“Maybe it’s not money they’re after,” Tokaido suggested

“Maybe they’re angling for an exchange. Maybe they want to barter my cousin for the members of the nuclear team they can’t get their hands on. What’s the latest on that?”

“Well, so far, assassins have killed one of the defectors and nabbed another,” Kurtzman said. “We stopped them, though, in D.C. and Chicago, and Mack’s on his way to Vegas in case they try to make a move on the guy there. That leaves Shinn, who’s dropped under the radar.”

Moments later Colonel Michaels burst into the comm room. “Your cousin just contacted his business partners in Seoul,” he informed Tokaido. “His family’s being held in North Korea along with three other friends. The North is asking for a ransom.”

One of the world’s hot spots just got hotter.

Other titles available in this series:

Takedown

Death’s Head

Hellground

Inferno

Ambush

Blood Strike

Killpoint

Vendetta

Stalk Line

Omega Game

Shock Tactic

Showdown

Precision Kill

Jungle Law

Dead Center

Tooth and Claw

Thermal Strike

Day of the Vulture

Flames of Wrath

High Aggression

Code of Bushido

Terror Spin

Judgment in Stone

Rage for Justice

Rebels and Hostiles

Ultimate Game

Blood Feud

Renegade Force

Retribution

Initiation

Cloud of Death

Termination Point

Hellfire Strike

Code of Conflict

Vengeance

Executive Action

Killsport

Conflagration

Storm Front

War Season

Evil Alliance

Scorched Earth

Deception

Destiny’s Hour

Power of the Lance

A Dying Evil

Deep Treachery

War Load

Sworn Enemies

Dark Truth

Breakaway

Blood and Sand

Caged

Sleepers

Strike and Retrieve

Age of War

Line of Control

Breached

Retaliation

Pressure Point

Silent Running

Stolen Arrows

Zero Option

Predator Paradise

Circle of Deception

Devil’s Bargain

False Front

Lethal Tribute

Season of Slaughter

Point of Betrayal

Ballistic Force

Mack Bolan®

Don Pendleton

Ambition,

The soldier’s virtue.

—William Shakespeare,

Antony and

Cleopatra, III, i

Violence and injury enclose in their net all that do such things, and generally return upon him who began.

—Lucretius,

99–55 B.C.

All too often innocents suffer because of the grand ambition of people in lowly positions of power. The way I see it, my job is to even the score, to restore balance and mete out justice.

—Mack Bolan

Much thanks to Feroze Mohammed for continued patience, support and understanding

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

CHAPTER FIFTY

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

CHAPTER ONE

Koreatown, Los Angeles, California

The two men huddled in the littered backstreet alley. “Are you sure you’re okay with this?” John Kissinger asked Mack Bolan, a.k.a. the Executioner.

Bolan smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “A little late to be asking that, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, but still…” Kissinger didn’t finish his sentence.

Bolan was years removed from the time when his actions were motivated primarily by a hunger for vengeance, but Kissinger had asked for help in avenging the torture execution of a long-time DEA field agent he’d worked with before he’d been brought into the Stony Man fold. Given the number of times Kissinger had covered his back in the heat of battle, Bolan wasn’t about to turn down his friend’s request.

“Let’s do it,” Bolan told his colleague.

The two men stood in an alley located at the periphery of L.A.’s Koreatown, home for more transplanted natives of that long-divided Asian peninsula than any other locale on the planet. Most of the signs and billboards in the neighborhood—as well as the majority of the omnipresent graffiti scrawls—were in Korean, and the few early morning pedestrians Bolan and Kissinger had driven past while approaching their staging position had been Korean, as well.

The population was continuing to grow and so it was no surprise that this rundown neighborhood of warehouses and loft buildings was slowly being converted into residential housing. Work crews were already out in full force across the alley, gutting the one-time shipping headquarters for a long-defunct furniture manufacturer so that it could be turned into an apartment complex. Bolan and Kissinger welcomed the noise and clouds of dust. They were being backed up by three DEA agents, but there were an estimated twelve Korean gang members holed up in the building they were about to raid: any diversion would help level the playing field once the action began.

The building in question, located around the corner from where the two men were readying their weapons, was a four-story cinder block with faded paint, boarded windows and a condemnation notice posted next to the main entrance. For years the absentee landlord had ignored the city’s demands to make repairs following the ’94 earthquake and any day the structure would come under the wrecking ball. In the meantime, according to DEA intel, the Korean gang—self-christened the Asian Killboys—had taken up residence and made the site the waystation for their drug-dealing. It was there that DEA agent Rick Starr had been taken after a botched stakeout the week before. The feeling was that he’d refused to cooperate while being interrogated, because when his body had been discovered three miles away in a vacant lot next to a strip mall on Western Avenue, he’d been covered with cigarette burns and was missing his tongue as well as three fingers. Kissinger had learned of the torture while attending Starr’s funeral and even before the agent’s body had been laid to rest he’d vowed to strike back against his friend’s tormentors. Now, as he glanced at his watch and confirmed that the raid was about to begin, Kissinger steeled himself and murmured under his breath, “This one’s for you, buddy.”

At 7:35 p.m., right on schedule, a garbage truck rumbled past the renovation site and headed toward the condemned building. Both Kissinger and Bolan knew that a DEA agent was behind the wheel and that another officer was hiding in the rear hold. Bolan leaned forward and peered around the corner, glancing at the rooftop of the building directly adjacent to their target. There, the third agent soon appeared. He rose from a crouch once he reached the roof’s edge and took a few tentative swings before tossing a grappling hook across the twenty-foot gap separating the two structures. His aim was true and when he pulled the line taut, the hook snagged on the other roof’s outer ledge and held firm. Shifting hands, the agent grabbed a short-stocked rifle loaded with tear gas rounds and took aim at one of the few top-floor windows still paned with plate glass.

“Showtime,” Bolan muttered.

In unison, the Executioner and Kissinger charged from the alley and sprinted toward the condemned building. Bolan was armed with a .44 Magnum Desert Eagle. Kissinger’s M-16 carbine had a flash-bang grenade loaded in its submounted M-203 launcher. As Stony Man’s resident weaponsmith, Kissinger had further tinkered with the rifle, shortening the barrel by three inches and the stock by an inch and half, making it more maneuverable in close quarters without sacrificing performance or accuracy.

The Stony Man operatives were halfway to their target when the garbage truck’s hydraulic arms groaned to life, lifting its mawlike scoop out of the hold. As the scoop swept up toward one of the boarded windows on the second floor, the agent hiding inside rose into view. He had a MP-5 subgun slung over his left shoulder, leaving his hands free to use a crowbar on the slab of plywood. Once he’d started to loosen the plank, his colleague on the adjacent rooftop fired a tear gas round into the top floor. By then, the driver of the garbage truck had gotten out of the vehicle and was circling to the rear entrance of the target building, cradling his own MP-5 close to his chest.

When planning the raid, Bolan and Kissinger had taken dibs on the front entrance. As they expected, they found that the windowless, reinforced steel door was locked.

“I got it,” Kissinger said.

Bolan stepped back and quickly donned a gas mask as Kissinger chewed away at the lock and door frame with rounds from his M-16.

Once Kissinger had on his mask, the two men lunged forward, shouldering their combined four hundred pounds of weight against the door—which gave way. They jerked it to one side and charged inside.

The ground floor of the structure had been gutted years earlier and was empty except for loose debris and a few scraps of litter left behind by transients. There was no sign of the Killboys, however. The element of surprise had paid off, Bolan figured. Hopefully they could close in on the gangsters before they spread throughout the building.

“Take the elevator,” Bolan shouted to Kissinger through his gas mask. “I’ll get the stairs.”

The men split up. Bolan rushed through the beams of sunlight slanting in through gaps in the boarded windows. Once he reached the stairwell, he could hear gunshots being exchanged on the next floor up. He took the steps two at a time and hesitated a moment on the second-story landing, then charged into the hallway.

A cloud of tear gas filled the corridor, but through the haze Bolan was able to make out a pair of Koreans who’d just emerged from one of the rooms. They were cursing and gagging but still had their wits about them and had managed to gun down the DEA agent who’d pried open the far window to climb from the garbage scoop into the hall. Wounded, the agent returned fire before slumping to the floor. His shots were off the mark, but he’d held the gangsters’ attention long enough for Bolan to get the drop on them. By the time they turned to face the Executioner, both men had been clipped by rounds from the Desert Eagle.

Bolan then cautiously stalked down the hallway, pausing to check each room he passed. The rooms were all vacant. Once he reached the fallen agent, the soldier crouched and quickly fingered the man’s wrist. He couldn’t find a pulse.

“We’ll get them,” Bolan assured the dead man. “All of them.”

Bolan was rising to his feet when he heard someone enter the far end of the corridor. He whirled and took aim but held his fire when he recognized the DEA agent who’d been driving the garbage truck.

“Keep going!” Bolan shouted, gesturing to the floors above. The other man nodded and disappeared into the far stairwell.

Bolan reloaded his .44 as he sprinted to the other landing and made his way up to the third floor. He entered the hallway just in time to see Kissinger bail out of the elevator. That same instant a grenade went off inside the shaft, shaking the walls and stinging the weaponsmith with shrapnel as its concussive force knocked him to the floor and jarred loose his gas mask.

Bolan rushed forward and slipped his comrade’s mask back in place, then helped him to his feet. Kissinger winced when he put his weight on his right foot, and his left arm was bleeding where a chunk of flying debris had struck it. He ripped open his shirt sleeve and inspected the wound.

“Just a nick,” he said. His ears were ringing from the explosion and he could barely hear his own voice.

“What about your ankle?” Bolan asked.

Kissinger took a tentative step forward and clenched his teeth. “Feels like a sprain. I’ll live.”

Glancing upward, Bolan said, “My guess is they’re all up top, but let’s do a quick sweep here just in—”

Bolan fell silent as Kissinger put a finger to the mouthpiece of his gas mask and pointed to an open doorway two doors down from the ravaged elevator. Sunlight poured out through the opening, betraying the shadow of someone moving inside the room.

Both men dropped to a crouch. Favoring his bad ankle, Kissinger inched forward and took aim at the doorway, then fired the stun charge from his carbine’s grenade launcher. By the time the grenade went off inside the room, Bolan was already on his feet and rushing the doorway.

Just inside the room, one of the Killboys screamed and grabbed at his ears as he writhed on the floor. Bolan kicked away the automatic pistol the man had dropped, then swung around and fired at another two Koreans standing ten yards away next to an upended row of Army cots. Both men went down, but not before one of them had sent a 9 mm Parabelum round whizzing past Bolan’s ear. The shots just missed Kissinger as he hobbled his way through the doorway.

When he saw the first Korean grabbing for his fallen handgun, Kissinger lunged forward and knocked the man out with the stock of his carbine, then took aim at the gangster’s head. He stopped short of pulling the trigger, however, when he detected motion off to his right. He glanced over his shoulder and saw yet another Korean crawling out a far window onto the fire escape.

Bolan spotted the man at the same time and veered away from the toppled cots toward him.

“I got him!” Bolan called.

The Killboy paused halfway out the window and drove Bolan back with a quick shot, then disappeared from view. As the Executioner gave chase, he could hear a steady exchange of gunfire up on the fourth floor. Kissinger could hear it, too. He made sure the man he’d cold-cocked was still unconscious, then limped his way back to the doorway.

“I’ll help them finish things upstairs,” he shouted to Bolan.

The soldier nodded, then crawled out the window onto the fire escape. Glancing down, he spotted the fleeing Killboy. The Korean had already reached the second floor and was getting ready to jump to the ground. Bolan leaned out over the railing and took aim at the man.

“Freeze!” he ordered.

The gangster ignored the command and leaped down to the alley.

One of the renovation workers, wearing white coveralls and an oversize work cap, had wandered over from the adjacent building, and the Korean grabbed hold of him from behind, using him as a shield and pressing the barrel of his pistol to his captive’s skull.

“Damn it,” Bolan cursed as he yanked off his gas mask. There was no way he could get a shot off without risking the worker’s life.

Bolan was debating his next move when, to his amazement, the worker suddenly lashed out with an elbow, jabbing his captor squarely in the ribs. In the same motion, the would-be captive torqued free of the Korean’s grasp and stabbed at the man’s shins with a well-placed karate kick. The Killboy’s leg buckled and he let out a pained cry as he was struck by a second blow, this one to the base of his skull. His gun clattered to the asphalt and he soon followed suit.

In the fracas the worker’s cap had fallen off, and when a spray of long brown hair tumbled out, Bolan realized for the first time that it was a woman. His shock was surpassed moments later with a flicker of recognition.

“Jayne Bahn?” Bolan whispered under his breath.

He quickly clambered the rest of the way down the fire escape, catching up with the woman as she pinned the Korean to the ground, twisting his arm behind his back in a full Nelson. When she glanced up and saw Bolan, Bahn shook her head with equal disbelief.

“Well, well,” she chided. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

CHAPTER TWO

Jayne Bahn was a veteran field agent for Inter-Trieve, a globally active bounty hunter service whose abnormally high success rate had drawn an ever-growing list of high-profile clients, both in the U.S. and abroad. Jayne had done more than her share to bolster the company’s reputation, and several times she’d crossed paths with Bolan while on assignment overseas, most recently during a mission in Indonesia involving jihad insurrection. Now, once again, fate had thrown them together. Bolan wasn’t sure why.

“What are you doing here?” Bolan asked the woman once he caught up with her.

“I think they call it surveillance,” Bahn replied.

The Korean she’d taken on slowly came to, and when he began to struggle against Bahn’s hold had, she gave the man’s arm another sharp twist. He grimaced and began cursing her in his native tongue.

“Yeah, I love you, too, sweetheart,” the woman told him.

By now the neighborhood was alive with the wailing of police sirens. Three squad cars soon screeched into view and the moment they rocked to a stop, out spilled a handful of armed officers. Some went to work cordoning off the area from the throng of curiosity seekers drawn by the bedlam; the others strode toward Bolan and Bahn, guns drawn.

Bolan flashed a badge packet identifying him as a special agent for the Justice Department. His affiliation with Stony Man Farm—not to mention the existence of the Farm itself—was a well-guarded national secret and whenever pressed to identify himself, Bolan usually relied on his Justice credentials. When the officer in charge balked at Bahn’s ID, Bolan quickly vouched for her. Squared away, they turned over their prisoner and headed back toward the Killboys’ hideout. The garbage truck’s engine was still running, but the building itself had fallen eerily silent.

“Okay, now,” Bahn said once they’d reached the broached front entrance, “you’re here because…”

“Uh-uh,” Bolan countered. “Ladies first.”

“Since when was I a lady?” Bahn wisecracked.

“The jury’s still out,” Bolan said, “but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”

“Such flattery, how can I resist?”

Once inside, Bolan led the woman to the nearest stairwell. As they started up the steps, Bahn explained that Inter-Trieve had been hired by the family of slain DEA agent Richard Starr to track down the head of the North Korean outfit supplying the Killboys gang with heroin and methaphetamines.

“That would be Kim Jong-il,” Bolan told her, referring to the rogue nation’s enigmatic leader. “Do they really think you’re going to bring him in?”

“There’d be one hell of a bonus if I could,” Bahn said. “But I think they’d settle for somebody further down the food chain. One of their generals or else the guy who middlemans their stuff to the States.”

“Good luck,” Bolan murmured skeptically. The tear gas had begun to dissipate inside the building, but neither Bahn nor Bolan had bothered to put on a mask and their eyes stung from the lingering residue. The smell of cordite was still heavy in the air, as well, as they bypassed the first three stories, making their way to the top floor.

“At any rate,” the woman went on, “there I was, casing the place out, when some guy plays Batman and goes crashing through one of the windows here. Next thing I knew, all hell was breaking loose.”

She pointed to the top-story window the DEA agent stationed on the adjacent rooftop had crashed through using the grappling hook line. A slain Korean lay dead on the floor just inside the window, an AK-47 at his side.

Halfway down the hall, Bolan and Bahn caught up with John Kissinger and the two surviving DEA agents. They were in a large room where the Killboys stored their drug wares. The agents were looking over a folding table stacked high with street-ready bags of heroin and several cardboard boxes filled with methaphetamine capsules. Kissinger stood over two of the gang-bangers killed in the firefight. Bolan recognized one of them as the man the weaponsmith had knocked out on the third floor; apparently he’d regained consciousness and decided to die fighting instead of making a run for it. Kissinger’s right ankle was still bothering him and he’d bound his wounded arm with a strip of cloth that was fast changing color from white to red. He did a double take when he saw who Bolan had brought into the room with him.

“What do you know…Our favorite party-crasher,” Kissinger said.

“I’ve been called worse,” Bahn countered evenly. “Nice to see you again, too.”

“Let’s wrap this up,” Bolan said.

Leaving the DEA agents to inventory their drug haul, Bolan, Kissinger and Bahn ventured into the hallway and conducted a room-to-room search of the rest of the building. They encountered no further resistance and wound up back in the third-floor room the Killboys had used as a crash pad. Bolan sized up the toppled Army cots and quickly did the math.

“We’ve got two more beds than we do Koreans,” he surmised. “We better take another look around.”

“I don’t think we need to,” Bahn told him.

“Why not?” Kissinger interjected.

“I saw two guys leave right after I got here,” she explained. “They were in a late-model van. Dodge, I think.”

“Did you get a look at the plates?” Bolan asked.

“Hey, I was two buildings away. Give me a break.”

“Not much chance of them coming back here after this,” Bolan said.

“Rats like this have more than one nest,” Bahn theorized. “I’m sure they’ll turn up.”

“Let’s see what else we’ve got here,” Bolan said.

He was already beginning to search the compound. There wasn’t much to go through. Besides the cots, there were a few sheets and pillows, a couple heaps of rumpled clothes and a cardboard box overflowing with fast-food wrappers and soda cans. Kissinger tipped the box over and started looking for clues and evidence amid the trash. Bolan and Bahn turned their attention to the clothes, checking pockets.

“No help here,” Kissinger grumbled, coming across only a few back editions of a local Korean newspaper and a foreign language porno magazine. He flipped through a few of the magazine’s glossy pages, then glanced over at Bahn.

“Nope,” he said. “Thought for a second that might have been you in the Miss November spread here.”

“Har-har,” Bahn deadpanned.

“Hang on,” Bolan said. He’d come across a folded sheet of paper in the back pocket of a pair of jeans. Bahn and Kissinger approached as he unfolded the paper, revealing a computer printout with two columns of names. The printout was in English, but there were Korean characters scribbled alongside either column. Most of the names in the second column had addresses listed beneath them. Only one of the addresses was in Los Angeles; the others were in Nevada, Illinois and Washington, D.C.

“Distribution network?” Kissinger wondered out loud.

“I don’t think so,” Bolan said. “Otherwise all the names would have addresses. Besides, they probably have other distributors back east. It’s gotta be something else.”

Bahn peered over Bolan’s shoulder, then whistled to herself as she pointed at one of the names in the first column.

“Yong-Im Hyunsook,” she whispered.

“Ring a bell?” Bolan asked her.

“I might be wrong, but, yeah, I think so.”

When she didn’t elaborate, Kissinger prodded her. “And?”

“Again, I might be wrong, but if I’m right about this guy’s name, we just might have opened up a whole new can of worms.”

“Get to the point, would you?” Bolan snapped.

“Touchy, aren’t we?” Bahn teased. She went on, “Okay, let me put it this way. If this Yong-Im guy’s who I think he is, we’re definitely not talking about just street gangs and drug-dealing anymore.” Tapping the paper for emphasis, she added, “What we’ve got here is a hit list.”

CHAPTER THREE

Canoga Park, California

It was a little past eight in the morning when Hong Sung-nam pulled his rental van to a stop halfway down the block from Dr. Yong-Im Hyunsook’s one-story tract home. He’d planned on arriving sooner but had gotten hung up in traffic. It had also taken longer than expected to apply the slap-on decals that would make the van appear as if it were part of the local cable company’s truck fleet. Hong was dressed in a plain navy-blue outfit that closely matched the uniforms worn by the company’s field workers. He’d picked up the outfit at a secondhand store in Koreatown the previous afternoon. It was missing the Trident Cable logo, but Hong doubted anyone would notice. If anything, he was more concerned about the short sleeves, which barely covered the freshly inked Killboys tattoo on his right bicep. There was also the matter of the name tag sewn above the right pocket of his shirt. There weren’t many Koreans named Norm.

As he waited inside the van, Hong saw an overweight, middle-aged man in a peach-colored sweat suit jogging his way on the sidewalk. The hit man quickly grabbed the clipboard on the seat beside him and glanced down at it, scribbling gibberish as he waited for the jogger to pass. Moments later, however, he was startled by a rapping on the passenger-side window. Hong looked up and saw the older man gesturing for him to roll down the window. Hong tensed, then leaned over and cranked the handle, lowering the window a few inches.

“What’s up?” the jogger said. “They told me on the phone it’d be a couple days before they could get somebody out here.”

Hong thought quickly and responded, “Change in schedule.” His English was fluent but bore a heavy Korean accent.

“Decent.” The jogger pointed back the way he’d come. “Only thing is, you’re at the wrong end of the block. I’m the last house on the right—22421.”

Hong glanced at his clipboard, pretending to look over his work orders for the day. “I have three calls on this block,” he told the man. “You’re on the list.”

“Perfect,” the jogger said. “With any luck, I’ll be able to catch the ball game tonight, right?”

“Right,” Hong said.

The older man stepped back from the van and resumed his jogging. Relieved, Hong tossed the clipboard onto the seat and glanced behind him.

Crouched in back of the van was a twenty-year-old Korean-American wearing an outfit similar to Hong’s. Ok-Hwa Zung was a new initiate into the Killboys. His older brother was already a gang member, and this day Ok-Hwa hoped to come at least one step closer to earning his stripes. As such, he was nervous with anticipation. Looking out through the van’s rear windows, he watched the jogger turn the corner, then lowered the 9 mm pistol he’d just yanked from the waistband of his slacks.

“I hope he doesn’t cause us any problems,” Ok-Hwa murmured.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Hong told him. “We’ll be finished with our business and out of here before he realizes he’s not getting any service today.”

“And when that happens he’ll call the cable company,” the younger man countered. “They’ll figure out we were impostors.”

“We have no control over that,” Hong said. “Besides, by then we’ll be halfway to Nevada.”

“If nothing goes wrong,” Ok-Hwa said.

“Nothing will go wrong,” Hong assured him. “Now put the gun away and stop worrying.”

The younger man fell silent. Hong turned his attention back to Dr. Yong-Im’s house. They were in an older neighborhood on the western fringe of the San Fernando Valley, an hour’s drive north of the Killboys’ Koreatown headquarters. Large shade trees lined the parkways and over the years their roots had buckled the sidewalks, requiring asphalt patches to keep people from tripping over the raised edges. A few of the yards were well-kept, but most had balding lawns riddled with weeds and surrounded by scraggly, overgrown plants. Hong knew that by U.S. standards this was a lower middle-class neighborhood, but compared to conditions back in North Korea, these people were living in the lap of luxury. And yet they were still concerned about such frivolous things as cable reception. Back home, Hong’s people were lucky if they even had a television capable of picking up state-sponsored broadcasts on the only available channel. Ball game? Back home the only thing to watch was propaganda speeches and reruns of the previous year’s victory parades down the streets of Pyongyang.

Hong’s envy was surpassed only by his hatred for Americans, which had intensified during his surveillance of the neighborhood the past few days. He’d had his fill of the self-satisfied way these people went about their business, oblivious to hardships endured by the rest of the world. If he had his way, instead of a panel van he’d be here in a tank, blasting rounds into these homes and then picking off the residents with a machine gun when they rushed outside in fear. That would show them.

At half-past eight, Dr. Yong-Im, a short, balding man in his early fifties, emerged from his house and picked up the copy of the morning paper lying in the driveway. He took the paper with him as he got into his Camry sedan and backed out into the street, then headed away from Hong’s van toward the far end of the block. If he stayed true to his routine, Yong-Im would soon be at the local Starbucks coffee shop, where he’d spend the next hour nursing a latte as he worked his way through the paper. Hong figured that would be all the time he and Ok-Hwa would need.

“Let’s go,” Hong told his colleague.

Hong grabbed the clipboard and a tool kit, then the two men got out of the van. An unseen dog yapped a few times at them from one of the neighboring backyards, but they reached Yong-Im’s house without any further run-ins. On the remote chance that anyone might be watching from inside one of the nearby homes, Hong and Ok-Hwa lingered a few moments in the driveway, dividing their attention between the clipboard and the roofline of the house. Hong made it appear that he was trying to track down the cable junction box, then led Ok-Hwa through a side gate to the backyard. There, tall cinder-block walls covered with creeping fig blocked their view of the adjacent yards and, by the same token, insured that no one could see them as they carried out their assignment.

Ok-Hwa had been tapped for the mission because of his experience as a electrician’s assistant, and he put that experience to quick work, pinpointing the home’s security system and then tracking the wiring to an outside circuit box. Once he’d shut down the system, he signaled Hong, who proceeded to use a locksmith’s pick on the sliding-glass door that led to Dr. Yong-Im’s family room. It took him all of thirty seconds to trip the lock and slide the door open.

Yong-Im lived alone, and inside Hong was relieved to see that the place was sparsely furnished. That would make things easier.

“I’ll start in here and work my way to the kitchen,” Hong told Ok-Hwa. “You take the den and the bedrooms. You know what to look for.”

Ok-Hwa nodded. “If he’s lucky, we’ll find it. Otherwise…” The younger Korean grinned malevolently and dragged an index finger across his throat.

Hong corrected Ok-Hwa. “If we don’t find what we’re looking for, the good doctor will only wish he were dead.”

CHAPTER FOUR

South Kangwon-do Province, North Korea

General Oh Chol of the Korean People’s Army grumbled under his breath as the military jeep carrying him through the mountains bounded over yet another deep rut in the narrow dirt road. His lower back was aching, and he’d forgotten to bring along his pain medication. There was a part of him that wished he’d forgone security considerations and taken a helicopter from Kaesong. It would have been faster and a hell of a lot more comfortable, but he understood the need for caution.

After all these years and all the setbacks, things were finally falling to place for Kim Jong-il’s regime, and there was no sense in taking unnecessary risks. Oh knew the U.S. and her allies had spy satellites combing the entire country for signs of suspicious activity, and the sight of a chopper setting down on this supposedly uninhabited side of the Changchon Mountains would be sure to raise a red flag. Traveling by ground was by far the safer course, and Oh figured he could endure a little discomfort for the cause. Besides, once he reached the installation, he figured he’d be able to get his hands on something for the pain.

While the other side of the mountain range overlooked the demilitarized zone and was overrun with heavily armed military posts, here on the north face there was little sign of civilization other than the dirt road, one of several that threaded its way through the rolling terrain. A few bald escarpments and promontories poked up through surrounding vegetation, but otherwise the mountains were so pristinely verdant that global conservation groups were lobbying to have the area declared a wildlife sanctuary. Oh knew there was little chance of that ever happening. After all, why should Kim Jong-il give a damn about a handful of endangered species when the hillsides could be converted to poppy fields?

After another twenty minutes on the road, Oh came upon an area that had already undergone such a transformation. Under the vigilant eye of several dozen armed soldiers, more than a hundred laborers were busy at work on a twenty-acre parcel that just this past spring had been clear-cut and replanted with poppies. The crop was well along and the workers were going from plant to plant, cutting into the podlike bulbs and then scraping the resinous ooze into small containers. Once accumulated into cargo vats, the raw opium would be transported cross-country to government-run pharmaceutical plants in Chongjin and processed into heroin for distribution abroad. Changchon presently contributed only a fraction of the opium grown in the northern provinces, but if things went well here in the trial area, more tracts would be carved out of the local mountainside. The way Oh had heard it, inside of three years, Changchon could be matching the output of all the collective farms combined, doubling the country’s heroin trade and helping to further subsidize Kim Jong-il’s military ambitions.

There were two obstacles to the Changchon enterprise. The first, climatic conditions, was beyond the regime’s control. Poppies thrived best in a warmer terrain with better soil than what the mountains here provided. But the feeling was that by cultivating more and more land, quantity could offset the inferior quality of North Korean heroin compared to that harvested in more favorable environments such as Afghanistan and Myanmar.

The second problem involved the work force, and as Oh’s jeep carried him along the periphery of the poppy fields, he was given a vivid demonstration. Twenty yards to his left there was a sudden flurry of activity. Seven carbine-toting soldiers broke from their positions at the edge of the fields and stormed through the waist-high plants to where one of the workers, a woman in her early sixties, had just slumped to the ground.

Oh motioned for his driver to stop the vehicle and he watched as two of the soldiers jerked the woman to her feet. Blood flowed freely from where she’d slit her wrists with the sharp-edged tool she’d been using to cut open the poppy bulbs. Apparently the soldiers hadn’t gotten to her in time, because she hung limply in their arms until, disgusted, they finally dropped her back to the ground.

The other workers shrank back as one of the soldiers shouted at them while pointing at the body. Oh could hear the officer demanding to know why no one had stopped the woman or at least notified the guards the moment she’d turned the blade on herself. When none of the workers responded, the man barked a command to his fellow soldiers, who promptly raised their carbines and fired. Three workers reeled from the impact of the gunfire and pitched forward, disappearing from view amid the poppies. The others let out an involuntary cry, then quickly fell silent when the rifles were turned on them.

Oh knew this was an all-too-frequent occurrence here in Changchon. The laborers were all interred prisoners at the nearby rehabilitation center, and because it was common knowledge that assignation to the camp was the equivalent of a life prison sentence, all too many workers had taken advantage of the tools they were provided with and opted to commit suicide rather than suffer through an extended incarceration. Those who ran the camp had made it clear that anyone who stood by and allowed a fellow worker to take his or her life would face execution, but obviously the deterrent wasn’t working.

Oh had no stake in the struggling venture, which was run under the aegis of the Ministry of Security, but when Lieutenant Corporal Yulim Zhi-Weon, the camp’s supervising officer, wandered over to exchange a few words, the general couldn’t help offering an opinion.

“Maybe you need to run things more like in Chongjin and the northern collectives,” he suggested. “Use schoolchildren to do the harvesting.”

“And where do we get the schoolchildren from?” Yulim retorted. “Ship them in from Kaesong? I don’t think so.”

“There has to be a better way.”

Yulim glanced at the fields, where soldiers where dragging away the slain workers, then turned back to Oh and shrugged. “There are always more prisoners,” he said. “One way or another, we’ll make our quota.”

“That’s what our Great Leader would like to hear,” Oh responded.

Yulim changed the subject. “You’ve been away the past few months,” he told Oh.

“My services were needed in Pyongyang,” the general replied.

“There has been a lot of activity inside the mountain,” Yulim reported. “Not to mention all the late-night shipments. At least four times a week.”

Oh nodded. “That’s what I’m here to check up on.” The general didn’t bother explaining that the bulk of his time at the North Korean capital had been spent choreographing the clandestine deliveries Yulim had just mentioned. And even though the facilities Oh had come to inspect were located directly adjacent to the concentration camp, what went on inside the mountain was classified and Yulim lacked the necessary security clearance to be brought inside the loop. The lieutenant corporal could pry all he wanted, but he wouldn’t be getting any answers from Oh.

The men were interrupted when a dilapidated army truck suddenly appeared out of the foliage twenty yards to Oh’s right. The truck had arrived at the site by way of another of the dirt roads leading up into the mountains. The rear bed was covered by a canvas shell, but Yulim had apparently been expecting the vehicle and knew what kind of cargo it was carrying.

“Speaking of more prisoners,” he said.

Once the truck came to a stop, officers immediately encircled the vehicle. The rear tailgate was lowered and, one by one, more than a dozen men and women climbed down to the ground and were herded into a single file. Half of them wore peasant rags and had the emaciated look of farm laborers. The others, however, were far better dressed, and a man, woman and a girl in her midteens looked to be part Japanese. Since most of the repatriates had long since been weeded out of the general populace, Oh suspected they were from the south. Spies, perhaps.

Yulim’s attention had been drawn to the Japanese-Koreans, as well, and he seemed particularly focused on the young woman, who had long black hair and striking features. And, unlike the majority of prisoners her age, she showed no signs of starvation and had at least the semblance of a full figure.

“What do we have here?” Yulim murmured, a smile creeping across his face. By the time he turned back to Oh, the smile had bloomed into a wide grin. “Forgive me, General, but it would appear I have some inspecting of my own to attend to.”

“I think you have more in mind than ‘inspection,’” Oh countered.

“Perhaps,” Yulim said.

The lieutenant corporal snapped off a quick salute and moved off toward the new prisoners. Oh had no interest in watching the other officer act out on his lechery, so he signaled his driver and they continued along the road, leaving the poppy fields behind.

After another ten minutes of unrelieved jostling, the jeep reached flatland and soon came to the base of a large gorge cordoned off by three concentric rows of tall cyclone fences, each topped with razor-edged lengths of barbed wire. Prior to its fortification for use as the Changchon Rehabilitation Center, the compound and its honeycomb network of mountain tunnels had served as one of North Korea’s primary mining centers, yielding untold tons of coal, iron ore and magnesite. Most of the mine shafts had been long played out, but chain gangs made up of prisoners capable of more strenuous work than the poppy fields offered were sent daily into the mountain bowels with shovels and pickaxes to seek out new veins or to fill their carts with chiseled leavings.

Once Oh’s jeep had passed through the security checkpoint at the main entrance, the general rode past the crude barracks and the work yard where inmates sifted through the latest haul from the mines. Beyond the yard there were at least a dozen visible openings bored into the base of the nearby mountain. Oh was taken to the most heavily guarded of the openings. There, he climbed out of the vehicle and rubbed his lower back as he left his driver behind and made his way past the sentries, barely acknowledging their salutes.

A well-lit passageway, paved and large enough for a semi-truck to pass through, led him fifty yards deep into the mountain before giving way to a large subterranean bunker the size of an airplane hangar. Unseen generators powered banks of overhead lights that bathed the chamber in a glow so bright that Oh had to squint. Portions of the surrounding walls consisted of bare rock, but for the most part the enclosure—floors, walls and ceiling—was lined with a four-foot-thick layer of reinforced concrete. The far wall had been partitioned off with a row of prefabricated offices and laboratories, and to the general’s right was a two-story housing facility every bit as full of amenities as the concentration camp barracks were deprived. Oh had stayed in one of the officers’ quarters a few months earlier when he’d overseen the initial construction of the bunker facilities, and it heartened him to know there would be a warm bed waiting for him once he’d completed his inspection.

Oh strode to his left, bootheels clomping loudly on the concrete, until he reached the chamber’s storage area. There, concealed inside thick, cylindrical metal canisters mounted to large, seven-axle transporters, were six Taepo Dong-4 intercontinental ballistic missiles. The missiles, three generations removed from the two-stage, Scud-derived, Taepo Dong-1 that North Korea had lobbed into the Sea of Japan back in 1998, had been originally manufactured a hundred miles to the north at the army’s R&D facilities in Sin’gye. Once built and deemed operative, the ICBMs had been dismantled and, over the course of the past three months, using circuitous routes and staggered delivery schedules, Oh had seen to it that the armament had been transferred, one by one, to Changchon. The final missile had arrived two days earlier and reassembly had been completed only a few hours before the general’s arrival.

Oh was looking over the missiles when he was joined by Major Jin Choon-Yei, a short, lean career army officer in his early sixties. Jin, a long-time colleague of Oh’s, had taken charge of operations at Changchon when the general had been called back to Pyongyang, and the major had supervised the site’s transformation into the primary hiding place for North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. Prisoners at the concentration camp, along with Lieutenant Corporal Yulim and the camp’s security force, had been kept in the dark about the nature of the facility and construction had been carried out by military inductees and trusted private contractors.

“Things are coming along nicely, yes?” Jin remarked after the men exchanged greetings.

Oh nodded. “So far, so good. What about the warheads?”

“Over here.”

Jin led Oh past the missiles to a garage-size steel vault imbedded in the mountainside. The door to the vault was closed and guarded by a pair of sentries who stood as rigid as statues, diverting their gazes from the two officers.

“We have four warheads ready for deployment,” Jin told the general, pointing past the sentries at the safe. “The others, as you know, are en route from Yongbyon and Pyongyang.”

Oh nodded. “The next shipment should arrive by tomorrow morning, with the others to follow soon after.”

“We’ll be ready for them,” Jin assured the general.

“Good,” Oh said. “There’ve been no problems, then? No setbacks?”

“None,” Jin said. “The closest thing we have to a problem is some crumbling of the bedrock where we didn’t encase it in concrete. It’s very minor, though.”

The major pointed, dragging Oh’s attention to the area where the warhead vault was imbedded into the raw cavern walls. Small heaps of fallen rubble had accumulated on the ground at the base of the vault and Oh could see faint stress fissures in the nearby rock.

“Keep that monitored,” Oh suggested. “If the fissures widen, I’ll have someone brought in to see if we need to fortify the rock.”

“It probably wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Jin conceded.

Oh made a mental note to call the KPA’s Corps of Engineers regarding the matter, then quickly turned his thoughts to other matters.

“Now, then,” he said, “what about the launch site?”

“I just spoke to your nephew and he says things are coming along,” Jin reported. “And the access tunnels are close to merging, as well.”

“Already?” Oh was pleasantly surprised. He’d made a point not to pry into his nephew’s handling of construction at the missile base, and it appeared now that his faith in the younger man’s talents had paid off.

“Here,” Jin said, leading Oh away from the site, “let me show you.”

Jin’s office was located in the first of the prefab rooms situated along the far wall. Once they’d entered the room, the major directed Oh’s attention to a bulletin board mounted on an easel across from his desk. Tacked to the board was a topographical map of South Pyongyang Province, which was bordered to the west by the Yellow Sea and to the south by the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas. Two thick lines drawn with a marking pen snaked through the Changchon Mountain Range. The longer line, stretching for nearly seven miles, wound its way south from the facility. The second line was far shorter, barely a quarter-mile long, reaching northward from Kijongdong, a controversial North Korean installation located just north of the DMZ. A barely discernible gap marked where the two lines would eventually intersect.

“We’ve been working around the clock in both tunnels,” Jin told Oh. “If all goes well, by morning the tunnels will have connected. Once that happens, it will only be a matter of widening a few stretches and clearing away debris, then we can haul the missiles and warheads to the launch site.”

Oh smiled faintly. From the sound of it, they would achieve launch capacity within a week, well ahead of even the most optimistic projections made a few months ago. Kim Jong-il would be pleased.

“I’ll check the tunnels in the morning,” the general told Jin. “In the meantime, I’m exhausted.”

“Your room’s the way you left it,” Jin assured him.

“Good,” Oh said. “Before I retire, though, I was wondering. My back has been acting up and I forgot my medication. If you could help me out…”

The major smiled indulgently and went to his desk, unlocking one of the side doors. He removed a vial and handed it to the general. “This should take care of the pain and help you sleep.”

There was no label on the vial, but Oh knew the capsules were filled with doses of morphine, a byproduct of the rehabilitation center’s heroin operations. Oh thanked Jin and quickly helped himself to one of the capsules. He was about to excuse himself so that he could get to his quarters before the morphine kicked in when Jin broadsided him with a pointed query.

“Forgive me for bringing this up, General,” the major said. “I know things seem to be going well, but I’ve been hearing certain rumors about the missiles. About how well they might perform.”

Oh’s smile faded as quickly as it had appeared. He turned to Jin, eyes flashing with irritation.

“What rumors?” he demanded.

Jin blanched. He took an involuntary step backward and stiffened.

“Forgive me,” he repeated. “It wasn’t my place to bring this up.”

“What rumors?” Oh pressed.

Jin hesitated, then said, “What I’ve heard is that these missiles are based on designs first drawn up by the Project Kanggye Team. The team that defected.”

Oh struggled to maintain his composure. The mass defection of all five nuclear weapons specialists comprising the Kanggye Nuclear Research and Development Team had supposedly been kept under tight wraps ever since it had been carried out two years ago. The crew, which had devised the means by which to nearly double both the range and accuracy of the Taepo Dongs, had been replaced by other physicists and military scientists who’d discovered that several members of the original team had tampered with their work data prior to defecting. The need to scrutinize every scrap of data to try to rectify errors had effectively derailed the missile program for the better part of fourteen months, and there was still concern that the replacement team had failed to contend with all the problems the defectors had created. And because there was no way to test the Taepo Dongs without attracting the attention of the outside world, the odds of failed launchings or errant trajectories were far greater than hoped for. The ranking brass had done its best to downplay the risks while fast-tracking production of the ICBMs, but in the back of everyone’s mind, including Oh’s, was the concern that a glitch planted by one of the defectors would avoid discovery and prove the undoing of the whole enterprise.

Oh saw no point in trying to deny the rumors. Instead he tried to alleviate the major’s concerns.

“We’ve had teams at work tracking down the defectors,” the general explained. “Once we have them in custody, hopefully they can be convinced to come back and verify whether the missiles can be successfully fired.”

“A wise move,” Jin responded. “But aren’t the defectors all still in America?”

“For now they are,” Oh said. “And for a while they did a good job of hiding from us. But now we know where they are. At least, most of them. Even as we speak, we are moving in to seize as many of them as we can in one fell swoop. With a little persuasion, I’m sure they’ll tell us where we can find the others, as well.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Canoga Park, California

Dr. Yong-Im Hyunsook was two steps inside his house when he realized something was wrong. Normally the security alarm would start bleeping faintly the moment he opened the front door, reminding him that he had thirty seconds to deactivate the system. When he failed to hear the warning bleeps, Yong-Im’s first thought was that he had forgotten to turn the system on when he’d left the house. But when he stared past the entryway and saw that the sliding-glass door in the living room was partially open, a wave of panic swept over him. He recoiled and turned back toward the front door, but before he could make it outside, there was a blur of motion to his left and the next thing he knew someone had grabbed him from behind. In involuntary cry spilled from his lips as he was jerked backward with so much force that he lost his balance and tumbled to the floor, bounding past the entryway tiles to the carpet that blanketed the living room.

He was still down when his attacker strode over and kicked him sharply in the ribs. He groaned in pain and instinctively began to pull himself into a ball. A second kick glanced off his shoulder and caught the side of his head. Through the sudden ringing in his ears he could hear someone sliding closed the door leading to the backyard.

“Don’t hurt me,” the defector pleaded, covering his face with his hands to ward off another anticipated kick. “Just take whatever you want and leave!”

But the intruders weren’t going anywhere. Across the room, whoever had closed the door turned on the living-room television and raised the volume. Yong-Im’s attacker, meanwhile, grabbed him by the shirt collar and began to drag him across the carpet. The collar tightened around the scientist’s neck and cut off his breathing. He gasped and waved his arms futilely, trying to break the other man’s chokehold.

It was only when Yong-Im was on the verge of passing out that Hong Sung-nam eased his grip and gave the other man a final shove before stepping back. Ok-Hwa Zung moved away from the television set and joined him. The younger man had his gun out and was fitting the barrel with a sound suppressor.

Hong, meanwhile, took a small ceramic ashtray off the nearby coffee table and nonchalantly stuffed it into a stray sock he’d taken from Yong-Im’s bedroom.

“We can’t take what we want because we weren’t able to find it,” he told the cowering scientist. “Maybe you can help us out, Dr. Yong-Im.”

Yong-Im froze in place, his horror escalating with the sudden realization that these weren’t mere burglars. That they’d called him by his real name could only mean one thing: they were either from the North Korean secret police or REDI, the dreaded Research Department for External Intelligence. It didn’t matter which entity they represented. Now that they’d found him, Yong-Im knew that he was a dead man. Still, there was a part of him that grasped at the false hope that he could somehow avoid the inevitable.

“You have the wrong house,” the scientist pleaded. “My name is not Yong-Im. My name is Evan Rohri. You can check my wallet. You’ll see!”

Hong and Ok-Hwa exchanged a glance, then Hong suddenly whipped the weighted sock around, striking Yong-Im in the jaw.

The man’s cry was drowned out by the blaring of the television set. A welt began to form on his jaw where he’d been struck.

“I’m sure they gave you a new name when you defected,” Hong taunted the scientist, “but you are Dr. Yong-Im Hyunsook from the Project Kanggye Nuclear Team. There’s no sense trying to deny it.”

“My name is Evan Rohri!” Yong-Im persisted.

Hong lashed out again with the weighted sock. Yong-Im threw a hand up and deflected the blow. His fingers went numb where the ashtray struck them.

Hong signaled Ok-Hwa. The younger man moved forward, grabbing Yong-Im and pinning his arms behind his back. Hong laid into the scientist a third time with the sock, splitting his lower lip and breaking two of his front teeth. Blood began to seep from the corner of his mouth.

“We’ve found you and we know the addresses of the others, except for Shinn Kam-Song,” Hong told the older man. “Tell us where we can find him and maybe we’ll let you live.”

Yong-Im stared at his captors, trembling. He couldn’t help them, even if he wanted to. After they’d defected, the Kanggye Team had been split up and, for their own protection, none of them had been told where the others had been relocated to, much less what their names had been changed to. He spit out the blood pooling inside his mouth and clung to his first defense.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he insisted. “I don’t know about any nuclear team! I’m a retired accountant! I’ve lived here in America since I was a child!”

“Liar!” Ok-Hwa screamed at the prisoner. In a burst of fury, the young Killboy initiate tossed his gun aside and jerked Yong-Im across the carpet, slamming his head against the corner of the coffee table. “Do you think we’re fools?”

Hong reached into his tool kit for a syringe filled with an amber fluid. He had a feeling they were going to need truth serum to get Yong-Im to talk. As he readied the needle, his partner continued to throttle the doctor.

Hong became alarmed by Ok-Hwa’s ferocity and finally set aside the syringe and rushed over to intervene.

“Ease up, you idiot!” he shouted. “We want him alive!”

But Ok-Hwa was caught up in his bloodlust and he continued to hammer Yong-Im’s skull against the tabletop until Hong forcibly pried him away. Even then, Ok-Hwa continued to rage at their prisoner.

“That will teach you!” he seethed.

Hong dragged his protégé aside, pinned him against the wall, then went nose-to-nose with him.

“Who’s running things here?” he demanded.

“He wasn’t cooperating!” Ok-Hwa countered.

“Who’s running things here?” Hong repeated, shaking the younger man.

“You are!” Ok-Hwa relented. “You’re in charge!”

“Don’t forget it!”

Hong released Ok-Hwa and turned back to Yong-Im. The defector lay sprawled facedown on the floor, blood from his mouth discoloring the carpet. He wasn’t moving. Hong crouched over the man and turned him over. Yong-Im’s face was bruised and swollen. His eyes were open, but his stare was vacant. Hong let the man go and slowly stood. Ok-Hwa met Hong’s livid gaze with one of his own.

“I didn’t mean to kill him!” he said. “I was just trying to get him to cooperate.”

“There’s not much chance of that happening now, is there?” Hong said coldly. He turned the television up even louder, then went to a nearby desk and yanked out one of the drawers, spilling its contents onto the carpet. He’d already looked through everything in the desk and taken pains to make it appear that nothing had been disturbed. But now everything had changed. They needed to cover up the real reason for their visit. They couldn’t afford to make it known that the Kanggye Team was being targeted by REDI. Until they got their hands on the other defectors, they needed to maintain the element of surprise.

“Give me a hand!” he shouted at Ok-Hwa. “We need to make it look like he stumbled onto a burglary!”

Ok-Hwa quickly joined in, helping himself to Yong-Im’s wallet as well as his watch and jewelry.

“What do we do then?”

“We stick to the plan,” Hong told him. “We’ll go to Nevada and track down the next member of the team.”

CHAPTER SIX

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

Hal Brognola rarely returned from his White House briefings in a state of good cheer, and this day was no exception. As he disembarked from the helicopter that had brought him from the capital to Stony Man Farm, a clandestine base of operations in the heart of Shenandoah Valley, he trudged wearily past the sun-drenched fruit orchards to the inconspicuous-looking farm house.

As he headed toward the tunnel to the Annex, Brognola ran into Barbara Price, the Farm’s blond-haired mission controller. Price was carrying a file folder filled with intelligence briefs on the North Korea situation.

“I just spoke to Mack and Cowboy,” she told Brognola as she took a seat alongside him in the small electric rail car waiting for them at the mouth of a thousand-foot-long underground tunnel connecting the main house with the Annex. “They knocked out that street gang in L.A., but it turns out drug-running was just the tip of the iceberg as far as what they were up to.”

The rail car purred to life and slowly carried them along the subterranean passage that ran beneath the orchards as well as a stretch of land that had been converted into a poplar grove, the better to sell the Annex’s supposed function as a timber mill. Along the way, Price briefed Brognola on Bolan’s discovery of an apparent hit list involving North Korea’s former Project Kanggye nuclear team.

As he listened, Brognola fumbled through his suitcoat for a cigar. He wasn’t about to light up; he’d cut back on his smoking in recent years and for the most part contented himself to fidgeting with cigars the same way some people used worry beads.

“I’ve got Carmen checking the status of the defectors,” Price concluded, referring to Carmen Delahunt, one of Aaron Kurtzman’s cyber experts. “She should have an update ready for us.”

“Good,” Brognola replied. “If you ask me, though, I’m not sure we’re talking about a hit list, per se.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think these defectors are more valuable to North Korea alive than dead,” Brognola said. “Especially with this whole missile situation going on over there.”

“You have a point,” Price conceded. “What’s the latest on that?”

As succinctly as possible, Brognola rehashed the key points brought up during the White House briefing. For the past three years, the so-called People’s Democratic Republic of North Korea had been using its unchecked nuclear weapons development as a bargaining chip in its demands for economic aid and other concessions from the U.S. and her allies. The ploy had had intermittent success, but each time America had given an inch, DRNK had turned around and asked for a mile, then used balking by the West as an excuse to resume its nuclear agenda. When matters had escalated in recent months, Russia, China and Japan—prompted by concerns about their close geographic proximity to North Korea—had been forced off the sidelines and into the fray. There had been hope that pressure from their closer neighbors would make Kim Jong-il’s regime more willing to make compromises, but the opposite had been the case.

In recent weeks DRNK’s demands had escalated to the point of absurdity. The President was concerned by the sudden change in tact, as it seemed to indicate that the rogue nation now less concerned with negotiation than pursuing its agenda by more aggressive means. The implication seemed clear: North Korea had stalled long enough on the diplomatic front to beef up its nuclear arsenal and was now looking for a pretext to use it. And if all available intel was correct, the range of the DRNK’s missiles was no longer restricted to countries that lay adjacent to North Korea. Word was that the Korean People’s Army now had four-stage ICBMs capable of reaching American targets in a two-thousand-mile-wide swath extending from San Diego to the Great Lakes. And, much as the U.S. had always been concerned about the vulnerability of its troops stationed below the 38th parallel, now a goodly share of the homeland citizenry was lined up in Kim Jong-il’s crosshairs, as well.

Whether North Korea would be foolhardy enough to launch a first-strike attack on the U.S.—thereby ensuring their doom via retaliatory bombing—was still a matter of debate, but the President, for one, wasn’t about to play wait-and-see. At the end of the briefing, his orders had been concise and to the point: find the ICBMs and put them out of commission.

“Obviously we’re working every diplomatic angle possible to diffuse the situation,” Brognola concluded, “but the feeling is that Kim Jong-il is through talking. Which means we’re running out of time. We need to track down those missiles, pronto.”

“Bear’s working OT on the Sat intel,” Barbara Price assured Brognola. “If anybody can use that kind of data to find a needle in a haystack, it’s him.”

“I hope you’re right,” Brognola said. “I could use some good news right about now.”

The rail car finally came to a halt at the underground entrance to the Annex. Brognola followed Price to the Computer Room. The large chamber was subdivided by a handful of computer stations and the far wall was lined with a bank of large, flat-screen monitors. Normally the Farm’s entire cyberteam would be on duty by this time and the area would be a bustle of activity, but at the moment only two of the computer stations were being manned.

Carmen Delahunt, a vivacious, middle-aged redhead recruited from the FBI, glanced up from her keyboard long enough to tell Price and Brognola, “Give me two seconds. I’m in the middle of a download on these defectors.”

“Go ahead,” Brognola told her.

The only other person in the room was crew chief Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman, a burly, middle-aged man confined to a wheelchair in the aftermath of the first—and most deadly—of several attacks made on the Stony Man compound during its existence. Kurtzman was a computer genius and had done a yeoman’s job of staying on top of each new development in the ever-changing field of high-tech intel gathering. Not that anyone would know it by looking at his workstation. The cubicle was in its usual state of cluttered disarray, anointed with coffee spills and strewed with food crumbs, sticky notes and enough clipboards to stock an entire football coaching staff. To the untrained eye the area may have seemed chaotic and disorganized but, as Kurtzman had proved time and again, he could reach through the chaos at a moment’s notice and track down specific material faster than his more orderly counterparts.

“Morning, troops,” he called to Price and Brognola as they pulled up chairs. “Are we having fun yet?”

“As always,” Brognola deadpanned.

“Have either Hunt or Akira checked in?” Price asked.

“Zip from Hunt,” Kurtzman said, referring to Huntington Wethers, the one-time Berkeley cybernetics professor regarded as the most analytical member of the Farm’s cyber crew. Wethers was presently in Baltimore, serving as part of the newly founded National Scenario Group, a think tank established to condense daily briefs submitted by the country’s various intelligence agencies into a one-page overview that would hopefully convey a concise view of recent international events and anticipate possible future developments based on the new data. Additionally, NSG had allowed the intel community’s right hand to know what the left was doing, leading to better cooperation and efficiency in field operations.

“As for Akira, he checked in about an hour ago,” Kurtzman went on. “He says the ‘ghosting’ operation is going well, but it’s been a little hit-and-miss trying to tap into any KPA military intel. At least so far. Give him a few more days, though, and I bet it’ll be different story.”

“I’ll second that,” Price said. “Did he manage to squeeze in a visit with those relatives he was talking about?”

“Actually, he said he’s had trouble reaching them,” Kurtzman said, “but I’m sure he’ll get around to it.”

Akira Tokaido, the youngest member of Stony Man’s cybernetic crew, had been born in America but was of Japanese descent and still had relatives living overseas, including a Japanese-Korean cousin living in Seoul. In fact, the latest developments in North Korea had coincided with plans Tokaido had already made to visit his cousin, prompting him to arrange a working vacation whereby he’d squeeze in family get-togethers between stints as a consultant for a U.S. Army Intelligence unit operating out of Camp Bonifas, just south of the DMZ. For months now, AI had been honing in on North Korea’s state-based radio signal and then overlaying counter-propaganda on the so-called “drift band,” a nearly identical frequency that, in certain reception areas, could crowd in and replace the regime’s signal. The “ghost” broadcasts were announced by North Korea defectors who could imitate DRNK spokespersons and were written in such a way as to discredit Party views and make everyday citizens more aware of the extent to which they were being brainwashed by their so-called Great Leader, Kim Jong-il.

“Okay, now that everyone’s accounted for,” Brognola said, setting aside his cigar long enough to retrieve a set of notes from his shirt pocket, “we’ve got a lot of ground to cover, so let’s dive right in, shall we?”

“Works for me,” Kurtzman said. “You want me to go first?”

“Yeah, go ahead,” Brognola replied.

Kurtzman punched a few commands into his keyboard, uploading a display map of the Korean peninsula onto a large wall screen, then turned his attention back to his own monitor, splitting the screen several times so that he could quickly access the spate of Sat-Link images he’d spent the past twelve hours sifting through.

For the past few months the U.S. and her allies had stepped up satellite surveillance of North Korea in hopes of pinpointing areas the KPA might use as launch sites for ICBMs. Kurtzman had loaded the lion’s share of these images into his computer and, frame by frame, he’d gone over them in hopes of turning up something the other intelligence agencies may have overlooked.

“Okay,” Kurtzman began, “the only good news—and I’m afraid it’s not much of a newsflash—is that we’ve ruled out any launch by sea. Their sub fleet just isn’t equipped for the task, and the only times they’ve touched port has been for open-air maintenance. Even David Copperfield couldn’t have slipped missiles onto the subs without us spotting them.”

“Understood,” Brognola said. “We’re talking land-based. But that’s been a given all along, so we don’t need to go there.” He absently tapped his cigar against the inside of his right knee as he scanned his notes. “At the briefing, NSA was leaning toward Taechon. Something about truck movements there the past week. You got anything on that?”

“Yeah, right here.”

Kurtzman dragged his cursor to the screen listing image files of Taechon, a city on North Korea’s northeast coast where a half-built two-hundred-megawatt nuclear power reactor had been mothballed during the Clinton administration under terms of the 1994 Agreed Framework. Despite worldwide objections, the plant had been started up earlier in the year and there was concern that its primary function had been the processing of spent fuel rods for the plutonium needed to fashion nuclear warheads.

Kurtzman highlighted a file and a few seconds later the large screen on the far wall displayed a satellite shot that vaguely reminded Brognola of the grainy images that years ago had triggered the Cuban missile crisis. A convoy of three eighteen-wheelers could be seen wending its way up a winding mountain road where there was no visible trace of outbuildings or any other development.

“This is about halfway through a sequence of about twenty shots taken three days ago,” Kurtzman explained. “The trucks pulled out of a warehouse three miles from the nuke plant in Taechon and headed for the hills. The thing is, the road there doesn’t go anywhere. It was supposed to be an overland route to Hyesan, but they wound up building another road out of Kimchaek, about twenty miles to the north.”

Price was intrigued. “Maybe they’ve got a facility tucked away in the mountains somewhere,” she ventured.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too,” Kurtzman responded, “but I ran with it and came up empty.”

He quickly clicked through the next series of images, which detailed the trucks’ advance up the mountain grade, then stopped on a shot in which the vehicles had disappeared beneath a tree canopy. “The convoy stops here for a couple hours, and there’s enough cover that they could have unloaded something. But check this out.”

Kurtzman typed a few commands, converting the image to an infrared scan of the area. “If there was any kind of facility here,” he went on, “we’d get some kind of a heat read. And if there were nukes in the mix, they’d stick out like a sore thumb, just like the readings we’re getting at the reactor plant. But there’s nothing. Nada.

“I don’t know if they just stopped for lunch or whatever,” he concluded, “but once they rolled out, they looped around and by the end of the day they were back at the warehouse. And the thing is, there are stretches leading to and from this covered area where the roads are dirt, so I zoomed in and measured the tread depth on the tires. No difference the whole way.”

“Meaning they didn’t unload anything,” Price guessed.

“Exactly.” Kurtzman yawned and rubbed his eyes, then shrugged. “You want my guess, it was a diversion. Nothing else.”

“Not the first time they’ve pulled that,” Brognola said.

Kurtzman nodded. “And I’ve got footage from Yongbyon and Kumho where they did the same thing, more or less.”

“In other words,” Price said, “they know we’re watching so they’re playing shell games with us.”

“Yep,” Kurtzman concluded. “I keep waiting to come up with a zoom shot where one of the drivers looks up and tweaks his nose at us and starts shouting ‘Nyah nyah…’”

“Meanwhile,” Brognola said, “somewhere down there, they’ve got those missiles tucked away someplace where we can’t see ’em.”

“I hear you,” Kurtzman said. “And I’ll keep sifting through everything from the sat-links, but somehow we gotta beef up our ground intel or we’re going nowhere.”

“CIA’s working on that,” Brognola assured him, “and the Army and Navy are both getting ready to insert covert op teams. If Phoenix Force wraps up its current assignment, we’ll probably want to throw them into this, too.”

“Probably a good idea,” Kurtzman said.

Before they could go on, Carmen Delahunt brought over a computer printout and cleared her throat to get everyone’s attention.

“Ready for my two cents’ worth?” she asked.

“By all means,” Brognola said.

“Okay. As far as these defectors go, we’ve got a bit of a mess on our hands,” Delahunt began. “For starters, one of the guys on that list just turned up dead in L.A. He was killed around the same time as the raid on that gang headquarters in Koreatown, so there was no way Mack could have gotten to him in time.”

“Killed?” Brognola murmured. “So much for my theory about them taking them alive.”

Price quickly scanned her notes, then asked, “Are we talking about Yong-Im Hyunsook?”

Delahunt nodded. “They got to him at his house in the suburbs. The place was ransacked to make it look like a botched home-invasion robbery, but we obviously know better. And from the looks of it, Yong-Im was tortured before they killed him.”

“Maybe he didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear,” Brognola suggested.

“That would be my guess,” Delahunt said. “Now, as for the others, the FBI moved in and took as many of them as they could find into protective custody. Unfortunately, they could only get to three out of the other five. One in Las Vegas, another in Chicago and a third here in D.C.”

“What about the other two?”

“One of them lives in Laughlin, Nevada,” Delahunt explained. “It’s a small casino town about two hours south of Vegas on the Colorado River. The guy wasn’t home when the Bureau showed up, so they’ve got the place staked out and are keeping an eye open for him.”

“How far is Laughlin from L.A.?” Brognola asked.

“About five hours,” Delahunt said.

Brognola checked his watch and calculated the time on the West Coast. “So there’s a chance the Koreans got to him after they whacked Yong-Im.”

Delahunt nodded. “That’s cutting it close, but, yeah, they might have beat us to him.”

“There’s also a chance REDI has more than one team out looking for these guys,” Price interjected. “Especially when you consider how spread out they are.”

“True,” Brognola conceded. He turned back to Delahunt. “What about the last guy?”

“His name’s Shinn Kam-Song,” Delahunt said. “And of the whole batch, he’s probably the most valuable. He was the point man on missile development and guidance systems, and he’s also the one who did the most tampering with the R&D data before he defected.”

“Meaning he’s the one they’d want to make sure they got all the bugs out when they moved ahead without him,” Brognola surmised.

Delahunt nodded. “Yeah, he’s the one they want alive more than the others combined.”

“Where is he?” Price queried.

“Well, that’s the problem,” Delahunt said. “Up until three months ago he was living with his wife in Phoenix. Then they both just up and disappeared.”

“How is that possible?” Brognola said. “Weren’t we keeping tabs on them?”

“Not close enough, obviously.”

“Maybe REDI already has their hands on him,” Price suggested.

“I don’t think so,” Delahunt said, “otherwise Shinn’s address would have been on that list Mack found in Koreatown.” Referring to her notes, she added, “And the thing is, Shinn and his wife didn’t leave everything behind. They took most of their belongings with them. According to the FBI, Shinn was getting tired of all the debriefings they kept putting him through. The feeling is he wanted to slip through the cracks and not be bothered anymore. Not that I’d blame him. I mean, if you risk your life fleeing a police state, the last thing you want is another Big Brother looking over your shoulder all the time.”

“I’m sure it was for their own good,” Kurtzman said.

“Doesn’t mean they had to like it,” Delahunt countered. “In any event, I think Shinn and his wife are still out there somewhere.”

“If that’s the case, then we damn well better get to them before the Koreans do,” Brognola said. “Any idea at all where they might’ve relocated to?”

“Nothing definite,” Delahunt said. “But we do know that Shinn was close friends with Li-Roo Kohb, the guy from Laughlin. After they defected, their orders were not to contact one another, but maybe they made an exception.”

“It’s worth looking into,” Brognola said. He turned to Price. “Put Mack on it. If this Shinn fellow is the key to North Korea reaching first-strike capacity, we need to get to him before they do.”

“I’ll make the call now,” Price said.

As she moved over to the phone at Akira Tokaido’s workstation, Brognola turned back to Kurtzman.

“And let’s keep looking for that hidey-hole where Kim Jong-il’s hiding his arsenal.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Changchon Rehabilitation Center, North Korea

Lieutenant Corporal Yulim Zhi-Weon finished his lunch of fried oysters, bacon and scrambled eggs, then pushed the plate away and pulled a silver cigarette case from his uniform shirt pocket. By the time he’d lit a cigarette, a prison trustee had taken away the plate and replaced it with a fresh cup of coffee, a crystal ashtray and a small basket filled with fresh pastries delivered earlier in the day from Kaesong. Yulim’s quarters was an air-conditioned, three-room bungalow set on a tree-lined bluff overlooking the prison yard. There was a satellite dish on the roof, giving Yulim more than eighty different channels to choose from on the high-definition television in the spacious den set off from the dining room. Back in his bedroom, the sixteen-year-old girl he’d taken a fancy to back at the poppy fields was sleeping off the sexual workout he’d just put her through.

As he slowly smoked his cigarette, Yulim stared down at the prison yard. He could see a row of inmates filing past the mess tent for their daily rations, a cup of rice soaked in chicken broth. In light of today’s suicide and the subsequent killing of three more workers, Yulim wondered if it might be a good move to increase the rations slightly. Nothing major; maybe a cube of tofu or a few string beans. It would be a small price to pay if it would pick up morale at the camp. Yes, he’d told General Oh that he was sure he’d make his quota in terms of opium production, but that had been spin control. In truth, the Changchon fields had fallen drastically short of their projected output, and Yulim knew he could only bribe officials in Chongjin for so long before they refused to falsify the delivery tallies any further.

He needed better work from the inmates, and cracking the whip obviously wasn’t the solution. Of course, if the other plan Yulim was pursuing bore fruit, the shortcomings here at Changchon would become a moot point. If the other plan were to succeed, Yulim would no longer have to concern himself with incurring the wrath of Kim Jong-il and his military hierarchy. Everything would change; everything would be different.

Yulim took a last puff from his cigarette, then stubbed it out in the ashtray and sorted through the pastries, settling on a chocolate éclair. He dunked it in his coffee and was taking his first bite when there was a knock at the front door. Yulim nodded to one of the two security guards posted inside the doorway. The guard opened the door to yet another sentry.

“Major Jin Choon-Yei to see the Lieutenant Corporal,” the sentry announced.

“Send him in,” he called out, adding, “and wait outside. Everyone.”

The guards ushered the prison trustee out of the bungalow, then the major entered and joined Yulim at the dining-room table. Yulim held out his cigarette case, but Jin waved it away and helped himself instead to one of the pastries.

“So,” Yulim said, “how did the grand tour with General Oh go?”

Jin shrugged as he bit into his pastry. “It was the usual. I told him what he wanted to hear and he was suitably impressed.”

“So he still suspects nothing?”

The major shook his head. “In his mind, it’s all systems go.’ He’s sleeping now, but come morning he’ll see his nephew at the launch site and he’ll hear more of the same.”

“Good,” Yulim responded. “If all the other generals are so easily duped, it will make things that much easier for us.”

Jin chuckled. “I still can’t believe he would think you’d have no idea what was going on inside the mountain. All those night shipments moving directly past the camp here. Does he think no one notices anything?”

“He takes me for a good soldier who doesn’t ask too many questions. He figures that for all I care you could be building an apartment building instead of a missile compound.”

Jin finished his pastry, then confided, “I guess I’m a bad soldier, then, because I asked him about the defectors.”

A scowl crossed Yulim’s face. “Was that wise?”

“Don’t worry,” Jin assured his colleague. “The general and I go way back together. He trusts me like a brother.”

“I hope so,” Yulim said. “What did he say?”

“He confirmed what we already suspected. REDI is trying to apprehend the defectors and bring them back to look over the missile data.”

Yulim continued to frown. He lit another cigarette and took a nervous puff.

“That could pose a problem,” he said. “Especially if they manage to bring the team back before we’ve made our move.”

“What are the chances of that?” Jin countered. “Slim to none, I would say.”

“Don’t be so certain,” Yulim cautioned. “Kim Jong-il is determined to make sure the missiles are operational. I’m sure he’s sent his best men to the States.”

Jin shook his head. “Our Great Leader waited too long to play this hand. Even if they do get their hands on Shinn and the others, it will be too late for them to make a difference. Trust me, by the time the REDI agents return, with or without the defectors, we will already be in control. If anything, REDI is doing us a favor. If they bring back the Kanggye Team, we’ll take them into custody and have them do the verification for us. If we can prove that the missiles are functional, their price will only go up.”

The major mulled over Yulim’s words and decided the man had a point. “It’s a win-win situation for us.”

“Exactly,” Yulim said. “Our biggest concern isn’t the defectors. We just need to make sure we can keep a lid on our plans until it’s time to carry them out. If all goes well on that front, Kim Jong-il will never know what hit him. The country will be ours.”

WHEN LIM NA-LI WAS awakened by the sound of laughter in the other room, it took her a moment to remember where she was. Then she recognized Yulim’s voice and it all came back, bringing tears to her eyes.

When she’d been singled out after she and her parents had been transported to the concentration camp, she’d braced herself for the worst, but nothing had prepared her for the brutal assault Yulim had subjected her to. She was so sore that even the slightest movement was painful.

Lying beneath the satin sheets in the lieutenant corporal’s oversize bed, Na-Li fought back a sob. She closed her eyes and tried to fall back to sleep, anything to blot out the memory of Yulim’s rough touch and the rancid, smoke-tinged smell of his breath. But even when she pulled a pillow over her ear she could still hear the men talking and Yulim’s voice was like a prod, taunting her.

Finally she tossed the pillow aside and struggled out of the bed and wrapped a towel around her waist as she went to the window, which looked out on the mountains. The view was breathtaking, but the young woman spent little time dwelling on it. She wanted to escape, to climb out the window and just run. She didn’t care what happened to her. She just wanted to get away from her tormentor. As she feared, however, there were two soldiers posted at the rear of the bungalow. They stood only a few yards from the window, backs to her, carbines at the ready. Na-Li knew they would apprehend her before she was even halfway out the window, in which case she would have to face Yulim’s rage for attempting to escape.

Stepping back from the window, Na-Li was overcome by a sense of futility surpassed only by her morbid curiosity at what the men in the other room might be discussing. Against her better judgment, she found herself moving to the bedroom door, then leaning to one side so that she could press her ear close to the wood. It took only a moment for the men’s voices to become more than a rumbling drone. Now she could hear what they were saying. And the more she listened, the more she began to tremble. No, she thought to herself. It wasn’t possible.

Yulim and the other man were plotting to overthrow the Great Leader!

With horrified fascination, Na-Li continued to eavesdrop, trying to piece together the details the men were discussing and commit them to memory. She had no idea what she might do with the information she was overhearing, and there was a part of her that began to fear that Yulim would remember she was in the room and have her killed just as a precaution.

Moments later, it looked as if her fears were about to be realized. She heard Yulim mention her to the other man, but he did it laughingly, with no concern that she might pose a security risk. She was his plaything. No more, no less, and no threat.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Airspace over Southern California

“With everything going on, I didn’t get a chance to thank you,” John Kissinger told Mack Bolan.

The two men were on a Laughlin-bound private jet the FBI had charted back in Los Angeles. The Bureau had stepped into the picture as soon as the focus had shifted from the Killboys’ drug-running to their likely involvement with the men being held responsible for the death of Yong-Im Hyunsook. There were two G-men riding in the plane, across from Bolan and Kissinger. Jayne Bahn had sweet-talked her way aboard, as well, and was sitting across the aisle from the Stony Man operatives, cell phone pressed to one ear as she conferred with her colleagues back at Inter-Trieve’s West Coast headquarters in San Francisco.

“No thanks necessary,” Bolan told Kissinger. “I was happy to help out. How’s that ankle doing?”

“Feels okay as long as I’m sitting down,” Kissinger said. “They said if I keep my weight off it for a few days I’d be fine.”

“Knowing you, that’s not going to happen,” Bolan said with a grin. “My money says you wind up ripping loose those stitches in your arm, too.”

“No bet,” Kissinger replied. Thinking back to the firefight that had left him wounded, he went on. “I just wish we could’ve gotten them all. I mean, you gotta figure those two who drove off before the raid are the ones that whacked that guy in the valley.”

“We’ll catch up with them,” Bolan said evenly.

“I hope so.”

Bahn had gotten off the phone in time to hear the tail end of men’s conversation. “I hope you’re not saying it’s my fault they’re still on the loose,” she told Kissinger. “Hell, even if I’d been close enough to stop them, it would’ve tipped off the others and we wouldn’t have stumbled onto this whole hit-squad thing.”

“Nobody’s blaming you for anything,” Kissinger assured the woman. “Matter of fact, you kept another one of them from getting away. That makes you woman of the hour.”

“A lot of good that did,” Bahn scoffed. “Two hours of interrogation and the punk didn’t give up a thing.”

“Well, he’s just lucky we got called away,” Kissinger said. “Two minutes in the I-room alone with him and I’d have had him talking.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Knock it off, you two,” Bolan intervened.

Bahn smiled at Bolan. “Come on, he’s just flirting with me, that’s all.”

“In your dreams,” Kissinger said, suppressing a grin.

As the plane carried the group over the arid desolation of the Mojave Valley, the head of the FBI detail, Ed Scanlon, strode up from the rear of the plane. He was a tall, lean man in his midforties, wearing an off-the-rack suit and well-scuffed Oxford shoes.

“Got a wee bit of good news,” Scanlon announced, as he flipped his cell phone closed. “We went another round with that gang-banger and got him to spill. He confirmed what we’ve been expecting all along. One of the guys who rode off just before the raid is just the baby brother of a Killboy we’ve got chilling the morgue. The other guy’s a major player, though.”

“REDI?” Bahn guessed.

Scanlon eyed the woman, surprised. “You know about them?”

She nodded. “It’s the closest thing North Korea has to our CIA. Espionage, wet work. You name it, they get the call.”

“That’s about the size of it.” Scanlon continued, “Anyway, this guy’s name is Hong Sung-nam, and he’s bad news. We’ve got his crew linked to a handful of assassinations over in Asia, and last time we checked he was still over there.”

“Obviously you’ll need to update your records,” Bahn taunted.

“So it would seem,” Scanlon conceded. “We don’t know how he slipped stateside, but according to our stoolie, he showed in L.A. with a heroin shipment about a month ago and insinuated himself into the gang. Got the tattoos and everything. Apparently there were concerns that the Killboys needed more supervision so they’d spend less time butting heads with rival gangs and more time pushing the product. Of course, somewhere along the line he was rounding up info on these nuke defectors. And as long as he’s on the loose, we gotta figure he’s gonna work his way down that list you guys found.”

“Which means unless our raid scared him off, he’s probably on his way to Nevada,” Kissinger surmised. “Just like us.”

Scanlon nodded. “DEA’s selling that raid you were in on as strictly a drug bust. Hopefully Hong’ll buy it and stick to his game plan. We’ve got California Highway Patrol on the lookout for him, but if he’s worth his salt he’ll be able to evade any spot checks on the highways. I think our best bet’ll be to nab him when he tries to go after his next target.”

“If I remember rightly,” Bolan recalled, “the next guy on that list lived in Vegas, not Laughlin.”

“Good memory,” Scanlon said. “We’re changing our plans accordingly. You guys wanna play along?”

“What do you have in mind?” Bahn asked.

“Well,” Scanlon replied, “judging from how the three of you went gangbusters during that raid, I’m thinking you’d rather see some action instead of sniffing around Laughlin for this guy who’s third on the list.”

“You get points for flattery,” Bahn countered, “but you’re going to have to cough up more specifics.”

Bolan figured he knew where this was going and told Scanlon, “You want us in Vegas instead.”

“Bingo,” Scanlon said. “We’ve got the defector there under lock and key, but we figure if we plant a look-alike at his digs along with some backup, REDI’ll come in light and we’ll be able to get the upper hand on them.”

“And you want us for the backup,” Kissinger guessed.

“At least part of it,” Scanlon said. “We’ll have a crew there, but we’re spread thin looking for the Laughlin guy at the same time, so a few extra bodies couldn’t hurt.”

“Works for me,” Bahn said. “I just talked with my people and I’m green-lighted to follow through and see where this takes us.”

Bolan quickly weighed his options. Barbara Price had already asked him and Kissinger to help with the search in Laughlin, but Scanlon had been right in pegging him as someone who preferred the more proactive course. Fortunately his standing as a Stony Man operative was such that he could unilaterally change his plan of attack as developments dictated. He turned to Kissinger.

“How about if we split up,” he suggested. “You can take Laughlin and give that ankle a breather.”

“While you have all the fun?” Kissinger retorted. “I don’t think so.”

“Look, before this is over you’ll have more chances to jump into the fray.” Bolan nudged the aluminum crutches Kissinger had propped against the seat next to him. “You might as well give yourself a chance to recuperate.”

Kissinger thought it over, then nodded. “All right, all right. Laughlin it is.”

Bolan turned back to Scanlon. “Count me in.”

“Same here,” Bahn chimed in.

Kissinger stared at the woman bounty hunter, then grinned at Bolan. “Looks like I bailed just in time. Good luck, buddy. You’re going to have your hands full.”

CHAPTER NINE

Laughlin, Nevada

Although the casinos in Laughlin were set along the banks of the Colorado River, the town’s population, for the most part, lived a few miles inland, just west of a huge, coal-burning power plant that today, like most days, disgorged a steady plume of dark smoke from its towering exhaust chimneys. Randall Howland, a thirty-year veteran of the FBI, had spent most of the morning choking on the smoke as he maintained surveillance on the home of Li-Roo Kohb, one-time propellant expert for the Kanggye nuclear team. Howland had parked his nondescript Chevy sedan on the shoulder of a crestline road overlooking the defector’s neighborhood. Another two agents were biding their time downhill in a second car parked just past the stop sign where Li-Roo’s street intersected with Casino Drive. They’d been on stakeout now for the better part of three hours, waiting for the defector to return home or, better yet, for a sign of the REDI crew that was supposed to be in town looking to kill Li-Roo or at least abduct him and drag him back home to North Korea.

Howland was beginning to think they’d begun their stakeout too late. Maybe, he thought, the reason the man hadn’t answered the door earlier was because he was lying dead inside his house, already taken out by the same men who’d killed his colleague, Yong-Im Hyunsook, back in Los Angeles. That, or maybe the scientist had already been abducted. In any event, Howland had had his fill of twiddling his thumbs and breathing the exhaust from the power plant. Reaching inside his car, he keyed the dash mike and contacted his colleagues down the hill.

“This is getting us nowhere,” he told the others. “I say we go back to Li-Roo’s place and invite ourselves in.”

There was a moment’s hesitation before the driver of the second car replied, “Done. We’ll meet you there.”

Howland got into his car and drove down to Casino Drive, then circled around the power plant to Yancy Drive. Li-Roo Kohb lived halfway down the block in a small, twenty-year-old starter home set back on a small plot of land that, like most of the other residences on the street, had forsaken lawns in favor of cacti, succulents and other drought-resistant plants capable of withstanding Laughlin’s brutally hot, arid summers. There were a few people out, some tending to plants, others lazily basking on their front porches in the late-afternoon heat. One of Howland’s colleagues had already gotten out of the other car and was approaching the defectors’ next-door neighbor, holding out his FBI badge. The man’s partner, Agent Sandra Pearle, was standing next to the car, which had been parked two houses down from Li-Roo’s home.

“We should’ve done this in the first place,” she told Howland after he’d parked and joined her.

“Hindsight,” he murmured, leading the way up the front walk. When they reached the door, Howland knocked, then rang the bell. Pearle glanced around as she nonchalantly pulled a G-issue Colt pistol from her shoulder holster. She kept the gun concealed from view of the neighbors and waited for Howland to trip the lock. Her partner drew his gun, as well, then swung the door open.

“FBI,” he announced.

The only response was the chirping of a canary somewhere inside the house. The two agents did a quick room-by-room search. There was no sign of Li-Roo Kohb and the house seemed undisturbed. The canary was caged in an alcove just off the kitchen.

“I’ll check the garage,” Pearle told Howland.

Howland nodded, then began to retrace his steps through the house, inspecting each room more thoroughly for some clue as to Li-Roo’s whereabouts. He was in the den when Pearle rejoined him.

“He’s got a canoe and some fishing gear in the garage,” the woman reported, “and there are a couple pairs of hiking boots by the door, so obviously he’s the outdoors type.”

“Not much to go on there,” Howland muttered. They were interrupted by a knock at the front door. Howland whirled with his gun but held fire. It was the third agent, Bryce Thompson.

“Easy,” Thompson said. “It’s just me.”

Howland filled Thompson in on what little they’d found, then asked, “You come up with anything?”

“Couple things,” Thompson reported. “The gal next door says Li-Roo likes to keeps to himself, so she doesn’t know much about him. She says most days he’s out of the house by eight and doesn’t get back until after sundown.”

“We just missed him,” Howland said, recalling that their stakeout had begun shortly before nine. “What else?”

“She says there were a couple cable guys here yesterday afternoon,” Thompson said. “They were here nearly an hour.”

“Korean?” Pearle asked.

“She’s not sure. Definitely Asian, though.”

“Sounds like the same MO REDI used with that guy in L.A.,” Howland said. “Which means they’ve probably already tossed the place.”

“Maybe we should check for prints,” Pearle suggested.

“Yeah, maybe so.” Howland considered another possibility. “Could be they’ve been watching us during our whole stakeout, too.”

“If that’s so, we’ve pretty much blown our cover.”

“Not much we can do about that now. Let’s keep looking around here,” Howland suggested. “We still need to figure out where the hell Kohb spends his days.”

“If REDI’s been here, they probably already know,” Thompson remarked. “Which puts us a step behind them.”

“Thanks for sharing that,” Howland groused. He turned his attention back to the den. Li-Roo had a state-of-the-art sound system with a karaoke counsel and a carousel filled with more than a hundred CDs, mostly by jazz artists and Korean pop singers. There was a bookcase built into the wall, but it was empty except for a few library books, two devoted to local hiking trails and a third entitled How to Win at Texas Hold ’Em. On the bottom shelf, though, there was a ceramic bowl filled with candies, stray keys and a few packs of matches. On a hunch, Howland zeroed in on the matchbooks. The hunch paid off.

“I think I’ve got something,” he called, grabbing the phone next to the stereo. He dialed the number on the one of the match packs. After a few rings he found himself talking to the operator at the Laughlin Shores Casino.

“Do you guys have a poker room?” Howland asked.

CHAPTER TEN

Camp Bonifas, South Korea

Akira Tokaido awoke with a start to the persistent bleeping of his travel alarm. He muttered to himself as he untangled one hand from under the covers and reached over to shut off the alarm. It was a little after four p.m., South Korean time. Tokaido had hoped a quick catnap would take the edge off the fatigue he’d been battling since arriving at Camp Bonifas, but he felt every bit as tired as when he’d nodded off. And the situation he’d gone to sleep worrying over promptly began to hound him all over again.

After several years of corresponding and talking by phone with his cousin, this was to be the first face-to-face meeting between Akira and Lim Seung-Whan, and Tokaido had been under the impression that Lim was looking forward to the occasion as much as he was. But since arriving at Camp Bonifas, Tokaido had tried several times to reach his cousin without success. No one was answering the phone, either at his home or at Lim’s cell number. He’d left messages, as well, but his calls had yet to be returned and the young man was troubled by the silence. He knew that Lim had planned to take his family on a weeklong fishing trip on the Yellow Sea, but they were supposed to have returned two days earlier, not only because of Akira’s visit, but because the Seoul Sky-Eagles—the professional baseball team partly owned by Lim—were in the thick of a pennant race and Seung-Whan had made it clear how much he was looking forward to taking in this weekend’s crucial home series with the first-place Lotte Giants. Given all this, Tokaido knew that Lim wouldn’t have deliberately prolonged his fishing trip, and yesterday he’d double checked maritime conditions on the coast near Incheon, thinking inclement weather might have waylaid his cousin. But the sea had been as calm as the skies had been clear, so there had to be some other explanation for Lim’s being incommunicado.

Tokaido’s cell phone was on the dresser of the officers’ quarters where he was staying for the week. He’d left the phone on in hopes Lim might call, and his spirits rallied when he saw that someone had indeed left a message. It turned out, however, that the call had been from Barbara Price back at Stony Man Farm. Tokaido showered first, then dressed and pulled his long black hair into a ponytail before returning the call. The mission controller wasn’t available, so Tokaido asked to be patched through to Aaron Kurtzman at the Annex.

After they exchanged a quick greeting, Kurtzman told Tokaido the reason Price had called.

“Look, I know your plate’s full out there,” Kurtzman said, “but there’s a new wrinkle to this whole mess that you might want to keep an ear open for.”

Tokaido quickly tracked down a pen and paper, then scribbled notes as Kurtzman apprised him of the latest developments involving attempts by North Korean REDI agents to abduct members of the Kanggye nuclear team.

“If you come across any intel mentioning the defectors,” Kurtzman concluded, “you might want to give it top priority, because if the KPA spells out where they plan on bringing these guys, odds are we’ll find the missiles there, too.”

“It’s definitely worth a shot,” Tokaido admitted. “I’ll get on it first thing.”

“Listen, Akira,” Kurtzman went on, “I don’t know if it’s just the connection, but you sound exhausted. Were you out partying with the relatives last night?”

“I wish.”

Tokaido told Kurtzman about the problems he’d had getting in touch with his cousin.

“That’s strange,” Kurtzman said. “If you’re really concerned, maybe you ought to head down there and check things out. It’s only an hour drive to Seoul from where you are, right?”

“Something like that,” Tokaido said. “I can probably wrangle a chopper ride and get there even quicker. I want to wait until a little later, though. I keep thinking there’s been some kind of mixup and I’ll still hear from him.”

“You don’t sound very convinced of that,” Kurtzman said.

“Maybe not,” Tokaido confessed, “but it beats thinking about the alternatives.”

“I can understand that,” Kurtzman said. “Well, keep us posted. And if you come up with anything on that defector angle…”

“Don’t worry, I’ll get right on it and give you a holler if we get lucky.”

Tokaido wrapped up the call, then tried Lim again. There was still no answer. Anxious for some kind of news, he tried Lim’s office. Seung-Whan was CEO of a computer-electronics firm in Seoul bearing the family name: in fact, it had been the profits from Lim Systems International that had allowed him to buy his share of the Sky-Eagles baseball team. Tokaido managed to speak with Lim’s executive secretary, but she hadn’t heard from Lim and wasn’t expecting him back in the office until the beginning of the following week. She offered him some fleeting hope, however, explaining that Lim owned a beach house near Incheon and might have stopped over there after the fishing trip. The house didn’t have a phone, but Tokaido assumed Lim had his cell phone with him and should have received his earlier messages. Things still didn’t add up, at least in any way that was reassuring.

“Where are you, Seung-Whan?” he muttered as he hung up.

Tokaido slipped his cell phone into the same carrying case that held his laptop and the notes he’d compiled during his long hours at the base’s Communications and Radio Control Center. Though he wasn’t hungry, he stopped by the cafeteria for an early dinner. The food was standard Army fare: bland but filling. He stared into space as he ate, trying to suppress his growing concern over Lim’s whereabouts. He was so lost in thought that he didn’t notice an officer approach his table. The man had to wave a hand in front of Tokaido’s face to get his attention.

“Sorry,” Tokaido said in apology, staring up at U.S. Army Colonel Thomas Michaels.

“You weren’t in your room, so I figured I might find you here,” the officer told him.

Although Camp Bonifas was technically home of the United Nations Command Security Battalion, the U.S. Army’s 2nd Armored Division comprised the majority of the base’s actual manpower, and Michaels, who headed up intelligence operations along the DMZ, was third in command at the facility. A tall, hawk-nosed Seattle native, Michaels had been Tokaido’s primary contact the past week. Normally the man had a surprisingly easygoing demeanor, but as he took a seat, Tokaido noticed that the colonel’s expression was grim.

“I think we might have something on your cousin,” the colonel told the Stony Man cyber warrior. “If we’re right, I’m afraid the news isn’t good…”

LESS THAN TEN MINUTES later, Tokaido was sitting at his station at CRCC. The room, half the size of the Annex Computer Room back at Stony Man Farm, was located on the second floor of the UNCSB Administration Building. A bank of windows along the north wall overlooked the exercise yard, where a handful of new Hummers delivered from Seoul were being unloaded from a semi-rig. Beyond that, uniformed troops were out training in the surrounding hills and, far in the distance, a South Korean flag flapped in the breeze from the center of Daeseong-dong, the only inhabited village located inside the DMZ. Tokaido was oblivious to the activity, however. He was still reeling from Colonel Michaels’ news.

Less than an hour ago, the Army Intelligence radio crew had intercepted a KPA military communiqué in which a senior officer boasted that the day before a naval unit of the Bureau of Reconnaissance had managed to get their hands on a South Korean fishing yacht moored just off the coast of Gyondongdo, a small island in the Yellow Sea forty miles north of Incheon. They’d incarcerated those aboard the boat, which was presently en route to the North Korean military port in Sinsaeng. For now, according to the pirated dispatch, the plan was to dole out use of the yacht as a perk for naval officers with high-performance ratings.

“I know there aren’t many specifics,” Michaels said, pointing to the transcript Tokaido had just read over for a second time, “but there are just too many coincidences. It sounds like the same-size boat you said your cousin had taken out fishing in that area.”

“Yes, I know,” Tokaido conceded wearily. “But I don’t understand. Gyondongdo is located on our side of the maritime line. Seung-Whan wouldn’t have strayed into North Korean waters. He knows better.”

“Even if he stayed on our side,” Michaels said, “North Korea has been disputing that line ever since it was drawn up, and they have no qualms about crossing it, believe me. This isn’t the first ship they’ve snatched. Hell, they’ve even come ashore on a couple of these islands looking to abduct people. It’s happened twice this month that I know of.”

“Still,” Tokaido murmured. “It’s so hard to believe.”

“I hear you,” Michaels said, “and I’m sure it’s the last thing your cousin expected. No offense, but he’s well-off and it’s easy for people of his station around these parts tend to get a little complacent. They don’t realize how much can go wrong if they stray out of their element. We’re in a war zone.”

Much as he wanted to defend his cousin, Tokaido knew the colonel had a point. A number of times when he’d conversed with Seung-Whan, Akira’s cousin had dismissed Seoul’s close proximity to the DMZ and said he’d decided years ago that there was no point to living in fear of things he had no control over. Tokaido understood the rationale, but there was a difference between being fearless and foolhardy. Now it was looking as if Seung-Whan was paying a price for the latter.

Tokaido glanced back down at the transcript and read it over yet again, hoping somehow to glean more information. There was so little to go on, however. It wasn’t even clear how many people had been aboard the yacht when it was seized. For that matter, Tokaido didn’t know for sure how many people Lim had taken on the trip besides his wife and daughter. “Some friends” had been all he’d said.

On his third read-through, one word in the transcript jumped out at him. He looked it over, then glanced up at Michaels.

“It says here that those aboard the ship were ‘incarcerated,’” he said. “Are you sure that’s the right translation?”

Michaels nodded. “I heard the message myself. Yeah, whoever was on board that ship was taken into custody. They weren’t executed, if that’s what you mean.”

Tokaido nodded bleakly, already beginning to fear the worst. “At least, not yet,” he said.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Changchon Rehabilitation Center, North Korea

Lim U-Pol and her life-long friend Ji Lhe-Kan had been laboring in the poppy fields for nearly five backbreaking hours when one of the guards blew a whistle announcing the end of their workday. The two women were every bit as filled with fear and apprehension as when they’d first stepped off the truck that had brought their families here to the camp, but the work had numbed them, and exhaustion had turned them into automatons. Just as they’d lost themselves in the redundant task of extracting resin from the poppies, the two women now mindlessly followed the example of the other workers and turned over their scraping tools and the small plastic containers they’d filled with resin, then fell into line for the long march back to the prison camp.

U-Pol was so drained that it took all her concentration merely to stay awake and put one foot in front of the other. There was one saving grace to her fatigue: as with work ordeal in the fields, it proved a potent distraction, leaving her with little time to dwell on the fate of her husband and daughter, who’d been led away, along with Ji Lhe-Kan’s husband and son, shortly before the women had been first put to work. No indication had been given as to what lay in store for the men, but U-Pol assumed they had been diverted to some more strenuous labor. As for Na-Li, U-Pol had seen the way the commandant had looked at her daughter, and the thought of what he might have had in mind for young woman was unbearable to contemplate, so she’d struggled to block the matter from her mind.

Soon, the prisoners found themselves heading past a clearing where a handful of soldiers had begun to fling several corpses, one after the other, into a shallow pit barely deep enough to hold them all. The sheer horror of sight alone was enough to unnerve U-Pol, but when it dawned on her that her loved ones might be among the dead, her pent-up emotions suddenly erupted in a sob so loud and wrenching that it doubled her over. Fortunately she wasn’t alone. An equally profound wailing broke out among some of the other prisoners, men and women alike, and several of them strayed from the column, rushing toward the makeshift burial site. They were intercepted by the guards, who brusquely herded them back while shouting for silence.

During the commotion, Ji Lhe-Kan hurriedly spoke with the prisoner ahead of her, then turned to U-Pol and whispered that those being buried were prisoners that had been killed during an incident that had occurred before their arrival at the camp.

“Our men are still all right,” she added quickly. “Na-Li and Rha-Tyr, too. You’ll see.”

U-Pol nodded faintly, but she was consumed by doubt and she saw that her friend, too, was nowhere near as confident of their loved ones’ fate as she was pretending to be. The two women clutched hands briefly, as if attempting to lend strength to one another.

“Move on!” one of the guards shouted, further startling the women by firing a warning shot into the air with his carbine. “Unless you want to join them!”

When another soldier aimed his rifle at U-Pol and Lhe-Kan, the two women pulled their hands apart. U-Pol struggled to regain her composure, but as the prisoners resumed their march back to camp, the image of the mass grave continued to haunt her. She wept quietly, biting her knuckle each time another anguished sob swelled in her throat.

As the procession reached the camp and wound its way around the periphery fence, U-Pol and Lhe-Kan found themselves horrified anew as they were led past a spot where a young male prisoner had just made an unsuccessful escape attempt. He’d apparently made it as far as the top of the innermost fence before sentries in one of the nearby lookout towers had gunned him down, and though he’d been killed, his shirt and one of his pant legs had snagged on the thick coils of barbed wire topping the fence and he hung suspended, arms and legs pinned at an angle that made it look as if he were still alive and dancing in midair. A pair of guards had just reached the body, one carrying a ladder and bolt cutters, the other tugging at a leash to keep a full-size Rottweiler from sniffing at the pool of blood collecting on the ground directly beneath the bullet-riddled corpse.

“The third one this week!” a guard walking alongside U-Pol and Lhe-Kan said with a snicker. “You’d think they would know better by now!”

U-Pol tore her gaze from the grisly sight, blinking away a fresh flow of tears. She could hear Lhe-Kan weeping directly ahead of her, as well, but moments later the other woman’s sobbing stopped as abruptly as it had begun, and soon U-Pol saw the reason why. As they were herded through a side gate into the prison yard, she saw Lhe-Kan’s son, Rha-Tyr, standing bare-chested amid a handful of other young men who’d been given sledgehammers with which to pound away at some of the larger rocks that had just been brought down from the mines.

Rha-Tyr spotted the women in midswing and offered them a faint smile before he brought the hammer crashing down. He glanced around him, making sure that none of the guards was watching him, then gestured faintly over his shoulder. U-Pol looked past him to the side of the mountain overlooking the camp and saw the openings to several mine shafts.

“Seung-Whan and Pho-Hwa must be in the mines,” U-Pol whispered to her friend. Now that they were within the confines of the camp, the guards had moved away, leaving them free to talk.

Lhe-Kan nodded hopefully. “I told you they’d be all right,” she said.

“I don’t see my daughter anywhere,” U-Pol murmured, scanning the grounds for her daughter. Na-Li , however, was nowhere to be seen.

“Maybe she’s already in the barracks,” Lhe-Kan suggested, indicating the flimsy structures they were heading toward.

But U-Pol had her doubts, and a quick glance inside the barracks confirmed her fears. While the others began to collapse onto the wood-planked floor, eager to escape into the clutches of sleep, she and Lhe-Kan left the barracks and continued to search the grounds. Finally, U-Pol looked past the far perimeter of the camp and saw a small bungalow resting on a knoll surrounded by trees. Judging from the condition of the structure and the surrounding landscape, U-Pol guessed it had to be the headquarters for those who ran the camp. Again she recalled the way the commandant had looked at her daughter and she began to shudder. Lhe-Kan put an arm around her and the two women dropped slowly to their knees without taking their eyes off the bungalow.

“No,” U-Pol sniffed. “Please, not my daughter…”

WHEN NA-LI awoke, hours later, the clothes she had worn to the concentration camp were missing. In their place, a pair of crude sandals lay atop a coarse muslin frock that had been placed haphazardly at the foot of the bed. As she fingered the material, she felt the urge to cry yet again, but this time the tears wouldn’t come. She dressed slowly, her body still aching.

She was slipping her feet into the sandals when the door opened. Na-Li let out an involuntary gasp and recoiled as Yulim entered the bedroom, followed by one of the guards, who was carrying two overnight bags. Na-Li recognized the bags. One belonged to her, the other to her father. The bags, along with those belonging to her mother and the Ji family, had been confiscated from the family yacht and tossed into the front cab of the truck that had brought her and the others to Changchon. She’d doubted she would ever again see her tote or the belongings it contained, and yet here they were.

“Did you sleep well?” Yulim casually asked Na-Li as he took her bag from the guard and set it on the bed.

Na-Li stared at the man, incredulous. After what he’d done to her, how could he stand there and speak to her as if he were some loving uncle checking up on a favorite niece who’d come visiting the for weekend? She tried to muster some righteous indignation, but, as with her stifled tears, she found herself unable to act on her emotions.

Yulim nudged Na-Li’s bag closer to her and zipped it open.

“Go ahead,” he encouraged her. “Everything’s there, more or less. See for yourself.”

Na-Li stared at the bag, then glanced up at Yulim.

“Why?”

Yulim smiled benevolently. “I thought there might be something you’d like to take back with you to the barracks,” he said. “You can take one item. Anything you want.”

Na-Li remained on her guard as she tentatively opened the bag and inspected its contents. Her wallet had been confiscated along with her CD player, her music and a sharp-handled comb, but otherwise, as Yulim had assured her, everything else she’d packed for the fishing trip was still there. A few days ago, if told to pick one item from the bag, she, without question, would have taken her makeup kit. In light of everything that had happened, however, the last thing she wanted was to make herself look more attractive. So, instead, she selected her charm bracelet, a cheap piece of jewelry to which, over the years, she’d attached a handful of small knick-knacks, each one reminding her of a special time in her life.

“That would have been my guess,” Yulim told her. “It has sentimental value, yes?”

Na-Li’s first instinct was to scream at the man and tell him to quit trying to be so nice to her. She wanted to damn him for the way he’d abused her and let him know that she’d overheard him conspiring with the other officer. She wanted to tell him that if was the last thing she did, she’d find a way to use that information to make him pay for what he’d done to her. Instead, however, she merely nodded demurely and closed her fingers around the bracelet.

“I can go, then?” she asked.

“Of course,” Yulim told her. He indicated the guard and said, “He’ll take you back to your family. In a moment. First we need to reach a little understanding.”

Abruptly the smile left the lieutenant corporal’s face. He reached forward and grasped Na-Li by the jaw, tilting her head upward so that she had no choice but to stare into his eyes.

“You’ll be back,” he advised her, his voice cold with menace, “and no one is to know about what goes on in this room. Is that clear?”

Na-Li’s eyes widened with fear. The way Yulim was holding her jaw, it was impossible for her to speak. All she could do was nod.

“If you talk—to anyone—I swear I’ll kill your mother and father, right in front of you,” Yulim warned. “And they’ll die slowly and they will be in great pain. Do you want that?”

Na-Li shook her head as best she could. Yulim glared at her a moment longer, then slowly removed his hand from her jaw. The smile returned to his face.

“I’m glad we understand each other,” he said. “And I look forward to our next visit.”

Na-Li felt a sickening knot in her stomach. Yulim stepped back and gestured to the guard, who, in turn, snapped his fingers and motioned for Na-Li to come with him. Trembling, the young woman followed the guard from the bedroom and through the bungalow to the front door.

Outside, the late-afternoon sun shone brightly and Na-Li had to squint as she took the first few steps down the walk leading to the camp barracks. Once her eyes had adjusted to the light, she noticed the activity in the work yard. Rha-Tyr’s back was turned to her as he hammered away at the rock pile. The teenager belonged to their high school water polo team back in Seoul and Na-Li had always been captivated by his swimmer’s physique, but now the sight of his glistening torso reminded her of the sweating man who had just raped her. Repulsed, she looked away and her gaze fell on her mother and Ji Lhe-Kan. The two women were standing near the barracks, watching her. U-Pol had her hand to her mouth and even from a distance Na-Li could see the look of horror in her mother’s eyes.

Once she’d been led to the entrance to the compound, another guard threw the gate open and impatiently waved her through. Na-Li continued to walk slowly until she realized that she was no longer being followed by the soldier who’d brought her from the bungalow. She quickly lengthened her strides, then finally broke into a run, rushing past Lhe-Kan into her mother’s waiting arms.

“My poor child,” U-Pol sobbed as she held her daughter close. “My poor baby! What did they do to you?”

Recalling Yulim’s warning, Na-Li bit her lower lip, fighting back the urge to tell her mother everything that had happened. When she failed to respond, U-Pol broke their embrace and stared at Na-Li, whose jaw was still discolored where the officer’s hand had clenched it in his viselike grip.

“What did they do to you!” she repeated.

“Nothing,” Na-Li murmured. Grasping for some convincible lie, she told her mother, “They just had a lot of questions. They were just questioning me!”

U-Pol put her fingers to Na-Li’s jaw. “This is not from questioning,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter, Mother,” Na-Li said. “Please, can we not talk about it?”

Now that she had seen evidence of the unthinkable, the older woman could no longer turn a blind eye to what had happened. And, forced to confront the issue, U-Pol felt herself consumed by a sudden rage.

“They swore you to silence, is that it?” she guessed.

“Mother, please…”

U-Pol pulled her daughter back into an embrace, then stared over her shoulder at the surrounding mountainside.

“Don’t you worry,” she assured her daughter. “When your father learns of this, he’ll see that they pay! He won’t let them get away with this!”

LIM SEUNG-WHAN angrily stabbed his shovel into the heap of loose rock at his feet, then heaved the load into the ore cart resting on the rusting tracks extending deep into the mountainside. Beside him, his long-time friend Ji Pho-Hwa was attacking the cave wall with a pickax. When Pho-Hwa glanced his way, tears streaked through the soot caking his cheeks. Lim looked away, his face turning red with shame.

How had he allowed this to happen? Just two days ago the two men were enjoying themselves on the rear deck of Lim’s yacht, drinking and swapping stories as they waited for tuna to strike the heavy lines trailing from their fishing poles. Their wives were in the cabin playing mah-jongg and Pho-Hwa’s teenaged son was up on the foredeck flirting with Lim’s young daughter as they listened to some obnoxious rock-and-roll music on the radio. And after the fishing trip, Lim was looking forward to taking both families, along with his American cousin, Akira Tokaido, to watch his beloved Seoul Sky-Eagles at Freedom Stadium. Life was good. More than good. Things were perfect. And now? Now here he was, a prisoner of the KPA, separated from his wife and daughter, doomed to slave at the mines until the North Koreans decided what to do with him. All because he’d ignored Pho-Hwa’s warning not to venture too far north of Gyondongdo. “We’re here to fish,” Lim had teased his friend. “We need to go where the fishing is best.” He’d chided Pho-Hwa for being so worrisome, and after his friend had reeled in his first tuna of the trip—a four hundred-pounder that had put up a wonderful fight—Ji had stopped complaining and started to enjoy himself. Less than two hours later, the North Koreans had pulled up alongside the yacht and everything had changed.

There were eight other men working the vein alongside Lim and Ji, and so far they’d filled four carts with the rock they’d hacked loose from the cave walls. They were beyond the reach of daylight and had to work by the wavering glow of a kerosene lamp. Three armed guards watched over the group, filling the cave with the smoke of their cigarettes. Lim’s palms were bleeding where there had once been blisters, and the only thing that ached more than his arms was his lower back; it throbbed constantly and whenever he pitched another load of rock into the cart he felt a sharp, stabbing pain in his right hip. He didn’t dare stop what he was doing, however. When one of the other workers had slacked off a few minutes ago, complaining of leg cramps, the guards had laid into him with the stocks of their carbines, first targeting his arms and shoulders, then taking turns at his skull until they’d killed him. They pitched the man’s body into one of the carts and left it there as a warning for the others to keep working.

As he was shoveling yet another load into the cart next to the one containing the body, Lim Seung-Whan mustered the nerve to lean close to his friend and look him in the eye.

“I’m sorry, Pho-Hwa” he whispered. “Please forgive me.”

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