Bolan tore his gaze from the terrier’s limp carcass and stepped back outside. The sun was out now, its rays glancing off the three highway patrol cruisers parked haphazardly on the yard surrounding the trailer home. The AHP had been notified shortly after John Kissinger and Harmon Wallace had determined Shinn’s address, but they’d shown up too late to intercept the REDI crew that had seized Shinn and his wife. Bolan had arrived less than ten minutes ago. The Nevada Metro chopper that had brought him here along with Jayne Bahn and FBI Agent Ed Scanlon was back up in the air, conducting an aerial search of the surrounding valley. Other AHP officers, meanwhile, were checking with Shinn’s neighbors to find out if anyone had seen anything that might help shed light on where Shinn and his wife had been taken.
Jayne Bahn was talking with a patrolman near one of the squad cars. When she saw Bolan she ventured over and told him, “Well, we’ve got one small break.”
“At this point I’ll take it,” Bolan said.
“They found the car belonging to that guy whose body was stuffed in the well back in Goffs,” Bahn reported.
“But REDI’d already pulled a switch,” Bolan guessed.
She nodded. “They dropped it off at a truck stop up on the interstate near Williams,” she confirmed. “Helped themselves to a panel truck that matches the description of a truck one of the neighbors saw pulling away from here about twenty minutes before the cops showed up.
“He’s just calling in the APB,” she concluded, indicating the man she’d been speaking with. “Even if they swapped plates, hopefully they’re still out on the road and we’ll be able to spot them.”
“It’s worth a shot,” Bolan said. “We need to cover the airports, too.”
“Great minds think alike,” Bahn said. “AHP’s gonna post undercover agents near the entrance to every airfield within a hundred-mile radius. Scanlon says the FBI will take Phoenix and then widen the net if need be. You ask me, that’s gonna be our best bet. REDI might’ve gotten their hands on these folks, but they aren’t going to win any Kewpie dolls from Kim Jong-il until they deliver them back to the mother country.”
“Good point,” Bolan said. “And the one good thing about them being pulled down here to Arizona is that it probably threw off their getaway plans. If they’re scrambling, it ups the chances they’ll make a wrong move.”
“That’d be sweet,” Bahn said. “I was never big on hide-and-seek.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Phoenix, Arizona
Bolan was wrong.
As it turned out, having to come to Arizona to apprehend Shinn Kam-Song proved a stroke of good fortune for the REDI operatives.
Two years earlier, as part of a heroin deal made with the Chinese, North Korea had secured the clandestine ownership of the Far East Trading Company, an import wholesaler specializing in the cheap Made-in-China trinkets that were regularly packaged into giveaways sponsored by a number of America’s leading fast-food chains. FETC was headquartered near the harbor docks in the southern California city of San Pedro, and when the REDI teams headed up by Hong and Bryn had been dispatched to the States, they’d smuggled their way ashore by concealing themselves inside the same Far East cargo bin carrying forty thousand Scooby-Doo compasses as well as a ten-million-dollar heroin shipment earmarked for distribution by the Asian Killboys street gang. And San Pedro was only one of Far East Trading Company’s American distribution outlets. The company had additional facilities in three other Western states, including Arizona, and even before they’d shown up in Chino Valley, Bryn and Hong had both been in touch with contacts at FETC’s distribution center in Phoenix, greasing the skids for their getaway once they’d gathered up Shinn and his wife.
Now, less than forty minutes after the abduction, Bryn was at the wheel of the panel truck they’d stolen in Williams, making his way through the Prescott National Forest. He’d avoided the I-17, relying instead on less-traveled backroads where, hopefully, they would be more able to avoid detection by their pursuers. Hong was riding shotgun, and by using the truck’s citizen band radio to monitor police broadcasts, the REDI operative had already intercepted dispatches from the AHP officers who’d stormed Shinn’s trailer home, and now, as both he and Bryn eavesdropped on the latest transmissions, they knew that an all-points-bulletin had been put out on their getaway vehicle.
“This makes things difficult,” Hong told Bryn, glancing up from the road map he’d unfolded across his lap. “At some point we’re going to have to come out of the mountains and get back on the highway, and then we’ll have a twenty-mile stretch where we’ll be a clear target.”