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  Park seized the moment that remained to him, whipping the stolen carving knife from underneath his belt and charging and bellowing his rage. Shin had some kind of firearm in his hands, perhaps a submachine gun, but he grappled with its cocking lever, cursing raggedly. Park charged ahead and flung himself the last few feet, onto his friend-turned-foe.

  The impact and resultant fall left both men breathless, but they still had strength enough to fight for their respective lives. Each shouted insults at the other, their sweaty faces only three or four inches apart. Shin tried to club Park with his weapon, but Park’s weight on top of him denied the rich man full use of his arms. Park raised his carving knife, meanwhile, and plunged it down into Shin’s heaving chest, driving a scream up from his ruptured lung and out his throat.

  The shot that lifted Park and slammed him back against a solid table leg took him completely by surprise. He blinked through darkness at a pair of figures moving toward him, one considerably taller than the other, and his mind sneered at him, This is how it ends.

  * * *

  CHAN’S VOICE OVER the headset had directed Bolan to the mansion’s dining room. He met her there, outside one of the chamber’s access doors, just as a burst of autofire chattered inside. They burst through then, in time to see Park Hae-sung leap on top of Shin Bon-jae, the two men grappling fiercely until Park plunged a carving knife into his adversary’s chest.

  Bolan had fired almost instinctively, his single bullet lifting Park and slamming him against the nearest table leg, where he collapsed into a moaning heap. With Chan, he moved to stand over the two fallen combatants, scooping up a dropped Maglite from the floor and sweeping its beam over each of them in turn.

  Shin was as good as dead, the big knife jutting from his chest, blood spouting from his lips each time he struggled to exhale. There’d be no speaking with him, given his condition, so the Executioner turned his attention to the wounded North Korean spy.

  Kneeling on deep shag carpet, Bolan asked, “What made him turn against you?”

  Park blinked up at Bolan, tried to smile, but only managed a distorted grimace. “Major Roh,” he said with effort, barely making it. “Betrayed me.”

  “Roh Tae-il,” Chan clarified for him. “With the SSD in Pyongyang.”

  “What does he have to do with all of this?” Bolan asked.

  “Mastermind,” Park said and nearly laughed but lost it with a gout of blood that rivaled Shin Bon-jae’s.

  At first Bolan thought he had died, then Park managed to raise his head and gasp, “His plan to start a war and reunite the Motherland.”

  “And your fearless leader?”

  “Enjoys the show. They cheated me,” Park said, the rictus of a grin splitting his face. “Now I cheat them.” With that, his head slumped forward, chin resting on his chest as he expelled a final flood of crimson.

  Bolan rose to hear Chan ask, “Are we finished here?”

  “For now,” he said. “But I still have a ways to go.”

  11

  Guro District, Seoul

  The NIS safe house no longer felt entirely safe, but they had nowhere else to go. Chan produced two cold bottles of OB Lager while she briefed Bolan on Major Roh Tae-il of North Korea’s State Security Department.

  “He is well-known to the NIS,” she said. “He’s forty-eight years old, associated with the DPRK’s Ministry of State Security since he was twenty-one, which means affiliation with the former KGB, as well. His specialty for years has been running illegal agents here in the Republic, others in Japan and on Taiwan. We’ve never caught him on our own side of the DMZ, although it’s thought he visits the Republic several times per year, in different guises.”

  “Do you buy what Park said about Roh being the brains behind the sarin gassings in Los Angeles?” Bolan inquired. He had already passed the major’s name on to Stony Man and was awaiting word from their extensive database, but in the meantime he was interested in his helper’s take.

  “It’s possible,” she said, “but Roh would have to sell the notion first. Without approval from the Supreme Leader, he’d be mad to go ahead and try it on his own.”

  “And if he got approval from the presidential palace,” Bolan said, “that makes the terrorist attacks specific acts of war.”

  “It would,” Chan solemnly agreed.

  Not automatic war, as Bolan fully realized. There would be crucial steps involved: first convincing the White House, then sending a message to Congress with sufficient proof to warrant a formal declaration of hostilities.

  And if it went that far, what happened next?

  The modern style of warfare likely would preclude a physical invasion of North Korea with boots on the ground. These days the strikes would come from killer drones, cruise missiles and high-altitude stealth bombers, wreaking bloody havoc on the ground below. And after that, what consequences lay in store for those who fired the first barrage of shots?

  North Korea might be shunned by leading nations of the world, but its leader had allies spread around the globe. In the West, the DPRK still had embassies in Cuba, Mexico, Peru, Brazil and Venezuela. A dozen European states hosted its consulates, along with eleven in Africa, twenty-one in Asia and thirteen in Europe. Everywhere its flag flew, agents of the SSD were active undercover, ever on the lookout for potential human tools. In California, three such dupes had managed to exact a fearsome price. What might the final toll be, if that force was multiplied and globally dispersed?

  “What can we do?” Chan asked.

  He noted that she didn’t push the whole load off on him, but that did little to resolve the problems swirling in his mind. The Executioner had never taken down a head of state and never planned to. That was not a mere extension of his private ban on killing cops; indeed, he had eliminated politicians in the past without a second thought. But killing off a president, premier or a prime minister was something else entirely. It produced regime change, struggle to resolve a power vacuum at the pinnacle of government, and such change often tended to be worse than what had gone before.

  But Major Roh Tae-il was still within his reach, if he planned carefully made the necessary preparations in advance.

  “I’m going North,” Bolan said at last.

  “But not alone.”

  “You’ve done your duty. There’s no point sticking your neck out across the Parallel.”

  “My job is done when I say so,” Chan countered.

  “And your captain? What would he say?”

  “Nothing,” she replied, half smiling, “if I do not ask him first.”

  He knew the maxim of bureaucracy worldwide—that it was easier to gain forgiveness than permission. Still, for Chan to cross the DMZ and join him in a paramilitary action against members of the SSD was tantamount to war itself.

  If they got caught.

  She seemed to read his mind, saying, “If anything goes wrong, I’m just another terrorist. The SSD might try to link me with the NIS, but they will fail. No one outside Pyongyang will believe it.”

  Traveling with an American, if both of them were killed, might even make the accusation less believable, at least outside the DPRK.

  Frowning, he said, “Be sure, before you make another move.”

  Chan faced him squarely. “I’ve never been so sure of anything.”

  SSD Headquarters, Pyongyang, North Korea

  MAJOR ROH TAE-IL WAS long accustomed to bad news. When serving a pariah state led by a man perceived by many in the outside world to be insane, no end of stinging criticism was expected and received from every corner of the globe. There was a crucial difference, however, between hostile words and actual defeat.

  Slumped in his rolling office chair, Roh felt defeat envelop him and wondered whether he could save himself before it was too late.

  With the approval of his high-ran
king superiors—which meant approval from the DPRK’s Supreme Leader and leader of the Supreme People’s Assembly—he had joined in a conspiracy with Shin Bon-jae to carry out specific actions in America, viewed in Pyongyang as a trigger-happy nation prone to bomb and strafe countries that failed to heed its will upon command. This night that scheme had failed, dramatically and catastrophically, claiming Shin’s life and casting his great empire into disarray.

  Roh had absorbed that news and passed it to his immediate superior. What worried Roh most now, with that distasteful chore accomplished and the ripples spreading up the chain of command to reach the Kumsusan Palace, was what might happen next, in South Korea and at home.

  There was a chance, he realized, that his colonel would blame an underling—predictably, the major who proposed the plan—and let Roh take responsibility for all that had gone wrong, regardless of his real-world culpability. That could mean execution: unlike South Korea, death was dealt out often, almost casually, in the DPRK, for a list of crimes ranging from treason, espionage and defection to religious proselytizing and listening to unapproved outside media sources. Worse still, executions were normally public affairs, including death by hanging, firing squad or decapitation.

  Beyond the risk to him from his superiors, what else might happen as a result of Shin’s downfall? A private fear nagging at Major Roh suggested that the raiders who had toppled Shin’s empire might travel north across the DMZ to strike at Roh, his agency or even at the president himself. Roh’s enemies still had not been identified, as far as he knew, which made watching out for them nearly impossible. In a regime already paranoid, obsessed with internal security, what more could be done to prevent infiltration or sabotage?

  Roh’s safest bet, as things now stood, would be to flee for parts unknown. He had substantial funds on tap in Switzerland and the Bahamas, plus no less than six cover identities created over time to let him travel far and wide. Escape was risky, but still possible. As far as former comrades from the SSD tracking him down to punish him, that would be something to concern him throughout the remainder of his life. Exile, whether self-imposed or ordered by a government, did not ensure longevity.

  But leaving ran against Roh’s grain. He was a loyal North Korean, born and raised. He would not turn against his homeland now, simply because a plan went sour and he felt the heat. If killers meant to hunt him, they would find him in Pyongyang.

  And he’d have a number of surprises up his sleeve.

  Department of Justice Building, Washington, DC

  THIRTEEN HOURS BEHIND South Korea’s time zone, Hal Brognola heard the news of death and desolation over lunch: a six-inch hoagie sandwich eaten at his desk while he reviewed a stack of paperwork that seemed to grow relentlessly, despite his best efforts to whittle down the stack.

  So many criminals and terrorists, so little time.

  The television mounted on his office wall relayed details of the slaughter in Seoul from CNN. They didn’t have the whole story, of course, and never would, but it was still enough to make civilians sit up and take notice, while selected bureaucrats might fume and wonder how they could inject themselves into the story for publicity or other private gain.

  The bare facts as reported: an attack on Omega Congregation headquarters had razed the building, leaving several persons dead, one of them Choi Kyung-wha, reputed second-in-command to founding father Shin Bon-jae. More shocking yet was the demise of Shin himself, killed in a second paramilitary strike against his walled estate in northern Seoul, along with many of his acolytes, who had apparently been armed like soldiers when they died. Police had yet to offer a coherent explanation for that dodgy circumstance, which seemed to counter bland descriptions of the Congregation as a normal and legitimate religion. But the big news was Shin’s death and its expected impact on his vast financial empire.

  Who inherited the currency worth billions, real estate, commercial operations and the media outlets accumulated by a lifelong bachelor with no living heirs identified? Would Shin’s apparent murder spark a scramble for control of his elaborate network? Would one or more wills surface in the days or weeks to come, as they had done with Howard Hughes during the 1970s?

  Brognola, for his part, was more concerned with where Mack Bolan was right now, and how he planned to follow up the strikes in Seoul. Their last communication, brief and scrambled, indicated Bolan saw a link between the LA sarin massacres and Shin Bon-jae, stretching beyond the now-late billionaire to Pyongyang and North Korea’s State Security Department. Cauterizing that part of the open wound meant traveling across the DMZ and risking death or capture in the North Korean capital to punish those whom Bolan deemed responsible.

  That infiltration had not been a part of the big Fed’s plan when he’d sent Bolan to dish out payback for the slaughter in Los Angeles. Should he have foreseen it? With the fact of Park Hae-sung’s involvement—one more corpse accounted for—could Brognola not have predicted where the nightmare trail would end?

  Or had he simply closed his eyes to it and kept his fingers crossed?

  Whatever, it was too late now for him to reel in the Executioner. Once Bolan was committed to a mission, there was no such thing as turning back, leaving the job unfinished and its loose ends dangling. Bolan would press on, with or without his comrade from the NIS, and when the smoke cleared there would be more deaths to tabulate.

  Brognola only hoped that Bolan, his old friend, would not be one of them.

  And if he was, then what? Justice and State would solemnly deny that any Americans had been involved in any aspect of the crime spree, North or South of the Korean DMZ. No records had survived Bolan’s first “death” to contradict those statements. Indeed, Bolan’s whole life since the dramatic flameout in Manhattan’s Central Park had been an epic exercise in plausible deniability.

  Some would remember Bolan fondly, even tearfully, while 99.999 percent of the world’s population would have no idea the man they once followed through dozens of flamboyant headlines had, in fact, died twice.

  But Brognola would not forget. And if it came to that, he’d find some means to make the bastards pay.

  Guro District, Seoul

  CHAN TAESUN HAD barely offered to join forces with Matthew Cooper for a covert crossing of the DMZ when she picked out a flaw in the idea. Without collaboration from the NIS, how would that crossing be achieved successfully? The Military Demarcation Line was guarded around the clock from coast to coast, and while defenders in the South had found four communist incursion tunnels between 1974 and 1990, betrayed by wisps of steam rising from underground, the border was now airtight, at least in theory. Occasional gunfire exchanges still occurred, and some defectors from the North still fled southward, but crossings overland by car were strictly banned except where prior negotiations had arranged them.

  Two railway lines existed, the Donghae Bukbu Line on Korea’s east coast and the Gyeongui Line to the west, each facilitating closely monitored tourist traffic, but no white American could travel on those trains without risking arrest.

  The only other means of transit was by air, and that was an enduring challenge in itself. The DMZ was, in effect, a no-fly zone. Pilots who tried to circumvent the Parallel were forced to fly offshore from South Korea, from Seoul over the Yellow Sea, or from Sokcho over the Sea of Japan, then loop back over North Korea, risking sudden death on sight from fighter planes of the Korean People’s Army Air Force.

  Chan’s superiors within the NIS used certain private charter lines to carry spies and secret cargoes to the DPRK on occasion, facing the potential loss of lives and planes. She knew of one—Flying Dragon Airlines—that would carry out such missions for a price, but how could she afford their rates without official sponsorship?

  She sketched the idea out for Cooper, ending with her verdict that the standard price was out of reach. He listened then replied, “If money is the only problem, I can likely get it f
or you.”

  “How?” she asked him, frowning.

  “You have a mob in Seoul, like any other major city,” he replied. “In fact, last time I checked, you had more than four hundred of them, moving drugs and weapons, running prostitutes and gambling, deep in human trafficking. Point me at one of those and I can have your money by this afternoon.”

  She frowned at that, nearly incredulous, despite what she had seen and helped him do since his arrival in the capital. “You know our syndicates?” she asked.

  “I know the top three are the Double Dragon, Seven Star Mob and the HSS Mob,” he replied. Pick one, give me an address for one of their banks and I can tap it.”

  “But—”

  “Trust me,” he said. “It’s what I do.”

  “That means a whole new war in Seoul,” she said.

  “They’ll never know who hit them. The police can mop it up, and we’ll be in the wind before they have a shot at putting it together.”

  “Well...”

  “Is there another choice?” he asked.

  Chan came up empty there and finally, reluctantly, told him. “Members of the Double Dragon syndicate maintain a bank of sorts in Gangnam-gu, downtown. It handles money from their gambling, brothels and what you would call loan-sharking rackets.”

  “Sounds perfect,” Cooper replied. “When do we leave?”

  Gangnam-gu, Seoul

  THE DOUBLE DRAGON syndicate was strong in Seoul, but strength unchallenged over time may lead to negligence, even complacency. They hadn’t fought a war against a rival mob in years and were completely unprepared to face the Executioner.

  The outfit’s bank did business as a car wash. People brought their cars in as usual, many paid cash, while a selected clientele delivered money to the mob for varied reasons, chiefly payoffs on clandestine loans or for clandestine goods and services. A certain BMW, for instance, might come in for detailing, its driver leaving blocks of shrink-wrapped money in the glove compartment, where a manager would find it and apply the sum against a customer’s account. Approximately half of those who cleaned their cars on any given day were runners, dealers, pimps and loan sharks.