Cho had the upper hand and it was a quick, brutal skirmish. The Korean drove his knee into Virgil’s midsection, knocking the wind from the old man’s lungs, then quickly grabbed the scaling knife and thrust it between the ties Virgil had used to secure his lifejacket. The blade was sharp enough to puncture the old man’s chest, and when Cho wrenched the handle from side to side, the serrated edge shredded Virgil’s internal organs and then slashed his heart, killing him instantly.
Cho took a moment to steady the boat, yanked the knife from Virgil’s chest and staggered back to the other man. Johnny had just begun to regain consciousness. Cho leaned over and viciously dragged the serrated blade across the oarsman’s neck, finishing him off. In all, it had taken the Korean less than thirty seconds to kill the men and take control of the boat.
Getting rid of the bodies was a more tedious and time-consuming task. Cho dumped Johnny over the side first, then stripped Virgil of his hat, shirt and life jacket before easing him into the water, as well.
Once he’d donned the dead man’s clothes, Cho pulled the hat brim low over his forehead and took up Virgil’s position on the rear bench. The outboard motor was still running. Cho figured if he would wrangle his way out of the reeds without being spotted, he could race the boat downriver, then ditch it along the banks. After that, he’d try to find a way back to the safehouse.
Using one of the oars, Cho pushed the boat away from the bodies as well as the stolen personal watercraft, then slowly opened the boat’s throttle, heading shoreward as he negotiated his way through more of the reed thickets. All the while he listened carefully for the approaching sound of other boats or the man on the other Jet Ski. All he could hear above the purr of the motor, however, was the quacking of a few ducks as they fluttered up out of the water in front of him. Soon he was less then ten yards from the embankment. The water was so shallow he could see the river bottom.
With all his concern about his pursuer’s whereabouts, Cho had failed to consider the possibility that someone might have picked up his trail from overhead, where a steep, thirty-foot-high cliff rose abruptly from the embankment. He was within a few yards of clearing the reeds when a few stones clattered down the face of the cliff, tipping him off to the fact that he was being followed. Startled, he glanced up just in time to see a woman on a mountain bike streaking through the air directly toward him.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Jayne Bahn had done a good job of raising the handlebars as she vaulted over the cliff, but she’d slightly misjudged the distance to the boat, and instead of landing directly on top of Cho Il-Tok, she came up a few feet short, rear wheel striking the outboard motor instead. The boat’s engine died but it had enough play that it gave slightly on impact, tilting to the right so that when Bahn brought down the bike’s front wheel, it glanced off the side of the boat and splashed into the water. Bahn was thrown forward, somersaulting over the handlebars into the nearby reeds. The vegetation was dense and thick enough to help cushion her fall, and saved her from breaking her neck. As it was, however, the crash landing was hard enough to knock her out.
Cho, who’d lunged forward a split second before the bike had struck, had been nonetheless knocked clear of the boat, as well. He hit the shallow water headfirst and caught a faceful of silt from the river bottom before surfacing with a sputter, still shocked by the unexpected nature of the attack.
When he stood, grabbing the side of the boat to steady himself, the water was waist-high around him, so cold that he already could feel his fingers going numb. He splashed some of the mud off his face, then looked across the boat for some sign of his attacker. All he could see at first was the rear tire of the mountain bike; it poked up out of the water at a slight angle and he could see the frame was bent. Then he spotted Bahn, a few yards away, partially concealed by the reeds. She wasn’t moving.
The Korean turned and glanced out toward the river. The surrounding reeds obstructed his view and all he could hear were the drone of a few boats farther out on the river and the lapping of water against the embankment. Cho’s first instinct was to climb back aboard the boat and try to start the engine, but he was still incensed by the way he’d been attacked. So he tracked down the scaling knife he’d used on Virgil and Johnny and waded around the boat, intent on killing the woman who’d tried to thwart his getaway.
The water was only up to the Korean’s knees by the time he reached the reeds Bahn had fallen into. He tightened his grip on the knife and leaned over, using his free hand to part the fronds so that he could plant the blade in the woman’s chest.
“Nice try, bitch,” he murmured.
Cho pulled his arm back, but before he could bring the knife down, he learned the hard way that he wasn’t the only one capable of playing possum. With the sudden speed of a striking cobra, Bahn’s right leg came rising up out of the water in a kicking motion, and while she may have missed her mark earlier, this time her aim was true and the tip of her shoe caught Cho squarely in the groin. The Korean let out a pained yell and backpedaled in the water as he doubled over, giving Bahn the time she need to wrest herself from the reeds. She continued to take the offensive, stiffening her right palm and directing a karate blow toward Cho’s head. He saw the blow coming, though, and managed to throw his left arm up in time to deflect it.
Fighting back his queasiness, the Korean countered with a knife swipe that caught the woman off guard and came within inches of slashing her the cheek.
“Hey, no messing with the face, Killboy,” Bahn snapped.
“I’ll mess with more than your face before I’m done with you,” Cho countered.
He lunged forward, lashing out again with the knife. He deliberately went to Bahn’s left, hoping to coax her closer to shore, where he figured he could use the shallower water to his advantage. Bahn wouldn’t play along, however. She ducked under the swipe and in the same motion skimmed her hand across the water, sending a splash Cho’s way. It was a feeble diversion, but it gave her the time she needed to veer toward the boat, which had listed her way in the water. She grabbed the same oar Virgil had intended to beat the Korean with, then turned back to her adversary. Like Johnny, she held the oar like a club.
“Whaddya think?” she taunted. “Are we getting close to a fair fight now?”
Cho quickly sized up the odds. He had the better weapon, but the woman had more range with the oar. It would be difficult for him to get close enough to stab her. Yes, he could throw the knife, but if he missed, he would have given up his advantage. He decided to stick with his original strategy and took a step back toward the shore. The gravelly river bottom beneath his feet angled up sharply, allowing him to rise farther out of the water. It was now only halfway up his calves, whereas Bahn was still waist-deep. Cho also quickly realized that once he was ashore, he could additionally pelt his foe with stones and small rocks. For that matter, there was a path leading up to the cliff the woman had ridden her bike off. With a head start, he could easily outdistance her and make a run for it.
No, he thought to himself. There was no way he was going to run from a woman. One way or another, he was going to deal with her.
Bahn took advantage of Cho’s hesitation and took a few long strides toward shore, waving the oar back and forth in front of her.
“What’s the problem, Killboy?” she yelled. “You think I’m more of a threat than those two guys you took this boat from? Huh? You didn’t dilly-dally around like this with them, did you?” Bahn swiped the oar across the water, splashing Cho again.
“C’mon. Batter up!”
Cho did his best to look as if the woman’s taunts were getting the better of him. With a worried expression, he took another step backward, then stole a quick look over his shoulder. The embankment was level for a few yards before giving way to the cliff facing. All he had to do was get out of the water and draw the woman in a little closer.
“I don’t have time to deal with you!” he finally scoffed.
Turning his back to Bahn, he bounded
out of the water and headed for the path leading up to the cliff top. As he hoped, the woman was quick to take up the chase, thrashing her way through the water toward shore.
Cho lengthened his stride and was about to break into a run by the time he reached the path. At the last second, however, he suddenly changed course and headed directly toward the sheer wall of the cliff. As Bahn closed in on him, he pushed off and sprang upward, kicking his right leg forward. His foot struck the rock facing four feet up from the ground and he immediately pushed off, doing a reverse somersault in midair.
Bahn wasn’t prepared for the maneuver and she missed when she swiped at Cho with the oar, throwing herself off balance. Before she could recover, the Korean landed on top her, knocking the oar from her hands and tackling her to the ground.
Cho quickly pinned her, leaving one hand free. He still had the scaling knife and he sneered at the woman as he prepared to drive the blade into her.
“You thought they could only do that in the movies, yes?”
Bahn struggled but couldn’t break Cho’s hold on her. Staring up, she saw sunlight glint off the steel blade as it came sweeping down toward her.
This is not good, she thought to herself, resigned to her fate.
Before Cho could deliver a death blow, however, he was distracted by a loud droning. He turned toward the river and his jaw dropped in shock.
The man who’d been chasing after him earlier had just thundered through the reeds and was racing ashore! Cho saw that the man at the controls had no intention of stopping, and though he tried his best to dive clear of the watercraft’s path, it was too late. It bounded out of the water and even after its rider had jumped off, its momentum carried it on a straight course and broadsided the Korean, cracking his ribs and forcing the air from his lungs before skidding past him and crashing into the cliff wall.
Bahn had no idea what had happened until she rolled to one side and slowly rose to her knees. She saw Cho immobilized on the ground beside her, gasping for breath a few yards from the crumpled remains of the Jet Ski. When she turned to look the other way, she saw Mack Bolan rising to his feet and heading toward her.
“Next time you want to get my attention,” he told her, “do me a favor and just yell, okay?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Goffs, California
Hong Sung-nam and Ok-Hwa Zung had been on the road for more than five hours when they reached the Goffs Road turn-off on Interstate 40. The only stop they’d made had been in Victorville, where they’d abandoned their van in an unattended parking lot and helped themselves to a flatbed Ford pickup. Following a two-lane remnant of old Route 66, they soon reached Goffs, an afterthought of a small town located an hour’s drive southwest of Laughlin. There wasn’t even a town to speak of. The highest concentration of business was an intersection near the train line that boasted a general store and long-abandoned filling station. Hong turned right when he reached the junction and raised a trail of dust once the pavement gave way to a gravel road still pocked with chuckholes from the previous winter’s rains.
Two miles down the road, Hong pulled up to a ramshackle, one-story farmhouse abutting a patch of land where weeds were gaining the upper hand on a few haphazard rows of unharvested corn. Behind the house was a rickety barn. A portion of the roof had collapsed years earlier, and it looked as if a strong wind could easily topple the rest of the structure. There was a dust-covered Honda Accord parked inside the barn and there was room for Hong to ease the pickup to a stop alongside it.
Once he’d turned off the engine, Hong reached over and jostled Ok-Hwa, who’d nodded off in the front seat somewhere back near Barstow.
“We’re here,” Hong told the young recruit.
Ok-Hwa stirred and yawned as he glanced out the windshield at the arid wasteland that lay beyond the barn.
“Talk about the middle of nowhere,” he said.
“Why do you thing we chose it?” Hong said. “Let’s go.”
The men left the barn and kicked their way past the tumbleweeds dotting the backyard. As they approached the farmhouse, the rear door opened and a hard-looking Korean in his late thirties stepped out to greet them. Clutched in his right hand was a sawed-off Remington 30-gauge shotgun.
Bryn Ban-Ho had slipped into the country three weeks earlier along with Hong and four other teams of REDI agents. Most of that time he and his men had been traveling back and forth between Laughlin and Las Vegas, keeping defectors Kang Moo-Hyun and Li-Roo Kohb under surveillance and plotting for the day when the teams would finally receive the order to make their move. They’d rented out motel rooms in both cities, but the Goffs hideout served as their base of operations. Bryn had arrived a little more than an hour earlier, fully expecting that Hong would already be there waiting for him.
“What took you so long?” Bryn asked Hong. “And where’s Yong-Im?”
“I got here as fast as I could,” Hong replied, sidestepping Bryn’s query about the defector living in L.A. “Do you think I wanted to get pulled over for speeding?”
“Where’s Yong-Im?” Bryn repeated, glancing past Hong and Ok-Hwa at the pickup.
“There’s no sense in us standing around out here,” Hong responded evasively. “We can talk about this inside.”
Bryn shrugged and stepped back, motioning for Hong and Ok-Hwa to enter. Inside, the farmhouse was even less imposing than the patch of hardpan it rested on. The men strode past an empty kitchen to a living room decorated with a few mismatched chairs, a cheap sofa and several orange crates doubling as tables and cabinets. Another Korean was sprawled across the couch, smoking a cigarette as he watched a game show on the small black-and-white television resting on one of the orange crates. The reception was so poor that it looked like the contestants were being rained on with an endless shower of confetti.
“We had a small problem,” Hong finally explained. Gesturing at Ok-Hwa, he added, “Jackie Chan here got carried away when Yong-Im wouldn’t cooperate.”
“I figured as much,” Bryn said. “And I understand that wasn’t your only problem.”
“What are you talking about?” Hong demanded.
Bryn stared at Hong, surprised. “You didn’t hear?”
Hong frowned. “Hear about what?”
“There was a raid on your safehouse in Koreatown,” Bryn said. “First thing this morning, probably around the same time you were going after Yong-Im.”
Hong swore. Ok-Hwa, however, was more alarmed than angry.
“Was anyone hurt?” he asked.
“Hurt?” Bryn laughed bitterly. “They killed everybody except one.”
“My brother,” Ok-Hwa said, his voice strained. “Was he the one—”
“I don’t know who was killed and who wasn’t,” Bryn interrupted. “I don’t know anything except what we heard on the news.”
Ok-Hwa seemed dazed. He wandered over to one of the chairs and plopped down, raising a cloud of dust. Hong, meanwhile, asked Bryn for more details, and as he listened, he frisked his pockets for the list of defectors he and the other REDI agents had been sent to retrieve. It was a pointless gesture, though, because he knew all too well that he’d left the list back at the safehouse when he’d changed into his cable company uniform.
“But for us it doesn’t change anything,” Bryn concluded. “If they treat the raid as nothing more than a drug bust, we haven’t been compromised. We can still see our mission through.”
Hong nodded. He wasn’t about to tell Bryn about the list. They would just have to take their chances and hope the authorities wouldn’t know what to make of the sheet of paper if they found it.
Bryn led Hong into the rear bedroom. There, yet another REDI agent was standing guard over Li-Roo Kohb, the defector they’d just snatched from the Laughlin Shores Casino. The scientist was unconscious, lying on an unmade bed, his wrists and ankles bound with duct tape.
“Did you get him to talk?” Hong asked.
“Not yet,” Bryn conceded. “But at least he’s still alive,
so we can try again when he comes to.”
Hong ignored the dig. “We can try sodium pentothal,” he suggested. “We didn’t get a chance to use ours.”
“So I gathered,” Bryn said. “We still have our supply and, yes, we’ll try it on him. In the meantime, we still have Kang Moo-Hyun to deal with.”
“I’ll take care of him,” Hong volunteered.
“The same way you took care of Yong-Im?”
Hong bristled. “I already told you, that was Ok-Hwa’s doing.”
“You were in charge,” Bryn countered.
“Yes,” Hong retorted, “and because you asked to borrow my team so you could cover both Laughlin and Las Vegas, I was left to rely on the local product. My mistake. It won’t happen again.”
Bryn met Hong’s gaze and replied, “Your point is taken. Go ahead and take Las Vegas if you want. I understand your desire to save face.”
Hong was about to snap at Bryn but caught himself. There was nothing to be gained by any more petty bickering. Forcing himself to calm down, he told Bryn, “I want to leave Ok-Hwa here. I’ll borrow back a couple of my own men for the job, if that’s all right with you.”
Bryn shrugged. “Help yourself,” he said.
“I’ll take Woo-Ki,” Hong said, gesturing at the man guarding Li-Roo Kohb. “And Cho Il-Tok.”
“Cho might be a problem,” Bryn responded. “He’s not here.”
“Where is he?”
“After we got our hands on Li-Roo, he decided to stay behind.”
“In Laughlin?” Hong couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Why? To do what? Gamble?”
Bryn smiled. “I think it was another vice he had in mind. You know Cho. Give him a chance and he’ll do his thinking with the brain between his legs.”
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