Ballistic Force. Don Pendleton

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