Cold Snap. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ the drone of reporters struggling to get to the front to ask their questions first, something popped in the distance. Brognola instantly recognized the distant crack of high explosives. He touched his earpiece.

      “Barb, what was that?”

      “Grenade and small-arms fire on the street with the protesters,” Price answered. “The group that started for the security entrance has been hit. Secret Service is on the lookout for grenade launchers and assault rifles.”

      “Hitting the protesters?” Brognola asked.

      “Metro P.D. is on the move and FBI Hostage Rescue is mobilizing,” Price stated. “White House security has been raised to maximum.”

      “Any idea who opened fire?” Brognola asked, moving to a nearby window overlooking the scene. Wisps of black smoke curled into the sky, a grisly grave marker for where someone had struck with brutal violence.

      Brognola had been to the site of such massacres, had gone through many more evidence photos, but was all too aware of the smell of spilled blood and burst organs, the moans and groans of the wounded and dying. Every instinct he had was to rush out there, but Brognola was not a young man, nor the fastest and fittest.

      Younger men would—

      A police car racing to the scene suddenly erupted, bursting apart under the force of a shoulder-mounted missile. Flames blew out through the glass on all sides, a billowing fire that vomited into the open. Brognola clenched his fists.

      The gunfire continued. Secret Service guards at the gate took cover as automatic fire sizzled at the guardhouse. Bullet-resistant glass and built-in steel plating did little to alleviate the incoming torrent of bullets.

      Brognola grimaced as the sudden flurry of violence abated.

      This was not going to be the last shot fired in this war.

      Not if Stony Man had anything to say about it.

       CHAPTER TWO

      The American Vanguard National Fund’s offices seemed like those of any other financial organization, though they were in downtown Baltimore, Maryland, only a few hours from Washington, D.C., rather than in physical proximity to Wall Street.

      Of course, Rufus Schmied would not have wanted to be in New York City for the life of him. Baltimore itself was already stock-full of undesirable flesh trying to pose as humanity, but there was little chance that the 64 percent of the population who were black could ever hope to blend in with the society that Schmied sought to build. And the Jews held too much power in New York.

      Schmied looked out the window on a city in which the rot was far too strong yet was a center of power in his state. Schmied didn’t want to leave behind Maryland, which for the most part was pure outside the rotten core known as Baltimore. He’d even leave the city’s demographics alone; after all, not counting the city, the state was fairly clean.

      Big cities, with their “melting pots,” were sources of violence and corruption. Farther inland, on the other hand, where Americans were still Americans, things were so much different, so much kinder and simpler, so much easier. Schmied didn’t want to lose that.

      After all, it wasn’t the blacks’ fault that they were crammed into housing projects that seemed specifically designed to make them accustomed to prison, or engaged in soulless, mindless rote learning that reduced their abilities to think constructively. Liberal policies, intended to give them a break, were nothing more than the morphine used to diminish opium or heroin addiction—the trade of one soul-crushing addiction for another.

      The phone on his desk buzzed. “Mr. Schmied, your two o’clock is here.”

      “Thank you, Inga,” Schmied replied, pressing the speaker button. “Please hold all calls.”

      “Yes, sir.”

      Schmied pulled the cable from the back of his desk phone. He opened a locked drawer and began to scan the room with a hand-held electronic device, even as the appointment walked through the door. Schmied put his finger to his lips, sweeping the area. He then took a small white-sound generator and pressed one of its speakers to the glass. The static vibrations would make even a laser microphone incapable of picking up their conversation.

      “Don’t you think that’s a little much?” Warren Lee asked as he closed the door firmly behind him.

      Schmied raised an eyebrow. “This from you?”

      Warren Lee was tall, well-tanned, brown-eyed. If Schmied hadn’t known the man was half Chinese and half American, there would be little to give away that Lee was anything other than a white man. It was uncanny, but then, Schmied had little problem with Asians. After all, they had their ties to the true Aryan race, as well. For them, except for those who had fallen under the fetish of communism in mainland China, life was honor and discipline, unlike the poor rats that teemed in American cities.

      “Don’t give me any of that,” Lee grumbled. “I have to congratulate you on this morning’s event.”

      Schmied nodded. “It was not my personal work. I merely set the balls in motion.”

      “And you threw a perfect strike,” Lee told him. “The pins are falling exactly where we want them.”

      Schmied pointed to a seat for Lee, who sat across from him. Schmied poured a fresh cup of coffee for his visitor, leaving it black and setting it on the desk in front of Lee. He poured one for himself. Alcohol had proved the downfall of too many—the downfall of entire ethnic groups—so Schmied remained a teetotaler. Control was his drug. Anything that impaired his clarity was to be avoided like the plague.

      “I’m pleased for your approval,” Schmied said. He took a seat and crossed his legs, steepling his fingertips. Lee began to talk about the project they had allied themselves to accomplish.

      Schmied smiled pleasantly, channeling his amusement. “Precious” Lee thought he was trying to convince the Fund that he was somehow part of a Taiwanese “interest” looking for a means of discrediting the Japanese economy. If there was one thing the American Vanguard National Fund possessed, it was the resources to thoroughly vet any person walking through their doors with a scheme.

      Sure, Lee’s bona fides seemed to be legitimate enough to survive moderate scrutiny, but Schmied had not transformed a hundred million dollars’ worth of methamphetamine and automatic weapon sale profits into a multibillion-dollar bank by only making moderate inquiries. Laundering the business of biker gangs into a respectable banking conglomerate took attention and caution equal to the audacity necessary to raise that cash.

      Lee spoke eloquently, pointing out how the AVNF could further increase its earnings by investment into the project, but Schmied knew exactly what he was putting his work into.

      Hiring a highly skilled group of young men from Gehenna, Texas, dressed up as consummate professionals and equipped with the best weaponry money could buy, turned the sniveling milksops of Greenpeace and PETA into victims and national heroes. The Gehenna crew struck and disappeared, utilizing every ounce of intel they could to appear like a corporate security force taking vengeance upon a group of rabble rousers.

      Already, donations to both groups had doubled, and the liberal cable stations were demanding СКАЧАТЬ