Contagion Option

by Don Pendleton

  If he was down for the count, Reader would have seen his corpse sprawled in the street.

  Instead, the Fed was safe. Reader thumbed back the hammer on the Scorpion, a finely made revolver capable of utilizing whichever cartridges that could fit into a .357 Magnum cylinder, its extractor star capable of holding anything from .380 Auto to 9 mm to .38 Special with equal ease. He popped up and aligned the sights of the Scorpion on the sniper’s roost, the enemy’s position memorized from the momentary flash in the reflection on the custom barrel.

  Reader tripped the trigger and a thunderbolt ripped out of the four-inch barrel before the enemy rifleman could adjust to the scientist’s sudden appearance. At more than 1300 feet per second, the 125-grain slug plowed into the Korean sniper and hurled him into the depths of the building.

  “Kirby!” Reader called.

  “I’m fine, Stretch,” Graham answered. “Keep your head down!”

  Reader poked his muzzle around the corner and spotted what had prompted Graham’s warning. Two more Koreans, armed with assault rifles, perched in a doorway. They caught the flash of metal off Reader’s Scorpion, and one of them cut loose with a prolonged burst. Reader ducked back behind the wheel well as the car shook under the enemy onslaught.

  Over the staccato chop of assault rifle fire, Graham’s .45 thumped twice, loudly, and the gang member’s attack was suddenly cut short. The other gunner opened up, and Reader heard his friend curse and growl, ducking back under cover. Reader rushed from the cover of the damaged vehicle to the rear of a parked van, snapping off two quick .357 Magnum rounds at the doorway where the remaining rifleman cut loose.

  The two shots drove the would-be murderer back behind cover, and Graham’s SRP chugged out two more deep-throated cracks, but two rifles opened up in the doorway again.

  “I only winged him,” Graham advised.

  Reader didn’t acknowledge his friend’s announcement as he plucked the empty cases from his revolver. He opened a pouch on his belt and thumbed out three new cartridges. He loaded them in gently and carefully, then snapped the cylinder shut. He thumbed back the hammer partially and rotated one of the new rounds right under the firing pin, locking the hammer back with one soft tug.

  “Fire in the hole!” Reader shouted as he poked around the rear of the van and launched his shot.

  On top of the .357 Magnum charge, Reader’s bullet rocketed with blinding speed. When it stuck the top of the doorway, the slug disintegrated on impact. At first, the two gunmen had to have thought it was a panic shot, missed completely in the course of a wild gunfight.

  Then the truth settled on them in the form of vaporized capsicum concentrate powder. One of the riflemen staggered out into the open, screaming in pain, his AK spitting lead into the hood of a parked vehicle.

  Graham cut loose with his .45, dropping the blinded and agonized rifleman with two hits to the pelvis. The gunman collapsed in the street, his rifle forgotten amid the sudden additional pain of his hip being shattered by twin heavy-caliber slugs to the burning flame in his eyes and nostrils.

  Reader and Graham reached the gunman Graham had wounded with his initial burst of pistol fire. Graham tore the rifle from numb hands as Reader attended to the other wounded man.

  “Neat trick. What did you do?” Graham asked, putting a plastic cable tie around his prisoner’s wrists.

  Reader folded the other man’s arms behind his back and did likewise. “I simply created a concentrated mix of epoxy and capsicum powder in the 250-grain range and placed it atop an intermediate charge. Upon contact with a sufficiently dense surface, the round would disintegrate and create a cloud of soft-membrane irritant that would fill an area as large as a doorway.”

  “Tear gas bullets. Right,” Graham answered. “What happens if you just plunk one into someone’s chest?”

  Reader glanced to his friend. “Against bone, it would result in a fragmentation radius of six inches. Against muscle and organs, it penetrates thirteen inches with deformation to point-six-five-inch diameter.”

  “Ouch,” Graham muttered.

  “Obviously, it’s only meant for barricaded opponents behind secure cover,” Reader stated. “But like most less lethal solutions, caution must be taken into con—”

  “Right. Be careful. Just because it’s a tear-gas bullet don’t mean it won’t kill someone,” Graham answered. He scanned inside the building. “Nobody else is coming out to be a welcoming committee.”

  Reader picked up an AK and looked at it. “AK-107 rifle. Latest Kalashnikov design to be successfully marketed.”

  Graham holstered his .45 after reloading it and picked up his prisoner’s rifle. He fished a couple of spare magazines out of the wounded gang member’s jacket. “Sure as heck ain’t standard street-punk fare.”

  Reader reloaded his confiscated weapon and stuffed another spare magazine into his jacket pocket. “Obviously outside influences are at work here. Be careful.”

  Graham winked one glittering blue eye and entered the building, Reader hot on his heels.

  Wonsan, North Korea

  THE KOREANS WERE CAUGHT completely off guard when the Executioner burst through the door, and Bolan made a snap decision to take some prisoners. There was a good chance that these men spoke enough English, or some other language that Bolan understood, to provide him with answers. The fact that their hands were full of coffee cups and food instead of guns also granted him a moment to act in a less than lethal manner.

  With a hard snap of his wrist, he rammed the butt of his pistol into the jaw of the closest Korean, spraying teeth and blood across the room. The hapless sentry’s head flopped back violently, and he crashed across a table strewed with maps and paperwork, sheets fluttering like leaves in a hurricane as his insensate form plowed through them.

  The punch bought Bolan another heartbeat’s worth of shock and dismay, and he pushed swiftly on the heels of his audacious entrance with a fast kick to the side of another man’s knee. Bone snapped loudly, and the second guard’s leg twisted in a manner that it was never meant to. Bolan followed up with a piercing elbow in the neck as he continued his charge through the communications shack. The Korean with the broken leg crashed to the floor face-first and landed with a sickening crunch. The soldier didn’t spare an instant in his assault, knowing that the doomsday numbers were falling away rapidly. Instead, he hooked his forearm hard up under the chin of the third man in the room.

  The clothesline attack lifted the Korean off his feet and launched him against the fourth occupant of the shack before he could fumble for his holstered sidearm. Bolan pivoted and brought his heel down on the fourth guard’s groin with an impact that elicited an earsplitting wail of agony.

  That was probably the end of Bolan’s stealthy soft probe, but another step brought him in close enough to cuff his heel across the loudmouth’s jaw and to snap-kick him into unconsciousness.

  The third man clutched his throat, wheezing and stunned by the sudden assault, and Bolan reached out with his empty hand, screwing the muzzle of the sound suppressor under the Korean’s chin.

  “Speak Chinese?” Bolan growled in Cantonese.

  “Yes,” the Korean answered. “Some.”

  “How many more men in the facility?” Bolan asked, loosening the pressure on the man’s windpipe.

  “One in the submarine and two more shifts of guards in the main hut,” the Korean answered nervously.

  Bolan looked at the window of the commo shack. “Off shift.”

  The Korean nodded. “Not much to do here. We’re not expecting a visit for another day.”

  “The second sub?” Bolan asked.

  “And a visitor,” the Korean said. “We’re expecting a delivery from overseas.”

  Bolan’s eyes narrowed. “Where?”

  “We don’t speak with the delivery crew. They just drop off crates, and we load them onto the trucks,” the guard answered.

  Bolan lowered the Beretta, then jammed his thumb under the man’s ear. He knew the pinch
would increase the blood pressure in the Korean’s head dramatically, and after an instant, a blinding headache screwed the Asian’s face into a mask of agony. “Where do the trucks go?”

  “Inland.”

  Bolan looked at the mess of maps on the floor, then shoved the Korean toward them. “Show me.”

  The Korean understood the implication and with shaking, nervous hands, pulled a map from under his unconscious partner and spread it on another table. Bolan kept the Beretta in hand, an unspoken threat hanging in the air that he would make the guard’s death slow and painful if he attempted to betray the soldier’s presence. Nothing was noticeable out the window, the main hut remained quiet. The fourth man’s squeal of pain hadn’t raised an alert, yet.

  Bolan’s luck was still holding. If the Korean was convinced that he wasn’t an American, then so much the better.

  The guard pointed nervously at the map of the countryside and Bolan glanced at it. It was thirty-five miles out of town, in what looked like one of the rare bits of farmland that had been co-opted by the North Korean military.

  “What’s there?” Bolan asked in Chinese.

  The guard shrugged and shook his head. “Trucks. Whatever comes off the submarines.”

  Bolan frowned, then turned the stunned sentry around and rapped him at the base of his neck with the butt of the Beretta. The man slumped limply to the ground, and Bolan spent several moments, binding and gagging the four unconscious guards. It wouldn’t take much of an effort for them to break free, but Bolan wasn’t going to murder helpless men. He took a wastebasket and threw their side arms into it. They were armed with Vektor 9 mm pistols, more Beretta copies, except these were from South Africa. Bolan experimented with one of their magazines to see if it would be retained by the NORINCO knock-off, and it worked. Bolan stripped the pistols of their clips and pocketed them, adding to his arsenal. He cleared their chambers and pocketed the extra rounds. They didn’t have any spares, so Bolan left the wastebasket of stripped pistols under the desk. Unfortunately, no rifles were present in the communication shack. This would put the Executioner at a disadvantage.

  He wondered if he could find the enemy’s armory when a light out the window caught his attention.

  A half-dozen guards appeared in various states of dress, groggily clinging to their rifles. Bolan pivoted and shot out the light in the communications shack, then hit the floor.

  A curse in Korean reached his ears, and Bolan realized that he’d have no chance to secure an enemy rifle before going through the conspirator’s guard force.

  He thumbed the Beretta’s selector switch to burst mode and unscrewed the suppressor on the muzzle.

  The soft probe had turned hard, but Bolan wasn’t dismayed.

  It was simply business as usual.

  Salt Lake City, Utah

  KIRBY GRAHAM SWEPT each doorway he passed, expecting more hostile Koreans ready to greet him with a salvo of automatic fire. Instead, his AK went unfired as no lurking assassins lunged out of the woodwork. The only thing that met him was the coppery scent of freshly spilled blood. Graham entered an apartment and saw that the living room was strewed with corpses, and he took a deep breath. “Damn.”

  Reader entered and looked at the scene, his face twisting in conflicting waves of anger, disgust and sadness.

  Graham knelt and felt the throat of a kid, black eyes staring glassily toward the ceiling. He came away from the youth’s neck, blood covering his fingertips. He gently turned him over, seeing two bullet holes in the base of his neck. His jaw set hard, as he thumbed closed the kid’s eyes. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old.

  “Seems like someone else anticipated our line of investigation,” Reader said numbly.

  “They didn’t have to kill kids, damn it,” Graham swore. A teenage girl had been thrown across the back of a sofa, her clothes pulled halfway off. The view hit Graham in the chest like a Magnum slug, and he knew that whoever had staged this massacre had taken their time, willing to make it look as though a rival gang had taken the local gang-bangers off guard. The girl’s dark hair was caked with dried blood, her face a mass of bruises.

  She hadn’t died easily. She wasn’t even twenty, and Graham closed his eyes, knowing that her short life had come to a horrifying end. He looked toward the front.

  “No, Kirby,” Reader said, anticipating his friend’s thoughts. “No. You’re better than they are.”

  Graham’s face twisted in anger.

  “If you kill them, they win,” Reader continued to admonish.

  “So what?” Graham snapped. “They’re not going to attend the awards ceremony.”

  Reader held Graham back from the doorway. “We need to find out what they know.”

  Graham’s head swam crazily as Reader’s deceptively slender arms proved to be too hard for even his slablike muscles to burst through. He let the rifle hang limply in his hand and took a deep breath. “We’re ruining the crime scene, Stan.”

  Reader guided him out into the hall, his arms going from restraining to supportive. “We’ll find out who’s responsible, Kirby.”

  Graham nodded, his lips drawn tightly. “They probably didn’t leave much for the crime scene team to go over.”

  “Undoubtedly,” Reader agreed. “Are you all right?”

  Graham glared at his friend. “What do you think?”

  Reader nodded. “I can—”

  “I’ll help,” Graham interjected.

  Reader pursed his lips, then waved for Graham to follow him to the second floor.

  Graham spotted the sniper who had tried to kill them. He was sprawled in the middle of a living room on the second floor, his chest caved in by Reader’s .357 Magnum slug. The wound was horrific. “They figured that we’d be coming.”

  “This was likely a trap set for our benefit,” Reader agreed.

  “What’d you hit this guy with?” Graham asked, checking the corpse of the sniper.

  “A standard Mag-SAFE round,” Reader replied. “Relatively simple, but effective.”

  Graham fought off the urge to stomp the dead sniper’s face into a gooey mush. Already dead, he wouldn’t have provided enough cathartic retribution, and it would be more difficult to determine who the murderer was. The brawny Fed turned away and continued to look through the second floor, but after a few minutes, he realized that the entire building had been swept clean. Anyone who had been in residence was dead on the floor below.

  They’d been executed, not murdered. And the girl had been raped before her murder. It was enough to make Graham’s muscles tighten up to the point where he was afraid that he would implode from the tension.

  “Kirby.” Reader spoke up.

  Graham turned and noticed that there was a small rifle case set up in the room. He looked at it.

  “They couldn’t go around without gun cases,” Graham stated. “Utah’s pretty lax on firearms laws, but open carry of assault rifles is pretty—”

  “Look at his rifle,” Reader stated. “Look familiar?”

  “Yeah. A standard garden-variety Ruger mini-.30.”

  Reader looked at him with his usual “catch up with me” expression.

  Graham clenched his eyes shut. “A Ruger mini-.30 uses the same ammunition as an AK-47.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if the rifle barrel had been doctored to resemble a Kalashnikov’s rifling pattern. With one dead FBI agent killed by a typical Korean street thug…”

  “It’d suck all the normal resources reserved for the bank robbery into figuring out which of these punks did the dirty deed,” Graham affirmed. “While that went on, whoever was working this end of the cover-up was going to finish his job without interference.”

  Reader nodded.

  “Trouble is, they didn’t expect us to be so hard to kill,” Graham stated.

  “I picked this off one of the Koreans downstairs,” Reader said. He held up a .22-caliber revolver with a blood-flecked stainless-steel barrel. “High-capacity. Holds nine shots. Using
the base of a victim’s skull, and with the low power of a .22 Long Rifle slug…”

  “Quiet enough not to draw the cops in too soon,” Graham concluded. “They were going to stake us out here.”

  “So they knew who your contacts in the Asian gang community were,” Reader added.

  “You know we’re being watched,” Graham said. “I had the feeling when we were skiing, but I thought maybe it was some journalist watching you cut some fresh powder.”

  “I know the journalists in the extreme sports community and they would have been more open,” Reader stated. “My presence here raised some flags, even though I am only present by coincidence.”

  “So this ain’t just Korean street gangs. This is something bigger and nastier,” Graham mused.

  Gunfire cracked in the street and Graham and Reader rushed to the window. Shattered glass drove them back. The ceiling sprouted bullet holes from assault rifles.

  “We were so concerned with the question at hand that we dropped our guard,” Reader stated.

  “All this rifle fire’s going to draw the cops soon enough,” Graham muttered. “But I’m not looking forward to getting 9-1-1 backup.”

  The house shook, a huge crumpling sound rolling up the stairs toward them. Instants later, hot air rushed over their faces.

  “They’re not going to allow us the opportunity to be rescued,” Reader commented. “Another demolition device. Most likely incendiary.”

  “Torching the evidence,” Graham snapped. He looked at the window. “Think you can hit the roof of one of those parked cars out there, Stretch?”

  Reader looked confused for a moment, then Graham shoved him toward the window. As soon as Reader was through the shattered pane, the big Fed launched himself, as well, AK-107 still in hand.

  Outside, their ambushers attempted to cut them down as they leaped from the burning building, but they fell too quickly. Graham roared, holding down the trigger on his captured rifle, spraying the gunmen in the streets before he slammed into the roof of a parked car, the impact tossing him to the sidewalk, separated from the AK.