Ballistic Force

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.”