Don Pendleton - Contagion Option

“Police!” Graham echoed, following on his friend’s heels. Police officers swarmed into the lobby, spreading out and looking for hostile enemies.

“Graham!” Lieber’s voice followed.

Reader didn’t stop as he crossed over the prone figures of frightened hostages. Graham followed closely after and they reached a door marked Employees Only.

“Let me take the point, Stretch,” Graham replied. “I’ve got my armor, you—”

Reader lifted his own sweatshirt, displaying a shiny blue ballistic nylon shell covering his stomach. “It’s a new design I’ve been working on. Will yours stop 5.56 mm?”

Graham grinned. “Yeah, it will.”

He kicked the door open and charged through. Off to one side, a stairwell stood open and he took two long strides toward it before stopping short, teetering. Reader grabbed the back of his armor and tugged him back before he fell forward.

“Trip wire,” Graham warned.

Reader hopped over it and knelt by the device. “Crude. A grenade in a tin can.”

He snicked out his knife and snipped the fine string. “You got a paper clip?”

Graham handed it to him and Reader fed the metal wire into the hinge. The scientist took it out and pocketed the minibomb. “Okay, it’s safe, Kirby. Call the others in.”

Graham turned and bellowed through the door, “They went this way!”

Reader chuckled. “Who needs bullhorns with you around?”

Graham grinned and followed his friend down the stairs. The two men were cautious for any more trip wires, but the gang had to have anticipated one booby trap would slow down any pursuit.

They hit the basement running, their boots slapping concrete. The Salt Lake SWAT team was still clomping down the steps as Reader and Graham continued. When they turned a corner in the basement hallway, they saw a gaping hole in the foundation wall.

Graham’s sharp eyes noticed the demolition charges ringing the entrance and he grabbed Reader like a rag doll. The big ex-football player hurled them both back behind the cover of the intersection as the shock wave cracked down the hallway, hurling stones at bullet-like velocities.

“Thanks, Kirby,” Reader said, his head ringing.

Marrick was among the SWAT cops who finally showed up. “What the hell happened?”

“They cut us off,” Graham snapped.

“Must have used low-velocity explosives to cut that entrance hole. That’s how they got the whole gang in here,” Reader added. “Then when it was time to—”

“We have to get out of here, sir,” a SWAT officer interjected. “The building’s foundation has been compromised.”

Reader shut up and joined the exodus from the bank. As they reached the lobby, they saw that the hostages were already being moved out, but broken glass rained outside the windows. The large panes looking out onto the street were cracked, and Reader and Graham could both see a huge crack through the ceiling. Plaster filtered down through the newly made fissure.

“Hurry up!” Reader shouted.

The SWAT cops were already past, and Marrick and Graham were bringing up the rear.

“Anyone on the upper levels?” Reader asked.

The last of the SWAT cops, a lieutenant who believed in “first one in, last one out” leadership, paused. “I was going to send a team up the stairs, but when the explosion sounded, I told them to pull back. Did you see anything on that crazy camera of yours?”

“Just the snipers, and they were already gone,” Reader replied.

The SWAT commander nodded. “Get going. I want this place cleared—”

That’s when the roof came down in a choking cloud of dust. All Reader could hear was the cry of his best friend, Graham.

“Stretch!”

Pattaya, Thailand

AS SOON AS THE AIRCRAFT carrier’s helicopters loomed into radar range, Bolan and Grimaldi had taken off. They hovered in place long enough to watch the enemy submarine break apart. Bolan had made sure that it was only a diesel engine, and not a refurbished sub with nuclear power. His simple breaching charges were enough to turn the diesel engines into a bomb powerful enough to split the vehicle in two. Battered Korean survivors had been dumped into inflatable rafts and set adrift to explain what the hell they were doing in the area. Meanwhile, one less black market submarine patrolled the globe’s waters, snapped into two pieces and its ruined innards dumped to the bottom of the Gulf of Thailand.

At the airfield and Bolan’s temporary forward base in-country, he hooked up the severed IDE cables to a Stony Man laptop slot and had Aaron Kurtzman and the cybernetic team go over the hard drive via satellite uplink.

“Get some sleep,” Kurtzman told him. “It’ll take awhile to get what we need off the drive.”

“Will do,” Bolan answered. He made certain that their hangar was secured first, cleaned his pistols, slid the Desert Eagle under his pillow and went to sleep. Grimaldi had already sacked out after making sure that Dragon Slayer was in working order.

SEVEN HOURS LATER Grimaldi was up, having dry cereal and coffee as his morning meal, when Bolan joined him. “Mornin’, Sarge.”

“Any word from Aaron yet?” Bolan asked.

“Nope,” Grimaldi answered. “Want some grub?”

“I’ll make it myself once I change,” Bolan answered. The hangar hadn’t been equipped with a locker room that had a shower, so Bolan grabbed some clean clothes and a couple of towels and washed in the sink, scrubbing himself.

Bolan poured himself a bowl of dry cereal and helped himself to some coffee. Without a decent refrigerator, milk was out of the question. He supplemented his sparse grub with an apple.

It was boring, waiting, but the Executioner spent the time focusing on what he needed to do. He looked over maps to keep himself sharp on the area, and after refreshing his navigational knowledge, listened to radio reports to keep abreast of international news.

Three stories into the report, he listened to information about a Korean street gang who had robbed a federal bank in Salt Lake City. They’d escaped through the sewer system, and had set off an explosion that collapsed part of the building. Authorities were still trying to figure out the actual identities of the robbers, but promised swift arrests and resolutions.

The mention of the Korean street gang stuck in the Executioner’s mind. The prostituted young women were being shipped to North Korea in some form of trade. They were traveling concurrently with American and European style cattle, not common to Southeast Asia.

He’d heard plenty of rumors and stories over the years about UFOs and cattle mutilations around northern Utah, at a place called Dugway Proving Grounds. He remembered the actual facts about Dugway simply because several years ago there had been a leak of anthrax that had killed hundreds of heads of livestock in the area, and could have wiped out thousands of civilians if the winds had shifted during the containment breach.

Dugway was one of those places that remained on Bolan’s radar. He’d encountered dozens of efforts by foreign governments and terrorists to invade American bioweapons institutes across his long and bloody career. The Executioner had also encountered Chinese crime gangs abroad who did the dirty work of Communist Chinese intelligence services on more than enough occasions to never rule out the possibility that a group of common street punks could be working for a “higher” purpose.

North Korea was involved in smuggling humans and livestock, and there was talk of a mystery package from the captain of the freighter. And now, there’d been an incident involving a high-profile bank robbery and Korean street gangs in the backyard of one of the largest bioweapon containment breaches in recorded history.