Crucial Intercept. Don Pendleton

had family members who ranked highly in North Korea’s military command and intelligence structure.

      It would suit the family honor of all concerned if Kim’s wild nature was harnessed where he could do the most damage among the hated West, and that was deemed to be the United States. If Kim died spectacularly, sacrificing himself in that self-destructive manner that so characterized him, this was deemed so much the better. Even their leader was at least dimly aware of Kim’s volatile nature. Certainly the man had disgraced himself and potentially his family publicly enough in North Korea, his eccentricities finally culminating in atrocities against North Korean civilians that even the government and its military enforcers could not ignore.

      For the mission to be an unqualified success, Yoon had the unenviable task of keeping Kim restrained in order for them to capture this American, Daniel Baldero, and spirit him out of the country. Kim had to live only long enough for the team to acquire Baldero; if he died thereafter, that was best. Yoon had been informed by his superiors, in fact, that Kim was not to survive the mission. If that meant he were to meet with an accident on his return to Pyongyang, well, that was what it meant. The problem was not seeing to such an accident—the problem was keeping Kim under control long enough for them to get that far. He was dangerous, unstable and unpredictable—but Kim was also a deadly warrior, a berserker with no fear. They would need him before the mission was over, especially if this night-killer was truly involved. Yoon swallowed again, his throat very dry.

      The three of them—Yoon, Kim and the woman, Hu Chun Hei—sat in the upper-story room of the motel across the street from the one in which Baldero had only just rented a room of his own. It had not been difficult to secure the space, even in a hurry. It had been more difficult to conceal their field teams in their trucks in the hotel parking lot, for Yoon feared they were entirely too obvious sitting there in the American sport-utility vehicles. They had already risked flushing the prey once, and they could not afford to be discovered, not yet. For the plan to succeed, they had to remain unseen until one of the foreign teams had acquired Baldero. Then Yoon, Kim and their men, along with Hu, would swoop in and steal the prize, like an eagle taking a fish in its claws. The Americans would look like fools, Kim would die a hero, and Yoon would return to a promotion and much political currency in Pyongyang.

      Already, their surveillance had shown them much, and their contact within the Americans’ government had told them even more. It was, Yoon thought, truly astounding, the lengths to which the traitor American had gone to keep them apprised of the situation this man had helped create. He cared only for money, it seemed, and Pyongyang had transferred vast sums to him to secure his cooperation. More had been promised. Whether the man lived to spend it would be up to Kim, more than likely, and Yoon cared only that the man live to the limit of his usefulness. After that, Kim could indulge his baser instincts to his heart’s content. No one would have to know—what was one more fat, dead American? Yoon laughed at the thought and wondered if Baldero understood the extent to which his fellow American was willing to sell him to the enemy. Probably Baldero did not. It was not important.

      The American government man had, in fact, fed Yoon’s people a steady stream of intelligence since helping to bring them and their equipment, undetected, into the country. It was easy enough for the fool, as he was telling them primarily of their competition—other teams, similar to their own, from nations hostile to their interests and to the United States, whom the American had similarly helped to enter the nation. The North Koreans had paid him the most, and promised yet more, and thus the North Koreans enjoyed the privilege of the traitor’s further betrayal of the rest of his customers. How such a man thought himself anything but an animal, loyal to no one and nothing, Yoon could not fathom. Surely the man knew he had no honor, and that his actions earned him no esteem among those he greedily served against the land of his own birth? It amazed and disgusted Yoon, who nonetheless was determined to use the traitor until he could be used no more. Distasteful as this business was, their team could not have succeeded without this assistance from within the ranks of the American government.

      Most important was the tracking device. Kim, looking sullen and bored, sat on the room’s other chair toying with the small plastic-shelled unit, which showed on a GPS overlay that their quarry was in the building they monitored from across the street. Yoon had no doubt that the American had provided the other foreign kill-or-capture teams with similar devices, for it explained easily how the Iranians and the French had repeatedly found Baldero, as Yoon and Kim themselves had originally found the man. Fortunately for all of them, those Iranian and French fools had yet to do anything but shoot up large portions of the state. Baldero had proved to be a wily prey and had evaded them every time, once set to running. They would keep finding him, most assuredly, but with any luck the Israelis would intervene and either evade the others or neutralize them for good. Once that happened, Yoon would suggest that Kim and his team move in, and they would steal Baldero for themselves.

      To face their competitors directly would be suicide, and suicide of a type in which even Kim was reluctant to engage. They had many men, and they had weapons, but they were outnumbered by the other teams. No, they had to wait for the odds to change in their favor, the fortunate benefit of such a delay being that the other nations, were they discovered, would likely take any blame to be spread. Yoon and whoever did survive the mission could return to North Korea’s shores with no blood on their hands and no possibly irritating diplomatic problems following them—problems that Yoon was certain the West could use as convenient excuses to foist more onerous sanctions on an already unfairly beleaguered North Korea.

      Failure to obtain Baldero simply was not an option. No less than the leader himself had expressed a desire to possess the man, and thus it fell to Yoon to make sure this occurred. Were he to fail in that, his only other option would be to make sure Baldero died, and that might yet lead to a long, slow death by torture once he returned empty-handed. Much was riding on this. If Baldero did not end up in their possession by the time it was finished, Yoon just might kill Kim and then himself. He would take his own life to spare himself pain; he would take Kim’s both from a sense of duty and for sheer spite.

      On the face of it, it was daring, almost insane. A single American citizen held the key to potential military superiority for each nation to whom the program of his creation had been brokered. To Yoon’s knowledge—and he believed it to be reasonably complete—those nations, those customers, were Iran, dissident or covert elements within the French government, similarly rogue operatives formerly of Israel’s Mossad, and of course North Korea.

      The Iranians were fanatics and fools; they posed no real threat. There were, however, a great many of them. At least, there had been a great many of them. Trailing Baldero using the tracking device to stay undetected at a safe distance, they had almost stumbled directly into the battle that had erupted in Williamsburg. It was there that Yoon had caught his first look at the night-killer of the legends. The more he thought about those apocryphal reports, the more he thought this man, this implacable killer who had scythed through the Iranians as if they were so much fragile wheat, was the man of which North Korea’s security agents had so long whispered. It was said that more than once such a man—tall, with dark hair and blue eyes, a killer so formidable that his passing was like that of a lightning storm—had fought the interests of the leader’s military and intelligence operatives, defeating them every time.

      Even to breathe the nickname, “night-killer,” was to risk summary torture by the most zealous of the leader’s internal security forces. But if such a man, rumored to be an American mercenary or commando, truly existed, would he not appear when blood and gunfire erupted with the force of an invading army so very close to the seat of the American’s government? It seemed likely to Yoon. They had watched the night-killer destroy the Iranian force the man had encountered, then they had resumed their pursuit of Baldero, tracked him to his motel and taken up their observation posts once more. It was only a matter of time before the French or the Iranians, or both, arrived to try to kill him once more, and then the chase would begin anew.

      That had been the plan, but Yoon was no longer sure. If the night-killer took Baldero, he had much less confidence that his team could take the prize from this deadly foe. He was, suddenly, glad of Kim’s presence, for if any man were monster enough to face the night-killer of legend and kill the man, it would be Kim. He was just crazy enough, and just dangerous enough,