Ballistic Force. Don Pendleton

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.”