Before Cho could deliver a death blow, however, he was distracted by a loud droning. He turned toward the river and his jaw dropped in shock.
The man who’d been chasing after him earlier had just thundered through the reeds and was racing ashore! Cho saw that the man at the controls had no intention of stopping, and though he tried his best to dive clear of the watercraft’s path, it was too late. It bounded out of the water and even after its rider had jumped off, its momentum carried it on a straight course and broadsided the Korean, cracking his ribs and forcing the air from his lungs before skidding past him and crashing into the cliff wall.
Bahn had no idea what had happened until she rolled to one side and slowly rose to her knees. She saw Cho immobilized on the ground beside her, gasping for breath a few yards from the crumpled remains of the Jet Ski. When she turned to look the other way, she saw Mack Bolan rising to his feet and heading toward her.
“Next time you want to get my attention,” he told her, “do me a favor and just yell, okay?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Goffs, California
Hong Sung-nam and Ok-Hwa Zung had been on the road for more than five hours when they reached the Goffs Road turn-off on Interstate 40. The only stop they’d made had been in Victorville, where they’d abandoned their van in an unattended parking lot and helped themselves to a flatbed Ford pickup. Following a two-lane remnant of old Route 66, they soon reached Goffs, an afterthought of a small town located an hour’s drive southwest of Laughlin. There wasn’t even a town to speak of. The highest concentration of business was an intersection near the train line that boasted a general store and long-abandoned filling station. Hong turned right when he reached the junction and raised a trail of dust once the pavement gave way to a gravel road still pocked with chuckholes from the previous winter’s rains.
Two miles down the road, Hong pulled up to a ramshackle, one-story farmhouse abutting a patch of land where weeds were gaining the upper hand on a few haphazard rows of unharvested corn. Behind the house was a rickety barn. A portion of the roof had collapsed years earlier, and it looked as if a strong wind could easily topple the rest of the structure. There was a dust-covered Honda Accord parked inside the barn and there was room for Hong to ease the pickup to a stop alongside it.
Once he’d turned off the engine, Hong reached over and jostled Ok-Hwa, who’d nodded off in the front seat somewhere back near Barstow.
“We’re here,” Hong told the young recruit.
Ok-Hwa stirred and yawned as he glanced out the windshield at the arid wasteland that lay beyond the barn.
“Talk about the middle of nowhere,” he said.
“Why do you thing we chose it?” Hong said. “Let’s go.”
The men left the barn and kicked their way past the tumbleweeds dotting the backyard. As they approached the farmhouse, the rear door opened and a hard-looking Korean in his late thirties stepped out to greet them. Clutched in his right hand was a sawed-off Remington 30-gauge shotgun.
Bryn Ban-Ho had slipped into the country three weeks earlier along with Hong and four other teams of REDI agents. Most of that time he and his men had been traveling back and forth between Laughlin and Las Vegas, keeping defectors Kang Moo-Hyun and Li-Roo Kohb under surveillance and plotting for the day when the teams would finally receive the order to make their move. They’d rented out motel rooms in both cities, but the Goffs hideout served as their base of operations. Bryn had arrived a little more than an hour earlier, fully expecting that Hong would already be there waiting for him.
“What took you so long?” Bryn asked Hong. “And where’s Yong-Im?”
“I got here as fast as I could,” Hong replied, sidestepping Bryn’s query about the defector living in L.A. “Do you think I wanted to get pulled over for speeding?”
“Where’s Yong-Im?” Bryn repeated, glancing past Hong and Ok-Hwa at the pickup.
“There’s no sense in us standing around out here,” Hong responded evasively. “We can talk about this inside.”
Bryn shrugged and stepped back, motioning for Hong and Ok-Hwa to enter. Inside, the farmhouse was even less imposing than the patch of hardpan it rested on. The men strode past an empty kitchen to a living room decorated with a few mismatched chairs, a cheap sofa and several orange crates doubling as tables and cabinets. Another Korean was sprawled across the couch, smoking a cigarette as he watched a game show on the small black-and-white television resting on one of the orange crates. The reception was so poor that it looked like the contestants were being rained on with an endless shower of confetti.