Contagion Option

by Don Pendleton

  “I’m certain it’s a cipher,” Chong replied. “But he also goes by the name of Mojo.”

  Bolan’s eyes narrowed. Mojo was a man who was on the federal government’s Most Wanted list. A renegade scientist who saw humanity as a plague upon the Earth, he’d managed to not only rise in the ranks of the U.S. Army’s biological warfare command, but he also designed a series of deadly delivery systems for chemical means of destruction. He had been involved with Saddam Hussein when the Iraqi was looking for assistance against Iran. Mojo’s name had been lost, thanks to the assistance of one of his allies, a powerful information broker who could find enemy identities, or erase knowledge of anyone from existence. It had been only pure luck that Stony Man had destroyed the information broker a short while back when he tried to revive the Reich of the Americas.

  The nihilist organization that Stevens had joined, however, had been responsible for enormous death and suffering, from Dulles International Airport to Iraq and all points in between. Bolan, Able Team and Phoenix Force had destroyed most of the organization in two savage battles, but there were still loose ends.

  Mojo was one of them.

  It seemed that the mad biochemist was looking to unleash Armageddon on his own. Had it not been for the combined efforts of Bolan and Able Team, the entire nation would have been swept under a tide of a botulinum outbreak. Bolan realized that it was Stevens who had whipped up such a lethal cocktail, or rather, obtained the biotoxin from one of his old stomping grounds.

  Dugway Proving Grounds, the site of the deadly anthrax outbreak that killed thousands of sheep, once more loomed in Bolan’s mind.

  “The cattle. What is their purpose?” Bolan asked.

  Chong winced. “They have a few. We test some of his weapons on the cattle and cast-off, used-up whores from Thailand. The cattle are raised on a special farm in Thailand, because of their resemblance to those used in America.”

  Bolan frowned. “They’ll be mixed in with American herds after being infected as carriers?”

  “That was a long-range plan, but mostly we slaughtered them, removing most of the soft tissues, leaving only muscle, bone and meat. They wanted the carcasses, but they were already sterilized of external microbes,” Chong stated. “Even quarantined, though, the meat and bones had something else of use.”

  “Smuggling?” Bolan asked.

  “Yes. Used as cushions,” Chong said. “We’d ship them out, gutted and preserved.”

  “With traces of biotoxin in their systems…no, you removed the organ and nerve tissue,” Bolan added. “But what else could they carry that would be worthwhile. No one would eat the meat from those carcasses willingly.”

  “What do you think?” Chong stated, managing a wicked sneer through his pain.

  “How long have you been doing this?” Bolan asked, continuing his questioning. But the state of the carcasses still worked in his mind. Stuffed with lethal toxins from bioweapon testing, then slaughtered and transported thousands of miles, their utility as beef would be given up. Even if they were ground into hamburger, cooking processes would kill any germs active in the meat.

  “For years,” Chong replied. “We must have sent at least a thousand head to America, along with guns, gold and drugs in their body cavities.”

  “What about the submarines? What were transported on them?”

  Chong winced. “You’re breaking my back!”

  “Answer the question, or I’ll leave you limp and half dead,” Bolan growled.

  “We’d send toxin samples to the ranch in Thailand,” Chong stated. “Or back to the U.S. after they had us perform refinements in the laboratory here.”

  “Anything else?” Bolan asked.

  “Only cattle feed,” Chong replied.

  “You make cattle feed here? This is a meat processing plant and cattle don’t eat meat…” Bolan said. He trailed off, suddenly putting it all together.

  “We add protein byproduct,” Chong explained. “From the meat here, and from bones sent back to us via submarine from Mojo.”

  Bolan’s eyes narrowed. “You add cattle to the cattle feed.”

  The Executioner loosened his grasp on Chong and the general fell free, gasping for breath. He moved slowly, his muscles and back stretched to the point of snapping. Bolan kept his eye on the Korean as his mind raced.

  Mad cow disease came to the surface in his memory. Officially known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy—BSE—it was a fatal neurodegenerative disease in cows, which was transmitted when livestock ingested material from other animals with recessive genetic disorders. The faulty genes, digested by the cattle, would then affect other genes, eventually resulting in neurological damage. It would take a couple of cycles of damaged animals entering the feed process to result in full-blown mad cow disease. The aberrant infection protein, called a prion, could easily be spread.

  “How many years?” Bolan asked.

  “The past twelve,” Chong answered, coughing. His hand neared the Colt .45.

  Bolan let him edge closer, already gripping the butt of his machine pistol.

  “And it takes only a few years to approach breeding age…” Bolan replied.

  Chong looked back at Bolan. “He’s going to taint the world’s food supply with the mutant protein responsible for BSE and a dozen other neurodegenerative diseases.”

  “Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease,” Bolan answered, “which is fatal to humans. The prions can be used to induce BSE or CJD.”

  “And it’s as short a jump from bovine specific diseases to scrapie to infect sheep if you’re going by the mutant proteins route,” Chong began with a smile. He looked at the pistol on the floor, then edged away from it. “Either way, Stevens can use the prions to infect livestock and humans. He could create a worldwide famine, rendering cattle and sheep unusable as meat. And humans ingesting beef infected with the prions can develop CJD.”

  “It would take a powerful network to bring this about,” Bolan said. “You provided this end of it.”

  Chong looked at the Colt .45, then back at Bolan. “You’ll kill me anyway, won’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Bolan said.

  Chong looked back to the gun, then suddenly jolted as a rain of bullets tore through his chest.

  Bolan dived to the floor, dropping underneath the scythe of lethal bullets that churned through the doorway, ripping out bursts from his own Beretta.

  MI QUA HEARD TWO MEN talking in hushed tones inside the main meeting room. A handgun had thundered earlier, and Mi knew that it was Chong, with his big, nasty Korean War-vintage Colt .45, cleaning house.

  General Chong was covering his bases, trying to make himself seem worthwhile to Stevens and at the same time protect him from notice. He feared the reprisal of the mysterious biochemist, and the false implant that he’d been warned about.

  The trouble was that the alarms had awakened the entire meat processing plant/bioweapons development laboratory. It would take only a few moments for the North Korean military to learn that it was blacked out from communications by Captain Jaye on the submarine. There would be confusion, especially regarding the sudden earthquake in Wonsan caused by the demolition of the underground submarine base. But eventually, with the alarms, the North Koreans would learn that something happened. There were too many soldiers and technicians for Mi to take everyone out. Someone could possibly remember her, so she had to leave fast, but not before Chong was dead.

  She wouldn’t need the lighter-sliver launcher. Biotoxin would have been a fitting end for the traitorous general, but she didn’t have the time to be cute. Sooner or later, the soldiers would get together hazmat suits to venture into the office building. Alarms on a bioweapon base meant the possibility of a containment breach, even in a building where no biochemical research was going on.

  Mi spotted the man in black through the meeting room door. She pulled back and observed him quietly.

  The strange wraith was deeply tanned, his eyes ridged with epicanthic folds, but he was too tall and powerful
ly muscled, out of proportion for anyone raised in Southeast Asia. And while the mysterious intruder’s Chinese was good enough to hold a conversation with Chong, who only peripherally understood the language, lapsing into English for more technical terms, Mi could tell that the intruder didn’t speak Chinese like a native. He could have been some other Asian national, but she doubted it. The only men she’d seen who were that tall and sturdily built, yet with no body fat, were men who grew up in America on excellent diets.

  No, this man was Western.

  She heard them talking about Chong’s imminent execution, and she knew that this would be her opportunity. The fool was giving him a chance to defend himself. He had to have gotten all of the information he could have out of Chong.

  Mi triggered her machine pistol, sweeping Chong. The intruder ducked out of her path with lightning speed. Mi cursed herself, wishing she’d have taken the big man from behind, but Chong was such an easy target. Gunfire chopped the wall just above her shoulder, and she retreated, hammering out another extended burst to keep him down.

  Mi ducked down the hallway, breaking to escape as more autofire chased her, this time concentrated assault rifle chatter. She’d have been torn apart had she stood her ground, the power of the AK-107 proving enough to rip through thin drywall without much effort.

  She had to flee and to warn Stevens about the situation.

  He’d warned her that eventually she’d come across a lone operative who could throw any conspiracy into disarray. Though he was one man, he was skilled, audacious and unconventional, making him impossible to set up a suitable defense against.

  And he would be coming.

  This was him, though Stevens had described him as an American, tall and craggy, with cold blue eyes. As she bounded down the steps, feeding a fresh magazine into her machine pistol, she realized that it was relatively easy to come up with temporary prosthetics that could change eye color and eye shape. He spoke enough other Asian languages to pass for a foreigner, and Stevens also mentioned that the man would have enormous resources at his disposal.

  Quality, professional-grade makeup effects that could survive for a quick penetration into North Korea was obviously one of his enormous arsenal. She reached the first floor and broke across the lobby, and spotted men in biohazard suits waving at her from the other side of the glass doors. One leveled a rifle at her, and she realized that this was no way for her to escape. The few soldiers who were protecting the office center lay in the doorway, riddled with bullets, their corpses leaking on the floor. Their flesh had been charred, seared by the licking tongues of flame throwers in an attempt to seal off contagion.

  She turned and raced away from the doors.

  The bioweapon plant’s defenders were trained at containing quarantine breaches, and for the North Korean military, containment was a euphemism for “killing anyone trying to leave the perimeter.”

  Mi Qua wasn’t ready to die.

  She took cover in the guard kiosk, waiting for the big wraith in black to come out after her. Once both armed parties spotted each other, the ensuing firefight would give her a window to escape.

  And maybe, just maybe, Mi could use the North Korean defenders to eliminate Stevens’s intruder. That would raise her value in the eyes of the biochemical mastermind, especially after the mess that had been made of her operation.

  THE EXECUTIONER PAUSED at the bottom of the steps and fed the AK-107 its final magazine. He kicked open the door to the stairwell and saw a containment team in full gear, rifles ready to kill anyone attempting to escape this death-filled building. Bolan triggered the AK and dived to one side, 5.45 mm tumblers ripping into one of the armed men in the biohazard suits. The Korean jerked violently, torn apart by half a dozen slugs before Bolan reached the cover of a corner.

  Enemy slugs thundered into the wall he huddled behind, and Bolan wished that he’d had access to a grenade or a launcher. Instead, he’d have to deal with the enemy gunmen, one kill at a time, and during the fatal melee, he’d be giving other responders time to move in and back them up. The stairwell door inched open slightly, and Bolan spotted Zing. The Executioner poked the rifle around the corner and let the assault rifle chatter to knock down two more of the containment force. Their suits, designed to protect against microbes, were a weak defense against armor-piercing bullets that shredded through rubber and human flesh alike.

  The guards collapsed, and Bolan charged the stairwell, shoving Zing back in and onto the steps.

  Bullets hammered the door behind him, but it held.

  That wouldn’t last long.

  “What now?” Zing asked.

  “Improvise,” Bolan answered.

  He looked up to the first landing and found a fire extinguisher. He grabbed it and inspected it. The writing was in Korean, but the symbols were of a universal form. This was a compressed CO2 version of an extinguisher, exactly what he needed for his plan. He shouldered his rifle and pulled the very last of his plastic explosives. Zing waited beside him.

  “Stay here,” Bolan ordered. “This is going to get nasty.”

  Zing nodded and Bolan set the detonator in the putty.

  The compressed carbon dioxide was under tremendous pressure, held in by the metal casing of the extinguisher. While his plastic explosive would prove relatively useless when thrown by itself, producing light and noise without attendant power, the C-4 he had tamped in a ring around the center had the power to breech the shell. One small imperfection, and the device designed to save lives would instead transform into a deadly grenade as compressed CO2 burst to escape, turning the metal casing into a shower of lethal splinters.

  Bolan set the detonator on a five-second delay, then threw open the door and launched the extinguisher with all his might. The red metal canister hit the ground and bounced three times before coming to a halt in the doorway. The soldiers at the entrance opened fire, but all they hit was the door and surrounding walls, ignoring what seemed an impotent gesture.

  Then five seconds was up on the detonator.

  Even through the door, the explosion was loud and jarring. Bolan opened the door, Beretta machine pistols in both hands. The Koreans at the entrance of the office building were scattered. A dozen lay dead, crushed by the explosive shock wave and shredded by shrapnel launched at high velocity. Others cried out, wounded by fragments of the casing or the heavy bulletproof glass that had shattered under the overpressure of the detonating fire extinguisher.

  There were three men, unwounded, but jarred by the detonation. They struggled to recover their senses, bringing their weapons to bear, but the Executioner’s guns were out and tracking even as he assessed the damage of his improvised bomb. Three-round bursts ripped out from the twin Berettas, chopping into the trio of gunmen, hurling them into oblivion on the tips of high-velocity slugs.

  One wounded Korean struggled to raise his handgun, and Bolan shot him in the head, the triburst exploding his skull like an overripe melon. Stringy blobs of brain flew across the tile floor as his corpse flopped. The Executioner scanned the other wounded soldiers; none of them moved, not daring to incur his wrath.

  “Zing!” Bolan called.

  The young Korean page appeared, his Makarov low and at the ready. When he saw the carnage wrought by the fire extinguisher, he paled for a moment, but regained his composure.

  From his vantage point, however, he was able to notice movement in the security kiosk.

  “Look out!” Zing shouted on instinct, not wanting his ticket to freedom killed.

  As Mi Qua rose, machine pistol chattering, she sent out a scything burst that sliced the air above the diving Executioner. She swung the weapon toward the young Korean.

  Zing raised his own gun and opened fire, but not before bullets chopped into him, whirling him.

  Bolan fired before he even hit the floor, his Berettas stabbing 9 mm rounds into the treacherous assassin. One burst tore through her chest, while another cracked open her skull just behind the ear. Dead, seven times over from Zing
’s and Bolan’s bullets, Mi Qua slumped limply across the security counter, brains pouring out of the back of her head.

  Bolan turned back and saw Zing clutching his upper chest. He rushed to the youth’s side.

  “I’ll get you to help…” Bolan said.

  Zing winced, then shook his head. “Where?”

  Bolan grit his teeth. “I’m not going to leave you to die.”

  “Who’s going to die?” Zing asked, voice racked with pain. “I’m hurt, and I’d slow you down, but I think I can last awhile.”

  Bolan frowned, looking up. Some of the wounded had slumped, unconscious, others hid their heads from the fresh mayhem.

  “I can get medical assistance from my countrymen,” Zing added. “As long as Huan’s dead, I think I can handle life in the military. Get moving. If I say I was wounded trying to bring you and your partner, Mi Qua, down…”

  Bolan looked at the dead woman, then smiled. “You might get a medal. If anyone asks, tell them I was asking you where the bioweapons are kept.”

  “In the slaughterhouse, if you haven’t already guessed,” Zing answered, a pained grin on his face. He hurt, and blood soaked his tunic, but compared to the pain that had been inflicted upon him by the insidious major who’d violated him, it was only a dull ache. He took aim at the two remaining wounded who were still conscious, and fired a shot into each of them, killing them to maintain his cover.

  And Mack Bolan, the Executioner, disappeared through the entrance.

  He had one more stop to make in the “meat processing plant.”

  BOLAN USED A BORROWED AK-107 from one of the dead North Koreans of the containment team to deal with the guard force at the slaughterhouse. They put up a good fight, but against the Executioner, their efforts were for nothing.

  He checked his six, and saw soldiers swarming the lobby of the office building, medics attending to the wounded. Zing, in uniform, sporting two bullet wounds, would be attended to. He was one of them, though there was a spark in him now. Maybe sometime in the future, Bolan could use his assistance to deal with other threats in North Korea. Or Zing would defect. If asked, he could spin a fable about being grilled, while wounded, about the base.