by Glen Robins
As General Noh gazed through the window of the Press Hall, on the grounds of the Blue House, the irony of nature’s tranquility was not lost on him. Decked out in his full military uniform, complete with an impressive array of medals lined up along his breast pocket, he paced the room that served as his “other office” on the occasions when he held meetings at or near the executive headquarters. He had just spoken to the nation on TV, answering some, but not all, of the press corps’ questions about the imminent danger the country faced.
President Jang, who started the press conference, had skillfully narrated the threat as it was understood, then turned things over to General Noh to discuss details about the planned response to the brewing crisis. While avoiding specifics that would alarm the public but using the smokescreen of “in the interest of national security,” the General had, in his commanding way, assured his countrymen that he and the military were doing all they could to keep the public safe.
With the press conference behind him, it was time for another debriefing. Pressing a button on the desk phone, General Noh was conferenced into a meeting with the Joint Military Council. As the discussion progressed, nothing but grim alternatives emerged. Lives on the ground were weighed against the lives on the plane. Those on the plane were certain to die, but those are the ground need not be endangered. The welfare of the many in the city must outweigh the welfare of the much smaller number onboard. It felt like such a dastardly decision.
The joint chiefs had discussed a short list of available actions to reduce the loss of life and minimize physical damage to the country’s infrastructure. Of course, each alternative had a military bent to it, as none of his compatriots seemed capable of conjuring up anything short of an aggressive, tactical solution. Despite his thirty-five-year career in the Army, not once had General Noh contemplated the things this council had discussed. Although the Korean War had never officially ended, the fragile sixty-five-year peace was all but shattered. The men in that room were pounding on their war drums so loudly it made clear-headed thinking next to impossible. The pressure to mount an immediate and full-scale attack on North Korea was nearly overwhelming.
In his calm and commanding way, the General had stifled such talk. Instead, he insisted, they focus on the more immediate problem—doing everything possible to save the lives of those on the inbound airplanes. “There must be a technical solution,” he said. “While there is still time, we focus on getting the right people in here, people who understand Bluetooth technology and signal processing. We aim for a peaceful resolution first and keep our military options open in case we’re not successful.”
While he agreed that they could not allow these planes to enter South Korean airspace until the explosives had been neutralized, he found the pursuant discussion bleak. The focus quickly reverted from figuring out how to save the lives of the innocent passengers to, instead, punishing the enemy.
Two competing and highly inventive ideas emerged. Since F-16 fighter jets had already intercepted the planes and were escorting them around the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula, approaching Incheon International Airport from the south rather than from the east, the Air Force Commander suggested having the pilots overshoot Incheon and fly their commercial jets below the radar, aimed straight at Pyeongyang. A competing idea was to just fly at low altitude directly over North Korea and try to get as close as possible to the capital before they got shot down. Either way, General Noh’s compatriots were intent on doing harm to those who intended to harm them.
The thought of using commercial jets, filled with both foreign and domestic civilians, as kamikazes to bomb the enemy was unique, but reprehensible. Equally as unfathomable was shooting them out of the sky. Escorting them out to sea where they would eventually run out of fuel and succumb to gravity and then the unstoppable detonations was the least objectionable, but still distasteful. Political fallout aside, that was the one solution that represented the most realistic minimized-casualty scenario available to the security council given the time constraints should Jeong Tae fail in obtaining the pseudo random codes.
If he failed, the planes would run out of fuel. Their demise would be unseen, and the destruction minimized to the planes and their passengers.
This outcome was still awful to contemplate, but better than the alternative intended by the enemy.
The calculations showed the inbound flight from Dallas would be the first to drop. It had enough fuel to last just over three hours at typical cruising speed and altitude. The aeronautical experts had been busy crunching numbers to find the optimal speed and altitude to elongate the flight. They estimated it could go as much as an additional fifty minutes. That gave the team roughly four hours to work with.
As the discussion concluded, General Yoon, the Air Force Chief of Staff, announced to the council that two dozen F-16 Fighting Falcon jets that had been scrambled after the previous meeting had intercepted the incoming jumbo jets. Five teams of three jetfighters would escort the five passenger planes over the Sea of Okhotsk, before they reached Japanese air space, and lead them to the Yellow Sea, keeping them to the east of the island chain of Japan. The other F-16’s would patrol the airspace over the country, focusing on the coasts, the northern border, and the Capital city.
Minister Yim of the Ministry of Science and Information Communication Technology had responsibility for all things technical. He informed the group that his team was busy working up a solution that could be broadcast to a member of each flight crew. The team was mapping out easy-to-follow instructions designed to walk someone with intermediate technical abilities step by step through the process of jamming the Bluetooth signal. Unless they had the pseudorandom codes, it wouldn’t be a complete jam and it wouldn’t last very long. The imperfect solution would be based on whether the captured North Korean had told General Noh’s son the truth about how the detonators were set up and whether the devices were indeed linked via a standard Bluetooth configuration. Even if they were, because Bluetooth uses Frequency-Hopping Spread Spectrum technology to switch between seventy-nine channels 1600 times per second, Minister Yim was not confident enough to predict a successful outcome. At best, he said, without the codes they could only disrupt the connection for a short period of time.
“With precision timing and coordination,” he explained, “there is a chance the plane could descend through the one-hundred-meter trigger zone during the estimated seven-second disruption window. This, however, presents two problems. The first is the speed that would accompany such a steep rate of descent. Would the plane have enough time to pull up and enough runway to stop? The second unknown is whether the altimeter alert on the phone would kick back on and detonate the device. It could work, though, and that’s something, at least.”
Minister Yim, for all his knowledge and experience, had not allayed any fears, his optimism breathed new hope into a gloomy situation.
The only fail-safe solution, he warned, was to get the pseudorandom sequence for each device pairing. “Just get me those code files, wherever they are, and we’ll talk through the disarming process one-by-one with a member of each crew.”
After the call, General Noh paced in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows, hands clasped behind his back. No longer did the scenery outside hold any interest. It was the storm inside that demanded his attention. The Republic of Korea had never faced such a threat. The threat itself was inconceivable. The choices left to the leaders were unfathomable. As a military leader, his job was to protect innocent lives. Today, that job seemed impossible.
Throughout history, many great leaders had been forged in the fiery furnace of conflict, where the choices made in the heat of the moment would only be judged as prudent after all the facts were learned and assessed. The question was whether the world and the history books would ever know all the facts surrounding the decisions that had to be made in this crisis.
The burden of leadership was staggering.
General Noh would have to make heart-wrenching dec
isions while contemplating the thousands of lives that hung in the balance and the many more thousands of loved ones who would be devastated by their demise.
As a general, he had grown accustomed to the responsibility for people’s lives. But this was an entirely different level, a level few ever experienced. The term “sacrificing for the good of the many” took on new meaning.
Unless a miracle occurred, this day would surely go down as the most fateful day in Korean history, as well as in General Noh’s personal life. If, by the grace of God, all of the passengers on all five planes and all the lives in jeopardy on the ground were spared, it would be the most blessed day in Korean history that no one beyond the group in that conference room would ever fully appreciate.
There was a tremendous load riding on Jeong Tae’s shoulders, a load at least equal to that of the General.
General Noh stood, strode across the room, and locked the door. When he returned to the desk, he didn’t sit in the high-backed leather chair. Instead, he knelt by it and spent twenty minutes in fervent prayer.
Chapter 35
Over the Yellow Sea, West of Incheon, Korea
June 6, 4:42 p.m. Local Time; 12:42 a.m. California Time
Two and a half hours before its scheduled arrival in Seoul, Captain Hong Moo Gwang, the pilot of the Korean Air flight from Dallas-Fort Worth, had received a call on the emergency frequency from the Air Chief Marshal of the Korean Air Force. The emergency frequency insured that neither the crew nor the passengers could listen to the conversation. He had been informed that a squadron had been dispatched to divert his aircraft and escort it on an alternate route to Incheon International Airport. Though the information provided was scant, Captain Hong, a former Air Force pilot, obeyed without question. It was a highly unusual request that certainly held national security implications.
As the aircraft approached the northern end of the island chain that made up Japan, three fighter jets appeared first on radar, then through the windscreen. The squadron leader instructed Hong to fly in a south-westerly direction two hundred kilometers east of Japan’s eastern coast. Hong asked why.
“Sir,” replied the younger fighter pilot. “It is for the safety of those on the ground. We cannot allow your plane to fly over inhabited land until we are sure it’s safe.”
The Boeing 747 was loaded nearly to capacity with 401 passengers and 16 crew members. Hong’s posture stiffened. The co-pilot shot him a wary glance and adjusted his headset. Tension flooded the cockpit. An F-16 shadowed each wing and a third one followed a kilometer behind. It was a tactical formation with a message: If they didn’t comply, their plane would be blown out of the sky.
Hong followed instructions to reduce power and climbed to a higher elevation. The air currents up there would reduce fuel consumption. The Chief Air Marshal came back on and provided a brief overview of the situation. “I regret to inform you that we have obtained an intelligence report stating that North Korean infiltrators may have loaded an explosive device aboard your aircraft. A smart phone is set to relay a signal to the detonator based on GPS coordinates or altitude. That is why we cannot allow you to fly over inhabited areas.”
Again, the pilot and co-pilot looked at each other, eyes wide, faces taut.
The Air Marshall ended the conversation with a simple pronouncement. “We have our technical teams working on a solution. We’ll radio when we have something.”
Captain Hong was told to announce to the passengers that they were being rerouted and, therefore, their arrival into Seoul would be delayed. He was instructed not to share the information he had about the dangers they faced. No need to upset the passengers or crew members.
Chapter 36
Onboard Bell UH-1N Helicopter over Orange County, California
June 6, 12:47 a.m.
The Mexican authorities were true to their word and released Mr. Kim into our custody, but it took much longer than expected. Sergeant Lewis apologized profusely for the time lag. As soon as Yong Byun was signed out of the Attorney General’s holding cell, we piled him into Lewis’s Jeep and made our way back across the border.
Thirteen minutes later, Robinson, Yong Byun, and I were in the helicopter lifting off.
We each used the hour-long flight to catch up on our rest.
My sleep was interrupted less than thirty minutes into the flight by my phone vibrating in my pocket. It was my father, calling from his office at Army Headquarters in Seoul. I looked at the Huey’s onboard navigational screen to get oriented. I realized we were speeding over the darkened hills of Riverside County, southeast of Los Angeles. Our destination was John Wayne Airport in Orange County where a car would be waiting for us. The FBI agents in that car would take us to Yeo Chae Market, the Korean store in Garden Grove where Yong Byun picked up his groceries each evening. That was my starting point. I didn’t have much to go on, but I hoped the owners would share with me whatever information they could about Yong Byun’s supposed wife. She, I was convinced, would be in the area and quite possibly the linchpin in this whole operation. My hunch was that she and maybe others would lurk around, waiting for a chance to collect Yong Byun and bring him in. Her fate would be tied to his. Of this I was almost certain.
Since Mr. Kim had informed me that the Alpha team was based in Orange County, supplying all other teams with instructions and codes, I knew the technical guru would be connected to the “wife.” They seemed to be the ones controlling the technical and logistical aspects of all five teams. As the overlords of the operation, it would be their task to “tie up loose ends,” one of which was our friend, Mr. Kim. I guessed another part of their job was to oversee the return of each and every team member involved in the operation to the homeland.
When I answered the call, my father’s tone of voice was all business. This was General Noh, the highest ranking general in the Korean Army, who had called me, not my dad. I knew things were dire, and that others were listening to this conversation because his mannerisms were much different than during our prior call. He was performing for whatever crowd was listening. He was also gambling, betting all his political capital on the son that had cost him a chance at the presidency in the last election cycle. To the others in top positions in Korea, I was a court-martialed former squadron commander living in what amounted to exile.
No greeting, no small talk. He launched directly into a brief synopsis of the high-level meeting he had just attended. Wasn’t this stuff classified?
The call ended three minutes after it began. He reiterated the need for the pseudo random sequences for each Bluetooth device and said his team was working up easy-to-follow instructions in Korean and English that a member of the flight crew on each plane could use to disable them. Without those, we had no hope of saving the nineteen hundred passengers and crew members on those planes.
The last thing my father said was, “One hour and forty-five minutes of fuel on the inbound flight from Dallas. Good luck.”
The clock was ticking. I had until 3:15 a.m.
The only words I uttered were at the end when I simply said, “Yes, sir. I understand. We are en route to intercept the Alpha team as we speak. I’ll report on my progress upon contact with the enemy.”
I wondered what the others listening to our conversation were thinking. There were no guarantees that a) we would actually intercept the team in question or that b) if we did, they would know or have access to those codes.
That meant my new friend, Kim Yong Byun, who sat wedged between me and Robinson in the back row of the Huey’s cockpit, would be a key component to the mission’s success. I was using him as bait. However, since the FBI had discovered the two thumb drives, we had a cache of pictures. They had uploaded them to a shared drive, which I accessed on my phone.
“Is this him? Is this your tech guy?” I asked Mr. Kim after jabbing his ribs with my elbow to wake him up.
“I don’t think so.”
“How about this guy?” I continued swiping through the collection the FBI had uploa
ded.
Mr. Kim used the same answer each time until we came to a handsome, yet boyish, face. He motioned with his hands for permission to hold the phone. I passed it to him. With his hands cuffed and secured to a belly chain, he looked awkward trying to hold the thing and manipulate the screen. But he was eventually able to position the phone so he could use his fingers to zoom in on the face. “This is the only guy who was allowed to use the computer in our apartment. Just him. It was password protected and no one else had the password. He only stayed there one or two nights per week. I don’t know where he was otherwise, but I always guessed it was at the control house in Garden Grove.”
I took a closer look, but the face was not one I had seen before.
“He had a laptop and a bag full of all kinds of gadgets and wires and things like that. I didn’t know what his responsibilities were exactly, but I can assume that he’s the technician. Or one of them.”
“Do you know where he might be?” I asked, holding very little hope of getting the answer I wanted.
“No. Each man had his own set of instructions to follow after their part in the mission was completed. We were never to share that information with anyone, not even with other members of the team.”
Robinson was looking over Yong Byun’s shoulder. Without understanding the language, he seemed to know what we were talking about. He gave me an inquisitive look and without a word started tapping furiously on his phone’s screen. “I’m sending that photo to my team,” he said through the chopper’s comm unit. “They’ll run facial rec on this guy right away. We’ll see what we come up with.”
“He could be anywhere by now. That’s the problem. We’ve got to work up an alternate solution in case we can’t find this guy.”
