Cold Snap. Don Pendleton

and nodded with approval, making Lyons feel nauseated. He didn’t allow it to show in his features, though. He’d spent time working as an undercover agent for the FBI after his stint with the LAPD, and his control was ironclad. But when it came time to break this little clubhouse open, Lyons had plenty of fuel for his berserker rage.

      “Good to see at least one of you queer-coasters like American iron,” Crunch said, acknowledging the weapon on Lyons’s hip, then looking askance toward Schwarz and his shoulder-holstered Beretta, unmistakable for its magazine base pad and the lanyard ring behind it.

      Carrying or riding anything that wasn’t American-made was forbidden among bikers, which was why they’d pulled up in a rented Jeep Cherokee rather than rented “rice burners” aka Japanese-built motorcycles. As big and brawny as Honda could make a motor bike, it still was not an American-made Harley-Davidson. There wasn’t one of these men who would spare more than a second glance at a foreign-made weapon or vehicle.

      Schwarz had a Beretta M-9 A-1, which thankfully had Made in the U.S.A. scrawled on its slide, even though Lyons was fully aware that some might turn up their nose at him for carrying a gun with an Italian name.

      “What part of ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ don’t you understand?” Schwarz asked nonchalantly. He twisted the cap off a beer and took a drag on it. “’Sides, good enough for Uncle Sam, good enough for me.”

      Crunch shook his head. “Stupid European guns. Not even in a proper caliber.”

      “So give us something,” Lyons returned. “We’ve got the cash.”

      “What are you looking for?” Crunch asked.

      “I’m not looking to screw around with follow-up shots,” Lyons answered. “I’m here for ‘fast-and-dirty and then get the hell home.’”

      Crunch nodded. “You want 12-gauge air-conditioning, then.”

      Lyons smirked. “You get me, brother. You really get me.”

      “What about the guy with the pellet gun?” Crunch asked.

      “He digs .22s,” Lyons said with an eye roll.

      Crunch leered over at Schwarz. “Poodle shooters and pasta pistols. You need a new partner.”

      “Despite his wimpy tastes, I’ll keep him,” Lyons returned. “He might have to shoot someone five or six times, but he always has my back.”

      “That’s a good reason to keep him around,” Crunch said. “Listen, even our semi-only ARs are pulled for important stuff. I only have shotguns.”

      Lyons narrowed his eyes. “Things that bad, eh?”

      “You have no idea, and you never will,” Crunch returned. “Don’t dig in our business.”

      Lyons shook his head. “I don’t shit where I eat.”

      “That’s a rare admirable quality,” Crunch said. “Rucks, go get these two a couple of 870s from the locker. How much ammo you gonna need?”

      Schwarz spoke up. “Twenty apiece. If we need more than that, we’re dead, anyway.”

      “Says the faggot who needs fifteen in a clip,” Rucks chuckled.

      Schwarz was not the biggest or strongest member of Able Team, but he moved with such fluid grace and swiftness that no one in the clubhouse even saw him go from lounging on his tilted chair, heels crossed on the table in front of him to standing over Rucks, pushing the biker’s head to the floor with one hand. Lyons knew the move that kept the smart-mouth pinned. He could see Gadgets’s two first knuckles up under Rucks’s Adam’s apple, the other two fingers extended and pressed against the nerve junction under his jawbone.

      The Heathens wise-ass now had trouble breathing, his airway pressed down upon. The real paralyzing pressure, however, came from the ring finger and pinkie jammed against the cluster of nerves and juncture of blood vessels at that part of his body. Rucks’s eyes were wide, his mouth moving, gaping like a fish out of water.

      “You better be talking about a cigarette,” Schwarz growled as he loomed over the biker.

      Rucks croaked, the knuckles paralyzing his larynx, even as Lyons knew the blood flow to his brain was being interrupted. A few more moments and he’d be unconscious. It wasn’t as if Schwarz cared if someone thought he was gay, but in the role of a bad-ass, government-hating biker thug, the merest mention of his lack of manhood should have made him fly off the handle.

      Anchoring a man to the floor by his throat with one hand wasn’t flying off the handle, but eyes widened all around the scene.

      “Now you know why he only needs small stuff,” Lyons said nonchalantly. “Twenty sounds right.”

      “Have your boy let my man go,” Crunch said.

      Lyons nodded to Schwarz, who stood back. Rucks rubbed his throat, looking up at Schwarz.

      No, Hermann Schwarz was not a big man, but he was a master of Monkey Style Kung Fu, which meant that he kept his body far more limber than anyone of his relative mass and fitness should have been. The Monkey Style was loose and agile, matching the speed and limberness of Schwarz’s mind and body. Sure, Lyons snapped dimension lumber with a single punch with his choice of Shotokan Karate, but he didn’t think of his friend as a weak link, either.

      “You okay, Rucks?” Crunch asked. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Lyons. The bald biker was not going to give the undercover Able Team leader an opening due to a lapse of attention.

      “Feel like I swallowed a pool ball,” the Heathen croaked.

      “You’re lucky you didn’t swallow your own ball sack,” Schwarz told him.

      “Someone get these two assholes their guns and ammo,” Crunch said. “I’m getting sick of looking at these left coast pricks.”

      Lyons pulled a fat roll of bills from his jeans pocket.

      “No. Screw it,” Crunch muttered. “The RLR will owe the Heathens.”

      Lyons’s lip curled. “And we were getting along so nicely.”

      True to Crunch’s word, a pair of 870s and several boxes of shotgun shells were loaded into a nylon bag.

      “Now blow,” Crunch grumbled.

      “That we’ll do,” Lyons returned, hefting the bag.

      We’ll blow you straight to hell.

      * * *

      THOMAS JEFFERSON HAWKINS didn’t know which made him feel more naked: the lack of firearms concealed upon his person or the hostile glares when Tokyo citizens heard his Texan drawl, even if it was subdued. Both he and Gary Manning did their best to appear as innocuous as possible. So far, their mission was low-profile advanced intelligence gathering, seeking out signs of the conspiracy in Japan itself.

      Unfortunately, Hawkins, even though he had a fairly good tourist vocabulary in Japanese, still had a tiny bit of that twang. Right now, the Land of the Rising Sun didn’t want to suffer the presence of Americans among them. Manning, on the other hand, was less conspicuous in his mannerisms and speech. He already had a voice that sounded neutral, more reminiscent of a voice-trained news announcer who buried drawls and speech shortcuts to be accepted nationwide. As a Canadian, it was no effort for him to return to a more thick-tongued, long-voweled “Great White North” pattern of speech that divorced him from the United States of America.

      Even with that, Canada was scarcely a close ally of the Japanese in regard to research whaling, even though their interaction with the nation was minimal thanks to the U.S. and the Commonwealth of Independent States taking the brunt of any Japanese whaling in Arctic waters.

      Hawkins might not have had a concealed pistol, but he was far from unarmed. Tucked inside a waistband sheath was a combat knife, while on a thong around his neck, blade up, was a talon-hooked Karambit knife.

      The knife, sheathed