As he’d hoped, the flare had taken his assailant by surprise, temporarily blinding him, and though the gunner continued to shoot from the gully, he was firing blind and his shots flew wide of their mark. Bolan charged forward. When he spotted the enemy, he dived forward, crashing through the tumbleweeds and lashing out with the butt of his pistol. Bolan caught the man squarely on the wrist, forcing him to drop his mini-rifle. The Korean screamed and tried to fight Bolan off, but the Executioner easily overpowered him and knocked him unconscious with a karate blow to the back of the head.
By now the flare’s light was dissipating, but the Apache war chopper had drifted overhead and in the glow of its searchlight Bolan got a better look at his captive. The REDI operative was young, probably in his early twenties, wearing camou fatigues, desert boots and a dark beret. Bolan doubted the man had been working alone, and he glanced up and waved for the chopper to direct its beam elsewhere so that he wouldn’t be an easy target for the man’s cohorts. Crouching low in the gully, he looked around, gun at the ready.
By now FBI Agent Scanlon and Jayne Bahn had made their way up the hillside. Bolan saw them fan out, waiting for the Apache to reveal the other REDI agents. Instead the searchlight shone upon the bodies of Yokota and two of the slain agents. When there was no further enemy fire, the chopper moved off, directing its searchlight elsewhere along the hilly terrain.
Bolan turned his attention back to his prisoner. He stripped the weapons from his ammo belt and used it to bind the man’s ankles together, then converted the Korean’s own belt into makeshift handcuffs, tethering his hands behind his back. By the time he’d finished, the Korean had regained consciousness. His eyes, like Bolan’s, had adjusted to the moonlight and he stared up at his captor with defiance.
“You’re lucky we need a stool pigeon,” Bolan said with a scowl as he yanked the guy to his feet.
If Tahnk understood Bolan, he didn’t let it show. He continued to glare at the Executioner as he wobbled in place, fighting to keep his balance.
“Sons of bitches!” someone shouted in the distance.
Bolan stared past Tahnk and saw Scanlon crouching over one of his fallen comrades. The Bureau agent continued to swear as he rose to his feet and strode back toward the gully. Even in the pale moonlight Bolan could see the rage in the man’s eyes as he glared at Tahnk Woo-Ki.
“You nearly sliced his goddamn head off!” Scanlon railed, stiff-arming the Korean.
Unable to keep his balance, much less defend himself, Tahnk toppled to the ground like a fallen tenpin. Before Bolan could intervene, Scanlon raised his Colt pistol and pumped two shots into the assailant’s head, killing him instantly.
Bolan rushed forward and grabbed Scanlon by the wrist, then twisted his arm behind his back.
“What’s the idea?” he shouted at the agent.
“Let go of me!”
Scanlon tried to break free, but Bolan yanked tighter on his arm until the agent dropped his Colt. The soldier kicked the weapon to one side, then pushed Scanlon away. The field leader staggered backward but managed to stay on his feet.
“We needed him for questioning!” Bolan told Scanlon.
“Screw that!” Scanlon countered. “Nobody takes my men out like that and just walks away!”
Bolan glanced downhill and saw more agents heading uphill from the housing complex. The last thing he needed was for them to misread his confrontation with Scanlon and start firing. Warily, he picked up the agent’s Colt and handed it back to him.
“What’s done is done,” Bolan told him.
“A-freaking-men to that.” Scanlon eyed the man he’d just shot, then glanced back at Bolan. The rage was gone from his eyes, replaced by the subdued look of someone regretting a decision made in haste.
“All right, look,” he told Bolan, “I lost my head for a minute there, okay? Maybe I shouldn’t have off and whacked him like that.”
Bolan stared at Scanlon, feeling a flicker of empathy despite himself. After all, there’d been times in the heat of battle when he, too, had let an urge for vengeance get the better of him.
“Like I said, it’s done.”
“I know,” Scanlon said. “It’s just…I’ve been written up already a couple times for stuff like this. I can’t afford to go on review again.”
Bolan deliberated a moment, then crouched and quickly unfastened the makeshift binds he’d tied around Tahnk’s wrists and ankles. As he stood, he kicked the Korean’s fallen assault rifle closer to the body, then eyed Scanlon.
“He was armed and wouldn’t surrender,” Bolan said. “You did what you had to.”
Scanlon nodded, a look of relief and gratitude washing across his face.
“I owe you,” he told Bolan. “Big time.”
“Let’s finish up here,” Bolan said, strapping the ammo belt back around his waist.
Scanlon was holstering his Colt when Bahn wandered over, gun in hand. She eyed the slain Korean, then looked at Bolan and Scanlon questioningly. Bolan met her gaze and held it. If the woman suspected something was amiss, she didn’t let it show.
“There’s more bodies over there,” she finally said, gesturing up the hillside. “One of theirs, one of ours.”
Scanlon traded a glance with Bolan, then told the woman, “Yeah, I saw them, too.”
“Did you happen to notice that their guy was shot in the chest?”
“Yeah,” Scanlon said. “I figure Fred nailed him, then got his throat slit before the other guy died.”
“One problem with that,” Bahn said. “Fred’s gun is missing, so I’m not sure he was the one doing the nailing.”
Scanlon frowned and unclipped a flashlight from his belt. He shone the light on the Korean’s body, then inspected the gully where the Korean had been hiding.
“It’s not here,” he announced. He glanced around at the surrounding hills. “Must be one of them’s still on the loose. Let’s keep looking.”
Scanlon withdrew his gun again and moved off. Bahn stayed behind Bolan a moment, then whispered to him.
“Look, I saw what he did.”
“Shit happens,” Bolan told her. “Let it go.”
Bahn stared past Bolan a moment, watching Scanlon scramble up the hillside.
“Done,” she said. “Like the man said, let’s keep looking…”
HONG SUNG-NAM’S lungs burned as he sprinted across the pitched terrain of the foothills. He was moving in the opposite direction from where he’d parked the getaway car, but he was afraid the vehicle had already been pegged and might be under surveillance. He would have to find another way out. So far he’d managed to outdistance the chopper, but he could hear the drone of the rotors behind him and any second he expected the aircraft to come into view and nail him with its searchlight. Once that happened, it would be all over. And so he pushed onward, lengthening his stride in hopes of gaining more ground.
The ploy backfired, however, when he misjudged the lay of the land in front of him and came upon a sudden dip in the slope. His leg gave out beneath him and he pitched forward, landing hard on his shoulder and tumbling across the hard-packed soil.
By the time he’d come to a stop, the wind had been knocked out of him. He lay still on the ground a moment, dazed, then quickly came to and glanced upward. A few hundred yards behind him, the Apache helicopter had just cleared a rise and was slowly headed his way, sweeping the terrain below with its searchlight.
Hong looked around and realized he’d come to a rest at the edge of a dropoff. Twenty feet downhill was a natural culvert that had been lined with concrete, creating a runoff channel to divert floodwaters away from the housing development as well as a nearby two-lane road that wound through the foothills. The road was fifty yards away, and parked off on the shoulder Hong saw two cars, one a late-model Toyota, the other a police cruiser. The police officer had gotten out of his vehicle and was helping the driver of the other car change a flat tire. Their backs were turned to Hong and apparently neither of them had heard him. It was a
small consolation, however, because with the chopper fast approaching, Hong knew he couldn’t afford to stay put. He had to find some kind of cover before the searchlight swept across the culvert.
Grimacing, Hong inched forward and began to crawl down the steep incline leading to the runoff channel, which was cluttered with loose brush and other debris washed down from the hills during rainstorms earlier in the month. If he could reach the debris undetected, Hong figured he might have a chance.
Halfway down the slope, Hong accidentally dislodged a fist-size rock. He grabbed for it, but it tumbled clear of his grasp and clattered down into the channel along with a handful of loose gravel. Hong froze, then threw caution to the wind and scrambled the rest of the way down. He quickly burrowed his way into the debris, wincing as a tree branch jabbed sharply into his ribs. He ignored the pain as well as the throbbing of his ankle and forced himself to lie still.
He was lying flat on his stomach and could no longer see the road, so he had no idea whether anyone had heard him. All he could do was stay put. Fortunately, through all the commotion he’d managed to keep hold of the stolen pistol he’d used to kill Yokota. He held the gun close and listened intently. It was difficult to hear anything, however, above his labored breathing and the pulsing of blood past his temples.
A seeming eternity passed before Hong could make out the chopper, and in the same instant that he heard it, the searchlight swept its way across the culvert. The beam lingered on the clot of debris the Korean was hiding beneath, and Hong couldn’t be certain, but he thought the sound of the rotors was growing louder, which would mean that the chopper was closing in for a better look. He fought the urge to bolt from cover and remained still.
Finally the searchlight panned away, leaving Hong in darkness. The Korean slowly backed out from under the debris, rose to his knees and stared out at the road.
The chopper was hovering a few feet above the asphalt, and the police officer pressed his cap to his head as he ducked below the rotor wash and approached the pilot. Hong could hear shouting but couldn’t make out what was being said.
Moments later, the officer retreated from the chopper and it rose into the air and banked sharply, then drifted away from the road, continuing its search of the surrounding hills. Hong remained in the channel, gun in hand.
Out on the road, the police officer exchanged a few words with the driver of the other car, then got back into his cruiser and flashed his roof lights as he sped off. Hong saw his chance and went with it. He rose to his feet and furtively made his way up out of the drainage ditch, then headed toward the road.
Up ahead, the driver of the disabled car finished lowering the front end to the shoulder, then retrieved the jack and carried it, along with the flat tire, to the rear of the Toyota. The man wore a Stetson hat and a denim shirt over jeans and a pair of cowboy boots. He’d opened the trunk and was tossing the tire inside when he suddenly stopped and whirled.
Hong was halfway across the road when the man spotted him. A look of fear came over him as he saw Hong’s gun. He was about to cry out when Hong fired. One shot missed but another plowed into the cowboy’s shoulder and a third caught him squarely in the neck. The jack clanged at the man’s feet as he keeled backward off the rear quarter panel of the Toyota, then slumped to the ground. He was dead by the time Hong got to him.
The Korean checked the road to make sure they were alone, then reached over and dragged the dead man to the rear of the car and, with considerable difficulty, hoisted him up and dumped him into the trunk. He was fishing through the man’s pockets for his keys when he saw the headlights of an approaching car.
Hong quickly found the keys and slammed the trunk hood, then grabbed the fallen Stetson hat and put it on, lowering the brim over his forehead. He reached the driver’s-side door just as the other car was driving past. It was an SUV driven by a middle-aged woman. Tilting his head downward so the woman couldn’t get a good look at his face, Hong waved nonchalantly as he opened the car door. The woman waved back and drove on.
With a sigh, Hong eased himself behind the steering wheel and slid the key into the ignition. The sound of the engine turning over was music to his ears. He put the car into gear and eased his way onto the road, then accelerated up to the speed limit. After rounding the first bend, he came to a stoplight. A right turn would take him to the Strip. He chose instead to go left and was soon on Interstate 5. He kept an eye open for the turnoff to Boulder Highway, which would eventually lead him back to the safehouse in Goffs. There he could plot his next move…
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Changchon Mountain Range, North Korea
Anyone looking for evidence of Kim Jong-il’s iron-fisted control over the citizenry under his rule had to look no further than the concentration camps. The camps had first sprouted up in the wake of the Korean War and had targeted primarily Japanese-Koreans, but over the years the ranks of the imprisoned had swelled to the point where now more than a quarter-million individuals—nearly ten percent of North Korea’s entire population—had been yanked from the streets and carted off to the twenty-four “rehabilitation centers” spread throughout the country.
Few of the inmates were criminals in the true sense of the word. According to an estimate by Amnesty International, for every prisoner guilty of a true criminal offense, there were twenty who had been sent to the camps for far more dubious reasons that varied from unlawful assembly or participation in religious ceremonies to such petty infractions as an inability to recite, on command, Kim’s First Inaugural Address. And there were instances in showcase cities like Pyongyang and Kaesong, where those who perceived as to too old, infirm, or merely unattractive were shunted off to the camps so that they wouldn’t sully Kim’s ongoing attempts to portray his isolated country as “heaven on earth.”
Most of those incarcerated came to accept their fate with meek resignation, but, understandably, there were also those who came into the prisons boiling with anger and resentment, and for them the inhumane conditions at the camps only served to fuel their rage at Kim and the regime that had kept him in power since the day he’d been handed the reins of power by his ailing father, Kim Il-Sung.
Nowhere had malcontent festered closer to the boiling point than at the facility in the Changchon Mountains, and for those prisoners who were determined to put an end to the cruelty and barbarism heaped upon them, this day’s incident at the poppy fields had been the last straw.
For weeks, a handful of inmates had been plotting their move, and in that time they’d carefully approached others in the camp, slowly amassing a group of nearly seventy men and women willing to stand up to their torturers and try to overthrow them. And now, in the dead of night, while the others slept, the masterminds behind the plot huddled close in their barracks to discuss their options.
“We’ve waited long enough,” Prync Gil-Su whispered to his co-conspirators. “It is time to act.”
Prync was a rarity among the prisoners. As recently as six weeks ago he’d been a high-ranking officer with the KPA whose loyalty to Kim Jong-il had been unquestionable. All that had changed the day when, while inspecting the latest renovations to the palatial mausoleum where the remains of Kim Il-Sung had been interred following his death, Captain Prync had casually speculated how much food and medicine could have been purchased with the hundreds of millions of dollars that had been poured into the monument.
In the weeks prior to the visit, Prync had been saddled with the logistical task of burying sixteen thousand famine victims in the central province of Pyongan-Namdo—a mere fraction of the three million North Koreans who’d died of starvation over the past dozen years—and he’d spoken out in mere frustration, never expecting his comments to be passed along, much less taken as a direct jab against Kim Jong-il.
But two days later he’d been hauled from his bed, shackled and beaten in front of his family, then shoved into a truck by goons working for the Ministry of Internal Security. It hadn’t been until he was halfway to Changc
hon that someone had bothered to inform him that he’d been found disloyal to the regime and sentenced to the concentration camps. His pleas of innocence had only earned him further beatings, and since arriving in Changchon he’d been cut off from all contact with his family, though he’d been told that they, too, had been imprisoned at another camp somewhere in the north provinces.
Over the past weeks Prync’s time had been divided between the mines and the rock pile, and during that period he’d overheard enough other tales of wrongful imprisonment to forever shatter his delusions about Kim Jong-il and the DRNK party apparatus he controlled. Far from rehabilitated, Prync had been turned into a revolutionary, and these days he lived for the chance to help wrest Kim from power. First, however, there was the matter of getting out of prison.
None of the others argued Prync’s call to move up the timetable for action. In fact, his closest colleague and confidant at the camp, Vae Jae-Bong, a former college instructor at Kim Il-Sung University in Pyongyang, was quick to second Prync’s motion.
“We have everything in position,” said the one-time professor of anthropology. “I know we said that we were going to wait for the rainy season, but the more we delay, the more deaths there will be.”
“And the greater chance that they’ll learn of our plot,” whispered another of the men.
“There remains the problem of subduing the guards,” Prync replied. He turned to Vae. “Has the trustee come down in his price yet?”
Vae shook his head grimly. “I spoke to Chung-Hee today. He’s holding firm.”
Prync cursed under his breath. Ahn Chung-Hee headed up the camp kitchens and was responsible not only for prisoner rations, but also meals for Lieutenant Corporal Yulim and the entire camp’s security detail. Ahn had access to the black market and claimed it might be possible for him some morning to lace the soldiers’ food with enough morphine and tranquilizers to dull their senses or possibly even incapacitate them for a few hours, greatly increasing the chances of a successful prison uprising. The cost for his treachery was high, however, and no one at the camp had the means by which to smuggle in enough cash to meet his price.
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