Don Pendleton: Interception

The Executioner landed hard on his rubber-soled boots, which absorbed some of the shock of his impact. He went down to one knee, then came back up. His right hand tucked his pistol away as his left reached around and swung the silenced Kalashnikov from behind his back on its sling. He took up the assault rifle just as a third North Korean soldier rounded the corner at the far end of the platform, his weapon up and hunting for a target.

Bolan squeezed the Kalashnikov’s trigger and felt the recoil of the long rifle thump into his shoulder. The heavy-caliber rounds burned across the space between the two combatants and ripped the other man apart, then Bolan caught a flash of motion out of the corner of his eye and instinctively pivoted to face the new threat.

The final guard had circled and climbed over the secured crates housing the disconnected rockets. The muzzle of the man’s weapon blazed a star pattern, but green tracer fire buzzed harmlessly past Bolan as he drew down and punched the man from his perch with a short burst.

Bolan did not hesitate. He sprinted forward, hurtled across the body of the second man he’d killed, and charged down the length of the flatbed. As he ran, he let the silenced AKM drop to his side and pulled his ready-prepped satchel charges from their web belt carriers and rushed to put them into position.

He moved back and forth in a huddled crouch around the ends of the rockets, working with feverish efficiency. The Semtex was such a powerful compound and he had packed so much into his satchels that the procedure wasn’t difficult. Proximity with the engines was enough, and he slapped down the charges and primed their radio receivers for his signal.

He wasn’t interrupted though he knew that with so many of the sentries missing it was only a matter of moments before he was discovered; the law of averages demanded it. He worked coolly, planting the satchel charges as efficiently as he could, then standing and sprinting for the next boxcar. Only one more flatbed to go and he would have ensured the destruction of the rocket housing, guidance systems and engines.

He turned and scrambled to the edge of the flatbed. The train swayed and rolled beneath his feet as he circumnavigated the heavy chain tie-downs and sharp-edged corners of the crates housing the rocket components. Looking back the way he had come, Bolan turned and jumped lightly across the distance between the two railcars, letting his primary weapon dangle off its sling against his torso. He caught hold of the hard steel rungs of the ladder set into the freight car and quickly climbed upward.

As soon as his head cleared the edge of the carriage, wind tore into him. He scuttled over the side, got to his feet, caught his balance and began to move forward. He ran steadily, scanning ahead and hunting for the second flatbed containing the unmarked crates and their deadly payloads. The second hand on his watch continued cutting off segments of time with irrevocable consistency.

Finally he saw the break in the row of boxcars that indicated the second flatbed. On one side of the train the mountainside, thick with evergreens and heavy bushes, rose like a retaining wall while on the other side the drop into the valley was sheer and unforgiving. Bolan’s luck had held mainly due to the relaxed posture of an army long used to a subjugated population and one too technologically and financially challenged to provide its ground units with radio communications.

Bolan stopped running and dropped to one knee, the AKM up and ready. He cursed under his breath. A curve in the track allowed him to see the boxcar directly in front of the second flatbed from more than just one angle, and the news was not good.

The final railcar was a club carriage designed to carry passengers, and on a military train that could only mean more soldiers. To reach the second rocket storage area he was going to have to cross a railroad car filled with armed men. Just that quickly the factors working against his success had multiplied exponentially. Bolan worked the pistol grip of his assault rifle as he shrugged against the weight of the modified rucksack on his back. He rose and approached the sleeper car.

THE CURVE OF THE RAILROAD track continued along an inward spiral against the side of the mountain, exposing the inside surface of the train to Bolan from his position on the boxcar roof. He saw the dark face of the passenger car suddenly split open and a rectangle of yellow light spill out. Bolan dropped flat on his belly as a dark figure stepped out onto the train platform.

Immediately, Bolan noticed that the figure was dressed in civilian clothes, a leather overcoat draped across his fireplug frame. The man was talking animatedly into a cell phone. From less than twenty yards away Bolan was immediately struck by how compact, and thus how new, the communication device was. Cutting-edge cellular phones were not available to the average Korean, or even the average military officer. By default Bolan realized he was seeing someone very important. In his other hand the man carried a black leather briefcase Bolan recognized as a laptop carrier.

Moving surreptitiously Bolan raised his night-vision goggles. He had taken off the apparatus before his swim and kept it secured while he moved along the train to avoid the depth perception problems inherent to their use. Now he moved carefully to bring it up over his eyes and then zero in with the zoom function.

The North Korean on the cell phone jumped into abrupt focus. There was plenty of ambient light coming from the passenger car for the advanced-technology glasses to bring every stark line of detail into view. Bolan played the image-enhancement lens across the man’s face and knew from accessing his mental mug shots that he was looking at a major player in the North Korean government. He dredged the name from the recesses of his memory—he was looking at Kim Su-Kweon, department chief of the Research Department for External Intelligence—RDEI. The RDEI was a nefarious and sinister organization linked to activities as diverse as creating infiltration tunnels under the DMZ and selling methamphetamines to Yakuza interests in Japan.

If the RDEI was a web, then Kim Su-Kweon was the fat spider at its center. The man turned his back to the wind, his leather satchel swinging in his other hand. Bolan knew instantly he had to acquire that laptop. If he could secure it and then blow the train, there would be every reason for the North Korean command and control to believe the device had been lost in the explosion. It would be an intelligence coup of significant proportions.

Bolan pulled his NVDs clear of his face as Kim Su-Kweon shut his cell phone and turned toward the door leading into the passenger railcar. Bolan pushed up off his stomach and raised his silenced AKM up to cover the man.

Catching the motion out of the corner of his eye, Kim turned in surprise. He gaped in shock as he saw the black-clad apparition of the Executioner above him. He barked out a warning and dropped his cell phone, which clattered to the platform and skittered away to be pulled under the thundering wheels of the train. His hand clawed inside his overcoat as Bolan moved lightly to the edge of the boxcar roof. The North Korean intelligence agent pulled his pistol free and tried to bring it to bear.

Bolan loosed a 3-round burst into the man’s face from under six yards and splashed his brains across the steel bulkhead of the railcar behind him. The intelligence agent was thrown backward by the inertia of the heavy-caliber rounds, and his laptop case fell from slack hands as he pitched forward, then crumpled to his knees on the steel mesh of the platform. Bolan rushed forward and leaped across the distance between the two cars.

He landed hard and folded up but fought to keep his feet in the sticky pool of Kim’s spilling blood. The door opened and a uniformed soldier with an AKM in his hands appeared in the entranceway. Bolan didn’t hesitate to knock him back into the passenger car with a quick burst that clawed out his throat and blasted the back of his head off.