Contagion Option

Mack Bolan wasn’t walking the razor’s edge now

He was cutting his feet on the blade, and only his and Grimaldi’s skill could keep his blood from spraying the U.S. government in the fallout.

It was risky, and when Bolan called Stony Man Farm for an intelligence update and to inform Brognola that he planned to go to North Korea, it wasn’t to ask permission. Such a request would have been construed as nothing less than an act of war, even if the foray was in utmost secrecy.

The Executioner wasn’t a government employee, and there was a conspiracy summoning him into the depths of an enemy stronghold.

There wasn’t an option of survival.

He either succeeded, or the world would be drawn into a war that could explode into a three-way conflict with China.

Other titles available in this series:

Stalk Line

Omega Game

Shock Tactic

Showdown

Precision Kill

Jungle Law

Dead Center

Tooth and Claw

Thermal Strike

Day of the Vulture

Flames of Wrath

High Aggression

Code of Bushido

Terror Spin

Judgment in Stone

Rage for Justice

Rebels and Hostiles

Ultimate Game

Blood Feud

Renegade Force

Retribution

Initiation

Cloud of Death

Termination Point

Hellfire Strike

Code of Conflict

Vengeance

Executive Action

Killsport

Conflagration

Storm Front

War Season

Evil Alliance

Scorched Earth

Deception

Destiny’s Hour

Power of the Lance

A Dying Evil

Deep Treachery

War Load

Sworn Enemies

Dark Truth

Breakaway

Blood and Sand

Caged

Sleepers

Strike and Retrieve

Age of War

Line of Control

Breached

Retaliation

Pressure Point

Silent Running

Stolen Arrows

Zero Option

Predator Paradise

Circle of Deception

Devil’s Bargain

False Front

Lethal Tribute

Season of Slaughter

Point of Betrayal

Ballistic Force

Renegade

Survival Reflex

Path to War

Blood Dynasty

Ultimate Stakes

State of Evil

Force Lines

To Bobbi, as always.

This book never could have been done without you.

We must dare to think “unthinkable” thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world. We must learn to welcome and not to fear the voices of dissent. We must dare to think about “unthinkable things” because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.

—J. William Fulbright,

March 27, 1964

In my War Everlasting, I have been forced to see the unthinkable put into action by the unconscionable. To contain a catastrophe, sometimes the options are to lose an entire city than to lose a nation, but as long as there is still a breath in me, my option is to lose myself to save a city.

—Mack Bolan

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

The body plummeted through the sky and crashed with a dull, sickening thump into the dry grass. More bodies followed as the transport plane made a slow, lazy circle over the field.

The team had done this a hundred times before, and the men, dressed in black, took to the field.

The bodies were hollowed-out cattle, their bellies distended with packages. Some clinked with the heavy ring of metal, while others were stiff pillows of compressed powder. Two of the cows were filled with rolls of rifles, wrapped in plastic and cushioning foam.

“Looks like Christmastime for the gang,” a man dressed in black mentioned as he pulled the weapons from the body cavity of the slaughtered animal. “Must be twenty rifles here.”

“Chatter,” another replied quietly.

The first fell quiet, admonished with a single word. Sound carried, and even though their helicopter had scanned the area for miles with infrared and radar, they still worked in hushed, professional silence to ensure their private, midnight endeavor went undetected.

In the darkness, none of the men in black used regular white lights. Occasionally they would flash on a low-powered, low-signature red light, but only for a moment. In the empty field, there was too much risk of strangers noticing.

They had been doing this for years and hadn’t been caught.

One man spoke among the group. “Leave a souvenir for the conspiracy theorists.”

The others nodded and as they dragged a dozen carcasses off the field, they left one lying in the dried grass.

One man pulled a small butane-lighter-like device and burned a brand into the carcass. He worked from memory, knowing which ranch they were on.

The rest of the team took out folding rakes and went over the entirety of the field before returning to the helicopter. The branding artist backed his way to the helicopter, obscuring his tracks, leaving no trace that anyone was ever there. The long, padded skids of the transport chopper rose from a patch of hard, rocky soil and sparse grass leaving little clue of the vehicle’s presence.

The presence of the gutted cow would obfuscate the situation handily. No one would suspect their smuggling ring, in business across several decades, was in operation. Not when investigators were hampered by crackpot theorists who blamed slaughtered cattle on aliens or top-secret Army surgical teams testing surgical lasers. The truth was at once mundane and would shock the world should it ever get out.

But the men in black, as they left the gutted, cauterized corpse in the field, wouldn’t be responsible for that leak in secrecy.

The dark helicopter rose into the Utah night, its Kevlar hull minimizing its radar signature to that of a sparrow, sideways speakers reflecting the sound of the rotors at a right angle to the original racket to dampen the noise to a thrumming whisper. The stealth bird swung lazily back toward its home base.

It was business as usual.

CHAPTER ONE

The Gulf of Thailand, twenty miles out of Pattaya

It was business as usual for Mack Bolan, a.k.a. the Executioner, as Jack Grimaldi raced Dragon Slayer low over the Gulf of Thailand, so low that the sea spray pelted the windshield. The high-tech combat helicopter was loaded to the gills with electronics and weaponry to give Bolan the kind of edge he needed when fighting impossible odds. The war bird had been designed specifically for the soldier’s crusade against the forces of evil. With encrypted communications, wireless satellite computer links and sensors that could pick up anything across the spectrum, Dragon Slayer could find almost any target. Laden with rocket and grenade launchers, and the awesome .50-caliber GECAL multibarreled machine gun, the helicopter could destroy even a small column of tanks.

Grimaldi held them low over the water, about five feet between the belly of the sleek bird and the tops of the tallest waves. With speakers that reflected the sound of the bird’s own rotor slap at ninety-degree angles to the original sound, the normal thunder and roar of the helicopter was muffled to little more than a low hum. This was a stealth insertion on a freighter loaded with contraband from Thailand.

The ship was on course for North Korea. The freighter was registered to Liberia, which enabled it to travel around the world without more than a second glance. Sometimes that registry also covered illegal operations, but since major corporations profited from both tourism and “under the counter” transportation of goods, powerful sponsorship kept governments from looking too closely at the problem.

Mack Bolan wasn’t the government. He wasn’t a civil servant with a license to kill. Certainly, through the Sensitive Operations Group at Stony Man Farm, he had official backup in the form of intelligence, a gunsmith and occasionally two of the best covert strike teams on the planet. Still, the Executioner considered them just that—backup. He enjoyed his camaraderie with the warriors and support crew at Stony Man, but he was his own man, with his own resources and his own crusades. Even Dragon Slayer had been funded from the massive war chest that Bolan had accumulated, the spoils of countless wars against organized crime. While the aircraft was assigned to Stony Man Farm and was registered to the United States Justice Department by the Federal Aviation Commission, the Executioner didn’t let taxpayer dollars fund his arsenal. Instead, the sleek aircraft had been funded from money “donated” by gangsters, drug dealers and terrorists.

Where the donors had been sent, they wouldn’t ever need money again.

“Coming up on the freighter. ETA thirty seconds,” Grimaldi said over Bolan’s LASH radio.

“Smooth ride as usual,” he told the pilot.

Grimaldi smiled. “Well, the last time the lady was flying in Thailand, she took a pounding. She’s proving to Daddy that she can handle this.”

Bolan grinned, then opened the side door. He’d have to get out quickly. Even with a radar signature the size of a hummingbird, and making not much more sound, the rotor wash would be noticeable to anyone on the freighter’s deck. In addition, the helicopter itself wasn’t invisible, despite its dark-colored hull. The ship’s running lights would betray Dragon Slayer’s presence in a heartbeat.

He gripped the sides of the door opening as Grimaldi popped the helicopter up and over the rail. With a surge of muscles, Bolan leaped to the deck, landing in a crouch, then rolling into a somersault as Grimaldi dipped the helicopter back and out of sight. The drop was fifteen feet, but Bolan was strong and agile, and he allowed momentum and supple movement to absorb most of the shock.

As soon as he hit, Bolan drew his Beretta 93-R, folding grip snapped down, sound suppressor in place.

On a data screen in the passenger cabin of Dragon Slayer, he’d kept an eye on infrared blobs, humans walking the decks, memorizing where his enemies were on this ship. According to the scanners, there were twenty-five people on board in various compartments.

That didn’t count the containers in the hold. Infrared scans had trouble going through both the hull and the tractor-trailer containers in the hold, but there was a definite heat signature that caught Bolan’s attention. He was here on the advice of an old ally in Thailand who had said that the ship was smuggling people to North Korea. Bolan had pulled a few strings to get Dragon Slayer delivered, because he knew the sleek high-tech aircraft could possibly be needed to get wounded or dying bystanders back to shore.

Bolan had engaged the slave trade in Thailand once before, and had dropped a brutal ax on its neck. The trade still existed and thrived, because the Executioner had been able to take out only one mastermind of the insidious child slavery ring and his organization—the San United Army.

Still, he had his ear to the ground, and when he had the opportunity, he’d stop by and give the flesh peddlers a taste of long-delayed justice. With a crusade against the forces of terrorism and crime that went on around the world, Bolan couldn’t be everywhere at once. But when he arrived, he made up for lost time.

“Anyone catch sight of me?” Bolan asked over his radio.

“Nobody moving your way, no one taking up arms against you,” Grimaldi answered. “You don’t exist.”

Bolan pressed his lips tightly together. “Good, I intend to keep it that way for a while.”

Sliding through the shadows, clad in his skintight blacksuit, Bolan slipped between cargo hold lids and containers on the deck.

With every trailer, he paused and pressed a small cup against the container. The cup contained sensitive electronics that amplified sound and fed it through his LASH radio. The hands-free unit would tell him if there was anyone inside breathing or moving. Whispers would be as clear as straight to his ear. With a quick look over his shoulder, he’d listen for a few minutes, then move on.

He heard the rattle of machinery in most of the containers, metal jostling against metal. He wasn’t certain if it was farm machinery or crates of rifles, but whatever it was, it wasn’t in need of immediate attention.

“We’ve got movement on the bridge,” Grimaldi warned, and the Executioner slipped deeper into shadow, Beretta 93-R at the ready. Dragon Slayer hovered silently, back a full klick, but the Stony Man pilot could keep a close eye with telephoto lenses and other advanced surveillance gear.

Bolan, nearly invisible, looked toward the bridge. A pair of gunmen exited the bridge, being ordered around by the captain, a swarthy man who looked to be from the Mediterranean. The guards were Asian, and they didn’t look happy to be ordered around. The Executioner knew that their mission would be urgent, simply because of their weapons and how quickly they were dismissed by the irate man in command. Bolan closed across the deck, cautious not to let the enemy know he was there.

The guards reached a stairwell that led to the hold, and paused. One lit a cigarette and started to speak in Vietnamese, a language Bolan understood all too well.

“That Italian idiot thinks he can push us around like he owns us…” one man said.

“He’s Greek, not Italian.”

“Greek, Italian, they’re all hook-nosed bastards who think because they have round eyes they can see everything better than we can,” the first man muttered. “I left Dhom Phoc for this?”

“Hey, would you rather live on a commune?” the other man asked. “Pham, we’re making money here.”

Pham tossed away his cigarette, the butt bouncing off the toe of Bolan’s boot as he stood in the shadows. “Yes. Money. I have to remember that. Besides, it’s better than being blown out of the water by the Chinese navy for being pirates.”

The second smuggler laughed. “Don’t worry. Once we get the cargo back to Korea, we’ll be transporting drugs and booze as usual.”

Pham shrugged. “If you say so. Come on.”

They started down the steps and Bolan gave them a few moments lead time before he strolled onto the deck, walking with purpose as if he belonged there. He followed the two Vietnamese smugglers down the steps, Beretta 93-R holstered under his arm. Still, he had the pommel of his forearm knife resting in his palm, ready to slice flesh and draw blood with a simple flick of the wrist.

The two Vietnamese sentries chattered and continued to complain about the Greek man in charge, unaware that they were being followed. Out at sea, with no one around for miles, sailors tended to think that they were immune to intrusion.

One of the Vietnamese looked back and spotted Bolan, and the soldier lifted his hand in a half wave before turning into the first hatchway he could find. The sentry waved back to Bolan and called out something in an unintelligible effort at Italian. The Executioner poked his head out the hatchway and responded in his own Italian.

“What did you say?” he asked, keeping his body and the suspicious-looking blacksuit and battle harness out of sight behind the doorjamb.

The Vietnamese paused and thought hard about what he needed to say. “I said, nice night.”

Bolan smiled. “Wouldn’t know. I’ve been belowdecks all evening. Where are you going?”

The other Vietnamese translated for his less articulate friend, then answered.

“The captain sent us to bring up a couple of girls for some after-dinner entertainment,” the second one said.

Bolan kept the anger out of his face and nodded. “Oh…great.”

“Yeah, I know. Getting that greasy bastard’s leftovers sucks,” the Vietnamese with the better Italian answered.

“We aren’t supposed to be sampling the merchandise,” Bolan mentioned.

“It’s not like the Koreans are going to know anything’s missing. Most of these girls are professionals, so it’s not like the clients are going to expect virgins,” the guard responded.

Bolan shrugged. “Yeah. Well, when the North Korean military brass end up with the clap, you can explain that to Kim Jong-il.”

The chatty guard stepped closer to the doorway. “What?”

Bolan sighed. “Didn’t know that the captain had the gift that keeps on giving?”

The Vietnamese guard looked to his friend and exploded rapidly in his native tongue. “Oh dammit! That greasy Greek gave us the clap!”

The second one’s face paled. “You’re kidding!”

“This guy said the captain has…” The sentry paused and looked back toward Bolan. “Wait…I haven’t seen you bef—”

Bolan reached out and slammed his left hand tightly around the guard’s throat, cutting off whatever else he had to say. The forearm knife dropped into his other hand and launched like a dart. The Executioner’s throw was true, the sharp spike of steel imbedding deeply into the second man’s chest, a gush of blood squirting in a long, lazy, crimson arch.

The wounded guard gurgled, trying to gain his breath, but several inches of steel had pierced his lung, making speech difficult as the organ flooded with blood.

Bolan’s captive enemy struggled to break his grasp, forgetting about his guns. Panic had overtaken the smuggler, and if he had his wits about him, he would have reached for any of his weapons, or even one of Bolan’s pistols, and ended his torment—and the Executioner’s intrusion—with a pull of the trigger. However, fingers like steel savagely crushed his windpipe and jugular, making the Vietnamese resort to primitively hammer against Bolan’s forearm. Given the big man’s musculature, it was akin to trying to punch through a thick oak tree branch.

The Executioner pulled the Beretta and shot his captive’s partner through the forehead, finishing the man’s suffering before his lung completely filled with blood and he drowned. Then he pushed the suppressor between his adversary’s lips and grated in the man’s native language, “You make a sound, you die, even slower than your friend.”

He eased the pressure on his captive’s throat, and the man nodded.

“How many are in the hold?” Bolan asked, pulling the gun back so his hostage could speak.

“We started out with one hundred, but four died already,” the guard said.

Bolan pushed the Vietnamese’s head hard against the unyielding bulkhead. The result was that the pirate’s almond-shaped eyes crossed. “How did they die?”

“Two were already sick…another cut her wrists…and the last one…Captain Tinopoulos beat her to death.”

Bolan’s jaw locked as he put a stopper on his fury. He needed more answers. “How healthy are the rest?”

“They’re still in good shape,” the sentry said. “But some are seasick. At least, they’re throwing up, and they have a fever. We had them belowdecks for two days before we set out.”

Bolan knew it wasn’t seasickness. If these young victims were being sent to Korea, then that meant they were discards from the Thai sex slavery trade. Many of them were probably suffering from heroin or opium withdrawal. The Thai flesh peddlers often used drugs as a very short leash to keep their slaves under control. “Take me to them.”

The guard nodded. “My name is Pham…”

Bolan squeezed his throat more tightly. “I’m not interested.”

Pham coughed and sputtered, “Sorry.” Finally, Bolan released the pressure.

“Shut up,” Bolan said. “You’re not going to get any sympathy from me by telling me your name.”

Pham’s lips pulled tight. “But—”

“You joined in on raping these girls…”

“They’re just pros—”

Bolan’s fingers tightened and Pham’s eyes widened in horror as his feet left the deck. The pressure on his throat was enormous, not only from the crush of the Executioner’s grasp, but the weight of his own squirming body. Pham’s fingers dug into Bolan’s forearm, trying to pry it away to relieve the force of his own mass on his windpipe. “They never chose this life. Not that someone like you would care.”

Bolan let go and Pham crashed to the floor. The guard reached for his weapons, but somewhere along the line, probably in one of those moments when the air was being squeezed out of him, the tall, grim avenger had disarmed him. He crawled on all fours when Bolan stepped on his ankle, pinning him between two hundred plus pounds of muscle and sinew and crushing steel grating. Pham grit his teeth to keep from crying out. Bolan’s hand laced into the Vietnamese’s hair and yanked him up to a kneeling position. “I can find the hold myself. I don’t need a tour guide.”

Pham whimpered. “All right…all right…”

Bolan let go and Pham crawled to his feet. He walked with a limp, but by now, his spirit had been broken. Pham had no will to escape.

“Give me the knife and drag your dead friend into this cabin,” Bolan ordered.

Pham obeyed without a hint of protest. He pried the blade out of the corpse and handed it, pommel first, to Bolan. The soldier put the blade back in its quick-draw forearm sheath.

The Executioner wasn’t a cruel man, but he was practical. A display of just how much pain he could inflict was often enough to prevent an enemy from pushing his luck. It also had given the big warrior the opportunity to vent his rage somewhat.

Bolan had encountered sex slavers before across his career, from Las Vegas to Bangkok, and all points in between. He’d begun his crusade when his teenage sister had been pressed into prostitution by an organized crime group, and the fallout had resulted in his family exploding from within. Those who profited from adults were already scum, but it took a special kind of evil to engage in selling and destroying the innocence of adolescents and children. Bolan still thought of Cindy as a kid, even though she was in her late teens when she’d been forced into “the life,” so this was one crime that the Executioner felt very close to. Though the world was too big for the Executioner to focus on any one brand of evil, he had been lucky enough to get a tip from an ally in Thailand about a large shipment of slaves being shipped to another nation. Bolan figured that he’d deal himself in for this hand. It wouldn’t take long out of his War Everlasting, and he didn’t have any urgent, upcoming missions right now.

It was time the underworld learned once more that trading in human lives was a fatal mistake.

Pham limped along, sufficiently cowed. Since Bolan had demonstrated facility at understanding two of the languages the young man spoke, he doubted Pham would try to warn his friends in another language. Instead, he went silent, sullenly walking what he expected to be his final mile. Bolan wouldn’t have any compunctions if the young smuggler stopped a bullet, but someone would have to live to spread the word to the underworld that an executioner still stalked those who traded in flesh. Every battle Bolan fought, even though it was a very secret war, left a footprint, spreading fear and terror among those who didn’t fear the law.