The Days Before: A Prequel to the Five Roads to Texas series (A Five Roads to Texas Novel Book 8)

by Brian Parker

  The two men watched their team pile into the trucks and stoke the fires to run the engines. “Doing our part to combat global warming,” Alcock said charmingly as the guard watched the proceedings. “Environmentally friendly and whatnot.”

  Finally, the engines had enough heat to get the vehicles moving and the drivers executed a three-point turn, then sped out of the gates down the old logging road. Grady watched the guard through his scope long enough to see him threading the chain back through the fence, then he was up out of his hide position and running toward the road, a rifle in each hand.

  He ran alongside Truck Two, handing his rifle up to Hannah, and then fell back to the open tailgate. Grabbing the outstretched hand of the Korean, he leapt into the bed and collapsed, breathing hard.

  “Thanks,” he said, his breath fogging in the frigid air. The trucks hadn’t been going that fast, but the effort of sprinting after lying in the snow for so long was enough to put his body on notice that he was, in fact, getting old.

  “Nice to meet you,” the interpreter said with a British accent. “Lieutenant Seong of Her Majesty’s Special Air Service.”

  Grady grimaced when he pronounced it “left-tenant” instead of the American way of saying it. “Grady Harper. I’m the American in charge of this little shit show.”

  “Then it’s doubly nice to meet you, sir. Some of the chaps back at the camp provided information that may be of use when we infiltrate North Korea.”

  “How much do you know about our mission?” he asked.

  “Next to nothing,” the lieutenant replied. “I was told that you’d be going into the North tonight and needed an interpreter. Your mission was to take priority over everything, including the intel gathering that I’ve been doing for the last five weeks in that hell hole.” He smiled, revealing crooked teeth. “I won’t miss it though. That’s for sure.”

  Grady nodded, gritting his teeth to keep them from chattering in the cold night air. “We are going to infiltrate North Korea. We have evidence of human experimentation and we need to confirm or deny the allegations before our governments will take further action.”

  “More sanctions?” Seong groaned.

  Grady shrugged. “Maybe a direct military intervention if we find any proof that it’s actually going on—but that’s for later. You said you got some information that would help us get into the country?”

  “Possibly. Several of the men said the bridge over the Tumen River is too heavily guarded, but we could go downriver by about five kilometers and float the trucks across on a ferry.”

  “There’s a ferry going into North Korea,” Grady asked skeptically.

  Seong shrugged. “It was there two months past when one of the recent arrivals came to the camp with just the clothes on his back. They’re exporting too many workers into Russia across vast stretches of forest. If everything went to the bridge it would add half a day or more to the trip, so the two governments worked it out to save time.”

  Grady thought about pulling the map from his pack, but discarded the idea. There were too many things that could go wrong traveling down the road, from it simply blowing away, to sparks from the burner igniting one of their only two maps. He brought up a mental image of the area of Russia that they were in. All he could recall was forest and a long road. A glance beyond the interpreter to the trees close by the road told him his memory was correct.

  “When do we need to make the decision to divert?” he asked.

  Seong shook his head. “I don’t know where the ferry is, Harper. I only know that there is one.”

  “So it could be two hundred miles away?”

  “That’s unlikely since the international border between Russia and North Korea is only seventeen kilometers long,” Seong stated.

  “Okay. Good point,” he conceded.

  “I don’t like it,” Hannah cut in.

  “I’m sorry,” the Korean said as he reached out a hand to her. ” Lieutenant Seong. Yu, if you’d like.”

  “Yu?” Hannah asked.

  He nodded. “Yu is my given name. Seong is my family name.”

  “Nice to meet you, Yu.” She chuckled softly behind her scarf at the play on words. “I don’t like the idea of deviating from the plan.”

  “And what exactly is the plan, may I ask? How are you going to infiltrate one of the most heavily guarded international borders in the world?”

  “You’re going to tell the guards that we’re returning from dropping off a load of political prisoners in Russia.”

  Lieutenant Seong blinked, then looked to Hannah. “Are you serious?”

  “We plan to come through at about 4 a.m. when nobody gives a shit, then you just talk your way through.”

  “I’m sorry, but that is the dumbest plan that I’ve ever heard.”

  Grady smiled. “That’s why it’ll work. Nobody sneaks into North Korea. They’re focused on keeping people in. We’ll deal with some private or a sergeant who’s tired as fuck, bored out of his mind, and doesn’t really give a shit anyways. They’ll wave us through.”

  “You’ve got to be joking, sir. Even a bored kid in the middle of the night will question why ten men are crossing the border and call for support.”

  Grady laughed as he opened the stove to shovel more wood in. “I’m fucking with you, man. There’s an area a mile and a half south of the Friendship Bridge where the river gets about six hundred feet wide and slow before narrowing to two hundred feet and becoming fast again. We have two inflatable rafts that we’ll use to cross the river at that point tonight at around 4 a.m.—still taking advantage of the bored private, but not risking the checkpoint on the bridge.”

  Seong sniggered for a moment. “Whew! You had me worried there for a moment, Harper. I was wondering what type of Yank cowboy outfit I’d been attached to.”

  “To be honest, we had zero knowledge of the ferry you mentioned,” Grady stated. “We’ll have to be extra vigilant that we aren’t too close to wherever that is. From our briefings, security on the Russian side of the Tumen is virtually nonexistent, but there are roving patrols and barbed wire on the North Korean side, then a shallow minefield immediately inside the wire. The mines should help us cross without being seen by some guard right on the shoreline.”

  “How do you plan on navigating the minefield?”

  “The minefield was placed in the 1950s, with minor upkeep over the years. So they are standard metal bodies. Simple mine detectors will do the trick. We got the latest and greatest from Uncle Sam. Satellite imagery shows the field to be approximately one hundred and fifty feet wide. Once we’re past the mines, we’ll need you and one of our guys to steal two more trucks from the bridge security force—maybe just one if it’s big enough. Then come get us and we’ll head toward Pyongyang where our objective is.”

  The man nodded slightly. “Okay, sir. What do you need me to do until I’m expected to steal a truck?”

  “Just follow along for now. Work up a plausible story that a North Korean private would believe as to why we are crossing the river into their country if someone spots us.”

  “Alright.” He looked at his bare wrist before grimacing. “Do you happen to have the time?”

  Grady glanced at his own wrist. “It’s just after midnight. We should arrive at the crossing site around three. We’ll need to inflate the rafts and then make the crossing.”

  Seong grunted, “Thank you,” and settled back against the side of the truck to rest. Grady watched in amazement as the lieutenant closed his eyes and appeared to be sleeping within seconds. He scooted closer to Hannah for warmth, there was no way he could sleep comfortably in this cold.

  She shivered beside him, leaning in silently toward him as well. He wondered if crossing tonight was the right call. They’d been going nonstop for well over twenty-four hours now and needed a legitimate rest break before they made it to the area where the tunnel complex was supposed to be.

  There will be time to get a nap in once we cross the river, he told himself.
They could hole up somewhere in the morning for a few hours before they made the final push. There’ll be time.

  NINETEEN

  * * *

  TAEDONG, NORTH KOREA

  MARCH 22ND

  They were out of time. The team needed to move now to infiltrate the site or risk losing another twenty-four hours. They’d pushed hard, Grady deciding not to stop for the badly needed rest in favor of security. Staying anywhere near the borders of the country was too risky. Their best bet was to make it to somewhere close to their objective and hole up for the day. Three hundred miles and several close calls with army units on the highway later, and the team was within a kilometer of the target tunnel complex and it was nearing midnight—their perfect infiltration window.

  Grady looked around the small assembly area at his team. They all looked tired; none of them appeared to be fully alert. Not good, he thought.

  “Okay, we have two options,” he said. “We hit this place in the next hour while all of us are exhausted from trying to get cat naps during the ride down here, or we hole up and get some rest, then hit the target tomorrow night. That means we lose a full day on the mission.”

  Bazan spoke up first. “I don’t like it. The more time we wait around in this place, the more likely someone will discover us and report the fact that we’re here.”

  “Agreed,” Knasovich replied. “There are farmers and kids all over the place. “SF 101. All it takes is for one local to report our presence and the op is blown.”

  Grady listened to the input of his team. He was tired, but not so tired that he’d be a risk to the mission if things went kinetic. However, even if everything went one hundred percent smoothly, which it wouldn’t, they still needed to EXFIL from North Korea. They would have, at a minimum, another eighteen hours in the trucks moving to the coast where there was a British sub waiting for them. It was a huge risk, but so was waiting a full day to go into the complex.

  “Alright,” Grady said, clearing his throat. “We’re all exhausted, but Baz and Alex are right. If we sit around and wait for tomorrow night, we risk getting discovered by some roving patrol—or worse, by civilians. We go tonight.”

  To their credit, no one grumbled or complained. He’d made his decision and they would follow his orders. They were all experienced professionals who stood to make a very big payday once this op was over. He looked at his watch and did a quick calculation. “I want to be on the move again in two hours. Get a catnap in. I’ll take the first watch. Rob, I’ll wake you up in an hour for the second shift.”

  “Roger, boss,” Carmike said.

  As everyone flopped down onto the snow-covered ground around the trucks, Grady’s eyes caught Hannah’s. She smiled and waved before pressing up beside one of the others as they all crowded together for warmth. He waved back, but she’d already pulled her parka down over her eyes. None of them would be comfortable trying to sleep, but at least it was something.

  The time passed quickly on Grady’s watch as he shivered in the growing cold, thankful that they hadn’t come to the country in the dead of winter. He tried to imagine what it must have been like for the soldiers and Marines in the Korean War. During his formal military education, he’d read some of their accounts of the horrors of the winter fighting and he’d been stunned at the barbarity of it all. Men freezing solid in fighting positions overnight, frostbite with loss of fingers and toes within hours of arriving in country, the mass waves of humanity when the Koreans and Chinese attacked American battle positions—UN positions, he corrected himself.

  The war had been under the command of the United Nations. That had turned out well, Grady grunted into the cold. The UN was well meaning, but everything they did, even today, seemed to go sideways. There was no way in hell that he’d accept a contract with the UN if he were ever offered one. That organization was a dumpster fire, kept afloat by US money and humanity’s insatiable desire to stick their noses in other peoples’ business.

  Grady woke Carmike for his shift and sat upright in the snow against the rear wheel of one of the trucks. He’d spent so much time thinking about the mission over the past hour that his brain was on overdrive. He tried to sleep, but it never came. Instead, the time passed with him in a slight daze. And then Carmike was going around shaking everyone awake.

  Time to go.

  Infiltration into the target facility was more difficult than Grady expected. About a mile from the target facility, they encountered roving patrols and several lines of troops that they had to evade. The time of night made it easy enough to do, but the security posture made Grady wonder what was happening at the tunnel complex. The soldiers they encountered were watching in the direction of the facility, not guarding the approaches like he’d planned for.

  Once they made it past the outer ring, they didn’t see any more Korean troops. The team had expected to find guards posted at the entry and potentially having to fight their way inside, but there was nothing. Empty guard shacks gave the place an air of abandonment. Alex and Hannah, who were up on a rise about four hundred meters from the tunnel complex opening in overwatch, reported no movement from anywhere they could see.

  The problem with underground facilities was that there were no side entryways, no windows to sneak through, and no lesser-known way to get inside; there was usually only one way in, through the main entrance. Some places had an emergency escape exit, but not usually since that was an added vulnerability that needed to be protected and shielded. Nope, it was lottie dottie everybody through the front door—a great way to get your entire team killed by just one guy with a machine gun.

  Grady scoped the area surrounding the closed doorway, looking for security cameras, external firing emplacements, or anything that would indicate that the facility was in use. Nothing.

  “We clear, Alex?” Grady whispered over the team frequency.

  “Clear,” came the sniper’s reply.

  Grady tapped Bazan on the shoulder. “Ready to breach?”

  “One minute,” the demolitions man said, his hands working with something inside his backpack that Grady couldn’t see. “Okay. Ready.”

  “Moving now.”

  They sprinted across the small one lane road leading to the hillside opening before dropping to the ground to examine the place once again. The first guard shack, located about fifty meters from the second was empty. The upper half of the single person shack was glass, which allowed the guard to see in 360-degrees. He couldn’t see below the glass and decided to check the structure instead of bypassing it.

  “Gonna check the guard shack,” Grady said.

  Bazan grunted and dropped to the ground, pulling his rifle into his shoulder. Then he tapped Grady’s boot to let him know he was in position. “Moving,” Grady responded, running toward the shack in a low crouch.

  There was zero cover alongside the road as Grady closed the distance. It was a good position for someone charged with watching the approaches to a secret facility. The shack allowed a guard to see for several hundred meters. It was only about a hundred and twenty meters from where Grady began his run to the shack, but by the time he arrived, he was winded. The altitude, cold, and lack of sleep were beginning to take their toll—exactly what he’d hoped to avoid by taking the small break earlier.

  The shack was as empty as it appeared to be from across the field. No guard sat on the floor, trying to ward off the cold as he’d suspected. The Spartan guard shack held a metal folding table and chair, and that was it. There was no log sheet that he could pass off to Seong or any intel of any kind.

  “It’s empty,” he grumbled, both relieved and perturbed. Something was already making his spine tingle that things at the facility were not as they’d expected them to be. “Alex, Hannah, you guys seeing anything?”

  “Nope,” the sniper replied. “Still all clear. You need to work on your cardio, though. That took almost thirty seconds.”

  Grady grimaced. Fuck that guy, he thought, annoyed that he’d selected Knasovich to come on this
mission. He’d told Hannah that the guy was an ass just to be an ass, and here he was, being an ass over the comms during the infiltration. “Keep the chatter to a minimum,” he barked. “Moving to the second shack.”

  The second shack was set back two hundred meters from the first. He made the all-out sprint in one minute. It was faster than his last movement, but he wouldn’t be winning any track meets anytime soon. “In position,” he said, allowing Bazan to reposition closer before inspecting the shack.

  “Moving,” the engineer said. Grady watched a shadow disengage from the ground and move closer to him before it dropped back to the ground about thirty meters from his position. “Set.”

  Grady peaked through the glass. It was the same as the first shack: plain and empty. “Nothing.” He glanced at the entrance to the facility, now only half a football field away. It was hard to tell in the darkness, but he thought there was a sign on the door—not something that most ultra-secret facilities chose to do.

  “Baz, stay in place. I’m moving to the door.”

  “Not what we discussed, boss,” the man replied.

  “Something’s not right.”

  He jogged to the entrance, no longer worried about sprinting. Either the North Koreans were extremely good at deception, or this place was truly empty. When he arrived at the doorway, which was a large, metal blast door set directly into the side of the hill. There was a chain with thick links stretching from one side of the door to the other, set into eyelets welded directly to the doorframe. If anyone was inside, they weren’t getting out.

  There was some type of red marking tape, similar to what police used at crime scenes, wrapped around the vault’s handle. Grady leaned closer, the large wheel was welded around the base, ensuring that it wouldn’t spin. He stepped back and appraised the door once more. That’s when he saw that there was writing on the door, Korean symbols painted directly on the metal.