Omega Cult

by Don Pendleton

  They hemmed and hawed for precious seconds before Major General Baek Ho-ki replied, “We’re leaving, sir. We thought you might wish to come with us.”

  Seizing the intrusion as an opportunity, Im replied, “Not yet. While I agree it may be wise to leave the compound, we have business to conduct before we go.”

  “What business, sir?” Colonel Paik asked.

  “I wish to speak with Major Roh again, if we can find him,” Im replied. “If not, that in itself answers a question I’ve been pondering.”

  “You wish to question Roh...right now?” Baek asked, as if confirming it.

  “Immediately,” Im said, understanding that he pushed his luck. “And you shall both accompany me, yes?”

  Reluctantly, almost as one, both officers replied, “Yes, sir.”

  15

  Mack Bolan exited the tunnel between buildings, noting as he reached his destination that the compound’s siren, muffled underground, was once again sounding its ear-piercing alert, as loud as ever. Checking for opponents as he went, he realized that most of them were outside now, sweeping the courtyard for the enemies who’d pierced their insulated little world and set the place on fire.

  That made it slightly easier for Bolan, since he didn’t have to fight his way from one room to the next, expending precious ammunition on complete strangers who featured nowhere on his target list. The only man remaining whom he hoped to see was Major Roh; the rest were nothing but an inconvenience to him now, albeit one with the potential to destroy him.

  For a heartbeat Bolan’s thoughts veered off toward Chan Taesun, but he retrieved them just as quickly, focusing with single-minded purpose on his hunt. In theory he knew Roh could evade him on familiar turf for hours, ducking, hiding in the maze of rooms and corridors he knew so well from long experience. But Bolan had a plan of sorts to flush him out—or, at the very least, to place them on somewhat equal terms.

  It wasn’t a great plan, but he was improvising. Under the circumstances, it would have to do.

  Passing a door labeled with characters he couldn’t understand, Bolan picked out the universal lightning-bolt symbol warning of high voltage on the other side. He opened the door and crossed the threshold, instantly confronted by a large panel of circuit breakers, likewise tagged with labels Bolan couldn’t read. Instead of puzzling over them in vain, he stitched the panel with a burst of rounds and plunged the building into total darkness. When he stepped out of the small maintenance room, only his penlight cast pallid illumination in the corridor.

  Now for the hunt.

  He pressed on swiftly, pausing for just a beat at corners before rounding them to face whatever lay in store for him. Along the way he caught two men who’d been off duty when the raid began, and cut them down before they had a chance to use the weapons they carried. That done, he skirted spreading pools of blood and went on with his quest.

  He thought of calling out to Roh, dismissed it just as quickly as a bad idea, and moved along one corridor after another, following his penlight’s narrow beam. Outside, the hostile fire had slackened off, whatever that meant for the Executioner or Chan. Perhaps the guards had ceased firing at shadows and were now launching a more systematic search. Or perhaps the compound’s force was simply running low on men.

  He had a vague escape plan brewing in his mind, in case he found the fleeing major soon. Outside, he had observed two armored personnel carriers—the regime’s standard-issue M1973 Seung-ri VTT-323, with space inside to fit a crew of four plus ten fully equipped infantrymen.

  If Bolan could reach one of those vehicles when he was done, preferably joined by Chan...

  But that came later.

  Here and now, he still had at least one more man to find and kill.

  * * *

  THAT HUNTED MAN was desperate. His flight between one building and another had accomplished little, and he had been cursing his bad luck when suddenly the building he’d sought refuge in blacked out. Spewing a string of bitter expletives, Roh felt his way along the corridor where he’d been trapped by sudden darkness, worried now that he would stumble into someone who might kill him without thinking twice—either a frightened member of the SSD or, worse yet, one of those intent on hunting him.

  Roh felt that he was running out of time and hope, reduced to creeping through the darkness like an ant lost in its own tunnel below ground, stripped of its normal senses and without direction. Truth be told, it made Roh feel like weeping, but he bit his lower lip until it bled and held his weakness close inside.

  Was he imagining cessation of the gunfire from outside? Had other members of his service overcome the enemy or had they all been killed? It seemed impossible, but at that moment, isolated in the inky blackness of a mausoleum, Roh was open to the worst of pent-up fears. Even his childhood phobia against darkness, suppressed when he had entered military service, seemed to be returning now, with fears of monsters breathing down his neck.

  Were those footsteps approaching him or simply sounds coughed up by his imagination? Pausing, Roh dragged in a breath and held it, willing his frantic heart to silence. After a minute, when his lungs were close to bursting, Roh knew that he did hear footsteps, two or three men at a minimum, closing on him rapidly.

  With nowhere he could hide in time, Roh clutched his submachine gun, waiting for the newcomers to close and show themselves, if that were even possible. A moment later two pale flashlight beams rounded a corner fifty feet in front of him, sweeping the hallway as they came. One beam, and then the other, locked on Roh, and he was startled by the sound of a familiar voice emerging from the dark.

  “Major,” Colonel Paik said, “we were just looking for you.”

  “We?” Roh answered back.

  “I’m here with General Im and General Baek.”

  “For what purpose?” Roh asked, risking an insubordination charge on top of all his other problems.

  “We have questions,” Baek informed him, “about what is happening outside.”

  “And if I do not choose to answer them?” Roh asked.

  “You must,” Im insisted, sounding gruff.

  “Oh, must I?”

  Roh made his decision in a microsecond. Raising his SMG, he stitched his three superiors with sizzling 7.62 mm rounds from his Type 79 stuttergun. The three men who outranked him had no chance to save themselves, the bullets ripping into their uniforms, through flesh and bone, dropping them together in a twitching heap.

  There was no turning back from that point onward. Major Roh Tae-il was now officially a traitor and a murderer. If he were fingered for the massacre of his superiors, he would be hunted down and killed without the nicety of a court-martial to confirm his sentence, dumped into an unmarked grave or fed into the camp’s incinerator like a bag of trash.

  But if he slipped away before the three were found, their deaths might well remain a mystery.

  Something to think about as Roh went searching for an exit from the building that had turned into a tomb.

  * * *

  CHAN HEARD AND recognized the sound of submachine-gun fire, headed toward it in the dark, using a small flashlight she’d brought along in preparation for emergencies. The light was risky, guiding and betraying her, but she did not have cat’s eyes that could penetrate Stygian shadows without help.

  Where was Matthew Cooper? Somewhere up ahead of her, inside the same building, unless he’d found their man, eliminated Major Roh, and gone in search of her. She tried her Bluetooth headset, spoke his name softly and was surprised to hear him answer.

  “I’m here,” he said, his deep voice almost soothing to her ear, although the darkness separated them and she had no idea where “here” might be.

  “You heard that firing?” she inquired.

  “Affirmative. I’m heading for it now. A long hallway, northeast of where the tunnel runs int
o the building.”

  “On my way,” she said, and started picking up her pace. She had a goal now, rather than the random act of searching for a quarry she might never find. Whether the latest gunshots had to do with Major Roh or not, at least she had a hope of finding Cooper and rejoining him. She was no longer simply lost and groping in the dark.

  Even with Cooper’s curt directions guiding her, Chan found she still had far to go. Two minutes passed, then three, four, and she had begun to worry that she’d missed a turn when suddenly her flashlight’s beam picked out three corpses lumped together in the corridor. Chan did not recognize the men but saw their rank insignia, knew that whoever had killed them, if he was a member of the SSD, had to now be fleeing for his life.

  “I’ve found the bodies,” she told Bolan through her headset.

  “Go on another fifty yards,” he said. “I’m at an exit to the north. Somebody just slipped through it. Maybe Roh.”

  “Coming!” she said, and broke into a run.

  She overtook Bolan just as he reach out for the gray door’s pressure bar. He heard her coming, paused just long enough for confirmation with his penlight, then shoved on through—

  And dropped from sight immediately as a burst of automatic fire raked over the doorjamb.

  * * *

  THE BULLETS MISSED—a hasty try by Major Roh that paid no dividends. Bolan, prone on pavement at the exit’s threshold, saw his adversary clearly for the first time as one of the courtyard spotlights framed Roh for a moment then swept on. Somehow it seemed as if the major’s SMG had jammed and he was grappling with its charging handle while he spat a string of what the Executioner assumed were curses in Korean.

  Bolan wasn’t in the mood for what screenwriters liked to call a fair fight, where the hero always waited for his enemy to draw first, get the first shot in, before taking him down. While Roh struggled with his weapon, the Executioner framed his target in the sights of his assault rifle and fired a burst of six or seven full-metal-jacket rounds from no more than fifteen feet away.

  The slugs cut through Roh’s tunic, generating spouts of blood that turned the tan fabric a deep crimson in seconds flat. The impact hurled Roh backward, arms rising above his head, his submachine gun spinning off somewhere into the night. Next thing he knew, Bolan was staring at Roh’s boot soles, Chan standing above him, covering the corpse with her SMG.

  “All right,” she said at last. “How do we get away from here?”

  He rose, pointing, and said, “I thought we might try one of those.”

  The two armored personnel carriers stood side by side some thirty yards away. No one had manned the fighting vehicles during the courtyard skirmish, and they were unguarded now, as Chan and Bolan ran up to the nearest one and scaled its welded hull, using the wheels and track as stepping stones. Its hatch opened easily, and Bolan dropped inside, Chan following and peering closely at the APC’s controls.

  “I’ve driven something similar to this, before,” she said. “In the Republic, we use the Fiat Type 6614, but the controls look much the same.”

  “Okay,” Bolan said. “Fire it up and take us to the nearest gate. I’ll man the guns if anybody tries to stop us.”

  As she found the starter button and its engine came to grumbling life, she cautioned him. “The best speed we can do is about 100 kph. The fuel tank’s full, I see, which means we have a range of something like 480 kilometers.”

  “I’ll take what we can get. If we can make it to the coast, so much the better, but somewhere along the way, we’ll have to use the radio.”

  “For help?” she asked, her tone saying she already knew the answer in advance.

  “If you can get some from your captain,” he replied.

  “No promises,” she said. “But we can try.”

  And if he passes on it, Bolan thought, at least we’ll have a blaze of glory at the end.

  It wouldn’t be the same as Central Park, the first time he had “died”—no funeral reported in the New York Times, for one thing; no reports at all, in fact. But they would know somehow, at Stony Man, and he would be remembered by the people in his life who mattered, down there at the bitter end.

  A soldier’s end. And when he thought about it, Bolan knew he wouldn’t want it any other way.

  The APC kicked into gear and started rolling toward the compound’s southern gate. Before it traveled thirty yards, the hulking beast was taking hostile fire.

  * * *

  CHAN THOUGHT OF how far she had come within the past two days, and how much farther she had to go to get back home. It seemed impossible from where she sat, hunched at the APC’s controls and peering through its green night-vision periscope, hearing a storm of bullets rattle off the monster’s armored hide.

  Above her, Matthew Cooper manned the guns. He opened with the twin heavy machine guns, their impressive thunder echoing inside the APC and making her ears ring, while hot brass cartridges rattled across the armored floor behind her driver’s seat. If one of those fell down the collar of her North Korean uniform, she could expect a painful burn, but that would be the very least of her potential problems should the enemy somehow disable their escape vehicle, trapping them inside.

  She wrestled with the gearshift and steering wheel, guiding the vehicle toward the gate they had crashed through earlier to breach the SSD compound. In front of her, armed men in uniform ran here and there, wasting their small arms ammunition on the APC, one of them lobbing a grenade that struck its jutting prow and bounced away before exploding harmlessly.

  As they approached the fallen gate, Cooper raked those defending it with the APC’s machine guns, swarms of bullets cutting through the bodies as they jerked and danced, their uniforms in bloody tatters by the time they fell and lay immobile in the dust. Chan drove across them, mind closed to the sound of flesh and bones compacting under nearly thirteen tons of rolling steel. The Seung-ri had its share of rearview mirrors, but she kept her eyes away from them, refusing to behold the scarlet trail of flesh and fluids she left behind.

  Then they were past the crumpled gate, the only bullets hammering their hull coming from the rear now. Cooper was busy with his guns, firing along the track they had followed to a semblance of their freedom, dropping anyone who did not leap for cover in the face of so much killing fire. Somewhere downrange a smaller vehicle exploded, possibly from tracers ripping through its fuel tank, firelight giving competition to the compound’s sweeping floodlights.

  Once they reached the edge of darkness, Chan opened the APC’s accelerator, watched the needle on its small speedometer run up to one hundred and hold there, topped out on its scale. The SSD had other rolling stock with greater speeds, to overtake them, but before that happened they would have to locate drivers with a suicidal bent to face Cooper’s guns. And in the meantime they were rolling over broken ground, jouncing along, the rough terrain child’s play for their appropriated ride.

  Chan’s greatest fear was aircraft now, perhaps a Russian Hind helicopter gunship that could blast them into smoking wreckage with its 12.7 mm Gatling gun or rockets. There was a chance Cooper could drop a Hind out of the sky, but Chan had seen the helicopters work and did not like his odds.

  An hour later, when nothing had come for them, she grudgingly began to wonder if they had escaped. How was that even possible?

  “It’s time,” Bolan said, lowering himself to sit beside her.

  “Yes,” she said reluctantly, and reached out for the dashboard-mounted radio.

  * * *

  UNTIL THE MOMENT of their pickup by a Surion transport helicopter, Bolan had thought Chan’s plea to her commander might have fallen on deaf ears. Even when he had seen and heard the South Korean chopper overhead, it still seemed likely that a DPRK gunship or jet fighter would appear and blast it from the air, while trapping him and Chan on hostile ground. Only when they were
airborne and buckled up, the helicopter swinging out to sea, did he accept the possibility that they might manage to survive. Still, a threat from ground-to-air missiles remained, and Bolan kept his fingers crossed until the Surion was well beyond their range.

  They landed, to his surprise, not at a South Korean military base, but rather at the US Army’s Camp Red Cloud, near Uijongbu. There, a full-bird colonel by the name of Thompson greeted Bolan like a long-lost friend, pumping his hand and smiling down at Chan before a captain from the NIS led her away and joined her in a waiting limousine.

  Bolan expected some kind of debriefing, or at least a few quick questions, but instead he got a hot meal and a change of clothes that fit him perfectly, together with a small room that contained a cot, a stainless-steel toilet and a half-mirror that allowed him to inspect some of the minor injuries he’d picked up on the wrong side of the DMZ. A sergeant named Jacoby showed him how to find the mess hall, but when Bolan asked him about Chan, the noncom only shook his head and answered, “Who’s that, sir?”

  Deniability.

  For all he knew, someone in North Korea’s regime was busy screaming to the media about a raid across the Parallel, mass murder of upstanding DPRK military officers by vile provocateurs, and any other piece of propaganda that might fly. Some of it might be closer to the mark than the “No comments” coming out of Camp Red Cloud, the US Embassy in Seoul, and from the State Department back in Washington. Nothing of substance would be either granted or explicitly denied, leaving the North to make its usual “wild charges,” flaunt selected photos from the SSD compound if they deemed it to be safe, and hope for outrage from Vietnam or the Chinese.

  Bolan, for his part, thought of Chan Taesun, then hit his borrowed cot for some much-needed sleep. Whatever happened next could get along without him for a while, and when he dreamed, his mind turned homeward to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, some seven thousand miles away.

  Epilogue

  Incheon International Airport