False Flag

by Jack Slater

  Trapp took stock of his position. Barely half a dozen seconds had passed since the two gunshots had ripped through the wooden door. Judging by the sound the weapon had made, it was a 9 mm pistol. Plenty powerful enough to rip through blood, flesh, even timber—but the half foot of concrete protecting Trapp’s back would be impenetrable.

  As long as his opponent wasn’t packing anything heavier…

  Trapp heard a woman’s murmur, then a harsh retort. The woman’s voice cut off immediately.

  Colonel Kim, he thought. It had to be.

  The man who had caused so much torment was on the other side of the wall that separated the office space from what Trapp now assumed were sleeping quarters. It was an oversight that had almost killed the CIA operative. He should have known that the man would have stayed close to his prize.

  The question was, was the control unit on his side of the wall, or Trapp’s?

  Trapp had barely completed an initial scan of the darkened office before the shooting started. He was looking for shooters, not computers. But he knew he had to make a decision, and fast. If the North Korean colonel had access to the control unit, then Trapp only had a matter of seconds to spare.

  In a situation like this, it was use it or lose it—and that’s exactly what Trapp was afraid of. If Kim activated the weapon, then he had bigger problems to deal with than a few dozen—even a few hundred—angry North Korean soldiers.

  He rose smoothly to his feet and began backing silently away from the doorway, closing the angle so that any further shots fired through the door could not possibly hit him. As he did, his eyes scanned the room for any sign of the control unit.

  Shapes began to emerge through the gloom, and Trapp dismissed them one after another, keeping enough of his attention focused on the movements of his opponent to ensure that he would not be surprised. He kept his weapon trained on the closed doorway, finger stroking the trigger, ready to fire with only the briefest half second’s notice.

  The North Korean was making noise now. His movements might not have been audible to an amateur, but to Trapp they were as clear as day. Perhaps he thought that Trapp himself was dead. Perhaps he simply didn’t care either way—believing himself to be invincible. It fit the profile. Childhood trauma—as the CIA operative knew well—can change a man. Molding him for good, or evil.

  In Trapp’s case, it was both.

  But having seen the prison camp attached to the North Korean base, and the callous disregard for human life evidenced by the dying Chinese test subjects, he suspected that Kim had gone only one way.

  A voice called out. The accent was unmistakable. The tone cold, harsh, mocking. “Did I hurt you, American?”

  Trapp did not respond. There was no sense in being dragged into a slanging match—unless he stood to gain something from it. At that present moment, he did not. Speaking up would only give away his position, giving his opponent vital information.

  Kim tried again. “Lay down your weapon. We can—how do your people say it?—talk this out.”

  Trapp’s eyes never stopped roving. One after another, he discounted items that might be found in any office across the globe. Computers, filing closets, staplers, even a typewriter.

  And then Trapp saw it. A squat case, a bit like a large ammunition box. It was split open on hinges, and connected by a thin wire to a closed laptop. A second wire emanated from the box, this one running to the nearest window and out. Trapp suspected it led to a satellite dish on the roof of the office building.

  Relief flooded through him like the breaking of a dam, unblocking at least a fraction of the tension that had ridden with him all this way. The control unit was on his side of the wall, and that put Trapp in the driving seat. Possession was nine tenths of the law, and if the North Korean wanted to wrestle back control of the device, he was going to have to come get it.

  And that meant exposing himself.

  “I don’t think so,” Trapp growled, breaking his self-imposed silence. “I’m fine right here.”

  He knew that he had to keep Kim talking. He quickly glanced at his watch. The ETA of the cavalry was under five minutes—but that was a best case scenario. The naval helicopters would have to fly low, across unfamiliar, poorly mapped terrain, in order to avoid North Korean air defenses.

  It was five minutes if he got lucky. And given the events of the last week, he wasn’t counting on lady luck being on his side.

  “So you are American,” Kim replied, a note of triumph in his voice. “I thought so.”

  Trapp heard movement outside—the thud of boots against concrete, muffled cries, confusion, barked orders. Moving silently, he checked that the window shutters were bolted tight shut and locked the main entrance, dragging a desk in front of it to provide extra reinforcement. Throughout, he kept low, with his weapon trained unerringly on the offending doorway, knowing that any moment his enemy might seize on his distraction to strike.

  “You can’t win, you know,” Kim said, almost conversationally. “My men will wear you down eventually.”

  Trapp knew that much was certainly true. But what Kim didn’t know—couldn’t possibly know—was that Lieutenant Quinn, his Navy SEALs, and the best part of a company of pissed-off leathernecks would shortly surge from the skies and rain down lead on anyone who stood in their way.

  He didn’t have to last forever. Only until help arrived. It was a waiting game, all right. Only to Kim’s eventual surprise, the odds were stacked firmly in Trapp’s favor.

  As a droplet of sweat trailed down his forehead, then tickled the bridge of his nose, Trapp readjusted his aim. His mouth was dry, muscles exhausted from the efforts of the past few days. From fighting in Macau, from diving into the depths of the South China Sea with the Cheyenne, from crawling through mud and rock in the North Korean mountains to get to this very point.

  His thoughts drifted to Ikeda, to that filthy, cramped laboratory. A pang of regret gnawed at his stomach. He had left her alone, no doubt terrified, surrounded by reminders of a fate she did not yet know wasn’t to be hers. And yet he wrestled himself back from the brink. A single mantra echoed in Trapp’s mind.

  Keep him talking.

  “What’s your endgame, asshole?” Trapp growled, crouching low and shielding his body behind a thick metal desk. “You’re picking a fight with the two biggest countries on earth. This can’t possibly end well for you.”

  Outside, the maelstrom only grew in intensity. Floodlights clicked on, and thin shafts of light broke free of the shutters. Truck engines coughed and growled, and the shouts grew closer. Trapp’s heartrate redoubled its intensity and sweat winked into existence on his palms. He shifted the pistol into his left, then wiped the right dry before switching back.

  Trapp licked his desert-like lips. He hoped he was right about this. He glanced anxiously at the control unit, knowing that one stray bullet could send the whole world up in flames. The device was no doubt set up like a dead man’s switch. If it was put out of action in the midst of a battle, then pre-positioned munitions on dozens of satellites circling the globe would detonate at the same time.

  And catastrophe would ensue.

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Kim replied confidently, his voice muffled by the door—yet sounding closer than it had before. “It matters not whether we win, only that you lose.”

  Jason attempted to fix the North Korean’s position, but gave up. It was impossible. Two well aimed bullets could scythe through the wood and cut the colonel down. He could stop a war.

  Or start one.

  If he fired his weapon, the soldiers now circling the office building outside could easily open up with everything they had. The walls were thick, but they could only withstand so much. Trapp realized that if he was going to take Kim down, he needed to do it without firing a shot. The integrity of the control unit was paramount.

  “Come in here,” he yelled. “We can settle this like men.”

  It was a corny line, but then again Trapp didn’t believe that Kim
would go for the invitation. It was just another delaying tactic designed to buy Lieutenant Quinn and his men precious seconds.

  “Don’t take me for a fool,” Kim replied, voice dripping with cold derision. “I know better than to trust an American. Your country has had its boot on the neck of mine for generations. In a week, you will be dead, and that boot will be gone—China will do the dirty work for us.”

  Trapp’s ghostly eyes flared with understanding as the final chess piece fell into place. Kim wanted to provoke the Chinese into doing what his own country could not: clear the DMZ of American troops and leave the road to Seoul clear.

  Astonishingly, he was willing to plunge the world into nuclear war to achieve his goal. It was scarcely comprehensible.

  Outside, a voice called out.

  It sounded like it was being amplified through a megaphone—compressed, metallic and impossibly loud. It was in Korean, and Trapp did not understand a word. He threw an anxious glance at the doorway, checking for movement. But there was none.

  “Can you understand him?” Kim called out.

  “No.”

  The North Korean chuckled. “I thought not. Korean is a beautiful language, don’t you think?”

  Trapp fought the temptation to roll his eyes, not that Kim could see. They were in the midst of a standoff as deadly as any from the old Wild West, and this sociopath wanted to talk semantics?

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “Strange, isn’t it?” Kim replied. “That you cannot understand my people, when your colleague does so well…”

  Hot rage bubbled in Trapp’s gut as he processed Kim’s words like lava spewing from a tectonic volcano. He saw Ikeda then, as she’d appeared before she recognized his face. Marked with bruises, and the blood of the dying around her. Tortured like no one—let alone a woman—should ever be.

  He took a step forward, knuckles blanching from the tension he was applying to his pistol. His knee thudded against the metal desk, which made a sound like a stone dropping into the depths of a well.

  Don’t do it, jackass.

  Jason Trapp had only survived this long by acting at all times with cold precision. Perhaps it was a result of his horrific childhood, but he could master his emotions like few others in the world. It certainly wasn’t healthy, but it was damn effective. And yet in that moment it took everything he had not to burst forward, kick down the door, and tackle Kim to the ground.

  “She is your colleague, is she not?” Kim gloated. “Or perhaps more than that? A friend? A lover?”

  The man’s words curdled like soured milk. Trapp’s fingers stroked the trigger. It would take so little to put an end to this. A fraction of an inch.

  And then a sound broke in the skies overhead that changed everything…

  52

  In the mountainous terrain the heavy rotorcraft were inaudible until they were almost on top of the North Korean camp. It was as though they were ghosts emerging from the fog. One moment the world was silent.

  The next it exploded into life.

  Trapp barely had a second to process this new piece of information before a naked demon burst through the doorway, a pistol in his hand. In the darkness, it was impossible to make out details, but as the banshee passed through a grate of light thrown from the shutters, he saw a deranged grin on the man’s scarred face.

  Involuntarily, the CIA operative took a step back. His finger began to retract on the trigger, but he stopped himself at the last moment. All hell might be about to break loose, but it hadn’t happened yet. He couldn’t risk firing a shot.

  “Stay back!” Trapp yelled.

  He pictured the room in his mind. It was rectangular, with a door at either end. One was the exit, the other led to Kim’s sleeping quarters. The exit was nearest Trapp’s current location, and the control unit. Between Kim and the end of the world lay half a dozen desks.

  But a fraction of a second later, Trapp realized that the North Korean colonel was not aiming for the device. The man’s target was…

  Me.

  In one fluid movement, Jason holstered his pistol and retrieved his fighting knife. He kept his body low so that Kim could not target him. Though he could not risk firing a shot, the North Korean was under no such restrictions. It was far from a fair fight.

  Kim hurled a desk, his cock briefly lit up in a shaft of light. Trapp absently wondered if this was all just a dream. If he’d wake up and shake his head and blame too many drinks the night before.

  But he knew that was not the case. And even as his mind wandered, he was already moving. He could not stay where he was, or Kim would be on him within seconds. He crawled low, using the desk for cover, and rolled behind the next in the row. He kept his body between Kim and the control unit at all times. If it came to it, he knew he would take a shot for that thing. He would have to.

  Thunder crackled outside.

  But Trapp knew that it was not the weather. It was an M-230 chain gun, capable of spewing six hundred rounds a minute out to a maximum range of over three miles.

  “Come out!” Kim yelled. “Show yourself!”

  His voice had taken on a manic edge. Trapp knew it well. It was the sound of a narcissist whose view of the world was meeting cold, hard reality. He clenched his free fist with satisfaction.

  Trapp let out a low chuckle. Before it was done, he crawled to a fresh spot, briefly peeking out around the side of the desk covering his position. Kim was standing about ten yards distant, his feet shoulder width apart, arms trembling under the weight of a small pistol of a model which Trapp did not recognize.

  It had to be domestic.

  “You brought them here,” Kim said, his voice low and desperate. “You!”

  No kidding, asshole.

  Trapp did not mouth his response. Some things were better left unspoken. And this was one of them. The North Korean was working himself up into a frenzy that was clouding his judgment. And Jason Trapp was happy to take advantage. As the colonel smoldered, he moved.

  He did so silently, like a jungle predator, his spectral eyes glinting as they passed through a ray of light shattered into pieces by the window shutters. And then he was on Kim, bursting upward, the darkened blade of his knife slicing the man’s thigh from the crease of his hip to the top of his knee.

  Blood started out. Hot, steaming, slippery, coating Trapp’s hands.

  He expected Kim to take a step backward, to collapse from the pain, but the man did nothing of the sort. He snarled, anger made more animal than human, and whipped the butt of his pistol round so fast Trapp had no time to duck.

  The weapon collided with the CIA man’s stolen helmet. The steel bucket wasn’t padded, so while it absorbed the worst of the blow, Trapp’s skull took the rest. He staggered back, half-stunned, as the weapon skittered harmlessly away, scraping against the concrete floor.

  “Fuck,” he groaned.

  Trapp grimaced, setting his jaw and blinking as he attempted to regain control of his thoughts. Slowly, they came back. But the knife in his hand was gone, and in the darkness he could not see where it had fallen.

  This would be old-fashioned, hand-to-hand combat.

  And amazingly, the North Korean colonel was already limping toward him, blood dripping freely from the savage wound on his leg.

  “Just my lucky day,” Trapp muttered. Somehow he was going face-to-face with a psychopathic killer who looked like he was on bath salts.

  He unclipped the helmet from his head, grasped it by the rim, and hefted it like a weapon. It was ungainly, round, but if it hit someone hard enough, it would do real damage. And since it was all Trapp had, he was prepared to make do.

  “Come on then, you prick,” he growled. “What are you waiting for?”

  Kim’s brown eyes were black in the darkness. His teeth flashed yellow as he dived for Trapp, bronzed skin stained dark with blood, a kaleidoscope of muted color. It was like a scene from a horror film.

  Reactions still dulled by the blow to his head, Trapp was a second s
low to respond. He swung the helmet, but it was still rising as Kim’s fingers clutched his throat.

  It hit the man.

  But too late.

  The North Korean’s forward momentum collided with Trapp. Though the man was far shorter, and wiry—almost emaciated—his size was a poor guide to his strength. His fingers were locked around Trapp’s throat in a death grip, and even as the CIA operative toppled backward, colliding with the desk and rolling to the side, Kim continued to rain down a relentless series of blows from his knees and legs.

  Trapp was winded, but the fall dislodged Kim’s grip on his neck for the briefest second. Enough to snatch a breath, to fill his lungs with badly needed oxygen, and to come up with a plan.

  It didn’t need to be complex.

  Fight back.

  Like the knife before it, Trapp’s helmet was now gone. Kim’s naked body lay against Trapp’s chest, and the man attempted to lock him in a wrestling grip. But Trapp lashed out with an angry fist that collided with the colonel’s temple, stunning him for long enough for the operative to scramble backward.

  His heart was thundering, breath stolen from his impossibly fit body in the way that only combat can. Adrenaline flared through his veins, soothing his aches and pains and pushing him on. Trapp made enough room to stand up and pulled himself to his feet, adopting a crouched position. He could scarcely believe what he was seeing. Kim was like a rabid animal, his mouth snarling in a deranged grimace, anger burning in his eyes.

  But Trapp knew that he had the advantage. Strong as his opponent was, he had eighty pounds on the man. Hand-to-hand combat has a remorseless logic.

  Weight wins out.

  Kim charged, and Trapp waited until the man was almost upon him before he lashed out once again, this time connecting with his stomach. The Korean barely seemed to feel the blow, firing a series of his own into Trapp’s midsection.

  The operative absorbed the strikes, but barely.

  He started to reassess his original assessment.