Cold Snap. Don Pendleton

didn’t allow himself to slow down. If there was a fire and someone was burning, then he needed to get there immediately. He was part of the fire safety crew and he’d allow nothing to slow him down.

      As he reached the starboard deck, he immediately plunged into a thick, roiling cloud that hit him like a brick wall. A spasm of coughing struck him and Isamu stumbled back, hacking gunk out of his nose and throat in an effort to regain his breath. He reached into his pocket for a rag and pressed it over his nose and mouth to form an improvised filter, but as he leaned out, the charcoal-gray smoke made it impossible to see more than a few feet toward the aft.

      The grisly stench was stronger now and it was accompanied by screams of pain. Isamu cursed himself for being so impatient to get to the scene of the accident that he’d passed the fire-gear locker on the starboard side. He’d assumed that he’d prove able to get to the equipment locker on that side of the ship, and his haste now cost him. Rather than rush back and take even more time, Isamu relied upon his memory, feeling along the way to where he remembered the equipment locker stood.

      Getting it open, Isamu reached in, found an oxygen mask and pulled it over his head, but only after the face piece was in place did he take the rag away from his mouth. No longer assailed by chemical smoke, his tears helped to clear his vision. Now with less of an excuse to be clumsy, he shrugged into a fireproof coat and tugged on his gloves. An industrial-strength fire extinguisher would get him moving toward the center of the disaster while others prepped the hoses.

      Almost as an afterthought, Isamu grabbed up a walkie-talkie and plugged its jack into the firefighter’s mask. Now he could transmit and receive, hands-free.

      “I’m in gear. Heading to the fire with the extinguisher,” he announced, following protocol. He’d screwed up once, and found himself floundering in the passageway. Another mistake would cost lives.

      He scrambled toward the thickest of the smoke, the high-test extinguisher making him list with each step simply due to its weight. The bottle was heavy, seventeen pounds of mono-ammonium phosphate, which would give it sufficient endurance to move in and save as many of his shipmates as he could. The phosphate was a good neutral compound, perfect for dealing with anything from electrical to burning fuel. It would cut loose with a high-pressure cloud, more than enough to snuff out a large column of flames that he could maneuver through.

      Sure enough, his first tug on the trigger quenched a section of deck, not only clearing a path for him to cut through to the main fire, but also allowing a couple of injured sailors to escape. Isamu waved and patted them on, careful not to touch any burned areas, for risk of exacerbating tissue damage to already injured skin. “Fire control, I have three coming in, severe burns, but they’re still ambulatory.”

      “I read you,” came the quick response. “We’re prepping sick—”

      Thunder crashed and Isamu suddenly lost his radio signal.

      “Hello? Hello!” he shouted through his mask.

      He couldn’t waste more time. He gave the extinguisher trigger another squeeze, blasting more of the phosphate and smothering more yards of sizzling deck. As he did so, the smoke thinned, just for a moment, and he could see where a gigantic “bite” had been taken out of the ship, hot metal smoldering as a surging wave slapped it, a cloud of steam rising from the wreckage. The fires came back within moments, farther on, but because Isamu was far from the actual hole, he could see that the flames came from metal that was white-hot. For some reason the explosion looked as if it had originated two or three yards from where the hull should have been, but the harpoon guns that they used didn’t have that much gunpowder and the magazine was elsewhere, closer to the bow.

      A third thunderous impact shook the ship and Isamu whirled to see what was happening. Even as he did so, he noticed a low black object about four hundred yards away. At first Isamu thought it might be a whale from its sheer bulk, but it was too far out even to be a sperm whale. Another part of what made Isamu think it was a whale was the puffing smoke. It looked like the exhalation of a whale, the hot moisture of its breath expelled into frigid Antarctic air.

      But another puff erupted. Something dark and small shot up and sailed through the sky toward his ship.

      Hideaki Isamu had only a few moments to realize that the object on the waves looked reminiscent of an American stealth fighter, so famous and recognizable from countless video games and Japanese anime. He also recalled that there were ships—warships—that had a similar configuration. Comparable stealth craft had even been used in one of Isamu’s favorite movies to destroy a Red Chinese—

      * * *

      THE YINGJI-82, yingji literally meaning “eagle strike” in Chinese, was a magnificent piece of weaponry. Though it was nearly 21 feet in length, because it was stored inside the trimaran’s missile magazine, no camouflage paint was required to make it low profile. White with red piping and nose cone, the missile accelerated from the low-profile launcher and accelerated to 664 miles an hour in the space of a few seconds.

      The YJ-82 was fired straight up, especially since the range and target were being guided by the launcher’s own internal radar that currently painted the Saburou Maru with beams invisible to the human eye. The Eagle Strike—known by NATO forces as CSS-N-8 Saccade—had been designed from the ground up as an anti-shipping missile, complete with the ability to carry 360 pounds of high explosive to its target at speeds just below subsonic. The speeding munition rode on its turbojet at Mach 0.9 toward its target.

      Though it was a current front-line surface warship and air-to-surface fighter jet weapon, the Yingji-82 wasn’t exactly the newest in designs. It had begun its fighting history in 1989 and spread to the Middle East, particularly to Iran, thanks to sales by China in 1992. The weapon, though it hadn’t been utilized in major military engagements, had proved its stealth in crippling an Israeli naval frigate in 2006. Hezbollah, supplied by the Iranians, hit the INS Hanit with a YJ-82 that managed to penetrate the warship’s multilayered anti-missile defenses.

      A Japanese whaling ship such as the Saburou Maru wouldn’t stand a chance. The first round struck with enough force to make a forty-foot-wide hole in the aft of the whaler. Materials around the blast zone were heated up phenomenally, igniting any flammable objects in the area. On a warship, the flames would not have been so bad, as there was far more fire control equipment on hand and far less that would actually burn. On a whaler, which didn’t expect torpedo or missile strikes, it was a churning inferno.

      The Yingji-82 came down in close proximity to Hideaki Isamu, its semi-armor-piercing high explosives penetrating the interior of the Maru. Isamu didn’t suffer at all as the detonation produced a sheet of force that instantly burst every single cell in his body. Neurons detonated under the pressure wave, and as such, Isamu literally had no means by which to experience the trauma that killed him outright, liquefying organs.

      Others were not so lucky, as sailors were hurled into the frigid Antarctic waters. The poor men wouldn’t last long, twenty minutes if they managed to keep themselves afloat. Unfortunately broken arms and legs or deep concussions rendered those seamen helpless. Unable to hold their breath, several already were gone, breathing in ocean water and drowning instantly.

      Four missiles took apart the Japanese whaler completely, bulkheads torn asunder. The 150-foot craft groaned in agony, the swelling oceans producing enough stress on the threadbare keel to snap it in two.

      The Saburou Maru was merely the first of the Japanese research whaling craft to be lost in the space of three days. Three more, including one factory ship, were destroyed, lost at sea.

      * * *

      BARBARA PRICE STOOD at the center of the Computer Room in Stony Man Farm. She was surrounded by a sprawl of computer hubs, each built and personally designed by the four master information-gatherers that made up the Sensitive Operations Group’s cybernetic support crew. Between the four of them, if it could not be uncovered, it was beyond discovery.

      Right now, Price was keeping her eye on the world map up on the video screen wall, also mirrored on her tablet computer.

      In three days, four Japanese industrial ships had been lost. Casualties