He had only a small packet of plastic explosives with him, more like an afterthought than an actual supply, and he unwrapped it from its waterproof packaging.
Bolan wouldn’t have long to blow out the lock and he hoped the small packet of explosive putty would prove strong enough to cut through the metal of the access door.
Salt Lake City, Utah
DETECTIVE RONNY KHO lit a cigarette and sighed as Rachel Marrick went over what the Asian Crimes Task Force had shared with the FBI.
“Listen, Rachel, we don’t have bubkes on this mess,” Kho stated as he tapped some ashes into a small green-rusted copper plate with a similarly green Buddha sitting on its rim. “The gangs are more into home invasion than bank robbery. Especially with that kind of precision timing and using enough explosives to knock down a building.”
Marrick shrugged. “The robbers spoke what the hostages thought was Korean, Ronny.”
Kho nodded and rolled his eyes. “But everyone wore masks and, like you and the officers on the scene described, they had newfangled AKs, not the old-school 47s that most bangers pack.”
Marrick looked at her notes, then brushed at something on her blouse. “I just—”
“You didn’t get it,” Kho told her.
Marrick looked down at the odd fleck on her chest. It seemed to glow bright red….
She dived to the floor a moment before the back of her chair exploded as a bullet pierced it. Kho hit the deck, pulling his Heckler & Koch .45. Marrick’s Glock was in hand, as well, as she looked around. The window of the office was shattered.
Cops at the desks in the main squad room had also dropped to the floor. A few uniformed officers poked their heads around the doorjamb, crouched low.
“You guys okay?” one asked, trigger finger resting on the frame of his pistol, just above the trigger.
A red dot burned on his shoulder and Marrick fired a quick shot into the wall beside the door before a second sniper bullet stabbed at the flinching cop. Marrick’s fire had driven the policeman back behind cover before the assassin could claim his life. Her round had struck plaster and woodwork, and stopped cold. She doubted, after seeing what the bullet had done to the chair back, that even his body armor would have stopped the rifle slug.
“Cripes!” the cop shouted. “Watch—”
“The assassin lit you up!” Marrick shouted. “Nobody in that doorway, or I’ll shoot you personally!”
The cop gulped audibly. “You saved my life.”
“Buy me a coffee later,” Marrick offered as she crawled under the window. Kho followed her.
“What do you think?” Kho asked. He rapped his knuckles on the wall. “Think the brick’s enough to stop that guy?”
Marrick shrugged. “The snipers at the bank had steelcored bullets, according to Reader and my partner.”
“So he could chop through the brick, but it’d take time,” Kho stated. “And we’re pinned here.”
Marrick grimaced. “He’s not going to stick around for long, though. Not with a whole station full of cops sitting here.”
“The fact that he even took a poke at you while you were here…” Kho began.
Her cell phone interrupted the Asian Crimes detective. She took the call.
“Rachel, we were just ambushed where a few gang members lived,” Graham said. “Are you—”
“Under sniper fire,” Marrick answered.
“We haven’t found out anything, and they’re trying to kill us,” Graham noted. “Be careful. They’ve got some heavy firepower.”
“Yeah,” Marrick said, looking at the destroyed chair. There was a hole the size of her fist in the padding. She could imagine what the bullet would have done to her chest. “Just be careful.”
“You’re the one getting shot at now,” Graham told her.
“Yeah, but I’m nice and safe behind a brick wall,” Marrick answered.
A jet of smoke tore through the broken window and sailed into the office. She and Kho were blinded and deafened by the roaring cloud as it thundered through, and then, from the choking haze, a shock wave hammered into them.
Screams filled the air and Marrick winced as she was pelted with splinters and chunks of broken wood.
“Jesus!” Kho gasped, waving smoke from his face. His other hand clutched his cheek where a stapler had bounced off it, splitting the flesh open to the bone.
Marrick blinked, her eyes burning from the exhaust of the LAW rocket. She’d been at a demonstration of the antiarmor weapon, and remembered catching a face full of exhaust when one had been fired. She grabbed Kho’s shirt and dragged him to his feet. Kho resisted, but Marrick didn’t have time to explain as she coughed up exhaust fumes. Eventually, the Vietnamese cop put one foot in front of the other and followed her through the doorway as a second detonation struck the wall they’d been nestled against only seconds before.
They hit the shattered squad room just as the blast shoved them from behind. A chunk of brick glanced off Marrick’s head and she tumbled across the broken body of a police officer. Half-blinded, she felt around and recoiled in horror as she felt the torn flesh and charred shirt of the dead cop.
“Oh, God…” Marrick whimpered, rolling off the corpse. She looked around and saw Kho lunge for her. The two of them rolled to one side as bullets struck the cratered floor of the squad room.
On the far side of the settling debris cloud, they saw the laser light of the scope flicker through the cloud for a few minutes before cutting out.
“They must have run out of rockets,” Kho muttered, coughing. “I saw the beam.”
“Thanks,” Marrick said.
“Shit, you’re the one who dragged me from ground zero of the second blast. We’ll call it even.”
Marrick nodded. The pair made it to the entrance of the squad room. “God…there was a dead cop on the floor.”
The hallway was packed with stunned and dismayed officers.
“There were only Mahoney and Walsh in there. The rest of us evacuated once the rifle bullets started cutting into the squad room,” someone said. “Mahoney was the one who almost got shot.”
“Where is he?” Marrick asked.
“Here,” Mahoney groaned. “I took a drawer in the gut.”
The cop’s shirt was open and he had a huge livid bruise on his chest where his body armor had saved his ribs from being crushed. His face was bleeding from shrapnel.
Marrick took a deep breath. “Oh, no…”
Mahoney winced, as much from regret as from pain. “Walsh was the only one killed.”
Marrick rested her head against the wall, guilt washing over her. “They were after me.”
“Sister, you saved two cops today,” another cop said, squeezing her shoulder. “We’ll catch the bastard who pulled the trigger on that rocket launcher. And he’ll be lucky if he lives to see a trial.”
Marrick’s lips pulled taut into a thin line.
She wished that she could believe that it would be so easy, but even though she could see the all-prevailing tentacles of a monstrous conspiracy around her, cutting to its heart would only get deadlier and messier from here on out.
Already, one Salt Lake cop was dead, and from the sound of Graham’s voice, there were other casualties. She shook her head, fighting off her dread and guilt. Kirby and Stan were counting on her to keep it together.
The conspirators weren’t going to get away with murder.
Not anymore.
CHAPTER NINE
Wonsan, North Korea
Bolan didn’t have enough explosives to tear apart the metal access door on the main gates, but he could do some damage to the hinges and handle. He wadded his sparse supply around the hinge bolts and at the base of the handle, setting three pencil detonators in each of his mounds. He then backed off, pulling the motorcycle aside to keep it from being damaged if the door should fall away.
After five long, nerve-racking seconds, the three blobs of plastique detonated, shattering the hinges and tearing the handle off th
e door. It sagged, resting on the locking bolt connected to the frame, but there was a large hole over the guts of the lock. Bolan used his Ka-Bar fighting knife as a crowbar and wrenched the bolt to one side. The door, weighing almost a hundred pounds, shoved him back a few steps as it gave in to gravity’s pull, but he grabbed the sides and dragged it out of the way. He looked back down the ramp and heard the preliminary crump of the thermobaric releasing its vaporized fuel.
Bolan had only moments before the spark detonated the lethal cloud, and he righted the motorcycle. Its engine still rumbled, and he threw himself onto the seat, tripping the throttle. The Kawasaki skidded in a tight circle, and he launched forward through the doorway. One of the handlebars struck the side of the door frame, and nearly hurled him off balance, but Bolan recovered and veered immediately out of line from the doorway. In the next heartbeat, a streaming jet of burning-hot flames tore through the open doorway, singeing his hair and drying out his damp clothes.
A moment later, the huge metal door buckled under the thundering shock wave, but Bolan had already accelerated to sixty miles an hour, tearing across the small warehouse. A couple of Korean guards spotted him on the motorcycle and started to say something when they saw the huge mushroom of dust and debris blowing through the vent in the large dock doors.
Bolan lowered his head and continued toward the open loading dock as the hurricane-force wind buffeted his back and elbows. To slow down was to be picked up and hurled like a toy by the sudden gust of atmosphere escaping the collapsing cavern. The Kawasaki launched off the lip of a dock, and he sailed thirty feet before the wheels struck ground again and bounced another five feet. When it came down a second time, the bike gripped the concrete and yanked the Executioner along at ninety miles an hour. The warehouse behind him shuddered, windows exploding under the escaping shock wave, shards of glass spraying like diamond snowflakes.
Bolan cut to a hard right and applied the brakes, killing the throttle on the Kawasaki once he’d gotten a safe distance from the warehouse.
It stood, hemorrhaging dust from its depths, a cloud wending up lazily into the sky.
One second slower and he would have been caught by the blast wave. He didn’t have any hope for the warehouse guards, and he knew that he wouldn’t have survived the deadly hurricane. Already, the warehouse roof sagged as support struts, torn loose by the explosion’s force, left it a limp dome of collapsing metal and scaffolding. After a few more moments, the building imploded, girders poking up. Bolan looked around, the shock wave had shaken all the buildings in the area.
Bolan fired up the Kawasaki again and remembered the map route that he’d gotten from the man in the communications shack. He paused for a moment, regretting that those he’d shown mercy to were dead, murdered by the conspirators. Though his title was the Executioner, the murders of unarmed and unconscious prisoners wasn’t part of his morality.
The enemy demolitions team had no doubt escaped, leaving Bolan with only one course of action—find the bioweapons testing base and find out what its owners knew before the conspiracy removed it from the equation with the same finality as the submarine pen.
Bolan accelerated to 100 mph, spinning onto a highway that would take him to his destination, and a rendezvous with a North Korean general.
MI WAITED IN THE LOBBY for General Chong’s staff to arrive. Her lighter rested in her pocket, even though she wouldn’t need it right now. She wanted all of them in one place to eliminate them. Still, it was reassuring. The clothes she wore, snug and conforming to the soft, sensual curves of her body, would have revealed any pistol, although her long black hair covered the handle of the knife taped between her shoulders. The lighter could launch a sliver of solidified toxic chemical into an enemy up to thirty feet away.
The lighter was designed to hold fifty such slivers, its small fuel reservoir a compressed gas launcher. After that, it was disposable. But Mi trusted that she’d never need all of its remaining shots. She’d only launched one of the deadly little darts of biotoxin, and she doubted she’d need more than six when Chong and his staff were eliminated.
She would then leave the meeting room, climb into the closest Jeep and race to the coast where Stevens’s submarine would send a raft to pick her up.
Mi would disappear, and she’d return to civilization.
At least, that was the plan.
She remembered a wise man’s saying that a plan only survived until it was put into action.
If things hit the fan, then she’d have to improvise her way out.
Her cell phone rumbled in its holster, and her brow furrowed. She plucked it out.
“Mi.”
“Met up with the man in black. Plan scotched.”
The phone went dead and her neck tingled. The man in black was someone Stevens had informed her about. Some associates of the doctor had encountered this mystery man and had been taken down. With their loss, Stevens’s plans had been set back, but not completely eradicated. However, no plot the doctor hatched went on without the possibility of this stranger’s interference.
And now he was here.
Mi frowned and continued to wait for Chong’s co-conspirators, plotting her means of escape. The submarine pen had to have been destroyed already, and news of its loss would soon reach the general’s ears. One didn’t detonate a fuel-air explosive underground and not attract attention. The pen was supposed to be destroyed as soon as Mi gave the signal that Chong and his staff had been assassinated.
To be contacted meant that they had to detonate prematurely.
The North Korean military would be investigating, and they would eventually remember their old cold-war era underground pens for an unbuilt submarine fleet. Once they realized something was up with their old covert facility, they would come to the “meat processing plant” to look in on their other top-secret facility in the Wonsan area.
Chong and his staff would be taken prisoner and interrogated.
North Korean torture experts were some of the most terrifying thugs Mi had ever heard about. She’d studied under one who’d defected to Stevens’s organization, and she knew full well that Chong would crack like a brittle eggshell. Once that happened, the whole operation would be compromised.
Mi looked at the lighter and knew she’d fall prisoner to the North Koreans if they reacted with their usual brutal efficiency. She’d break, too, but it would take longer, and she’d go through hell before they’d gotten anything out of her. The lighter would give her a fifteen-minute agonizing death with one biotoxic splinter. She mused about firing more than one shot into herself. Perhaps a larger concentration of the toxins would kill her more quickly.
Anything to escape the torturer’s greedy, tearing grasp.
No, that would only be her last resort.
She had her job to do, and she would try to meet up with the submarine to return home.
But she kept the suicide option in reserve.
Salt Lake City, Utah
KIRBY GRAHAM SAW Rachel Marrick, looking as if she’d been battered. Her brown hair was disheveled and her face was crisscrossed with minor cuts that had been cleaned. She was just another rumpled, spindled face in the crowd of dismayed policemen and civilians who milled around the police station in the wake of the assassination attempt. He rushed up to her, and Marrick gave him a brave half smile.
“Rough day?” Graham asked.
Marrick chuckled, a tear crawling down her cheek. Graham clasped his large hands on her shoulders and gave her a gentle squeeze. She nodded. “There’s a dead cop because they wanted me dead.”
Graham frowned. He wasn’t about to one-up her with the tale of the murdered youths and the young woman who had been raped. He understood her guilt, though. She kept a strong front, despite the single tear. “We’ll find them, Rachel.”
Marrick nodded, her lips still screwed into a smile that Graham knew she didn’t feel.
Stan Reader flexed his back after getting out of the car that they’d borrowed. He rested his h
and on his lumbar region, then nodded.
“What happened?” Marrick asked.
“I tossed him out a window,” Graham replied.
“Yeah, he got on my nerves, too, but…” Marrick said, resorting to a quick joke to take her mind off her problems. She noticed the bandage on Graham’s thick biceps. “You’re cut.”
Graham nodded. “Well, I followed him out the window.”
Marrick looked at him for a moment, exploring his deep blue eyes. Graham tried not to lose himself in her hazel gaze. “How bad was it?”
Graham’s lips tightened. “You’ve had enough drama for today.”
Reader walked up to them, remaining silent. Even though Graham joked that his friend didn’t have the strongest of social graces, he had enough decorum to hold his tongue while the two partners were talking. Graham wondered how much Reader knew about his feelings for Marrick, then dismissed the thought.
“We should retire to a more appropriate location,” Reader suggested.
Marrick raised an eyebrow. “Saying we should get a room?”
“I have one,” Reader commented. “I meant a more discreet location to compare notes.”
Marrick looked at the squad car that Graham and Reader had driven up in. “We’ll take my car. What happened to the Curb Bomb?”
Graham chuckled at the reference to his old battered Buick. “Well, it hasn’t blown up yet, but its race has been run.”
“I probably could build a new engine for it,” Reader mentioned. “Maybe upgrade its electronics and replace the rusted and bullet-pocked body panels with alternative composites…”
Graham shook his head. “Let it rest in the junkyard.”
“But it was your official vehicle—” Reader began.
“Lieber gave it to Kirby as punishment,” Marrick explained. “Except he didn’t realize that Kirby was a better mechanic than the guys in the motor pool.”
“Oh,” Reader replied. “Well, considering its damage, it’s no longer suitable for government duty. I should pull some of my favors and have it delivered to New York where I have my office and laboratory.”
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