Death Dealers

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 (#ulink_1c85f0c4-d86c-5290-ae9b-349b18059558)

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.

Like Schwarz, he’d taken a few hits off the pot he’d been given. He’d actually imbibed more than Schwarz had, if only because Hawkins knew that there was far less likelihood of negative health effects off marijuana than methamphetamine. The little that Schwarz had smoked showed on the Able Team genius’s features, the bags under his eyes, the half step slower in his stride, even the sounds of his words. A minor taste of the meth, and staying up all night duplicating the activities of a tweaker, had left Schwarz looking as though he’d been run over by a truck.

Still, a half step slower for Schwarz was a sight quicker than most other men. Hawkins himself felt a bit more tired, but he was glad he didn’t have a background in meth. Munchies and a lowering of his energy this morning was much better than inhaling a neurotoxin and muscle stimulant.

He knocked back some coffee, then checked his watch. According to the agenda, there was going to be a sample mall for this convention of crazies. Tables would be stacked with the smaller, man-portable goods and there would be videos for larger items.

The mall would open in an hour.

In the meantime, Hawkins, like the other members of his undercover team, had been keeping his eyes peeled for what security was around the place. They could never break character, not certain if there were any spaces not covered by security cameras or hidden microphones. Even if Schwarz could use his electronic skills, there was a good chance that interfering with these observations would only draw far more attention. And so, Lyons continued to act like a grouch.

Hawkins stayed on script. He had a job to do, and they could wait until this mission was over to mentally and emotionally unwind. In the meantime, he kept his eyes peeled and ears tuned. Finding electronics was one thing. Sizing up the security and their competition was something very different. Hawkins could already tell that plenty of the guards were professionals of various stripes. The guy who came through and had hung out at Lyons’s door, for example, was a Samoan who Hawkins estimated at six foot two inches and 325 pounds. A lot of it looked like fat, but the man moved as if he were easily half that size, with canny, sharp eyes that paid attention like an eagle scanning for prey on a prairie.

Hawkins observed him through the peephole, having spent more than enough time looking through such fish lenses to have a good sense of what was going on even with the curved distortion of the glass aperture. Measuring the Samoan against Lyons provided a good scale to work with.

Hawkins announced that he was leaving the hotel room, going to see what was up and about. It might not have been the best of ideas to wander away alone. Sitting and waiting was fine under the auspices of being immobile and observing enemies, but sitting in a hotel room was something completely different. At least outside, he could observe. He could fill his anxious nerves with input.

Hawkins didn’t intend to engage an opponent, though he did have a pair of small Smith & Wesson M&P 360 revolvers, both in .357 Magnum and loaded with 125-grain semijacketed hollowpoints. Out of the stubby 1.9-inch barrels of the lightweight pistols, the high-velocity slugs reached over 1160 feet per second, bringing 375 foot-pounds of energy on a target. Hawkins didn’t intend to pull out both revolvers at once, just use one as a swift reload for the other. The 360s were made of an alloy stronger than titanium, making the weapons exceedingly light. That lack of weight meant they would recoil even harder against his hand. He’d tried utilizing one of the little revolvers with its as-issued grips, but the gun had smashed into the web of his hand and the ball of his thumb like a torturer’s hammer. Fortunately, changing the grip profile of a revolver was as simple as using a screwdriver.

The little lightweight twins had Pachmeyer Compacs, which had a vital quarter inch of cushioning, recoil-spreading rubber around the back strap of the revolver. Now it was a blunt thump, not a claw-hammer chop. He could burn off five rapid shots into a target, even with the heaviest loaded rounds. With the stubby .357 Magnums, he could more than defend himself if things came to a head in a conflict, but by their very nature, the revolvers were meant for close, nasty work, though he had trained beside Lyons and Manning to be able to hit a man-size target all the way out to 100 yards. It wasn’t easy, so that was why Hawkins trained hard and often.

Hawkins returned his attention to the guard force. The Samoan was likely drawn from local resources. The man showed canny situational awareness, as had every other guard on hand. The security force themselves were well equipped.

Those who carried long arms wore body armor, eye protection and had hearing protection on lanyards dangling from behind their neck. The choice in big guns was between AK-12 assault rifles—some of the newest variants on the classic and proved Kalashnikov line—and Benelli M-4 Super-90 shotguns. Considering that current Russian military issue was still the AN-94, since 1997 in fact, the AKs were not military surplus or “fallen off the truck” to fill the wallets of Russian officers. The Benelli was also standard military issue from the Los Angeles Police Department to the United States military under the classification M-1014.

Judging by the shape of the magazines, the AK-12s were either 7.62 mm or the 5.45 mm replacement. The guards had their spare magazines in pouches on their body armor, and the pouches were kept shut. Either way, these rifles could lay down long streams of lead at 600 rounds per minute, or put out concentrated tri-bursts at 1000 rounds per minute per pull of the trigger. The Benelli M-4s were equally devastating, chambered for 12-gauge and could hold seven plus one in the chamber. That kind of firepower was meant for keeping the various factions at this auction in line.