Contagion Option

by Don Pendleton

  Mack Bolan wasn’t walking the razor’s edge now

  He was cutting his feet on the blade, and only his and Grimaldi’s skill could keep his blood from spraying the U.S. government in the fallout.

  It was risky, and when Bolan called Stony Man Farm for an intelligence update and to inform Brognola that he planned to go to North Korea, it wasn’t to ask permission. Such a request would have been construed as nothing less than an act of war, even if the foray was in utmost secrecy.

  The Executioner wasn’t a government employee, and there was a conspiracy summoning him into the depths of an enemy stronghold.

  There wasn’t an option of survival.

  He either succeeded, or the world would be drawn into a war that could explode into a three-way conflict with China.

  Other titles available in this series:

  Stalk Line

  Omega Game

  Shock Tactic

  Showdown

  Precision Kill

  Jungle Law

  Dead Center

  Tooth and Claw

  Thermal Strike

  Day of the Vulture

  Flames of Wrath

  High Aggression

  Code of Bushido

  Terror Spin

  Judgment in Stone

  Rage for Justice

  Rebels and Hostiles

  Ultimate Game

  Blood Feud

  Renegade Force

  Retribution

  Initiation

  Cloud of Death

  Termination Point

  Hellfire Strike

  Code of Conflict

  Vengeance

  Executive Action

  Killsport

  Conflagration

  Storm Front

  War Season

  Evil Alliance

  Scorched Earth

  Deception

  Destiny’s Hour

  Power of the Lance

  A Dying Evil

  Deep Treachery

  War Load

  Sworn Enemies

  Dark Truth

  Breakaway

  Blood and Sand

  Caged

  Sleepers

  Strike and Retrieve

  Age of War

  Line of Control

  Breached

  Retaliation

  Pressure Point

  Silent Running

  Stolen Arrows

  Zero Option

  Predator Paradise

  Circle of Deception

  Devil’s Bargain

  False Front

  Lethal Tribute

  Season of Slaughter

  Point of Betrayal

  Ballistic Force

  Renegade

  Survival Reflex

  Path to War

  Blood Dynasty

  Ultimate Stakes

  State of Evil

  Force Lines

  Don Pendleton’s

  Mack Bolan®

  Contagion Option

  To Bobbi, as always.

  This book never could have been done without you.

  We must dare to think “unthinkable” thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world. We must learn to welcome and not to fear the voices of dissent. We must dare to think about “unthinkable things” because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.

  —J. William Fulbright,

  March 27, 1964

  In my War Everlasting, I have been forced to see the unthinkable put into action by the unconscionable. To contain a catastrophe, sometimes the options are to lose an entire city than to lose a nation, but as long as there is still a breath in me, my option is to lose myself to save a city.

  —Mack Bolan

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  The body plummeted through the sky and crashed with a dull, sickening thump into the dry grass. More bodies followed as the transport plane made a slow, lazy circle over the field.

  The team had done this a hundred times before, and the men, dressed in black, took to the field.

  The bodies were hollowed-out cattle, their bellies distended with packages. Some clinked with the heavy ring of metal, while others were stiff pillows of compressed powder. Two of the cows were filled with rolls of rifles, wrapped in plastic and cushioning foam.

  “Looks like Christmastime for the gang,” a man dressed in black mentioned as he pulled the weapons from the body cavity of the slaughtered animal. “Must be twenty rifles here.”

  “Chatter,” another replied quietly.

  The first fell quiet, admonished with a single word. Sound carried, and even though their helicopter had scanned the area for miles with infrared and radar, they still worked in hushed, professional silence to ensure their private, midnight endeavor went undetected.

  In the darkness, none of the men in black used regular white lights. Occasionally they would flash on a low-powered, low-signature red light, but only for a moment. In the empty field, there was too much risk of strangers noticing.

  They had been doing this for years and hadn’t been caught.

  One man spoke among the group. “Leave a souvenir for the conspiracy theorists.”

  The others nodded and as they dragged a dozen carcasses off the field, they left one lying in the dried grass.

  One man pulled a small butane-lighter-like device and burned a brand into the carcass. He worked from memory, knowing which ranch they were on.

  The rest of the team took out folding rakes and went over the entirety of the field before returning to the helicopter. The branding artist backed his way to the helicopter, obscuring his tracks, leaving no trace that anyone was ever there. The long, padded skids of the transport chopper rose from a patch of hard, rocky soil and sparse grass leaving little clue of the vehicle’s presence.

  The presence of the gutted cow would obfuscate the situation handily. No one would suspect their smuggling ring, in business across several decades, was in operation. Not when investigators were hampered by crackpot theorists who blamed slaughtered cattle on aliens or top-secret Army surgical teams testing surgical lasers. The truth was at once mundane and would shock the world should it ever get out.

  But the men in black, as they left the gutted, cauterized corpse in the field, wouldn’t be responsible for that leak in secrecy.

  The dark helicopter rose into the Utah night, its Kevlar hull minimizing its radar signature to that of a sparrow, sideways speakers reflecting the sound of the rotors at a right angle to the original racket to dampen the noise to a thrumming whisper. The stealth bird swung lazily back toward its home base.

  It was business as usual.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Gulf of Thailand, twenty miles out of Pattaya

  It was business as usual for Mack Bolan, a.k.a. the Executioner, as Jack Grimaldi raced Dragon Slayer low over the Gulf of Thailand, so low that the sea spray pelted the windshield. The high-tech combat helicopter was loaded to the gills with electronics and weaponry to give Bolan th
e kind of edge he needed when fighting impossible odds. The war bird had been designed specifically for the soldier’s crusade against the forces of evil. With encrypted communications, wireless satellite computer links and sensors that could pick up anything across the spectrum, Dragon Slayer could find almost any target. Laden with rocket and grenade launchers, and the awesome .50-caliber GECAL multibarreled machine gun, the helicopter could destroy even a small column of tanks.

  Grimaldi held them low over the water, about five feet between the belly of the sleek bird and the tops of the tallest waves. With speakers that reflected the sound of the bird’s own rotor slap at ninety-degree angles to the original sound, the normal thunder and roar of the helicopter was muffled to little more than a low hum. This was a stealth insertion on a freighter loaded with contraband from Thailand.

  The ship was on course for North Korea. The freighter was registered to Liberia, which enabled it to travel around the world without more than a second glance. Sometimes that registry also covered illegal operations, but since major corporations profited from both tourism and “under the counter” transportation of goods, powerful sponsorship kept governments from looking too closely at the problem.

  Mack Bolan wasn’t the government. He wasn’t a civil servant with a license to kill. Certainly, through the Sensitive Operations Group at Stony Man Farm, he had official backup in the form of intelligence, a gunsmith and occasionally two of the best covert strike teams on the planet. Still, the Executioner considered them just that—backup. He enjoyed his camaraderie with the warriors and support crew at Stony Man, but he was his own man, with his own resources and his own crusades. Even Dragon Slayer had been funded from the massive war chest that Bolan had accumulated, the spoils of countless wars against organized crime. While the aircraft was assigned to Stony Man Farm and was registered to the United States Justice Department by the Federal Aviation Commission, the Executioner didn’t let taxpayer dollars fund his arsenal. Instead, the sleek aircraft had been funded from money “donated” by gangsters, drug dealers and terrorists.

  Where the donors had been sent, they wouldn’t ever need money again.

  “Coming up on the freighter. ETA thirty seconds,” Grimaldi said over Bolan’s LASH radio.

  “Smooth ride as usual,” he told the pilot.

  Grimaldi smiled. “Well, the last time the lady was flying in Thailand, she took a pounding. She’s proving to Daddy that she can handle this.”

  Bolan grinned, then opened the side door. He’d have to get out quickly. Even with a radar signature the size of a hummingbird, and making not much more sound, the rotor wash would be noticeable to anyone on the freighter’s deck. In addition, the helicopter itself wasn’t invisible, despite its dark-colored hull. The ship’s running lights would betray Dragon Slayer’s presence in a heartbeat.

  He gripped the sides of the door opening as Grimaldi popped the helicopter up and over the rail. With a surge of muscles, Bolan leaped to the deck, landing in a crouch, then rolling into a somersault as Grimaldi dipped the helicopter back and out of sight. The drop was fifteen feet, but Bolan was strong and agile, and he allowed momentum and supple movement to absorb most of the shock.

  As soon as he hit, Bolan drew his Beretta 93-R, folding grip snapped down, sound suppressor in place.

  On a data screen in the passenger cabin of Dragon Slayer, he’d kept an eye on infrared blobs, humans walking the decks, memorizing where his enemies were on this ship. According to the scanners, there were twenty-five people on board in various compartments.

  That didn’t count the containers in the hold. Infrared scans had trouble going through both the hull and the tractor-trailer containers in the hold, but there was a definite heat signature that caught Bolan’s attention. He was here on the advice of an old ally in Thailand who had said that the ship was smuggling people to North Korea. Bolan had pulled a few strings to get Dragon Slayer delivered, because he knew the sleek high-tech aircraft could possibly be needed to get wounded or dying bystanders back to shore.

  Bolan had engaged the slave trade in Thailand once before, and had dropped a brutal ax on its neck. The trade still existed and thrived, because the Executioner had been able to take out only one mastermind of the insidious child slavery ring and his organization—the San United Army.

  Still, he had his ear to the ground, and when he had the opportunity, he’d stop by and give the flesh peddlers a taste of long-delayed justice. With a crusade against the forces of terrorism and crime that went on around the world, Bolan couldn’t be everywhere at once. But when he arrived, he made up for lost time.

  “Anyone catch sight of me?” Bolan asked over his radio.

  “Nobody moving your way, no one taking up arms against you,” Grimaldi answered. “You don’t exist.”

  Bolan pressed his lips tightly together. “Good, I intend to keep it that way for a while.”

  Sliding through the shadows, clad in his skintight blacksuit, Bolan slipped between cargo hold lids and containers on the deck.

  With every trailer, he paused and pressed a small cup against the container. The cup contained sensitive electronics that amplified sound and fed it through his LASH radio. The hands-free unit would tell him if there was anyone inside breathing or moving. Whispers would be as clear as straight to his ear. With a quick look over his shoulder, he’d listen for a few minutes, then move on.

  He heard the rattle of machinery in most of the containers, metal jostling against metal. He wasn’t certain if it was farm machinery or crates of rifles, but whatever it was, it wasn’t in need of immediate attention.

  “We’ve got movement on the bridge,” Grimaldi warned, and the Executioner slipped deeper into shadow, Beretta 93-R at the ready. Dragon Slayer hovered silently, back a full klick, but the Stony Man pilot could keep a close eye with telephoto lenses and other advanced surveillance gear.

  Bolan, nearly invisible, looked toward the bridge. A pair of gunmen exited the bridge, being ordered around by the captain, a swarthy man who looked to be from the Mediterranean. The guards were Asian, and they didn’t look happy to be ordered around. The Executioner knew that their mission would be urgent, simply because of their weapons and how quickly they were dismissed by the irate man in command. Bolan closed across the deck, cautious not to let the enemy know he was there.

  The guards reached a stairwell that led to the hold, and paused. One lit a cigarette and started to speak in Vietnamese, a language Bolan understood all too well.

  “That Italian idiot thinks he can push us around like he owns us…” one man said.

  “He’s Greek, not Italian.”

  “Greek, Italian, they’re all hook-nosed bastards who think because they have round eyes they can see everything better than we can,” the first man muttered. “I left Dhom Phoc for this?”

  “Hey, would you rather live on a commune?” the other man asked. “Pham, we’re making money here.”

  Pham tossed away his cigarette, the butt bouncing off the toe of Bolan’s boot as he stood in the shadows. “Yes. Money. I have to remember that. Besides, it’s better than being blown out of the water by the Chinese navy for being pirates.”

  The second smuggler laughed. “Don’t worry. Once we get the cargo back to Korea, we’ll be transporting drugs and booze as usual.”

  Pham shrugged. “If you say so. Come on.”

  They started down the steps and Bolan gave them a few moments lead time before he strolled onto the deck, walking with purpose as if he belonged there. He followed the two Vietnamese smugglers down the steps, Beretta 93-R holstered under his arm. Still, he had the pommel of his forearm knife resting in his palm, ready to slice flesh and draw blood with a simple flick of the wrist.

  The two Vietnamese sentries chattered and continued to complain about the Greek man in charge, unaware that they were being followed. Out at sea, with no one around for miles, sailors tended to think that they were immune to intrusion.

  One of the Vietnamese looked back and spotted
Bolan, and the soldier lifted his hand in a half wave before turning into the first hatchway he could find. The sentry waved back to Bolan and called out something in an unintelligible effort at Italian. The Executioner poked his head out the hatchway and responded in his own Italian.

  “What did you say?” he asked, keeping his body and the suspicious-looking blacksuit and battle harness out of sight behind the doorjamb.

  The Vietnamese paused and thought hard about what he needed to say. “I said, nice night.”

  Bolan smiled. “Wouldn’t know. I’ve been belowdecks all evening. Where are you going?”

  The other Vietnamese translated for his less articulate friend, then answered.

  “The captain sent us to bring up a couple of girls for some after-dinner entertainment,” the second one said.

  Bolan kept the anger out of his face and nodded. “Oh…great.”

  “Yeah, I know. Getting that greasy bastard’s leftovers sucks,” the Vietnamese with the better Italian answered.

  “We aren’t supposed to be sampling the merchandise,” Bolan mentioned.

  “It’s not like the Koreans are going to know anything’s missing. Most of these girls are professionals, so it’s not like the clients are going to expect virgins,” the guard responded.

  Bolan shrugged. “Yeah. Well, when the North Korean military brass end up with the clap, you can explain that to Kim Jong-il.”

  The chatty guard stepped closer to the doorway. “What?”

  Bolan sighed. “Didn’t know that the captain had the gift that keeps on giving?”

  The Vietnamese guard looked to his friend and exploded rapidly in his native tongue. “Oh dammit! That greasy Greek gave us the clap!”

  The second one’s face paled. “You’re kidding!”

  “This guy said the captain has…” The sentry paused and looked back toward Bolan. “Wait…I haven’t seen you bef—”

  Bolan reached out and slammed his left hand tightly around the guard’s throat, cutting off whatever else he had to say. The forearm knife dropped into his other hand and launched like a dart. The Executioner’s throw was true, the sharp spike of steel imbedding deeply into the second man’s chest, a gush of blood squirting in a long, lazy, crimson arch.