Okinawa (3)
A few minutes earlier, when Lee Gyu-jin detected movement in the brush and pressed the buzzer on his chest to send the alert, Yeon-woo — already in his tactical gear — felt the vibration signal as well.
He immediately abandoned the mixing work and closed in on the direction the agents were covering, silent and fast.
Soon his field of vision took in a civilian bundled in thick clothing, walking through the shrubs, and Lee Gyu-jin crouched in cover with a pistol trained on him.
Yeon-woo first slowed his heartbeat and breathing to the absolute minimum, erasing every trace of his presence. He approached without a sound, then gently pressed Gyu-jin's wrist down so the shot would not fire.
Gyu-jin's eyes went round as he looked at Yeon-woo. But Yeon-woo was already watching the target.
Can't kill him. Not now.
Even from a moral standpoint, killing him was out of the question. He still carried the ruthlessness to end a life whenever it became necessary — but he had no desire to live this new life the way he had lived the last one. A new life came with new values.
Of course, the real reason not to kill him had nothing to do with morality. It was operational.
We could disguise the death as a fire casualty, but there's no need to hand them anything to get suspicious about.
A gunshot kill left a bullet's path through bone. The melting point of human bone sat above 1,670 degrees Celsius — extremely high. Even in a crematorium, where temperatures approached 1,000 degrees and everything else burned away, the skeleton remained. A natural wildfire consuming the island's vegetation would never generate enough heat to destroy the evidence of a bullet hole in bone.
And even if they disposed of the body at sea to erase that problem, a bullet that had passed through a person would still scatter and lodge somewhere nearby — in a tree, in the dirt, somewhere. If Baeksol ever got suspicious enough to launch a full investigation, no matter how carefully we cleaned up, they might still find something we never thought of.
For any number of reasons, a kill was a bad solution.
Yeon-woo clenched a fist for Gyu-jin to see, then pointed a thumb at himself and extended his index and middle fingers toward the target. I'll handle him.
Gyu-jin tilted his head. How is he planning to deal with him…?
Yeon-woo closed the distance behind the thickly clothed target with footsteps so quiet they made no sound at all. Lee Gyu-jin and Park Jung-hyeon had already gone wide-eyed, watching the scene unfold.
The Omega they knew — judging by his voice — did not seem particularly old, but every single movement marked him as a veteran with extensive combat experience. If they could pick up even one thing from watching him work, it would be worth it. Both of them kept their eyes locked on him.
Yeon-woo held his breath and matched the target's stride exactly, closing the gap at speed. The man never noticed a thing — not a footfall, not a breath — even with Yeon-woo right on his heels.
Then Yeon-woo snapped his hand into a blade and drove it into the back of the man's neck like a bolt of lightning.
No way—
Watching it happen, Gyu-jin adjusted his grip on the pistol. If Omega failed the takedown and the man raised a ruckus, he would put a round through him immediately. Gyu-jin knew a gunshot would create a trail of suspicion — but better that than getting compromised by noise.
Thwack—
"Guh—!"
Gyu-jin's concern proved unnecessary. The target's eyes rolled back and he crumpled face-first into the ground.
A karate chop. The classic edge-of-hand strike. Neither of them had expected it to actually drop a man cold.
…Wow. That actually works? I've only ever seen that in movies.
Lee Gyu-jin and Park Jung-hyeon both shook their heads in disbelief. Han Hae-un, for whom the sight was relatively familiar, simply nodded in quiet acknowledgment.
It was a staple of action films — a strike to the back of the neck that dropped someone unconscious in an instant. Of course it was possible in reality. The technique was called a brachial stun, and various agencies and special forces units taught it. Taught it — that was the key word.
First time I've ever seen someone actually use it in the field.
Behind the neck, the internal and external carotid arteries ran close together, and the swollen section between them was the carotid sinus. A precise, powerful strike to that point dropped a person instantly. But using it in real operations was the kind of claim that would get you laughed at even among agents and special forces — situations that actually required knocking someone out were rare, and when they did come up, you reached for a taser or a tranquilizer dart.
And yet the agent in front of them — Omega — had done it as if it were second nature. As if he had already put plenty of people to sleep this way.
After dropping the target, Yeon-woo immediately signaled Gyu-jin to sweep the area with the thermal camera. Gyu-jin nodded and scanned. No heat signatures within at least a fifty-meter radius.
"Clear."
At Gyu-jin's signal, the agents gathered around the fallen man.
"Where the hell did this guy come from all of a sudden?"
"What do we do with him? And that edge-of-hand strike… I thought I was watching a movie."
The word movie out of Gyu-jin's mouth made Yeon-woo flinch slightly; he scratched the back of his head. Well, I am a film actor. Being good at movie techniques probably isn't a problem.
While Yeon-woo entertained that stray thought, Han Hae-un studied the target with a blank expression. Internally, though, he was slightly rattled. As the current field commander, he still had to give the order.
Hmm. How do we handle this. Can't just dump him near their barracks…
It was already deep into the night, so quietly relocating him to a barracks or a warehouse before the operation started wouldn't be a major issue — but once the fire was fully underway and the unconscious man woke up in the chaos, of course he would get suspicious. One moment he had been walking through the forest; the next he woke up somewhere completely different. No one would fail to notice that something was wrong.
Do we just leave him here and start the operation?
While Hae-un stared down at the unconscious man, weighing life and death, Yeon-woo spoke quietly.
"Alpha-Beta. I'll handle this according to the Plan E method you briefed us on in advance."
Hae-un kept his poker face and nodded.
"Understood. Omega will take care of it. Tau and I will cover the perimeter in the meantime."
Of course, the Hae-un nodding along had no idea what Plan E was. He was simply glad Yeon-woo was taking it off his hands.
Hae-un and Park Jung-hyeon slipped back into the brush to stand watch. Watching their backs recede, Yeon-woo asked Gyu-jin quietly,
"Delta. When you looked at him through the thermal, was his body temperature higher than normal?"
"Sir? Ah — yes. Close to forty degrees. That's why I thought he was some kind of wild animal native to the island at first."
Walking hunched over with his hands in his pockets, he would have registered as a single heat mass rather than a human shape.
Yeon-woo nodded at that and began searching the unconscious man's body. It has to be here…
There had been one more reason not to kill him and simply neutralize him instead.
Rummaging through the thick coat, Yeon-woo found exactly what he expected — a packet stuffed with white powder in the inner pocket. One of the drugs they manufactured here.
The moment he first saw the man's outfit, Yeon-woo had known he was a user. The temperature's already past twenty-five degrees. No normal person would be dressed this heavily.
A classic side effect of the drugs. Actual body temperature spiked as if boiling, while the body itself felt chills and cold. This severe already. He's deep into it.
Yeon-woo pulled out the lighter gun he had been using for the reagent work, tore off a nearby shrub, and set it alight. Once the leaves had burned for a while, he stamped the fire out with his boot. Then he rubbed the ash from the scorched leaves onto his fingers and smeared it around the unconscious man's philtrum and jaw.
Before long the forest would be roaring with fire and ash would be flying in every direction — claiming he hadn't inhaled any of the smoke would be absurd. Judging by the fact that the man had walked all the way out here to sneak a hit, Baeksol clearly did not permit anyone to skim their precious "product" for personal use. And if he got caught, Baeksol would not leave him alone.
If he wants to stay alive, he'll invent some story.
Not that he would even need to invent much. When he eventually wakes up and sees the island reduced to ash, he won't be able to tell whether he passed out from the smoke or just blacked out from the drugs. At this stage of addiction, blackouts were routine. Whichever way the man reconstructed the night, he would never — not even in a dream — imagine that a special forces ghost had appeared out of nowhere and dropped him with a movie-style chop to the neck. That was enough.
Yeon-woo hoisted the man onto his back and headed for the water just beside them. The rock face here was gentler than the cliff the agents had scaled on the way in. He dumped the unconscious man onto a bare tidal rock with no vegetation nearby.
This should keep him from burning to death, at least.
Yeon-woo finished mixing the special solution again, and the agents divided up the resulting white phosphorus compound before scattering across the island.
The patrol routes, schedules, and camera positions had already been mapped perfectly through prolonged drone surveillance, so they moved without hesitation. Following their assigned paths, the agents ghosted past every camera and laid down the solution across the island. The storage warehouses and production facilities in particular had to burn completely, leaving no trace — so those received special care and thorough coverage.
That was why they had gone all the way to Brazil for the special solution. Once the fire caught, it would roar with ferocious intensity, then vaporize without a single residual mark. The solution itself would simply disappear.
The fire would start from the rear of the island. The workers' barracks sat reasonably close to the pier, so evacuating to the shoreline would not be a problem. It was hard to believe any of the laborers on this island had come of their own free will. From the drone footage, most of them appeared to be Southeast Asian — the most likely scenario was that they had been quietly diverted here while facing deportation for overstaying in Japan.
If that's the case, they're living as slaves in all but name — manufacturing drugs here until they die.
The roaring fire would break their chains as well.
Bzzzt—
The sensor on Yeon-woo's chest vibrated three times in rapid succession. Looks like everyone's finished.
From the command post, Kim Su-hyeok had analyzed the agents' GPS tracks, judged the coverage sufficient, and sent the recall signal. They hadn't been able to hit every single spot while dodging the island's cameras, but this quantity was more than enough to start a proper rat fire.
The agents rappelled down the cliff to the rubber boat waiting below. Yeon-woo, last to leave, crouched at the edge of the grass in front of him with the lighter gun in hand.
Nineteenth-century records like the Dongguk Sesigi and the Yeolyang Sesigi described how their ancestors would gather in groups, carry torches to the field ridges and rice-paddy banks near the village, lay down straw, and at night set it all ablaze at once to burn away the weeds. Fires rising from every direction made a spectacular sight — and they called it the rat fire.
The purpose of torching the fields was to eradicate rats and pests, and to clear the ground so new shoots could grow.
Yeon-woo looked out past the brush toward Baeksol's drug facilities.
As the ancestors knew — the only way to wipe out vermin is with a good, roaring fire.