. They were hoping that someone would be on his scent, listening to his phone calls, something that could be done with a phone-cloner unit, a device small enough to slide into a pocket.

Right now McCarter was approximately ten blocks away, walking in Blancanales’s direction.

And Blancanales, despite his salt-and-pepper hair and the cane he leaned on, looked good playing the part of an old man. The cane was a martial arts weapon. Blancanales was an experienced practitioner of bojutsu—not jitsu but jutsu—the practice of the use of the short staff or cane in actual combat, not the art.

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.