Ballistic Force

by Don Pendleton

  Dahn thought it over and responded, “It’s simple. Just forego the ransom.”

  Despite the gravity of the situation, Yulim found himself grinning. Unwittingly, he’d already set into motion the best means of saving himself.

  “I already postponed exchanging the prisoners for the ransom,” he told Dahn. “I said it was because we suspected Lim might be a spy. But what if it were to come out that the real reason was that I suspected General Chine’s motives for the kidnapping? I could make it look as if I wound up helping you make your case against him.”

  “One problem with that,” Major Jin interjected. “You’ve already told me that you yourself negotiated the ransom terms with Lim. He’ll refute your story.”

  “Not if he’s dead,” Yulim countered. “Give me a few moments and I’ll figure out a pretext for killing him and his family so they can’t talk.”

  “Lim is not the only one who needs to be silenced,” Dahn said. “I spoke with General Oh when I first arrived, and unfortunately I briefed him too much on what I was up to. Now he’s in a position to shoot holes through whatever story I might try to tell my superiors.”

  Yulim glanced at Major Jin. “Is Oh still here?”

  Jin shook his head. “He was just leaving as I was on the way over. He’s already on his way back to Kaesong.”

  “I could probably overtake him on my motorcycle,” Dahn offered.

  Jin eyed Dahn skeptically. “Nice try, but I don’t think we can trust you that much yet.” The major extended his hand, palm up. “Why don’t you just give me the keys?”

  The sergeant surrendered the keys and was about to further plead his case when Jin suddenly grabbed a whiskey bottle resting atop the commandant’s wet bar and turned on Dahn, swinging it like a club. The undercover agent tried to duck, but his reflexes were too slow and the bottle caught him squarely across the bridge of the nose. He reeled backward, falling over the corner of Yulim’s desk. Unconscious, he landed on the floor with a loud thump.

  Yulim looked down at Dahn’s limp form, then glanced up at Major Jin. “Was that really necessary?”

  “I owed a little something for trying to bug my office,” Jin countered. “Besides, with a black eye and a broken nose, he’ll have more credibility when we put him to use helping to clear up this mess we’ve gotten caught up in.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Camp Bonifas, South Korea

  Since his return from the Joint Security Area, Akira Tokaido had resumed his original assignment of helping the Army’s CRCC radio crew try to descramble the military frequency used by the KPA. He welcomed the challenge, not only because it called upon his expertise, but also because it demanded his full attention and kept him from watching the clock and chafing his nerves counting down the time left before his kidnapped cousin’s family would be released.

  And now, after several painstaking hours the intensified efforts had finally paid off.

  Thanks largely to Tokaido’s incessant tweaking of the directional controls operating the bases satellite dish receptors, a communiqué being sent out from the North Korean capital of Pyongyang had just been intercepted, and Tokaido was as stunned as everyone else by the contents of the message.

  “A coup?” he said. “All this time we thought they had their hands full playing shell games with their nuke arsenal and it turns out they’re in the middle of trying to put down a coup?”

  “Sure looks that way,” responded the officer working next to him. “From the sound of it, though, I think the whole coup thing more preemptive than prescriptive. They’re trying to nip it in the bud.”

  “Yeah, I got that,” Tokaido said, scanning the translation of the intercept. “And you had to figure there’s been some amount of rumbling in the ranks. But still, the idea that somebody on the inside is gunning for Kim Jong-il puts a whole new light on things.”

  “Amen,” the other man replied. “And if they start fighting over who gets to put their finger on the button for those nukes, look out.”

  The remark gave Tokaido an idea. “Maybe we ought to run with that.”

  “What do you mean?” the other man asked.

  “We could try ghosting a response on this same frequency,” Tokaido explained. “Word it the right way and maybe we can get them to confirm whether they’ve got their nukes stashed in Changchon. It’d beat waiting for NSA to redirect their sat-cams back over the mountains.”

  “Not a bad idea,” the other man said. “Let’s give it a shot.”

  Tokaido rose from his chair and stretched, then started across the room. Before he could collar the radio team’s North Korean translator, however, he was distracted by a loud curse coming from Colonel Thomas Michaels, who’d been on the phone much of the time since returning with Tokaido from Panmunjom.

  “Those freaking bastards!” Michaels yanked off his headset phone and pounded his fist on the table he was working at.

  “What happened?” Tokaido asked, veering over to Michaels’ station.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  Tokaido instantly felt a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. “My cousin?”

  Michaels nodded gravely. “They just called off the exchange.”

  “What?” Tokaido said.

  “They’re saying now they think he might be a spy.”

  “What a crock! What makes them say that?”

  “Beats me,” the colonel said. “And they cut off without setting up another time for doing the switch.”

  “Were we able to trace the call?” Tokaido asked.

  “It was scrambled, but we know it was a cell phone,” Michaels responded. “Same relay tower as the first call, but that’s all we’ve got to go on, and they’ve got at least a dozen different military installations within range of it.”

  “Wait a minute,” Tokaido said. “That tower’s atop Changchon Peak, right?”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  “Then it should be able to act as a server connect for callers on both sides of the mountain range,” Tokaido theorized. “The ones we were looking at before were all on the south flank, facing the DMZ. At the time we didn’t know about this mining camp my people stumbled on.”

  As he sorted through the haphazard heap of papers on his desk, Michaels said, “What, you think they’re holding your cousin in the same place where they’re hiding their nukes?”

  “It’d make sense, don’t you think?” Tokaido said. “I mean, it’s secure, it’s out of the way—”

  “And it’s within range of that relay tower,” Michaels interjected, glancing at the topo map he’d managed to track down amid his papers. “Maybe you’re on to something here, after all. The question is, what do we do about it?”

  “Simple,” Tokaido said. “You’re already planning to deploy an ops squad across the DMZ, right? Instead of dropping them on the coast, just do a deeper insertion.”

  “Well, going deep’s a little bit trickier.”

  “I know that,” Tokaido said. “But it can be done, right? I say we quick playing guessing games and try to get to bottom of things. Let’s hit this base and find out what the hell’s going on.”

  Michaels stared silently at the topo map for a moment, making the calculations in his head. Then he looked up at Tokaido and said, “Okay, buddy, we’ll go with your gut on this one. I’ll have that ops force ready to ship out at nightfall. I know it’ll mean waiting, but the darker it is when we come in, the better our chances.”

  “Great,” Tokaido said. “One more thing, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  Tokaido caught the colonel’s gaze and held it firm. “I’m going along.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Changchon Mountain Range, North Korea

  General Oh Chol was filled with misgivings as he headed back to Kaesong. His inspection tour of the Changchon facility had started out well enough, but any sense of optimism and well-being had been eroded during the last hour of his stay, and it was a toss-up as to which encounter had
unnerved him most: his clash with Major Jin, the revelations of Sergeant Dahn, or the abject sniveling of the teenaged girl who had ridden with him in the jeep as far as the poppy fields. Whatever the case, his mood had darkened, and as the jeep he was riding in made its way along the same dirt road that had brought him to Changchon the day before, his back once again began to act up on him. I’m getting too old for this, he thought to himself, wincing as the jeep’s suspension was challenged by yet another deep rut left by the multiaxled missile transporters that had taken the same roadway en route to the mountain storage facility. Yet another transporter was scheduled for delivery later that night, but Oh wondered if plans had changed in light of the stepped-up investigation into Jin’s and Yulim’s possible link to Operation Guillotine.

  “What a mess,” Oh murmured.

  “What’s that, sir?” the driver asked.

  “Nothing,” Oh said. “Keep driving. And try to steer clear of those ruts.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Oh withdrew his cell phone. He’d tried calling his nephew before leaving the rehabilitation site, but Park Yo-Wi had been busy. The general wanted to apologize for the way he’d dismissed Park’s suspicions about Jin then lectured him on the need to allow for minor discretions on the part of senior officers. As if Jin’s apparent part in a conspiracy against the government was anything minor!

  The general was dialing Park’s number when, above the drone of the jeep’s engine, he heard the droning of another motor. Puzzled, he glanced over his shoulder. They’d just rounded a bend in the road, so at first he couldn’t see anything, but as the jeep reached a straightaway, Oh finally spotted a man on a motorcycle headed their way. The driver saw the biker, as well, in the rearview mirror.

  “I think it’s the engineer who just rode up from Kaesong,” the driver said.

  “I think you’re right,” Oh said. “Pull over and let him catch up.”

  The driver eased off on the accelerator and waited until he came on a spot where there was enough of a shoulder for him to pull over. Oh, meanwhile, was about to hang up his cell phone when his nephew got on the line. It was hard for the general to hear him, however, over the loudening whine of the approaching motorcycle.

  “Yo-Wi, it’s your uncle,” Oh said, raising his voice and pressing the cell phone closer to his ear. “I want a word with you but I’ll have to call you right back. I’m in the middle of…”

  Oh’s voice trailed off as the motorcycle came to a stop alongside the jeep and he suddenly found himself staring down the bore of a Ruger .22 pistol. The biker’s helmet visor was tinted, so Oh had no way of knowing it was one of Jin’s subordinates, a low-ranking private named Euikon Gryg-Il, who was about to pull the trigger on him.

  As soon as Oh’s driver realized what was happening, he tried to shift the jeep back into gear. Before he could do so, however, the biker turned the Ruger on him and pulled the trigger. Oh tossed his cell phone aside and began to scramble out of the jeep, but Euikon casually shifted his aim back and fired twice more, putting one slug through the general’s shoulder and the other through his skull. Oh slumped limply halfway out of the vehicle.

  The killer dropped the kickstand on the motorcycle, then left the engine idling as he strode over to the jeep to make sure both Oh and his driver were dead. As he was doing so, he heard the faint voice of Park Yo-Wi on the fallen cell phone. The private reached into the jeep and grabbed the cell phone, disconnecting the call. Before returning to the motorcycle, he slipped the cell phone into his pocket. Once back at Changchon, he would turn the phone in to Major Jin so that he could check the number Oh had called and have it cross-referenced to determine who the general had been talking to when he’d been shot. Euikon suspected that once the caller was identified, he would have to be tracked down and taken care of, as well.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Zane Island, Pacific Ocean

  “I’ll see you in a few hours, then,” Mack Bolan said, wrapping up his long-distance call to Akira Tokaido.

  “We’ll be ready and chomping at the bit,” Tokaido responded over the secure line Bolan had commandeered after his return to the Army’s air base on Zane Island.

  Bolan ended up the call. When he emerged from Major Cook’s office, the officer was waiting for him in the adjacent squad room.

  “We’re all set,” Bolan told him.

  As the men left the squad room and headed for the airfield, Bolan quickly briefed Cook on the gist of his three-way conference call with Tokaido and his contact in the States. He explained that once he’d learned of plans to fly a special ops force into North Korea to seek out Lim Seung-Whan and the other waylaid kidnap victims, he’d suggested that the Bonifas crew needn’t take on the risks of attempting a deep insertion in a U.S. plane that could be picked up by KPA radar. Instead, they could stay put and wait to be picked up by the ops crew Bolan and Cook were assembling here on the island. After all, the Zane crew planned to stick with the original itinerary plotted for the FETC Young-333, using the North Koreans’ own cargo plane to infiltrate their air space. The only challenge would be deviating from their assigned flight path as they began their descent for Kaesong so that the commandos could be air-dropped closer to the Changchon enclave. Of course, once the drop was made, the plane would promptly double back to Incheon, hopefully before the KPA began to realize that their long-sought defectors weren’t being brought back home, after all.

  “Speaking of the defectors…” Cook said once Bolan had finished briefing him. They’d reached the airfield and both men saw Li-Roo Kohb, Shinn Kam-Song and Shinn’s wife, Mi-Kas, waiting to board a Cessna Citation X that would soon take them to Hawaii. There, Bolan suspected the trio would have to endure yet another debriefing as well as a tongue-lashing for having violated the terms of their defection, but eventually they would be back on the mainland and in a position to get their lives back in order. No matter how rough it might be for them to yet again readjust to new identities, Bolan hoped they would realize how much better off they were than if the REDI agents had managed to haul them back to their homeland.

  When Shinn Kam-Song spotted Bolan and Cook, he motioned to his wife and Li-Roo Kohb, and soon the three of them were shuttling across the tarmac toward their liberators. Once they reached the Americans, Shinn said, “We were hoping to see you. We owe you our lives.”

  “Just doing our jobs,” Bolan told them.

  “How can we thank you?” Shinn wanted to know.

  “Play it safer this time,” Cook responded. “Remember, this isn’t North Korea. Here, the people checking up on you are doing it for your own good. Understood?”

  Bolan and Cook exchanged a few more words with the defectors as they led them back to the Cessna, then the Executioner excused himself and veered over toward another plane that had landed on the runway earlier. It was a C-130 Hercules on a supply run from Oahu. The unloading process had already begun, and along with the usual shipment of equipment and food rations, the plane’s cargo included nearly two dozen wooden caskets intended for the victims of the firefight that had taken place earlier on the other side of the island. Jayne Bahn stood near the rear of the plane, her right arm in a sling, watching the caskets being placed on a tram for the short trip to the nearby hangar where the bodies had been transferred. She didn’t notice Bolan until he’d reached her side. When she turned to him, Bolan could see that she was in a somber mood.

  “If that bullet had hit me another inch to the right, one of those caskets would be for me,” she reflected.

  “Perspective,” Bolan said. “An hour ago you were complaining because you couldn’t finish out the mission.”

  “That still sucks but, yeah, at least when I fly back I’ll be riding first-class instead of lying horizontal.”

  “Not a bad consolation prize,” Bolan said. “And if that gang-banger back in L.A. fingers Hong as the guy who killed Starr, you’ll have done what you set out to do.”

  “Yeah, maybe so,” Bahn said. “Hell, I might even ge
t some of that bonus I was talking about.”

  “Don’t spend it all in one place.”

  Bahn forced a smile. “So, when do you head out?”

  “Soon,” Bolan said.

  “Good luck to you.”

  “Thanks. I have a feeling I’ll be needing it.”

  “You’ll be fine.” Patting her sling, Bahn added, “I’ll be up and running in no time myself. How long do you figure it’ll be before we crash into each other again?”

  “I’ll let the Fates take care of that.”

  Bahn stared into Bolan’s eyes, then leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. When she pulled away, she told him, “You never talk about your love life, but I assume there’s someone out there burning the home fires.”

  “Something like that.”

  She smiled again, then glanced to her right. The defectors were signaling to her from alongside the Cessna.

  “Well, there’s my ride.” She punched Bolan lightly on the shoulder. “Go knock ’em dead, soldier.”

  “Will do,” Bolan said.

  He turned and watched Bahn stride across the tarmac. He knew the odds were he’d never see her again. But then, he’d thought the same thing twice before, only to find their paths cross again.

  “Who knows,” he murmured to himself. “Time will tell….”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Changchon Rehabilitation Center, North Korea

  As the guards dragged him through the twilight from Yulim’s bungalow to the prison yard, Sergeant Dahn had little trouble playing the part of a disgruntled malcontent. His skull still throbbed from where Major Jin had struck him with the whiskey bottle, and he had to breathe through his mouth because his sinuses were clogged from the swelling of his broken nose. And instead of one black eye, Dahn had two. Except for his uniform—bloodied from his nose—he looked like a boxer who’d wound up on the wrong side of one too many prize fights.

  Dahn’s mood matched his sorry appearance. Once he’d come to the floor of Yulim’s den, Jin and the commandant had dragged him to the phone and presented him with a scripted preliminary report informing MII that suspicion of complicity in Operation Guillotine had shifted to several of Jin’s subordinates, including the private who’d been dispatched to kill General Oh. Dahn had had a gun to his head when he’d called in the report, with Jin vowing to pull the trigger if Dahn strayed from the script and tried to slip in anything that sounded like a possible code phrase that would inform MII that he was making the report under duress. He’d been told to blame a head cold instead of a broken nose for the obvious change in his voice.