Crucial Intercept

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“I understand. You’re doing your job.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Keep at it.” Bolan nodded to him, stood and offered his hand. Sheddon shook it; his grip was firm.

“Sir?”

“Yes, Officer?” Bolan asked, looking back over his shoulder.

“Good luck with…whatever it is you’re doing.”

“Thank you, Officer.”

It took Bolan only a few minutes to gather up his gear, check the Crown Victoria for damage and get on the road toward Newport News. Once in motion, he pressed the gas pedal as close to the floor as he dared, weaving through traffic with skill and determination. He was already far behind the curve, but there was no point in delaying further. Until he knew otherwise, his quarry was more likely than anywhere else to be in Newport News, Hampton, Norfolk, or beyond it. That meant he needed to be there, too, and soon.

He set the cruise control and, though he knew it was dangerous, spared a glance at his phone. He scrolled through the data the Farm was transmitting to him, calling up each image as it downloaded. There were brief personal biographies of the men for whom identities had been dredged up, and complete dossiers on two men not pictured. Bolan read in fits and starts as he switched his attention from the small screen to the road and back again. These were the Farm’s best guess at the likely leaders of such an Iranian strike group. It was a guess based on past Iranian intelligence ops and what Stony Man’s almost prescient computer team could tell him of known Iranian terror operatives—those operating with the nominal sanction of their frequently rogue state’s government.

The two dossiers were for men named Hassan Ayman, likely the senior member of an Iranian field team assigned to stir up trouble in the United States, and a Marzieh Shirazi, whose name Bolan remembered from several different terror bulletins in Europe. Each man had a file as long as Bolan’s arm. Shirazi was linked to several bombings of targets in Israel, where he had a close working relationship with the PLO and, more recently, with the Palestinian government that incorporated many high-ranking PLO figures, each man among them a murderous terrorist in his own right. Shirazi was small and squat, with a prominent brow, and dark, beady eyes pressed into a face that looked like it had stopped a brick at some point in Shirazi’s teenage years.

Ayman concerned Bolan more. He had no definitive terror incidents or murders assigned to him but, according to the file, he had long been rumored to be an extremely high-ranking official in Iranian intelligence. He was implicated in scores of deaths of civilians and nominally military targets alike, both in Israel and during the Iran-Iraq war. This last started in 1987. Apparently Ayman was believed, by the Farm’s team and as independently theorized by CIA analysts, to have been instrumental in several high-profile atrocities during the tailend of Iran’s “imposed war” with Iraq. If either Ayman or Shirazi was on scene, or if both of them were active in the here and present, on the streets of the urban United States, things would only get more bloody.

The big question remained: what did Iranian black-ops assassins want with a single former CIA cryptographer, a young man who had never, according to his file, worked as a field agent or on anything resembling a project related to Iran? This much was included in the data the Farm had sent on Baldero. It was a puzzle, and Bolan did not like puzzles. They pointed to incomplete information, and incomplete information, though a common problem in the field, was the most frequent cause of lost engagements. To gain and keep the initiative in combat required that he surprise his enemies. He did not intend to be on the other end of the exchange.

He was burning up the road, having passed Hampton and Newport News without incident, debating whether to cycle back and forth between them and Norfolk when his phone began to vibrate. The Farm would know he had reached the next city, of course; they were tracking him through the SAASM-compatible GPS tracking module in his phone. The Selective Availability Anti-Spoofing Module technology was the U.S. Military’s answer to GPS positioning. It ensured that, while his phone could be tracked by the team at Stony Man Farm, giving Price and her people up-to-date location data as Bolan traveled the country, no enemy could do the same, nor could false position data be transmitted to the Farm to misinform Kurtzman’s cyber team.

“Striker,” he answered.

“Striker, we have a mission-critical update,” Price said without preamble. “We are transmitting new coordinates to you as we speak. The advance field team has been combing likely spots for Baldero to go to ground, including local motels and gas stations. They have a pickup truck parked behind a Dumpster at a motel on the North Military Highway. They say it’s full of bullet holes.”

“Registration?”

“The truck was reported stolen in Charlottesville yesterday,” Price said, “and now it’s wearing a set of stolen license plates swapped from a similar Chevy S-10, also in Charlottesville.”

“Coincidence?”

“There’s that word again,” Price echoed.

“I’m on it,” Bolan said. “Out.”

It took him another fifteen minutes to reach the address, guided by the GPS directions in his phone. When he was close to the location, he stowed the phone and slowed, doing his best to stay inconspicuous. He found the motel and reconnoitered as quietly as he could, cruising around and hoping his interceptor and its missing side mirror wouldn’t scream “law enforcement presence” to Baldero if the man were watching and had reason to fear legal interference. Bolan was not a police officer, of course—he was a soldier. Baldero would not know that, though. To the fugitive Baldero, Bolan would represent the law, and any man running from so many shooters would either welcome rescue or fear capture. The situation would be very tense until the Executioner knew which way Baldero would break.

There was no sign of the advance field team. They would have pulled out to some discreet distance once word got out that a Stony Man operative was on the way. The team’s job was not combat and its mission was to remain undetected, to go unnoticed as long as possible. Getting drawn into a firefight was not its purpose; the unnamed, faceless analysts who had sent so much after-action intelligence Bolan’s way thus far could only continue to do so if they stayed out of the way. That was fine with the Executioner. He preferred to work alone, whenever possible, and if there was a firefight to be had, he was content to bring it to the enemy.

He found the truck right where he had been told to expect it, hidden in the lee of a pair of industrial-sized trash containers behind the motel. He parked behind it, blocking it in, nose-out in case he needed to put the Crown Victoria into action quickly.

The truck’s engine was still ticking. It had not been parked for long and was still shedding excess heat from what had to have been a breakneck drive. Bolan could smell burning brakes and hot rubber, the unmistakable odors of a vehicle that had been pushed to its limits.

He had his canvas war bag slung over his shoulder. Before he moved on the motel, he paused to open the bag’s large cover flap. Inside was the mini-Uzi he had first noted when making a cursory inspection of the care package from Kissinger. He withdrew the weapon, loaded one of the 30-round box magazines from the bag and placed the weapon on the hood of his vehicle.

He recounted the other explosives and lethal surprises in the bag, as well as taking stock of the loaded magazines for the Uzi. Kissinger had thoughtfully provided several 20-round box magazines for the Beretta 93-R, its 9 mm ammo compatible with the Uzi. There were a handful of loaded mags for the .44 Magnum Desert Eagle, too, and a few boxes of ammunition for both weapons.

Finally, he withdrew a small item he had at first overlooked. It was a rosewood-handled boot dagger in a leather sheath with a metal spring clip. He withdrew it, examined the four-inch, double-edged blade and resheathed the knife with a mental nod. Then he clipped the sheath inside his waistband in the appendix position, where he could draw it with either hand readily enough. His windbreaker covered it, barely, as it concealed his other hardware in their holsters.

As he went to pick up the mini-Uzi from the hood, a slip of paper fluttered from his sleeve, where it had been caught following his reach into the bag. Bolan scooped it up quickly, checking to make sure he was still unobserved from his vantage behind the garbage containers. Then he unfolded the paper.

Wear them in good health, it read in handwritten print. Stay alive. It was signed, simply, “Cowboy.”

Bolan shoved the slip of paper deep into his pocket. He picked up the Uzi and, holding the weapon low against his leg, moved in on the motel. Once he was in the shadow of the building itself, he took out his phone and texted a message to the Farm’s quick-contact number, which would display on a readout in the Computer Room, asking for room number intel.

Almost immediately, the responding text message came back, probably typed by Price herself: “Bear says man matching Baldero’s description checked in room 112. Grnd floor, East.”

That would mean the Farm, or someone on the advance team reporting to the Farm, had checked with the front desk. Whether overtly using government authority, or covertly using some ruse, the Farm had determined that a man who looked like Baldero had checked into room 112, which Price was informing him was located on the ground floor of the east wing of the double-winged building.

He made his way there, watching the doors and room numbers tick past in descending order as he went by. He was doing his best to ignore the gun held against his thigh. It was an old trick of role camouflage; if the gun wasn’t anything he noticed, a bystander might not notice it either. While there were always exceptions, Bolan knew from experience that most people simply didn’t look at the individuals around them. The majority of people walked through life in what one late, famous self-defense expert had called “condition white,” a state of blissful unawareness of their surroundings. Bolan was counting on that. It wouldn’t do for some particularly aware citizen to notice his weapon and call the police, perhaps tipping off Baldero that he had been located.

He found room 112 and pressed himself against the wall next to the door. Reaching out with one hand, he rapped on the door quietly, using the back of his left fist.

“Yeah?” came a voice from inside.

“Housekeeping,” Bolan said. “You want fresh towels?”

There was no reply from inside. Bolan could hear the occupant, presumably Baldero, shuffling around within. If it wasn’t his man, no harm would be done. If it was, however, he needed to take control of the situation right now. If he could get Baldero to open the door without causing a scene, he could quietly remove the man from the premises and take him into custody. Getting Baldero under wraps was the first step in stopping the shootings that were causing so much trouble, and in unraveling the mystery regarding why the shootings were happening.

“Sir?” Bolan asked again. “If you’ll just open the door—”

Just then a shotgun slug tore a hole the size of a quarter through the heavy motel door.

4

Straddling an upholstered wooden chair with his arms resting on the chair’s back, Yoon Jin-Sang focused the binoculars for a better view of the large, dark-haired man who had just entered the shelter of the motel’s second-floor overhang, sticking to the shadows. The man moved with unmistakable, deadly grace, like a panther. Yoon suppressed a shudder. He thought perhaps it was as they had feared, and the dreaded night-killer rumored in the reports trickling slowly down from military intelligence were true. If they were, he could believe that this man, the man he had just glimpsed in the binoculars’ view, was the night-killer. He did not say so. He knew the feelings of Kim Dae-Jung on the subject and did not wish to agitate his “superior.” When he spoke, he was careful to keep his tone subdued.

“He is here.”

“The large American?” Kim’s voice was too casual, almost indolent. The large, muscular man leaned back in his chair and paused to stare at the ceiling, as if he did not care.

“Yes, the same man,” Yoon said. “He is approaching Baldero’s room.”

Kim did not reply. Yoon banished the sigh before it could escape his mouth. His true superiors in military intelligence had given him his orders in no uncertain terms. He was to do his best to see to it that Kim carried out the mission with which he was tasked. Given Kim’s dangerously unstable nature, that might prove difficult, but it was not, they emphasized, considered impossible. Kim had been selected from the ranks of intelligence’s disgraced operatives because he was expendable and because he still 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, to match this unwelcome enemy.

The shotgun blast, when it came, deep and unmistakable, almost caused Yoon to jump. He was glad he did not; he did not wish to appear weak before his two companions. Kim looked up from the tracking device, interest and something like arousal crossing his face. Sitting on the edge of the bed, the woman, Hu Chun Hei, tossed her long black hair to the side in a reflexive motion and stopped manipulating the folding knife she carried.

They waited for long minutes, holding their breath. Nothing happened, and no one emerged from the hotel. The tracking unit, which Yoon could read from across the room, showed that Baldero was still inside the motel across the street. There was nothing to do but wait. Yoon tried to concentrate on the binoculars once more, hoping to catch a glimpse of Baldero or the big American who may well have met his end before the muzzle of the unseen shotgun.

Kim made a sound of disgust and slumped sullenly back into his chair, staring at the wall. It was at these times that he was most dangerous; when he grew still, it was never long before he exploded into violent movement, without warning and without provocation. In a way, Yoon could not blame him. The following, the waiting without action, were taking a perceptible toll on all of them. Only Hu remained impassive, but then, she was always inscrutable.

The sound of the knife whirling in the woman’s slim fingers told Yoon, who did not look back at her, that she had gone back to toying with the blade. She had been playing with the sharp, talon-shaped folding kerambit knife she carried since they had entered the room, silently spinning the vicious little weapon in endless circles from the finger ring in the handle. Back and forth, back and forth, completely around, then back and forth again—the knife’s movements were almost as hypnotic, were he to look at it, as was Hu’s beauty. She ranked highly in military intelligence, he knew, though no one in Kim’s unit was quite certain how high. She was Kim’s woman. That much had been made clear to him. As a result, none asked, and none dared question him…or her. Whatever arrangement Hu herself had with Kim and with their superiors was her business. It would, ultimately, be her neck, too.

Yoon had no instructions concerning Hu. She worried him, for if her loyalty was to her lover, Kim, and not to military intelligence and the leader’s government, she might interfere when it came time for Kim to die a hero’s death. If that happened, he would have to kill her, too, and he did not like the idea of incurring political debts to unknown individuals farther up the chain of power than he. Unfortunately, he had no choice in the matter. His primary and secondary mission objectives remained as they were regardless.

“I am going to call that fool, Tontro,” Kim announced abruptly. He removed a prepaid wireless phone, untraceable and readily available in the United States, from the pocket of the American jeans he wore. His black T-shirt, the jeans, and the American jungle boots he wore were a kind of uniform, among the North Korean team members. They were cheap, not very conspicuous and functional in the warm climate of Virginia. Yoon and Hu were similarly attired, though Hu’s clothing was significantly tighter.

“Tatro,” Yoon corrected automatically. It had become a mantra, and now Yoon suspected Kim did it on purpose, simply to nettle him. Little things like that were the man’s idea of humor, Yoon supposed, though he found the madman distasteful even at the best of times, and perfectly offensive when he was trying to be funny.

“Tatro.” Kim nodded, smiling his sickly, lopsided smile. He put his phone to his ear after redialing the number with a single press of his thumb. Yoon heard him and the American government man, the traitor James Tatro, exchanging meaningless pleasantries.

Yoon wondered if Tatro had the slightest idea just with whom he was in bed. North Korea was considered, laughably, a “rogue nation” among the Americans, though of course they would propagate such misinformation in their efforts to bully the leader’s people into submission. But the Americans, on the whole, especially those in their government, were curiously squeamish about violence. They would drop bombs on smaller countries from thousands of feet in the air, but the idea of actual blood flowing through their own fingers revolted them. Such was the stuff of Kim’s most pleasant dreams. If only this Tatro knew with whom he dealt, he would understand that he had truly signed a deal with someone he should consider a devil.

Kim’s family disgrace had started with a few easily covered-up murders. They had been servants, for the most part, and the occasional party or factory worker. Some had been transients. A few had been prostitutes, despite the leader’s best efforts to eradicate such practices from the streets of his nation’s fair cities. Kim had a sickness, one that drove him to need to kill as regularly as some men ate a heavy meal. The longer he went without indulging his impulses, the worse the expression of those dark inner desires was when it finally came to fruition. Forced by his family to give up his depredations, Kim had lived in what for him most surely had been agony, spending several months locked away in his family’s state-designated dwelling in Pyongyang.

When he finally escaped, he killed the person sent to guard him, an older cousin from his own family. Then he had escaped and murdered several families living in the public housing a few blocks away. It had been very, very difficult to cover up the evidence of those murders, to expunge all trace of those family’s many relatives and their connections to North Korean society in Pyongyang. Many threats had been made. Many citizens had been sworn to silence. Still many more had simply disappeared. It was not long after that, Yoon knew, that Kim had been consigned to this mission, a disgrace both to his family and to his work within military intelligence. He was an expendable, vicious animal who, once he served his purpose, would be put down like the rabid dog he was.

Yoon looked forward to that much of the mission.

“You have not informed us of something,” Kim finally said into the phone. Yoon could hear the other end of the line almost as clearly as Kim. The dangerous Korean had the volume of his phone set as high as it would go, the result of hearing loss in his good ear caused by a firearms “accident” when he was a teenager.

“I don’t understand,” the government man replied. Tatro’s reedy voice grated on Yoon’s already frayed nerves.

“You have not told us of all we face in our mission,” Kim said flatly, his tone hinting at deadly reprisals.

“But I have,” Tatro insisted. “I gave you full information on the size of the Iranian team and on the equipment I helped them smuggle in. The French team was delayed this morning when one of their trucks broke down, my spotters tell me, but they’re well on their way to you if they’re not there already. The Jews are around somewhere. That’s all.”

“There is another. A lone American. Big. Dark hair. Well armed. Very dangerous. The idiot Iranians spotted him on their trail and tried to kill him. Who is he?”

“I don’t have any information about a single operator,” Tatro whined.

“You have been paid a very, very large sum of money, American,” Kim threatened. “You were promised much more when we secured this fool whom you have so readily sold us. Do you think you can betray us now? With a single phone call, I can ruin you. I can see to it that your countrymen lock you away for the rest of your miserable life…or I can find you myself and see to it that you suffer for the very short span of whatever brief life I allow you to have.”