Hunt the Dragon

by Don Mann

  “Drop the weapon!” Crocker ordered, his HK aimed dead center on the man’s chest, his left hand gesturing down to the metal floor.

  The man, who appeared to be in his late forties, grunted disgustedly and lowered the pistol to his side. Crocker noticed he was wearing flip-flops.

  “Are you the captain of this vessel?” he asked, stepping forward with his weapon still pointing at the man’s chest.

  The Asian man shrugged.

  “Sir, are you the captain?”

  This time the man stuck out his chin and growled, “Cap-tain.”

  “You speak English? What’s your name?”

  The man sneered something in a foreign language. Beyond him, Crocker saw Tré, Pauly, and Sam checking a group of crew members huddled near the ship’s command console. Sam shook his head, indicating that they weren’t armed.

  Simultaneously, he heard Han over the radio: “Zero Alpha, White Shark One here. What’s the situation onboard?”

  “Stand by, White Shark. Situation developing. Over.”

  Crocker never took his eyes off the captain. He said, “I’m going to ask you one more time to drop the pistol. Then my men and I are going to inspect the ship.”

  The captain didn’t respond. Crocker was trying to decide whether he should shoot him in the leg, smack him with the butt of his HK, or forcibly remove the pistol from his hand. In the last-minute lead-up to the op, this contingency hadn’t been discussed.

  He stepped forward until they were within three feet of each other. Suddenly the captain lifted the pistol to his head and pulled the trigger. Blam! Blood and brain matter splattered across the bridge wall and floor as the captain’s knees gave way and his body folded.

  The gunshot reverberating in Crocker’s ears, cordite cleaving to the inside of his nostrils, he stepped over the body and stood next to Tré, who was facing five frightened-looking crew members. Pauly and Sam peeled away to inspect the rest of the tower.

  “Who’s the next in command?” Crocker asked.

  The tallest of the men, with a wisp of dark beard on his chin, held up his index finger and said, “My name…Lu. First officer.”

  “You speak English,” Crocker responded. “Good.” He pointed to the body bleeding out behind him. “First, I want him covered. Then I want to see your cargo manifest.”

  According to the manifest, the Cong Son Gang was transporting rice from Hamhung, North Korea, to Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf. The only other cargo was two small containers of “bicycle parts.” Remembering that Bandar Abbas was a port city in Iran and that Iran was one of North Korea’s few trading partners, Crocker radioed Captain Han of the SMP to board the ship and lead the inspection.

  That’s when Pauly and Sam returned, holding a dark-haired man by the collar of his dirty white shirt.

  “Who’s he?” Crocker asked.

  “Banasheh Nasari, according to his ID,” Pauly said. “We found him hiding in the mess.”

  It was a Persian name, which made sense, since the ship was headed to Iran and Jeri had said the Iranians might be behind the larger conspiracy. Nasari was a man of about fifty with a high forehead, black-framed glasses, and a sly, somewhat intellectual appearance.

  “Do you speak English?”

  He looked back at Crocker with dead eyes.

  “Who are you working for? Why are you on this ship?”

  No answer again.

  Akil tried addressing him in Persian and then Arabic. Nasari didn’t respond to either. Not that it really mattered to Crocker, who had decided that even if Nasari offered information, he couldn’t be trusted.

  Once Captain Han boarded, the SEALs descended to the cargo deck and stood guard as Lu and other crew members opened the large deck containers one by one. Han’s men slit open some of the 22.6-kilo (50-pound) bags of rice and crawled through the containers. Satisfied that they were filled only with rice, the group climbed down the metal galley ladder to the hold.

  The smaller twenty-foot containers in holds 1, 2, and 3 did in fact hold rubber bicycle seats and pedals. According to First Mate Lu, so did the containers in forward holds 4, 5, and 6. But the door to the forward hold area was double-padlocked shut, and he claimed not to have a key.

  “I bet this asshole has it,” Akil said, nodding toward Nasari.

  “Do you?” Crocker asked.

  Again no answer, just a blank stare.

  Instead of searching the ship for the keys, one of the policemen on Captain Han’s team produced a Rotorazer saw with a carbonized blade that cut through the locks like they were butter. Then he swung open the first container and sliced through a thick black plastic lining. Stacked inside were metal barrels packed with a white crystalline substance.

  Han put some on the tip of his tongue, tasted it, and spit it out. “Crystal meth,” he announced.

  Behind the barrels they found a wooden crate. Stacked inside it were rows of shrink-wrapped hundred-dollar bills.

  Lu claimed he hadn’t known they were there, and Nasari didn’t change his expression even when Crocker got in his face and asked, “You knew nothing about this either, did you?”

  The SEALs escorted the bills back to Singapore harbor, where they guarded them until U.S. Treasury officials arrived and took possession. Crocker later learned that they were counterfeit, amounted to nearly $1 million, and fit the same 2HK1 profile as the bills seized in Vegas.

  Even though Nasari claimed diplomatic immunity and had to be released, it wasn’t a bad day’s work.

  Chapter Ten

  The mind is a universe and can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

  —John Milton

  James Dawkins sat in the chilly underground workroom in the company of three male assistants and confronted the task in front of him. Basically he was being asked to miniaturize and calibrate the inertial guidance system that would fit directly under the warhead of a newly developed Unha-3 rocket. According to the mockups and schematics he’d seen, the Unha-3 was a three-stage 110-foot rocket that weighed about eighty-five metric tons.

  Dawkins shivered and sneezed into the sleeve of his dirty gray lab tunic. His nose started running.

  The first stage of the Unha-3 used a Nodong engine similar to those deployed on the Pakistani Ghauri-I and Iranian Shahab-3 missiles. It borrowed from the design of the Scud missile engine, but was at least 140 percent larger and featured more finely calibrated nozzles and combustors. Dawkins knew that the Nodong had originally been designed by the Soviets. He was also aware that a man who looked Russian, and who Dawkins suspected was a rocket engineer, appeared to be working in another part of this same underground complex.

  He had seen the man once, by mistake apparently, when he emerged from the bathroom with his watchers and assistants while Dawkins was being escorted to his room. They had exchanged quick looks.

  The second stage of the Unha-3 was almost identical in design to the old Soviet R-27 ballistic missile deployed in Soviet nuclear subs during the Cold War.

  Without even considering the third stage, which was the part Dawkins was charged with working on, he realized three things: One, he was almost certainly in North Korea. Two, he probably knew more about the progress of the North Korean missile program than anyone in Western intelligence. And, three, the North Koreans were close to developing an intercontinental ballistic missile that was capable of hitting the continental United States.

  His job was to provide the gyro-stabilized platform (GSP), missile guidance set control (MGSC), and amplifier assembly that would direct the warhead to within feet of its target. The GSP, which was the platform that needed the most work, acted to measure acceleration and velocity and maintain proper flight control. It was stabilized by dual-axis, free-rotor gyros whose rotors were supported on self-generated gas bearings. One gyro helped to stabilize pitch and roll, and the second provided azimuth stabilization.

  Dawkins knew all the details of this particular GSP system based on his work on a host of U.S. military rocket systems for UTC Ae
rospace. He was therefore able to identify the challenges immediately. In this case, this meant generating and regulating the proper gas cushions so the gyros would operate properly during startup.

  If he accomplished this, he knew he would be giving the North Koreans the ability to hit targets more than five thousand miles away with pinpoint accuracy. It’s something he absolutely didn’t want to do. But he also desperately wanted to get out of North Korea alive. This was the conundrum that confronted him now as he stood in the cold lab looking at the GSP on the table in front of him. It resembled a large stainless-steel ball with two bands encircling it at perpendicular angles. Each band housed a torque motor and a digital resolver.

  Somehow the supposedly backward North Koreans had chosen the perfect engineer for the task. How they had managed to identify Dawkins and snatch him so easily gave him pause. Clearly, these weren’t the bumbling fools spoofed in Western movies and comic books. They were dangerous, ingenious men who also ran very active uranium and plutonium enrichment programs, and therefore in Dawkins’s mind probably had sufficient amounts of weaponized uranium and plutonium to create numerous nuclear weapons.

  Dawkins had read published reports about the North Korean nuclear program. He also understood that one of the most difficult challenges in building an ICBM capable of delivering a nuclear weapon was reducing the size of the warhead so it could fit over the guidance system and atop the Unha-3 rocket. He wondered if they had other engineers, like the one he had seen in the hallway, engaged in that task as well.

  Of course, there was the Russian. One of Dawkins’s assistants, Pak Ju, referred to him as Dr. Soderov, formerly employed by the Makeev Design Bureau in Moscow, and boasted that Soderov had volunteered to help the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea without remuneration. Whether this was the scientist’s real name, and whether he had worked at the Makeev Design Bureau or not, was impossible for Dawkins to tell.

  Clearly there had been a large amount of outside input. In Dawkins’s opinion, the North Korean engineers and technicians he had met weren’t capable of bringing the program to the advanced state it was in now. He concluded this based on the knowledge and capabilities of the North Koreans he’d met, particularly his two assistants—Pak Ju and Yi-Thaek, both of whom spoke some English and were veterans of the program.

  Pak Ju was the older and more experienced of the two—a guarded, slow-moving, heavyset man in his late fifties with tiny slits for eyes that he hid behind yellow-tinted, black-rimmed glasses. Yi, Pak Ju’s subordinate in age and rank, had trained as a mathematician. He had a more agreeable manner, stuttered when he spoke, and was thinner, slightly taller, and balding. Dawkins’s third assistant was a guard or minder named Kwon, who stood about five eight, was thickly muscled, and rarely spoke. At least two of these three men accompanied Dawkins everywhere, including to the bathroom.

  At the end of each workday Kwon would lock the lab and the three of them would walk him down the hallway, down a flight of stairs and along another dank hall to his quarters, where Sung would be waiting. She prepared his meals, washed his clothes, and attended to his other needs. At night after he fell asleep, she’d leave quietly and lock the door behind her. She returned promptly every morning at seven to help him dress and serve him breakfast.

  It was a strange, simple routine, but one that he adjusted to relatively easily. At the end of the first week, Sung dressed in him in a suit—black and badly made—shirt, and hooded parka.

  “Think about you family,” Sung whispered before she turned off the electric space heater and pointed outside.

  “My family? What do you mean by that?”

  Kwon stood waiting in the hallway. The two North Koreans led him to a large freight elevator that lifted them to ground level. It was the first time Dawkins had seen the entrance to the underground complex, which looked unimpressive—a twenty-foot-high concrete structure with large metal doors hidden in a grove of tall pine trees. The air outside was thin and freezing cold. The sun shone weakly through a thick layer of gray clouds.

  He sneezed again, and his legs and head felt heavy as he walked beside Sung along a dirt path that ended at what appeared to be a very large body of water with islands in the distance shrouded in mist. Ice covered the rocks along the shore.

  As he shivered, he remembered that today was Karen’s ninth birthday. After muttering a prayer to her under his breath, he sighed. He wanted her to be proud of him, and sensed that whatever he did or didn’t do here would greatly affect her future.

  “Very peaceful, Mr. Dawkin,” Sung said, lingering at his side. He had asked her to call him James.

  “In the spring and fall the cranes come. They are sacred.”

  “Sacred? Are you sure you’re using the correct word?”

  “A thousand of cranes appeared when our Supreme Leader’s father died four years ago. They tried to carry him to heaven, but the people cried and despaired so much that the Supreme Leader’s father returned.”

  Dawkins assumed she was talking about Kim Jong-il, who had died of a heart attack in December 2011. “Where is he now?” he asked.

  “Living in special palace in Pyongyang.”

  “Do people see him?”

  She didn’t answer. He wanted to believe that Sung was a sensible woman, but this kind of talk troubled him. Changing the subject, he said, “I assume we’re on an island. Is that correct?”

  Sung turned slightly to glance back at Kwon. When she saw that Kwon wasn’t looking, she nodded. It was a very slight gesture of independence, he thought.

  He heard dry leaves crunch behind him and smelled cigarette smoke.

  Sung said loud enough for Kwon to hear, “Today is important day for you, Mr. Dawkin. Some very important man want to meet you.” It was the first indication Dawkins had that Kwon understood English.

  “Oh, really? Who?”

  “This is the great man who direct our program and is trusted by the Supreme Leader. This will be very great honor for you. We call him Jang-gun-nim.”

  “Am I correct to assume that’s his name?”

  “There is no word in English for this. Maybe…marshal, or honored general.”

  Presented with a choice, Dawkins would have preferred to remain outside, but he wasn’t. So he followed Kwon and Sung as they walked back to the complex, descended one level instead of two, and turned right. The hallways here were narrower, and they soon came to a door with two soldiers outside. Kwon saluted and they entered a waiting room with a large framed photo of Kim Jong-un on the wall, smiling and wearing sunglasses. In another image he wore a white tracksuit and held a basketball under his arm. Dawkins thought he looked like a puffed-up infant in adult clothes.

  A military orderly wearing white gloves showed him into an office. A square-shouldered, square-jawed man in a stiff green military uniform with red piping around the lapels and collar rose to greet him. His hand felt soft and lifeless. Behind him stood a wizened older man in a black suit and white shirt smoking a cigarette and sizing him up through thick glasses.

  Dawkins bent at the waist to show respect and was led to a sofa behind a round glass table in the corner. The honored general sat in an overstuffed chair opposite him, with the older man in another upholstered chair to his left and the jittery young aide/interpreter perched on a metal chair to his right.

  The aide picked up a piece of white paper and started to read in a high, strained voice: “The most honored general welcomes you, Mr. James Dawkins. He is joined today by Minister Kim Gun-san. The most honored general brings greeting from the Supreme Leader, who is brilliant and benevolent in all things. He wants to tell you that the project that you are privileged to work on is of utmost importance to our people and those who oppose imperialism throughout the world.”

  The word “privileged” grated on Dawkins’s nerves. The aide paused and seemed to be waiting for his response.

  After an awkward silence Dawkins muttered, “Thank you.”

  The young man leaned across the glas
s table and handed him a document. “The most honored general has prepared this schedule. When the tasks are completed, you will be paid one million dollars into your bank account and will be allowed to fly home in first-class accommodations. If you finish the task on time, you will get an extra bonus of one million dollars. Two million dollars in total, plus whatever gifts the Supreme Leader decides to give you. Does that please you, Mr. Dawkins?”

  The general smiled at him like a kindly grandfather and waited for his response. Dawkins noticed that he was wearing a gold Breitling Chronomat watch, which seemed at odds with the spare, functional surroundings. A large gold, jade, and diamond ring adorned the index finger of his right hand.

  “Mr. Dawkins?” the aide asked.

  Dawkins scanned the typed schedule, which had him completing all work on the gyro-stabilized platform, missile guidance set control, and amplifier assembly by September 15—approximately six months away. It was doable if everything went well.

  Dawkins cleared his throat and said, “I will do the best I can, honored general, but I hope you understand that some things are out of my control. Specifically, the delivery of parts. I’ve given my assistants a list of components with precise measurements and instructions in terms of composition and materials.”

  “Very good,” the aide gushed. He turned to the general and translated.

  As the general listened, he nodded and smiled so that his eyes became hidden. Despite his gentle manner, he exuded menace.

  A military aide arrived and served jasmine tea and almond cookies. As Dawkins drank, his entire body started to tremble. He didn’t know whether he had been drugged with something, was simply unnerved by the situation, or was coming down with a cold.

  Crocker was sitting on the edge on his bed in his apartment in Virginia Beach watching a Frontline documentary entitled “The Secret State of North Korea” when he heard a knock.

  “Dad?” his daughter asked through the door.

  He pulled a black World’s Fastest Indian T-shirt over his head and used the remote to lower the sound. “Yeah? What is it?”