by Glen Robins
Again, Sunny shook his head and said in Korean, “No good. Save it.” His lips curled as he showed me a bottle of ammonia-based cleanser and a lemon. “These will intensify its effect. But wait.”
Sunny studied the items on the table like an experienced shopper deciding on the right shoes to complete an outfit, surveying each with an expert’s eye. When he came to the end of the table, he hefted a car battery and some wire. He signaled for me to hand him the Xacto knife, which he then used to strip the insulation from the wire, exposing the raw copper strands.
I smiled at our male prisoner seated right in front of me. I needed him to think I was enjoying this. “If you insist on withholding the information we need, things are going to start getting really bad for you. We are here to save lives, possibly yours as well as those you intend to murder. You can choose to cooperate with us before we get started on you, or you can choose to find out if you’re as tough as you think you are.”
I stepped to the doorway and kicked the woman’s feet to make sure I had her full attention. Her eyes were hollow. She was trying to put herself in a trance, a technique often employed by well-trained operatives to remove themselves from the pain. They mentally detach themselves from the situation and bury the vital secrets of their superiors deep in their mind, layering lies and nonessential half-truths on top of the vital information their enemies seek. Sometimes they do it so well they confuse themselves and are unable to disentangle the truth from their own fabrications. I couldn’t allow this to happen. The freshest pain was in her foot, which is why I chose to whack the bleeding one.
That subtle recognition of her attempt to entrance herself was like adding one more twist to the coil inside of me. She, I realized in the moment, she was the linchpin, the one with the deepest knowledge, the highest rank.
Crouching next to her, I picked up the corkscrew and poked the tip of it into the soft flesh of her underarm. She pulled back, cutting off her own airway, and I knew I had interrupted her internal ritual.
“I think you understand that things will be much different than you might have imagined from here on out. First, your government will deny your very existence. You will have brought shame and disgrace and a mountain of intense scrutiny to your struggling nation. You know all the illegal markets that have sprung up over the past several years? You’re familiar with them, right? People are sneaking into China, buying things like electronics and beans and appliances and fresh fish and selling them for profit back in their cities and villages in the northern sectors of your country. A privileged few make it further south where the prices for such goods rise. You’re aware of this, are you not? You or your family members may have profited from this sort of activity or gained some level of luxury by means of such illegal trade. Am I right?” I was rewarded with a nearly imperceptible fluttering of the eyes. “I can see that I’m right,” I continued. “The most likely result of your attempted plot today is that those markets will be completely shut down. The Chinese will enforce tighter controls over their border with your country. They cannot afford to piss off the Americans.
“When the investigations conclude that your country was behind these attacks, you better believe all foreign money and food that is now coming into your country and helping your desperate citizenry will dry up. Conditions will worsen, and your countrymen may face another famine like the one in the 1990’s. Is that what you want?”
Again, I let my words sink in as I toyed with the sharp tip of the corkscrew. “How long can North Korea support its people with its own crop production? Without rice coming in from other countries, your domestically produced rice will feed less than fifty percent of your population. You know that. Who decides who lives and who dies?”
I made eye contact with the guy through the doorway. “Who decides the fate of millions of your people? I’ll tell you. You do. You can act right now and save those who will die a slow death by starvation as a result of your actions.”
I watched her eyes intently, allowing my voice to grow more somber. “Where are the codes to scramble the signal? Tell me now and save your countrymen.”
No response. She stared straight ahead with eyes that were dead to the world. The trance was threatening to take over again. I raised my voice. “Hey! I’m talking to you.” I slapped her wounded foot again and dug the corkscrew into her armpit just enough to rip open a small hole in her tender skin. Blood gushed and she cried out in pain.
The woman’s body shuttered as a fresh wave of shock set in. The guy pressed his eyes closed and howled through the duct tape.
While I talked, Sunny had hauled the battery and the wires into the bathroom in the corner of my office, walking backwards so they could see what he was doing. He flicked on the light. The whir of the woefully inadequate ventilation fan filled the space. He slid open the shower curtain. Yes, my gym had a small shower in it. A nice little convenience for which I paid extra rent each month. This night it was going to serve a higher purpose. Sunny turned the water on all the way. Cold, of course, and plugged the drain with the mousepad from my desk. The shower pan had about a five-inch lip on it. Not much, but hopefully sufficient for our purpose.
I quickly deduced his intentions and nodded my understanding.
Sunny removed a folded towel from the cabinet and placed it on the floor. That was where I was to stand, he said. He donned a pair of leather gloves for insulation and tossed me another set. Then he dropped the wire into the shower pan to electrify the water with somewhere around fourteen volts of electricity. Not enough to kill, but enough to cause considerable discomfort, for sure. I gestured my next move and he stepped aside.
On Sunny’s signal, I turned to the woman. “Once again, ladies first.” After ripping apart my elaborate hog-tie contraption, I grabbed her under the arms, feeling the gooey warmth of her fresh blood, and dragged her head-first to the edge of the shower. I maneuvered her upper body in one swift motion into the shower stall, mashing her face down into the shallow pool of electrified water that had accumulated, holding the back of her head and her neck firmly so she couldn’t wiggle out of my grip. Her weakened body gave very little resistance.
My movements were calculated to be severe and dramatic, the kind of rough treatment that would steal away one’s breath. I gave her no time to pull in any air before I pushed her face in the water. Today’s ordeal had already snuffed much of the fight out of her. The loss of blood, the shock, the disappointment, my grim appraisal of their situation.
Her body convulsed as I counted to sixty in my head, then pulled her up. “Ready to talk?” I asked. Before she could answer, I shoved her face back into the water, once again giving her no time to pull in a deep breath. I noticed, and I think she did too, that the water was tinged pink. Blood from her shoulder and armpit wounds was mixing with the spray from the showerhead. I didn’t hesitate. I put her face right back in it. This time, the count was to seventy-five.
“Now?”
Splash. She was in the water again, twitching and bucking. Only thirty seconds this time.
She came up gasping and spluttering water from her nose. Her whole body trembled uncontrollably. She nodded her head vigorously.
“Good. Tell me now how to disable those bombs.”
I ripped the duct tape off her mouth. “I don’t know,” she coughed. “I think it’s impossible.”
“Nothing is impossible,” I yelled. “Nothing. Now tell me.” I pushed her face back underwater for another thirty seconds, then yanked her head back up.
“Only our mission technician knows,” she cried. “He programmed all of them.”
“Where is your mission technician?”
She pinched her eyes shut and struggled to turn her ahead away from me, toward the back of the shower. “I don’t know. I promise,” she rasped between ragged breaths.
Something dawned on me in that moment, something I had overlooked or ignored in my anger and haste.
I dropped her and let her twist and struggle from a face-down-in-the-show
er position to an awkward half-kneeling, half-sitting position using her good shoulder to gain some leverage. Cold water continued to rain down on her, but she had knocked my makeshift plug away from the drain hole. She had also bumped the battery and disconnected the wire with her thrashings.
But I didn’t care.
My attention was immediately fixed on the guy. I could see him swallow hard as I approached him. “You’re the technician, aren’t you?” I barked. “Makes sense. Weasley little guy like you wouldn’t be good for much else. Now talk.” I grabbed him by the legs and yanked him away from the desk he had been leaning against. It was so sudden his head hit the floor with a thud.
The scrawny little man tried to be brave. He gritted his teeth and held his breath and turned away his eyes as if to signal that he could handle whatever was coming.
Sunny had quickly moved to the table and now held the welding torch in hand. He fiddled with the nozzle and its ignition switch before attempting to light it. It roared to life right away and he adjusted the gas mix until he had a nice, steady blue flame jetting out of the brass tubing.
“Ah,” he said in Korean. “Haven’t done this for a while. I really don’t like the smell of burnt human flesh, but duty demands we get answers. We don’t have time to mess around.” Sunny pointed the nozzle toward the guy’s exposed feet. I held the skinny calves and pressed them into the floor with all my weight.
“Go ahead,” I said to Sunny. “We need him to talk. Now.”
The technician looked at me and began to kick and thrash with all the terror of a bleeding man in shark-infested waters.
Sunny flashed an evil grin. “I usually start with the toes and work my way up to more vital parts. It isn’t pleasant. The smell is horrible and the pain, I would imagine, is worse.” Sunny continued to adjust the flame to increase the length of it. “Good thing we have lots of towels. This is going to be messy.”
I nodded to my father-in-law and he began to aim the flame toward the young technician’s toes. The smell of burning hair began to waft towards our noses. “Awful, isn’t it,” said Sunny.
The technician’s eyes, already wide, somehow grew another few centimeters in diameter. Ten seconds into his brave resistance, the skin on his pinky toe began to bubble as it scorched. The smell was horrendous. The poor guy was trying so hard to be brave but trying even harder to escape. I exerted my strength to hold his lower body still while Sunny held the flame in place. As the first lump of flesh melted off, exposing the off-white phalange, the man howled like a wounded dog and blurted, “Stop. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you. Stop, please. I’ll tell you.” He sobbed the pitiful tears of a child who fears disappointing a parent. He was not about to take one for the team.
The woman, who was still groaning in the bathroom, suddenly became vocal and commanding. The problem was her voice held neither strength nor conviction. It was barely above a whisper. “Don’t do it. Don’t tell these dogs anything.”
Sunny whipped around, pointing the blue flame at her. He walked toward her with the torch, but she continued. He waved the end of the flame across the sleeve of her soaked shirt. It was too damp to ignite but enough for her to feel the heat. Sunny set the torch down close to her body so that if she flinched it would topple over on her as he fastened a strip of duct tape across her mouth.
“Do the right thing,” I said to the sobbing young man. I gave him a reassuring squeeze on the calves. Speaking to Sunny, I said, “Thanks. Let’s hold off on her until we hear what this guy has to say.”
Sunny stood and slammed the bathroom door shut so the woman could be neither seen nor heard.
I turned my attention to the computer guru writhing in pain under my grip. This poor kid had little, if any, military training. He was a nerd—pale and wispy. Any veneer of a tough guy gone; his whole frame shook. He wouldn’t look me in the eye, but he started talking. I stopped him with an outheld hand, fumbling for my phone. I pulled it out and quickly found the audio record app and started it. “Please,” I said, “tell us how to disable those bombs.”
Seven minutes later, I had a voice recording from the technician that detailed the online location and password to a secured site where the pseudo random codes for the device pairings were stored. We logged on to it with my smart phone and accessed the life-saving sequences, which I was able to copy into the notes on my phone for easy distribution to the right people on the planes. The technical guru spelled out the steps necessary to disengage the Bluetooth connections, which would disarm each of the bombs. I had to give him credit. If what he was saying was true, he had an excellent memory and was as smart as anyone I had ever met. Anyone who can boil down complex tasks into easy-to-follow directions like that is on the genius level, I’ve discovered.
I bypassed Robinson for the time being and dialed my father. “Put me through to your IT guy, now.”
“It is too late, son,” he said solemnly.
Chapter 52
Costa Mesa, CA
June 6, 3:55 a.m.; Ten minutes of fuel remaining in LAX-ICN plane
My father’s voice was uncharacteristically faint. The usual force and gusto were absent.
“No, that can’t be.” I tried to control my own tone, but my emotions were bubbling over. “The plane from Los Angeles must have at least another fifteen minutes’ worth of fuel. It hasn’t been that long.”
“Yes, only fifteen minutes. They’ll never make it. They’re too far out to sea. We already lost a plane trying to land in Incheon. A true tragedy. Thousands of people saw it. We can’t risk another attempt like that.”
Even though we hadn’t spoken for many years, I recognized the resignation in his voice. It scared me. This is the man who was always so self-assured; the one who always had an answer, no matter the question.
My thoughts were disjointed. They flew out of my mouth in clips, rushed, and with very little formality, which normally I would afford a man of his rank, despite our familial relationship. “Father, I have the solution. The mission technician, he gave me instructions on how to disengage the detonators. They need to know. The people on the plane. The pilot or somebody. I need to send instruction to the pilot. All of them. Please, patch me through to someone on that plane. The Los Angeles plane. Hurry. There’s no time to waste. Hurry.” Although I used semi-polite conjugations, it was still an odd feeling yelling a string of commands to the highest ranking general of the Korean army. “Trust me, father. This will save their lives.”
“Without the codes, they’re doomed—”
“I have them. I have the codes. Patch me through. Now, please.”
“They’re so far out…”
Someone on the line interrupted. “Sir, they’re high enough that they can still make it if we patch the call through right now.”
“Really?” said my father. “Is that true? Can they make it to Incheon?” His tone brightened immediately. “Stay on the line, Jeong Tae, while we patch you through.”
Three minutes later, I was speaking with the captain of Korean Air flight 134 from Los Angeles—the plane my students were on. Apparently, my father had sent out a string of commands in the intervening minutes that told the fighter pilots to escort the jumbo jet back toward Incheon. I had the KAL pilot on speaker phone while I texted the audio file with the instructions. I skipped the long, formal introductions and just told him I was General Noh’s son and was working with the TSA in America. He didn’t need any more explanation of who I was or how I’d gotten the life-saving information I was in the process of sending them. “I have the codes you need. Please give the phone to your most technically savvy crew member. Hurry.”
Chapter 53
Onboard Korean Air Flight 134, LAX-ICN
June 6, 3:58 a.m., Seven minutes of fuel remaining on LAX-ICN plane
The pilot turned to the navigator. “Officer Kim? Would you please do the honors? I believe you are better suited to do this.”
Officer Kim, who had been listening in on the phone call with General Noh’s son,
snatched the phone from the pilot’s hand as he spun out of his chair and headed for the cockpit door. He trotted down the aisle, his laptop computer under his arm, through the business-class cabin and down the stairs, careful to avoid the look of one grappling with four-hundred lives in the balance. He bounded down to the main cabin, then speed-walked down the port-side aisle toward the aft serving area, ignoring the anxious looks from passengers as he went.
Without ceremony or explanation, he gave a knowing glance to the two flight attendants, then moved aside one of the wheeled service carts, forgetting to lock the wheels after pushing it out of his way. It crashed against the bulkhead and would have toppled had one of the attendants not caught it and secured it. The lever on the hatch didn’t release easily, so he had to give it a karate chop with the side of his hand. It finally popped up and he was able, with some force, to pry open the hatch, which led to an aluminum ladder fixed to a bulkhead beneath the service area wall. He scrambled through the undersized opening, aware of the increased engine noise coming from the space. He closed the hatch as he descended, then quickly moved to the luggage storage area belowdecks. Opening his laptop so it would wake up as he picked his way through the space, he looked for a place to set up.
Space was tight amid the specialized baggage holders, but so was time. He found a spot with enough room to sit and plopped onto the steel floor between two of the large, netted racks in a cross-legged position, balancing the computer between his knees as the machine whirred to life. He ran the pad of his index finger over the scanning bar to unlock the operating system. While the computer’s screen displayed its welcome page, the navigation officer fumbled his earbuds into place, dropping them twice due to the shaking of his hands before positioning them into his ear canals. He then opened the audio file on the phone and listened to the instructions.
