Cold Snap. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ