Contagion Option Read online

  ZING HO, THE YOUNG MILITARY attaché accompanying Major Huan heard the gunfire as they were on the way to the meeting room. Major Huan planted his hand on Zing’s chest and pushed him to the side of the hallway, drawing his handgun.

  “We’re under attack,” the major rumbled. His bodyguards had already drawn their submachine guns from under their ill-fitting, bulky trench coats. The rest of Huan’s staff was unarmed, dismay coloring their faces.

  Zing’s face screwed up tightly. He wished he’d had a gun right now, if only to put a bullet in this abusive bastard’s skull. Sure, his bodyguards might burn him down, but with the major’s death, they would be under no obligation to grab his younger sisters and turn them into sexual slaves. Sexual slaves as Zing had become.

  Huan pushed away from Zing and folded behind a wall of grim-faced, heavily armed bodyguards. Of course, the major was a coward, and he could pick up another young man at will.

  “Get to the meeting room,” Huan ordered. “You should be safe there.”

  The rest of the staff looked at each other in confusion, but Zing, his mind focused by contempt and rage, was tempted to just run for the nearest door and escape.

  “Do it!” Huan snapped.

  A bodyguard pulled the trigger on his submachine gun, perforating the ceiling and scattering the dismayed officers. Zing followed them until they were out of sight from Huan and his protectors, then slowed. The youth knew the staff members were the cream of the crop of the kind of sycophants who make up army officer staff teams—ass kissers and typewriter troopers who orbited men with any semblance of real power, hoping that a nicely typed report or a cup of coffee was enough servitude to keep them from real jobs on the front lines, looking over the demilitarized zones or planting minefields. The last combat training they received was all the way back in boot camp.

  Zing wasn’t much better, but being beaten and violated by Huan had provided him a mental armor against panic. He stopped at the intersection of a hallway and watched carefully around the corner as his frightened comrades raced toward the meeting room, where armed bodyguards for the others on Chong’s board of directors stood.

  The bodyguards offered one brief challenge, but driven to flight by the rattle of automatic weapons, the military leeches continued swarming to the protection of the meeting room. It didn’t help that the alarm killed any hope of understanding by drowning out spoken words.

  Zing pulled away from the corner and clenched his shoulders tight as machine-gun fire ripped through the fleeing hangers-on. Bullets chewed the corner that the young page had nestled against, but nothing penetrated to strike him.

  “Oh the hell with this,” Zing muttered. He looked around and spotted a stairwell, then ran for it. The door opened. A fire alarm added to the wailing alerts as he started down the stairs.

  He paused when he saw a tall, deeply tanned man with an assault rifle coming up the steps. Zing’s eyes went wide.

  Bolan looked at the youth. “Speak Chinese?”

  Zing nodded.

  “Who’re you?” he continued, switching to the one language they more readily shared.

  “I’m Zing Ho. I used to be Major Huan’s page,” the youth answered.

  “Used to be?” Bolan asked.

  “I’m hoping to hell that Huan stops a bullet,” Zing answered. “You’re here to kill him?”

  Bolan shook his head. “For now, I need answers. But that all depends on who else I have to question.”

  Zing weighed his options, staring into the big man’s eyes. The rifle’s muzzle was aimed at his heart. “Huan talks in his sleep. I keep my ears open.”

  “I never said Huan wouldn’t die.”

  Zing nodded. “I’m offering everything I know about what’s going on. But right now, the bodyguards are all in a panic. They just cut down the last of Huan’s staff as they tried to assemble in the side room.”

  “The side room?” Bolan asked. “That’s where the entourages and bodyguards would stay while the big men got together?”

  Zing nodded. “But with the racket going on, and from the way Huan’s guards mobbed up…”

  “Running through the halls didn’t seem like the formula for a long life,” Bolan concluded.

  “Yeah,” Zing answered. “I just want to get out of this mess.”

  “I can help,” Bolan offered. He pulled out a Makarov he’d gotten off the dead sentry and handed it to Zing. “Know how to use that?”

  Zing flicked off the safety, then checked the chamber. “Well enough.”

  “Just don’t forget, I can always interrogate someone else about what’s going on here,” Bolan warned. His rifle didn’t waver from Zing’s heart.

  Zing nodded.

  “Stay put,” Bolan said. “You’re not set up for a firefight. Head up two levels and hide on the landing there.”

  Zing listened to the big stranger. Despite the contact lenses and eye prosthetics, Bolan had reacted too viscerally to be a convincing Asian. The young Korean didn’t care, however. This stranger would be his ticket out of this hell hole. All he had to do was to weather this storm, and he wouldn’t have to worry about abusive majors ever again.

  THE EXECUTIONER ROLLED through the door that Zing had used to enter the stairwell, rifle primed and ready. He had one small errand to make, to confirm how the elimination of General Chong and his lackeys was to occur. With a burst of speed, he reached the corner that had protected the young page.

  Bolan switched to one of the few phrases he knew in Korean. “Don’t shoot!”

  His voice bellowed over the ruckus of the alarms. With the volume, and the background interference, the enemy bodyguards wouldn’t have an opportunity to determine the poor quality of his accent. Bolan waved his hand and heard a bodyguard bark for him to show himself.

  He stood, hoping distance would keep them from recognizing that he was neither Korean nor in uniform until it was too late. The corpses littering the hall, however, were a stark reminder that these men were willing to kill anyone who was a threat to them.

  One issued a challenge as Bolan edged closer. The only answer he could provide was to swing up his AK-107 and cut loose with a long burst. Bullets stitched the first two bodyguards, tearing their chests open with gory efficiency. Their bodies tumbled and jerked backward, other gunmen scrambling out of the way as the Executioner’s explosive opening took them off guard.

  One of them had the presence of mind to close the doors to the meeting room while another cut loose with a withering stream of bullets that drove Bolan behind the cover of a pile of bodies. The doors slammed shut in a heartbeat.

  Bolan rose to his feet, then saw the meeting room doors shake violently. Over the alarm, he heard screams of terror emanating from the small hall. He approached the doors, then realized that the shaking had stopped instantly. He put his ear to the door and listened, but silence reigned on the other end. He touched the surface. The doors were thick, practically bulletproof, and there was a silicone seal between the doors that would keep air from entering or exiting. On the other side, the atmosphere was lethal enough to kill within moments.

  Someone had set a blast of nerve gas to go off the minute the room was locked shut. Bolan stood back, realizing that it was too late for the poor bastards in the room. It had been his intention to spare anyone unarmed in the hall, as long as they didn’t put up a fight. Instead, the whole crew had been washed over with a lethal dose that didn’t discriminate between who was a threat and who was passive. Bolan’s shoulders sagged, and he turned from the instant abattoir.

  He wanted justice, and answers. There was no justice in the way these men died, subjected to the horrors of their nervous systems collapsing. Bolan raced back to find Zing, hoping that the youth could lead him to the head honchos.

  MI QUA TENSED as she heard the chatter of assault weapons ripping the morning silence apart in a torrential gunfight. She looked around, as confused as Captain Pei and his group.

  The man in black was here. With the firefight goi
ng on, the armed protectors of the covert base would be roused. So much for the quick and easy way, she mused.

  She pulled the lighter from her pocket.

  “Mi, I’ll protect you,” Captain Pei said, stepping closer to her. One withered arm reached out to embrace her, and she launched a deadly sliver right into the wrinkled flesh of the old bastard’s throat. He clutched the fresh sting, then wrapped both hands around his throat.

  The soft puff of the launcher didn’t register over the bellows of the alarms going off, and one of Pei’s bodyguards looked in horror as his boss suddenly seized up.

  “Containment breach!” the bodyguard howled in fear. He dropped his gun and ran. No body armor or bullets could stop a lethal plague from killing him, and Mi scooped up the man’s fallen machine pistol in a swift movement.

  Others had been frozen in confusion at the first guard’s panic, but one of Pei’s thugs was on the ball enough to realize that General Chong’s assistant seemed a little too eager to get her hands on an assault weapon. The bodyguard reached for his weapon, but Mi fired off a sliver that struck the man in the cheek. He winced, slapping the sting on his cheek, and continued to level his weapon at the impudent young woman who had grabbed the gun.

  In the next heartbeat, the armed thug’s body betrayed him, muscles tensing tightly, blood pressure soaring as vessels constricted. The gun in his hand exploded with a shot, but tightening tendons and sinews had yanked the weapon to the ceiling. Mi flicked off the safety on her machine pistol and fired a point-blank burst into Pei’s third and fourth bodyguards.

  The two men writhed and collapsed, organs chewed to useless pulp by a salvo of full-auto bullets, while the second of the bodyguards tried to cry out in pain and horror. Unfortunately, his windpipe was too constricted; only short breaths had kept him alive as he mewled and thrashed. The rest of Pei’s assistants, none of them combat troops, broke and ran, but Mi couldn’t afford witnesses. She grabbed the poisoned bodyguard’s gun and swept a staggering burst that cut them down as they fled.

  Lifeless bodies tumbled, their blood seeping in puddles on the floor where their remains slid to a halt.

  “Plan B,” Mi muttered in English. “Blow away everyone in my path.”

  She rushed back to Captain Pei’s side, reloading on the run.

  At least she had the satisfaction of seeing the captain’s mouth froth with thick, blood-tinged foam. His death wouldn’t be swift, but it was just punishment for pawing her with those withered, hateful fingers. For good measure, she kicked the man in the teeth, giving in to a hateful surge of vengeance.

  “I hope you remember me in hell, you old bastard. And I hope you remember that your disgusting withered hands are the reason I sent you there,” Mi stormed.

  She fed the machine pistol a fresh magazine and finished off whoever was wounded, then went after General Chong.

  “WHAT THE HELL is going on?” Major Phar snapped as gunfire and alarms blared violently throughout the office building.

  General Chong’s mouth stretched into a tight line and he pulled his handgun out. It was an old Colt 1911, one his father had gotten off an American GI during the war. It was a cherished heirloom in the Chong family, and the general had lovingly cared for the weapon, always keeping it loaded, and practicing with it often. Chinese NORINCO knock-off magazines and parts had kept it in fine working order. He thumbed back the hammer and leveled it at Phar’s face.

  “We’ve been compromised, Major.”

  “I—I didn’t do anything…” Phar sputtered, his eyes wide and round.

  Chong sneered. “No, but you know enough about what we’ve been doing here.”

  “Oh, God…” Phar muttered, an odd last epithet for a “godless Communist.”

  Chong’s .45-caliber bullet smashed through Phar’s face, chunks of bone and soupy thick blood flying in a gory explosion. His face caved in, Phar’s corpse toppled backward with boneless grace, his skull vomiting brains as it struck the tiled floor.

  Chong looked at Major Ran Gar and Colonel Hai Morg as they backed away from him. The two officers had counted on their bodyguards for too long, leaving their personal weapons aside because they were too heavy. They never expected General Chong, or any of the others, to snap and open fire on them, but the splattered mess of what used to be Phar’s head was mute testimony to their stupidity.

  Gar rushed forward, hoping to catch Chong off guard, stabbing his hand out in a martial-arts strike. Chong tilted his pistol and fired, catching Gar under his arm with a heavy slug that smashed a rib to splinters before plowing a gruesome path through his right lung. Gar’s legs turned to rubber beneath him and he toppled haplessly to the ground, coughing up blood from his severed bronchial tubes. Gar clawed along the floor, gasping and wheezing on his own blood, trying to stop Chong, even though he was fatally wounded.

  Chong coolly lowered the muzzle to the crown of Gar’s head, focusing the front sight in the middle of his balding pate. “So long, Ran. I actually could stomach your company. I’ll almost miss you.”

  The Colt thundered nosily, and Gar’s shiny pate collapsed under 230 grains of copper-jacketed lead. The bullet crushed bone and spiraled through brain tissue, whipping them into a messy paste before ramming into the top vertebra of Gar’s neck, breaking it in two, but stopping between the halves of the split bone. The major slumped to the floor on his elbows and knees, folded up as if in prayer.

  Colonel Morg held his chair between them. “Listen. Wait, Chong Raye…friend…”

  Chong sneered and fired at the chair. Its heavy metal backing held under the single shot, but Morg stood back, still holding the furniture as a shield.

  “Chong!” Morg pleaded. “Chong, we can both get away…”

  “I’m going to communicate with the doctor that we have been compromised, but that I’ve eliminated everyone else who could betray him,” Chong said. “You know what happened to Sung.”

  Morg clutched the chair more tightly. “I’ll take my chances!”

  Chong fired two shots into Morg’s legs, and they flew out from beneath him. The colonel flopped to the floor, one knee blown apart so that his lower leg hung on via a slender strand of overstressed muscle and skin, his other thigh sporting a huge bloody splotch where the other round had struck. Morg’s pleas turned into wails of pain.

  Chong shook his head and emptied the last of the Colt’s magazine into Morg’s head to shut him up. He dumped the empty magazine and fed in a new one, racking the slide to chamber a fresh round. He pulled out his cell phone, then thought about contacting the doctor right away.

  He’d use a land-line connection from an underground bunker. Perhaps the submarine pen in Wonsan. That facility was well-protected, unknown, and the presence of the city above it would cut off the doctor’s radio signal to the lethal implant beneath his skin. He’d be able to speak to the mad scientist with impunity.

  And, the submarine pen was a sophisticated enough facility that he could call in his own doctors to remove the implant.

  A smirk crossed the general’s face and he lowered the hammer on the .45.

  He might just get out of this alive. Certainly, he’d lost his position in the North Korean army, but he lived. He knew secrets, and he had his own covert resources.

  It was time to go into business for himself.

  But first he had to get to Wonsan…

  “General Chong?” a voice asked in Chinese. “Drop the gun.”

  He whirled, pulling the trigger on a .45 that wasn’t cocked.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Executioner held his fire, wanting to take General Chong alive. The fact that the man had lowered the hammer on his .45, rendering it inert, had also helped the soldier to hold his fire. Instead of stitching the North Korean with a burst of AK fire, he whirled the rifle around and smashed the black polymer stock across Chong’s jaw.

  The Korean flew backward with the force of the blow, and the pistol tumbled from nerveless fingers. Chong scrambled on his hands and knees, spitt
ing blood from a split lip. He looked desperately for the Colt, but Bolan wasn’t going to let up.

  Looping a long arm around Chong’s neck, he hauled back hard, using the crook of his elbow as a noose. Chong’s hands flailed wildly for a moment, then Bolan jammed his knee against the small of the Korean’s back.

  “Stop struggling or I’ll break your back,” Bolan snarled in Chinese. “I’ll leave your paralyzed body here for your masters to learn what deals you’ve made with which devils.”

  That stopped Chong’s struggles, though he still sputtered for air until Bolan loosened his pressure on the man’s windpipe.

  “The game is over for you, General,” Bolan whispered in his ear. “Your submarine pen has been destroyed.”

  “By the Chinese government?” Chong gasped.

  “No. By your American partners,” Bolan said.

  Chong swallowed and sucked a breath through his still partially constricted windpipe. “He’ll use the implant…”

  “Implant?” Bolan asked.

  “He installed a device…in each of us…my staff…”

  “If he’d done that, you’d have died a half hour ago, when the submarine pens were destroyed by a fuel-air explosive,” Bolan explained.

  Chong let out a sigh of regret. “Then…”

  “You’ve been had, General. But someone has killed most of your friends’ staff. Nerve gas of some sort,” Bolan told him. “In the alternate meeting room.”

  Chong winced. “Then there’s someone…an insider…”

  “That’s what I was thinking. He’s started wiping out everyone who’s in the know, and will get to you eventually,” Bolan said. “I threw a monkey wrench into the works by putting this whole place on alert.”

  Chong shuddered.

  “Yeah, you owe me your life,” Bolan taunted. “I ask only one thing in payment. Who’s your connection on the other side?”

  “Dr. Kent Stevens,” Chong whispered.

  Bolan shook his head. “Never heard of him.”