Chapter 80: Earning Foreign-Currency

TL: LittlePeach

A real explosion doesn't roll out like the CGI in movies.

It works like a sledgehammer of tremendous mass, spreading in every direction at once.

Anyone caught in a blast of this magnitude from anywhere under a certain distance usually dies on the spot, the shockwave alone pulping the internal organs before the hot flames even get a chance to sear the flesh.

Most of the guards who'd been milling around outside the compound in bewilderment went out exactly like that.

Looked fine on the outside, but on the inside they'd been mashed to a ruin.

That's the power of a van and twenty gas canisters.

"Heave."

I'd been lying there warm and cozy at ground zero for a while, so first I brushed off the burning embers clinging all over my body.

Stepping outside, I saw several mafia goons rolling around on the ground.

I stripped the clothes off the one who looked the least wrecked and threw them on, piece by piece.

Couldn't very well go strolling around the Mango Farm buck naked.

"Oh."

Glancing around, a few scooters slumped in a corner of the compound caught my eye.

They must have come charging in in a real hurry, because the keys were still sitting right there in the ignitions.

I picked up the cleanest-looking one and started the engine.

Putt-putt-putt-putt.

"La-di-da."

Leaving ground zero behind me, I lazily cranked the throttle.

The workers' quarters were neither too far nor too near.

A minute's ride, if I hustled on the scooter.

"Looks like they're all set."

I could see a big minibus in the distance, engine already running, everything ready to roll.

Maybe it was the motorcycle I'd ridden in on, but a nervous stir rippled through the vehicle.

"It's me, everyone!"

I shouted as loud as I could, in case someone decided to open fire from a distance.

At that, the agents waiting near the bus waved and came over.

"Welcome back, team leader."

"Great work out there, team leader."

Owl No. 11 and Crane No. 22 greeted me with smiling faces.

By now they seemed pretty used to me plowing a vehicle into something and blowing it sky-high.

Frank, on the other hand, standing there half-crouched with a rifle, was another story.

"...."

Rub-rub.

He stared at me with a dazed look, like a man who'd just seen a demon crawl up out of hell, scrubbing at his eyes over and over.

He wore the expression of a man in need of a detailed explanation, so I ignored him for now and scanned the area.

"Where's Sparrow?"

"Right here, team leader!"

"Oh."

Sparrow No. 10 had planted himself in the driver's seat of the bus.

He answered briskly, with a dignified look on his face.

"You're not hurt anywhere, are you?"

"Of course not! I'm right as rain."

"But do you have a commercial license?"

"Sure do. I've even got a motorcycle license."

"Hah. So all that's left is to drive us out of here, then?"

"That's right, team leader!"

Sparrow No. 10's shoulders shot up at the praise.

With that, the whole operation had gone off without a hitch, exactly as planned.

Whatever he'd been through in there, I'd have a chance to sit back and hear all about it later.

"Do we have some kind of list of the workers put together?"

"Yes. Sparrow No. 10 roughed one out while he was inside."

"He insists he wasn't kidnapped, he infiltrated the place.... For now I think you should just go along with that, team leader."

"Aha."

I took a quick look at the passengers inside the bus.

Maybe it was because they'd been held captive like slaves for so long.

Every one of the Mango Farm workers wore a terrified expression, holding their breath as they strained to eavesdrop on our conversation.

They probably couldn't tell whether we, the ones who'd rescued them, were their saviors or members of some even more vicious organizations.

"About twenty of them are Cambodian locals, another ten are tourists from Europe, five are Chinese, and there are even two Koreans in there."

"Mmm."

Most of them looked like dark-skinned Cambodian locals, with the occasional Eastern or Western face scattered among them.

I gave them a gentle nod of greeting, then turned back to the agents.

"Let's get out of the farm before we talk more. The Cambodian police will be here any minute."

"Yes, sir. We'll move out right away."

"But team leader. When did you change your clothes again?"

"Ah, these? A mafia guy had no business wearing something this nice."

"Ooh. Isn't this Gucci?"

Trading small talk like this, we finished getting ready to flee.

Sparrow No. 10 and Owl No. 11 took the lead in the minibus, and the passenger car carrying the rest of the agents fell in behind.

Against the night sky stretching out in the distance, the flame-wrapped building glowed red as it burned, like a sunset.

"Take a look at that, Frank. Isn't it a magnificent view?"

"...."

"It's just like a sunset."

Frank, who'd ended up watching the sight beside me from the back seat, made a sour face.

He looked like he had something on the tip of his tongue.

"Yeah...."

But in the end he couldn't quite bring himself to open his mouth.

He just seemed to want out of this place as fast as possible.

*****

Everyone knows a festival is a joyful thing, but the aftermath of a festival is a scene so wearisome that everyone wants to avoid it.

Having just gotten close to forty people out of the Mango Farm, the range of solutions we could offer them was not exactly wide.

For starters, leaving them at a police station around here was out of the question.

'I really can't trust the local Cambodian police.'

Any massive farm that dragged in kidnapping victims to work as laborers was, naturally, greasing the palms of the local precinct nice and thick.

Hand these people over to the police with a naive heart, and by tomorrow morning they'd be hauled off to some other farm, picking some other fruit. That much was obvious.

"I'll be off, team leader."

"Yes. I'm counting on you."

First, the two Koreans.

They were the only ones we tipped off in advance that we were NIS agents.

It was a grueling six-hour haul all the way to Phnom Penh, where the Korean embassy to Cambodia was located, so Crane No. 22 loaded the two of them, both sobbing their eyes out with emotion, into the car and hurried off on the journey.

"We'll be off too, team leader."

"Yes. Drive safe, Sparrow."

As for the remaining Westerners and Chinese, Sparrow No. 10 and Owl No. 11 would take the minibus and drop them off, one by one, near their respective embassy districts.

What happened after that was each country's business to sort out.

"All right, then...."

Now the most troublesome problem remained.

The Cambodian locals, who had nowhere to turn.

Twenty of them stood with frightened faces, waiting on nothing but our next decision.

The deliberation was short, and the decision was fast.

Rummage, rummage.

"This is all I've got.... Frank. You have any spare cash on you?"

"...."

I emptied my own wallet, and while I was at it, I emptied Frank's too.

Luckily he was carrying part of his operational funds in dollars, and we split that money up as best we could, pressed it into the locals' hands, and sent them home.

Divvied up, it came to enough for each of them to eat and sleep and get around anywhere in Cambodia for nearly a month.

"Akun, akun!"

"Akun chran!"

For once, a phrase I'd learned from my conversation textbook came up.

Akun chran is Cambodian for "thank you very much".

"Lea haey."

I saw them off with a goodbye of my own.

Once I'd sent everyone weeping with emotion safely on their way, the whole affair was finally wrapped up clean, without a shred of nagging unease.

"Good work, Frank. That hundred thousand dollars you promised last time, are you going to wire it straight to my account?"

"...."

The cleanup done, I quietly steered the conversation to money first thing.

I'd gone to all this trouble on his behalf, so surely I was in a position to demand my due?

"...Sunny Kick. I've finally figured out who you really are."

Frank, who'd been keeping a blank silence, at last worked his dry lips.

It came out of nowhere.

"Who I really am?"

"The fact that you're a mercenary with the Cherny Group."

"Oh."

Frank was the one who'd cocked his head and said he'd heard the name Sunny Kick somewhere before.

So I'd figured he was probably acquainted with one of my old comrades, and left it at a rough guess.

When I stared at him with bright, wide eyes, Frank opened his mouth with a sour expression.

"There's an annual refresher course that team-leader-grade agents in the Secret Intelligence Service have to attend. One of the tactical instructors assigned to our group told a story in the middle of a CQB class. Back when he worked as a mercenary in the Gulf of Aden, a pack of pirates once circled a big cargo ship, laying down warning fire."

A pack of pirate ships?

I ran into more than a couple of pirate ships in the Gulf of Aden, so my memory was hazy on which one he meant.

"He said that right at that moment, some crazy rookie suddenly gunned a little rubber dinghy straight out and rammed it clean into the pirate ship's deck."

"Oh."

That was when it came back to me, dimly, which pirate ship it was.

It happened early in my time at the Cherny Group, when I was still a rank-and-file mercenary on the Chernobog Team.

Frank's voice trembled slightly as he went on.

"Didn't give the pirates a chance to run their mouths about negotiations or anything else. Dumped a whole crate of grenades into the ship and sank it, then took the pirates who'd jumped overboard to save themselves, lashed them to the stern, and dragged them home trailing behind like strands of kelp.... Every last trainee who heard that story was completely floored."

I still remember it.

That day was unusually hot, and the team's irritation had already spiked clear up to the crown of their heads.

Worried that the mercenaries, on edge over that pirate ship, might start blazing away at each other, I took the dinghy out myself, nice and light, meaning to just wrap the whole thing up clean.

For the mercenaries, for the pirates, for all of us, it was the fastest and safest way.

'What was even going through my head back then, I have no idea. Living without a clue my body was that tough.'

In hindsight, it's a fond memory now.

Those were the days when, to survive among the madmen, I had to gladly become a madman myself.

It also came back to me that after that day, the mercenaries started treating me with a good deal more caution.

"That instructor drilled it into us. If we ever ran into a man called Sunny Kick as an enemy in the field, we were to run without looking back. And even if we met him as an ally, he was a hopeless lunatic and we were never, ever to associate with him."

"Is that so? What's this instructor's name?"

The idle badmouthing stirred up my curiosity.

When Frank hesitated, looking troubled, I quickly ran the roster of the teammates I'd knocked around with back then through my head.

"Ricky? Maxwell? Obadiah? Didier? Christian?"

A flinch.

"Christian?"

A flinch.

"Aha."

The informant's identity was exposed.

Christian Truman.

An ex-French Foreign Legion man who deserted, sick to death of the hazing culture in the unit, and then joined the Cherny Group.

He'd taken a bullet to the shin and retired before I made team leader, and I'd lost all contact with him after that. Never imagined I'd catch word of him in a place like this.

"But last I knew, the guy was British, so how'd he end up in Australia now?"

"He married an Australian."

"Ooh.... If you see him someday, pass along my congratulations on the wedding."

"I heard he's already got a son and a daughter, one each."

"Well, would you look at that!"

Anyway, it was cause for celebration.

While I nodded and smiled at the welcome news of an old comrade, Frank hesitated, wearing a look like he was wavering over something.

"Your team is chasing the Irobuchi-kai right now, you said?"

"Yes. That's right."

"Just a few months ago, our Secret Intelligence Service located their main plant."

"Oh?"

I opened my eyes wide at information I hadn't expected.

Frank seemed to wrestle quite a bit with whether he should tell me this or not, but in the end he slowly nodded.

"They're hiding inside New Bilibid Prison in the Philippines."

"A prison?"

"Yes. The ones locked up inside bribed the prison guards, and now they're producing narcotics in there, safe and sound."

"Man, that's really something...."

"They're distributing part of what they make there to Australia, too. But because of the geography of it being a prison, we haven't been able to lay a hand on them. An intelligence agency can't just go attacking another country's state facility, after all."

Frank was right.

Criminals who ought to be locked up and paying for their crimes had instead crawled into that prison of their own accord and built themselves a kingdom.

Even as I listened, the sheer absurdity of it pulled a dry laugh out of me.

"What's your reason for telling me all this?"

"...Originally I had no intention of telling you. But seeing the sabotage operation you just pulled off changed my mind."

"Aha."

"I wouldn't dare think of touching that prison, but you, Sunny Kick, you might be different."

He had it exactly right.

Whether the criminals were hiding in a mango farm or a prison, two or three ways to stir up the whole nest had already popped into my head.

"Just don't go blabbing anywhere that I'm the one who told you."

"I won't. Thanks for the information. Saves me a wasted trip to the Philippines trying to gather intel for nothing."

When I nodded and smiled, Frank made an uneasy face, as if to say he'd expected as much.

He seemed to have something else to add, because he wet his lips with his tongue.

"In exchange, going forward, when I need muscle on Southeast Asian drug organizations, would it be all right to contact you directly?"

"Well, now? There's no guarantee I'll always be in Southeast Asia."

"I can make the pay well worth it. Mercenaries of the Cherny Group deserve at least that much, naturally."

"Mmm."

It seemed he'd mistaken me and the rest of our Cambodia dispatch squad for Cherny Group mercenaries.

There was no reason to go correcting that misunderstanding by blabbing that we were agents of the Republic of Korea's NIS.

"From next time, I think I'll have to charge you a pretty steep rate."

More side-gig channels was welcome news for me, but even so, I had to keep the line firmly drawn.

When I started haggling, Frank held out his hand for a handshake.

"With your skills, at least two hundred thousand dollars is doable."

"For that much.... all right."

I obligingly took his hand.

Two hundred million won for plowing a single car into something, wasn't that a bargain both for me and for Frank?

'The NIS pays fifty million tops.'

If the country's broke, there's nothing to do but go earn some foreign currency on my own.

*****

The day after the whole affair wrapped up.

With everything in Sihanoukville finished, I'd finished getting ready to head back to Phnom Penh.

"Hmm."

On the off chance, I paid another visit to Otres Beach, where I'd been picked up.

I meant to check whether the blonde in the bikini who'd lured me in the day before yesterday was working the beach again today.

"Tsk...."

But there was no sign of her anywhere on the beach.

Given the nature of her trade, she was surely the type who baited people while pocketing a commission per catch.

A few of the kidnappers had gone silent since last night, so odds were high she'd caught the suspicious scent and fled.

"Tch."

So I just bought another glass of the mango juice I'd had back then.

Since things had turned out this way, I intended to fully savor today the peaceful vacation I hadn't gotten to enjoy yesterday.

The sea breeze grazing the tip of my nose, the sweet mango scent lingering on my tongue.

It was the very moment I went to lean back comfortably against the sun lounger.

Brrring-brrring.

"Huh."

My phone rang out of nowhere.

Checking the caller, it was Yang Mi-ryeong, who I'd been in touch with a few days back.

Maybe it was because I'd just spent several exhausting days over one blonde woman.

For some reason I was glad, and before I knew it my voice pitched up.

"Hello. Good morning."

-....

"Hello?"

-...What is it? Why are you answering my call like that?

The voice coming through the phone was thick with wariness.

Greet her warmly and she still gives me grief.

"No reason. Just glad to hear your voice today, is all."

-...You startled me. And here you'd already gotten in touch before.

I let out a dry laugh despite myself, but even that prim, standoffish voice sounded oddly refreshing.

Anyway.

-Are you still in Cambodia right now?

For some reason she quickly changed the subject.

At the question, demanding my location right off the bat, I nodded.

Sweeping my eyes around the area, in case yesterday's blonde might turn up again.

"Yes. Still in Cambodia."

-It's a little out of nowhere to call up suddenly and ask this, but there's something I'd like you to answer for me.

"What is it?"

-The moment I handed you that Hongmen Society intel a few days ago, the Shanyuan Society and the Hongmen Society went to war, as if on cue.

"...."

-And on top of that, you were in Cambodia at exactly that time.

Her fastball, coming in hard.

-This isn't a coincidence, is it?

"...."

I didn't bother to answer.

Because I'd already anticipated she'd ask me about this.

-Ha....

Before long, I heard the dry laugh of the sharp-witted Yang Mi-ryeong.

*****

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