by Brian Parker
“Hey, Ralph,” Grady said into his comm set.
“Go ahead,” the major replied, his crisp English accent clear over the radio.
“This place is abandoned. Door’s welded shut. Whatever happened in there, they sure as hell didn’t want it getting out. There’s a sign here in Korean. Can you send Seong down to me?”
There was a pause before Alcock answered. “He’s on his way.”
Alex’s voice came over the radio. “Hold up.”
Grady slid down to the ground and low crawled into the snow ten meters from the door. It was only a few inches deep, so even a cursory glance by a patrol would reveal his position. There was nothing he could do about the footprints. “What’ve you got, Knasovich?”
“We saw lights on the road leading in. Looks like a foot patrol is headed your way.”
“Shit,” Grady muttered. “ETA?”
“Five, maybe six minutes,” Alex replied. “They’re at the first bend, out of my line of sight right now.”
Grady looked around his immediate area for a better hiding spot. The only option he saw was the guard shack. “I’m going to clean up my footprints and enter the guard shack,” he announced.
“I got you, boss,” Bazan answered before the sniper could. He was only about a hundred and fifty meters from where Grady was now and would have the best support by fire position if things went kinetic.
Grady hoped they didn’t. The odds of mission success increased exponentially if they could avoid a firefight.
He stood and dashed back to the edge of the road where he’d crawled into the snow and bent down, using his hands to smooth over the snow. He wished for any type of broom or branch like he’d used at the cold weather survival school, but there was nothing in the barren location. He scooted backward as he went, trying his best to cover the trail and doing a shitty job of it.
Lights appeared in his periphery. “Time hack,” he grunted.
“Two minutes,” Alex answered. “You need to get to cover now, Harper.”
The shack was still twenty-five feet away, and closer to the road than he currently was. “Ah, fuck it.” He dropped to the ground once more and swept snow up in front of him, turning so he presented as small of a target as possible for the Koreans.
“Six men,” Knasovich said. “Passing by Baz now.”
Grady slid his rifle around the front of him and flicked the selector switch to fire. He cursed internally. He’d always known they would get into a fight, but he’d tricked himself into believing that it would be inside the tunnels, not on the approach to the facility.
“They’re checking inside the first guard shack,” Alex reported.
Good thing I decided not to go into this one, then, Grady told himself.
“Moving your way.”
The harsh sounds of men talking softly in their native tongue reached Grady’s ears. They weren’t concerned with noise discipline, obviously not expecting any trouble. He heard the crunch of their boots on the gravel road as they approached, their bodies still hidden by the night. The only thing he could see were the patrol’s three flashlights.
“Entering the second shack.”
The door to the shack squealed as they opened it. One of the men said something and the others laughed. Grady could see them now, their olive green uniforms in stark contrast to the white snow beyond the road. The door slammed shut and a flashlight beam passed within two feet of him as the men turned toward the facility.
They walked directly across his line of sight, confident that they were the only ones around at this time of night. The patrol moved up to the entrance. Two of the flashlights danced along the edges of the large blast door and down the length of the chain while the third shone on the ground at their feet.
One of the Koreans reached out to tug on the chain and another shouted a one-syllable word, tapping the other’s shoulder as he did so. The man who’d been reaching for the chain jumped and all of them laughed.
Whatever was locked inside the facility was scary enough to spook them. Great.
The Korean patrol finished checking the door to ensure it was secure and then turned back up the road, walking quickly without looking around further. They’d accomplished their orders to check the guard shacks and make sure the door was still locked, and now they were headed back to the perimeter.
“Moving past Baz,” Alex said, giving an update every two hundred meters. “They just passed the assembly area.”
Grady waited until the flashlights faded completely. “How long until another patrol comes by?” He knew that no one had an answer, but it felt better to voice the question than leave it bottled up inside.
“No clue, boss,” Bazan replied. “We need to get moving though.”
“Roger,” Grady said. “Ralph, you guys clear yet?”
“Give us a minute,” the Brit replied quietly. After a long pause he said, “Alright, the patrol has passed us by. Seong is moving your way now.”
TWENTY
* * *
TAEDONG, NORTH KOREA
MARCH 22ND
“Clear,” Grady whispered harshly. He was breathing too heavily, trying unsuccessfully to suck in enough oxygen through his mask’s filters. The harsh chemical charcoal smell had to be better than that of shit and unwashed bodies that likely hung thick in the air. He needed to calm down and control his breathing.
“What the fuck was that, boss?” Bazan asked as he knelt beside Seong’s twitching body. He already held the morphine pen injector against the man’s thigh, ready to plunge the needle into him. His NVGs showed the spreading dark smear as blood seeped around the bandage that the demolitions man had pressed to the translator’s neck.
“I don’t know, Baz. I don’t fucking know.” Grady glanced at Major Alcock, who leaned against the wall holding his rifle up. He’d hit his head hard when one of the men attacked them and his mask was askew on his face. “You alright, Ralph?”
“I think that one that bowled me over bit me. Other than that, a little knock on the head never hurt anyone.” He adjusted his protective mask back into place. “These guys smell bloody terrible.”
Grady grunted. He knew that the major’s claim that a bump on the head didn’t hurt anyone was simply male bravado, but if the man could carry on with the mission, then now wasn’t the time to address it. They had three bodies on the ground, and one of them was a member of his team. “Baz, what’s his status?”
“He’s losing blood, man. A lot of it. I’ve put on the QuickClot, but it’s not helping. There’s no way he’s gonna survive.”
“What’s going on down there?” Knasovich’s voice came over the radio.
“We’ve got two enemy KIA, one friendly WIA,” Grady replied, giving the SITREP so the four members of the team who hadn’t come into the facility would know what happened. “There were a couple of guys waiting for us when we came in. Bit Seong’s in the neck. He’s losing a lot of blood.”
“Did you just say they bit him?” Chris McCormick asked. He and Carmike were still at the assembly area in support positions while Hannah was in overwatch with Alex.
“Yeah. They didn’t have any weapons, but they were mad as hell after being locked inside this place.” He took his fingers away from the transmit button and asked Bazan, “There’s no chance for Seong?”
“I can’t do anything for him, man. Even if we were within a couple of miles of a major trauma hospital, they wouldn’t be able to save him. Only thing I can do now is ease his transition.”
“Ralph?” Grady asked, looking to the British officer. “He’s SAS, one of yours. What do we do?”
“Give him another dose,” Alcock said, his voice firm. “That’s what we’d all want if we were in that situation.”
Bazan hit the Korean with another auto injector and Grady turned away. Death was a risk they all took and each man knew that this mission had the potential to be extremely dangerous. There was no telling what the North Koreans were doing inside the complex, but they’d sure put a
lot of effort toward keeping whatever it was locked away.
Until his team had been stupid enough to open the front door.
After popping the lock that kept the chain in place over the door, they’d entered the darkened facility and been set upon immediately by the two guys who were now on the ground. Grady looked at the motionless bodies and couldn’t make out much in the darkness. “Going white light,” he announced, pausing for a moment to allow the others to remove their night vision devices.
What he saw made his stomach turn. “Did we do all that?” he asked, gesturing at the walls, which were covered in dried blood and feces. The men on the ground had experienced severe trauma, ragged cuts and chunks of missing flesh blended with the smaller, more deadly bullet wounds that his team had inflicted upon them.
“Why are they naked?” Alcock asked.
“No idea, Ralph. Not a fucking clue.”
“We need— Don’t forget to record this,” the Brit said. “Whatever happened to these people has to have something to do with that smuggled video.”
“Yeah, okay,” Grady said, feeling for the record button on his helmet-mounted GoPro camera. He panned his helmet across the dead, including Seong, narrating what happened softly, so the camera could hear him.
A clang of metal against metal echoed from somewhere in the facility. Grady instantly switched the white light off and dropped his NVGs back into place. Bazan stood up and edged nearer to him.
“What the fuck, man?”
“How’s Seong?” Grady asked without taking his eyes off the long hallway in front of them.
“Dead,” the demo man stated. “We need to get out of here.”
“We have a mission to perform,” Grady replied. “Let’s move out slowly. I want to clear each room we find. Don’t let one of these fuckers come up behind us.”
“Got it,” Alcock said, advancing down the hallway a few feet before stopping and allowing Grady to pass him. Bazan leap-frogged both of them to a point further down the tunnel. Once he was set, the Brit moved past him.
They traveled down the hallway like that until they came to the first doorway. They stacked up outside the door, then Grady and Bazan cleared the room while Alcock remained in the hallway keeping watch. The first room held several low benches and open cabinets with hooks on them. It looked like a locker room without any showers. Long dried blood was smeared across most of the surfaces.
They found the showers in the next room. An office in the following room contained no information of any kind. Off this office was a bedroom with a couch and king sized bed. Oddly, there was thick, plush carpet that softened the sounds of their footfalls. It wasn’t something that Grady expected in the middle of North Korea.
There wasn’t any blood in the bedroom. “Maybe the crazies hadn’t gotten to it yet,” Bazan whispered.
A shriek split the darkness. The two operators slid out into the hallway as the flapping of bare feet echoed toward them.
“You see anything, Ralph?” Grady asked, peering through his optics down the tunnel.
“It’s black as the ace of spades down here, lads.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Bazan asked.
“No. I can’t see anything in the darkness,” the Brit amended.
The shrieking continued and the flapping of feet got louder. Then a man appeared out of the dark, arms outstretched wide to help keep himself from careening into a wall. Grady gasped, he hadn’t seen the two that attacked them earlier. He’d simply reacted to the threat. This man was still over a hundred yards away, running full speed toward them. Like the others, he wore no clothing. Dried blood covered his skin, remnants from a hundred cuts and abrasions. His penis flopped back and forth as he ran, occasionally bouncing upward off his testicles to hit him in his protruding stomach. The sight, in conjunction with the bare feet slapping against the concrete floor made the entire situation almost comical until Grady remembered Seong’s corpse at the entrance.
It ran toward them, screaming the entire time as if it didn’t need to take a breath. “Boss?” Bazan asked when the maniac broke the fifty yard mark.
“I want him to get closer so we can get a good recording of what’s wrong with him. Then we need to restrain him and let him know that we’re rescuing him.”
“I don’t want this guy anywhere near me,” the demolitions man barked.
“How do you say ‘stop’ in Korean?” Grady asked.
“I haven’t any clue,” Alcock chuckled.
Grady cursed. “Going white light,” he said and flipped his NODs up, then clicked on the flashlight at the end of his rifle barrel.
The Korean’s screams intensified and he instantly altered his course, making a beeline for the light. Even at this distance, Grady could see a bubbly pink foam building at the corners of his mouth.
“Fuck this,” Bazan said, squeezing off two rounds. Both hit the runner center mass, causing him to stutterstep backward. Within moments, he charged forward once more as if he hadn’t just been shot twice. His face was contorted in a snarl of rage.
Grady fired one round into the man’s forehead. He dropped like a sack of shit, all animation leaving his body. “Threat neutralized,” he grunted. “Anyone hear anything else?”
They listened for the telltale screeching that had announced the dead Korean’s approach. When they no longer heard anything, Grady said, “Let’s finish checking this place out. Everyone go white lights.”
They had no idea how long it would be until the next patrol came back to the complex to check if it were still secure, so Grady decided that speed trumped stealth at this point. Flashlights on rifles and headlamps illuminated the darkness.
They cleared another room, some sort of control room with an observation window into a lab that looked as if it were completely destroyed. “Baz, you search this control room for anything that we can take,” Grady ordered. “I want to check out that lab.”
“I’m with you,” Alcock said.
They only needed to travel a few feet until they came to a doorway. Grady stepped through, his feet crunching on broken glass. To the left and right of the door were benches and chairs for observers. Straight ahead was a wall of glass, cracked and shattered the entire length, but held in place by its ballistic coating. Almost center in the wall, at equidistant from support beams, a hole the size of a large dog was covered in blood and ragged bits of dried flesh.
“If I was a betting man, I’d bet those men were locked in the lab. Here’s where they escaped,” Alcock said, pointing at the hole. Grady resisted the urge to deride him for making such an obvious comment.
“Hey, boss,” Bazan said over the radio. “I’ve got a notebook here. It was inside a backpack with some old dirty laundry behind the door. Good thing somebody was forgetful and left it here.”
“What’s it say?”
“Looks like half of it is in Arabic and on the opposite page is a bunch of different Asian symbols, probably Korean. It repeats like that for the entire book.”
“Arabic?” Even as screwed up as the mission had been, he was truly surprised. “Are you sure?”
“It’s the same shit I used to read as a kid. I’d recognize it anywhere.”
“Can you read it?” Grady asked hopefully.
“Not a chance. I left Iraq when I was six. Haven’t used it since.”
“Well, what do you think the book is?”
“My money’s on it being an operations manual for the control room,” his teammate said. “Of course it could just be instructions telling the soldiers not to piss in the corner and wash their hands after they shit.”
Grady grinned. He felt like that book was an important find. Any bit of good luck was welcome. “Alright, stow it and see what else you can find.”
He walked around the glass looking for a way into the lab. There was no way in except through the hole. “Not a chance in hell I’m climbing through that,” Grady said. “You see anything of use in there?”
Alcock pulled a chair ov
er and stood on it. “You can see over the bloody handprints if you get up higher,” he explained.
Grady grabbed a chair for himself and pulled it over as well. Inside the lab, there was the remains of a gurney, the metal frame bent in a hundred places. Most of the mattress was gone, shredded and torn. He had no idea where the filler had gone because it wasn’t on the floor. Broken glass from various test tubes, beakers, and vials littered the floor, their contents long since evaporated—or worse, Grady thought, remembering the lunacy of the men who’d attacked them.
Other than that, the room seemed devoid of anything useful. If there’d been a locked cabinet, a computer terminal, or anything like that, he would have considered crawling through the hole to investigate. As it was, the place was a waste.
“See anything, Ralph?”
“Fat lot of nothing, mate.”
“Okay, let’s keep going. This room’s a bust.”
They stepped down from the chairs and returned to the hallway. “Coming out,” Bazan called over the radio to let them know not to shoot him.
The rest of the facility held a Spartan barracks room, a cafeteria, several empty storerooms, and a conference room. Naked wires protruded from the wall in the conference room where the television and video equipment had been harvested for use at other locations.
“This place is a bust,” Grady announced. “Other than the three bodies and that book, we don’t have any evidence of what was going on here.”
“No evidence?” Alcock choked. “We’ve got the bloody truth right out there in the hallway. They were experimenting on those people and turned them into monsters. That’s more than enough evidence for me.”
“Are you saying we need to take the bodies with us?” Grady asked.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
Grady considered it for a moment. “If they’re contagious, we’re risking spreading the disease,” Grady articulated. “There has to be a reason why the Koreans sealed this place up.”
“I’d have just blown it up and collapsed the tunnel,” Bazan said.
