The Last Domino Contract by Philip Atlee

Author:Philip Atlee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Several hours passed while I sat on the floor of the dark room with my back to the bare wall. Except for the ornate reception room downstairs, and the one small office across from the room I was in, the new Korean town seemed entirely abandoned. Unlighted. Downstairs, the soldiers guarding me were murmuring and clacking mah-jongg tiles around; occasionally, I could hear their officer leave his cubbyhole across from my door and go down the creaking stairs.

I was drowsing against the wall, getting hungry again, when I heard the officer go to the head of the stairs again, and call down. Suddenly I realized that there were no sounds coming from below; eeling up, I went barefooted to the door and cracked it open. That made a noise, and the disheveled North Korean officer wheeled on me. His face was contorted with rage and he drew his machine pistol from its scabbard. As he threw it down on me, ready to fire, there were two slight, distinct clicking noises. The only shot he got off splintered the doorframe above my head, because he was falling when he triggered it.

I crouched, watching him roll over, and saw two barbs sticking from the back of his dark uniform jacket. Tiny wires trailed from the barbs, down the stairs. I stayed where I was, crouched, with the door barely cracked open, and watched him jerking spasmodically.

“Okay, Joe,” shouted a voice up the stairway. Unmistakably a Yank voice. “Time to lock and load, kid.”

I backed off a little, still crouched. A good many Koreans have been educated in the States, and speak American.

“What Joe did you have in mind?” I inquired.

“Joe Gall, you dumb bastard,” answered the voice, and a stocky man with a dark hood pulled back off his head came up the stairs lightly. His hair was sandy and his froggish, tanned face looked peeved. He was holding what looked like an eight-battery flashlight in his right hand, following it carefully as it reeled back in the two wire filaments attached to the barbs in the still-quivering North Korean lieutenant.

When the fine wires had been drawn back into the long barrel of the flashlight, he reached in a back pocket with his left hand and came out with a small pair of pliers. Leaning close, working carefully, he detached the two imbedded barbs from the North Korean’s back. They were bloody, and he wiped them on his funereal reco suit before securing them in the front of the flashlight.

I had seen him before. Not for years, but I had seen him before.

“What is that goddam thing?” I asked.

“Little beauty, Joe. A stun gun. Call’em Tasers. Delivers a fifty-thousand-volt charge. This cat will get his muscular control back in a coupla minutes, but he’ll stay in shock for a while.”

He turned to call down the stairs, and someone threw a bundle up to him. It was another dark reco coverall, with a hood, light para boots, and thick socks. Everything was the right size.

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