Death Dealers. Don Pendleton

four days prior to the attack in the American Southwest there had been a similar missile misfire on a base in the Gobi Desert, 275 miles northwest of Beijing, 20 miles north of Hohhot. The detonation of a missile that should have been deactivated was given as the reason for the catastrophe that had left dozens dead and a hundred more injured.

      Of course, that was merely the official story out of China. The truth, however, would be much more arcane, and naturally that is what Price assumed happened. Right now, the real facts were sketchy, which was why Tokaido was busy raiding PRC military databases.

      Price turned her attention to her tablet, pulling up the information on the missing scientists, Baxter and Chandler. The Stony Man mission controller made careful note that there was evidence of a more than genial relationship between the two, and that it was likely that any effort at taking one might have been a guarantee of capturing the other. Price was well aware of the kind of emotional manipulation the peril to a loved one could hold over a person. Right now, there was an excellent chance of recovering the pair.

      Baxter and Chandler were the only two missing from the base; other bodies had been uncovered, accounting for nearly a hundred murdered victims. Most had died at ground zero of one-thousand-kilogram-warhead detonations; others were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, shot through the head while wounded. Even so, the commandos who’d made the attack had been careful not to damage still-operating security cameras, so that the U.S. government would get a good look at what appeared to be PRC soldiers disguised as Americans attacking a base in New Mexico.

      Tokaido quickly sent a note to her tablet, the information showing up in a new panel.

      Air Force dispatched, seeking out attackers. Searched one-thousand-mile radius utilizing AWACS, found no sign of assaulters’ helicopters. Missiles showed up on radar only moments before attack, again, launched from location unknown.

      Price nodded to Tokaido, acknowledging the preliminary information. The youngest member of the cyber crew wouldn’t stop until he could deliver every detail necessary so the skills of the Stony Man action team could be applied with deadly laser focus. Indeed, though the cyber team was merely a support to the commandos in the field, it was with these keyboard rangers that Able Team and Phoenix Force could be deployed to locate and destroy threats to innocent lives and world peace.

      It had been three days since the first incident in China, and only by the sheerest of luck had Able Team come across Kevin Reising and his compatriots. They’d been based in Los Angeles awaiting a message and a destination. This was the day before the American incident.

      Hunt Wethers fired a report to Price’s tablet. It was from one of the Navy AWACS birds that regularly patrolled just outside Chinese airspace and over international waters. The craft had timed its patrol and observation of the Leizhou Peninsula specifically, knowing there was going to be a test firing of a new genus of the Dong-Feng 21 antiship ballistic missile.

      Not coincidentally, the DF-21 variant was purported to possess a maximum velocity of Mach 10. At 35 feet long and 16 tons in weight, not only could it carry enough explosives to kill an aircraft carrier in one shot, it also had nuclear warhead capabilities and a range of 1100 miles.

      Of course, the difference between a silo-launched ballistic missile and a more portable option such as the American design was phenomenal. Huge warhead capacities and high speeds were vital ingredients to altering a military balance. The Dong-Feng antiship variants were meant to provide the Chinese navy with utter superiority when it came time to reclaim the island nation of Taiwan. One missile could break an allied carrier apart; its nuclear variant could flash fry an entire carrier group.

      Both ways were means of overwhelming any defense against Chinese military expansion.

      The American missile system could be mounted on cruisers and fast-attack crafts, land-launched or carried on fighter-bombers. Just because both weapons systems had the ability to break Mach 10 was no reason to try to combine them. DF-2Xs reached Mach 10 because they rode on midrange ballistic missiles, rocket engines that were more than capable of launching satellites into orbit or delivering an MRV warhead. The American design was meant to deliver its warhead at such a high speed, and with such agility and accuracy, that the mass of the missile would provide penetration through even the thickest of hulls.

      Of course, with the presence of an auction promising the latest and deadliest hardware, including just the things necessary to take out enemy fleets, Price couldn’t help but feel that more than coincidence was at work here. “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

      “Quoting Ian Fleming?” Aaron Kurtzman mused.

      “Just trying to make certain I did the right thing allotting a Stony Man crew to this auction,” Price said.

      “Two separate styles of carrier-killer test programs are attacked, and then someone advertises it?” Kurtzman asked. “You’ve got good instincts on this, Barb.”

      She nodded, looking down at the screen of her tablet. So far, Stony Man had been fully capable of gathering all the information they could about the New Mexico attack, if only because the Sensitive Operations Group had many federal connections, both inside and outside conventional channels. China, however, was a very different situation, and tapping into their information had taken effort and penetration of high-security government systems. That Tokaido had located so much thus far was a sign of his skill and the power of the Farm’s cyber systems.

      The auction had been confirmed through multiple sources, as well. Not only did Kevin Reising have his invitation, but there had been a rise in digital currency exchanges—peer-to-peer payments that didn’t pass through legitimate banking functions. That data-cash was being funneled to a website called the Arsenal Europa, which had been touting the auction. Discovering the auction had been the combined efforts of Wethers and Delahunt, both of whom utilized their particular, individual instincts to narrow the search to its confirmed presence.

      They’d also managed to home in on a large supply of data-cash in storage under Reising’s accounts. The sums were substantial, well over fifty million dollars, allowing for more than a few high-tech, high-impact weapons. What a soldier for the Heathens outlaw motorcycle club would do with such a supply of cash made Price shudder.

      Of course, a previous Able Team operation had established links between the Heathens and the Aryan Right Coalition, a white supremacist group that was actually the action arm of an even more shadowed organization that called itself the Arrangement.

      The Arrangement had lost scores of men and millions of dollars in that conflict, but apparently that hadn’t been enough to set back the mystery group. Not if they could pony up that amount of funding to rearm and rebuild their shattered army.

      “Hunt, do you have any more information about where Reising’s money came from or where it’s sitting right now?” Price asked.

      The tall, slender, black professor looked up from his workstation. “Negative. Trying to dig into this data-cash network utilized by Reising is difficult, which is precisely why he chose it.”

      “How so?” Price asked.

      “Normally, I’d hope to find a centralized store of information, but the network itself is decentralized. It’s a mobile, mercurial entity. You need to have proper keys to locate your own money and allow transfer of funds. However, even going through those particular encryptions, you cannot access anything else. It’s like sticking your head into a disconnected pond and hoping to find a river to the nearest ocean,” Wethers explained.

      “So, we’re up against, essentially, the Mississippi River Delta rather than looking for Lake Michigan,” Price said. “Instead of a box, we’re stuck with just a tube, which in itself doesn’t necessarily lead to another tube, even though it’s all one ever-increasing, ever-branching main artery.”

      “Correct. This is the capillary system, which is useless without the arteries and veins, but while we can see an individual capillary, there’s no direct link, so we’re not even certain there is a heart. We could be in any organism,” Wethers explained.

      Price