Bloody Sunday

by Ben Coes

  “Roger that.”

  Calibrisi turned and walked out of the conference room with Jenna just behind him. On the elevator to the rooftop helipad, he spoke:

  “Let Derek know,” said Calibrisi. “River House should send a greeting party to meet the body.”

  “What about Dewey?” asked Jenna. “If he finds out Talmadge is dead—”

  “Let him know too. Get Dewey the location of the apartment and make sure he understands: if they found Talmadge out, they’ll be swarming the apartment, searching for other stuff. He’s going to need to come in hot.”

  53

  CHAERYONG

  NORTH KOREA

  Four platoons of KPA soldiers—more than 140 men—were dropped in a ten-mile corridor along an east–west line of territory near Chaeryong, to the south of Pyongyang. The orders were simple: find the invaders.

  Each platoon was spread out along the geographic line, each North Korean soldier approximately one hundred meters from the next, moving on foot.

  A dozen or so trained dogs, German shepherds, moved out in front of the line of soldiers, sniffing for unusual smells, trained to stop and alert their masters upon the discovery of any number of odors, including explosives, blood, food, and human beings.

  Each dog was managed by a handler, whose job it was to stay close to the dog. The dogs moved in a fast zigzag pattern, searching the woods for any recent signs of human activity.

  Three and a half hours after being dropped in the woods, Woo, a junior lieutenant in the KPA, heard barking from his dog, Podo. He found Podo next to a tree, still as a statue. Woo shone his headlamp down on the base of the tree. There, he saw a slight indentation in the shelf of pine needles that looked like a footprint. Podo stared at it, unrelenting, until Woo released him.

  Woo searched the area around the tree. Several feet behind, he saw a similar imprint on a rotting clump of leaves.

  Woo cued the mike on his radio.

  “This is Junior Lieutenant Woo. I found something.”

  54

  HWANGJU, NORTH KOREA

  SOUTH OF PYONGYANG

  As midday in North Korea approached, Dewey was increasingly gripped by the realization that he was running out of time. He’d struck Yong-sik sometime after ten P.M. He forced himself to look at his watch. It was almost one in the afternoon.

  Since talking to Jenna, Dewey had run for another hour. Finally, he saw sky in the distance open up and knew the forest was done. He came to the end of the tall pines. The trees stopped at a tall chain-link fence. Down an embankment, across a wide dirt shoulder, a paved road cut east–west.

  Dewey crouched, holding the rust-covered fence with one hand as he tried to catch his breath.

  There wasn’t much traffic, but there was some. Cars and trucks rumbled slowly by in both directions. Dewey watched for several minutes, trying to figure out what to do.

  Perhaps Talmadge owned a vehicle? Langley could lock in his location again and Talmadge could meet him. It was risky, he knew. As a Westerner, Talmadge was likely followed wherever he went. A better plan would be for Talmadge to bring it with him and leave it somewhere nearby. Even packaging the antidote so that it wouldn’t break and driving by and dropping it from the window would work, if Talmadge did it right. That way, Talmadge would not need to risk exposing himself. Yes, there was a chance the syringe might break if it wasn’t packaged correctly, but it was Dewey who’d be taking the risk, not Talmadge. Dewey was willing to take that risk.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said.

  As his breathing calmed, Dewey realized that the fever had returned. Running for so long—the pain from the running—had cloaked its return, but there it was. He felt like he was on fire, a flu-like heat that occupied every part of his body.

  No more, he thought, trying to collect his thoughts and gather the energy to keep going. Please, no hotter than this.

  He reached for the SAT phone and was about to dial when his vision suddenly blurred and then went black. He instinctively lay down on his back, in case someone looked over from the road. He put a hand on the fence, squeezing hard, as if doing so might make his sight return. He waited, trying not to panic, yet feeling torched by a high fever and now blind. Talmadge would have to come and find him. There was no alternative. Either that or he would … die.

  He felt for the keypad on the SAT phone and dialed two digits connecting him to Langley. A steady chirping noise indicated he’d misdialed and he tried again. This time, he heard a half ring, then a voice.

  “CENCOM, go.”

  “I need Jenna.”

  “Hold on, please.”

  A moment later, Jenna’s even, aristocratic British accent came on the line.

  “You’re getting closer. You’re within a few miles of the city.”

  “I can’t see, Jenna.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The fever’s back. I blacked out. You need to have Talmadge come and get me.”

  There was a long pause. Finally, Jenna broke the silence.

  “I have very bad news,” she said. “Talmadge was found out and they killed him. His body was just recovered in the DMZ.”

  Dewey lay on the ground, phone against his ear, breathing in short, rapid bursts. He was burning up. With his other hand he rubbed his eyes.

  Suddenly, Jenna started to cry. Dewey remained silent.

  “It doesn’t matter how they found out,” he said finally, a touch of resignation in his voice. “It’s irrelevant. We can’t change what happened.”

  “Dewey, I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” said Dewey quietly. “I have to go.”

  “No,” said Jenna. “Please wait, so Talmadge is dead? That’s simply a piece of the puzzle we don’t have to figure out. Thank God we know. Otherwise you’d be searching Pyongyang for him.”

  “Good point,” said Dewey derisively. “I can’t fucking see! I’m blind!”

  “It will pass,” said Jenna. “Any minute, I promise. The blackouts are designed into the poison. They last a few minutes and then go away.”

  “Where am I?”

  “You’re in a town called Hwangju,” she said, “south of the city. I’ve mapped out the route to Talmadge’s apartment. It’s uploaded to the phone.”

  “Describe it,” said Dewey. “Where is it, what floor is he on, where’s his door. Got it? Right now. That’s what I need.”

  “Will you be on foot?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, either way, you keep going north until you reach the river. It runs right through the city. Move along the river, continuing north. There are three islands in the river. They’re all large, with buildings. When the river splits for the third island, that’s when you need to cross. His apartment is behind the triumphal arch. The building is off the main road, south of the arch. It’s called Moranbong. The buildings all look the same but this one has green lettering on the front door. The number is forty-seven. His flat is on the fourth floor, second door on the right. There’s a Star of David scratched into the upper corner of the door. Talmadge would’ve hidden the second antidote somewhere inside the flat. All of this is uploaded to the phone.”

  Dewey saw vague traces of light, like stars, and soon he was looking up at the fence. His vision had returned. Slowly, he pulled himself up, crouching, phone to his ear, staring at the road.

  “I have to go.”

  “There’s one other thing,” said Jenna. “The flat is likely under watch. Expect KPA there. As for the antidote, Talmadge was well trained. You’re going to make it and you’re going to find the antidote. I know you will.”

  55

  SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORATE

  NSA

  FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

  Samantha Stout sat at her desk. A wall of large computer screens—eight in all—faced her. Each screen looked as if a child had sat down and started typing random letters and numbers into it, except for one screen that had a tile of news feeds from various parts of the world run
ning with the volume down.

  It was past midnight.

  Samantha was the individual inside the NSA who was responsible for testing and integrating the new software program that had been developed by DARPA. DARPA stood for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an agency inside the Department of Defense responsible for the development of cutting-edge technologies for use by the military. The program, called Rolex, was raw but potentially very powerful. DARPA had developed a way to capture certain nonintelligent electronic signals and convert them into symbols that could then be translated into words. In other words, it could grab pure data streaming through the sky from pre-internet forms of technology and convert it into words. It was Samantha who’d figured out how to aim Rolex at North Korea and specifically certain electronic frequencies that the NSA knew were being generated by the military. By writing an algorithm that was layered on top of Rolex’s algorithms, Stout had trained Rolex to be able to know what the signals pattern looked like when the North Koreans launched missiles. The problem was, Rolex only worked with historical data. It was an armchair quarterback, able to pinpoint when a launch had taken place. Her challenge: get Rolex to parse, assess, and react in real time. Rolex needed to be predictive versus reactive in order to know when the order to launch by the North Koreans had taken place—and therefore how long the U.S. had before the missiles actually left the ground.

  Samantha called a classmate of hers from the California Institute of Technology, a woman named Kami Gray who worked at a hedge fund in New York City. Kami, she knew, wrote algorithms that the giant hedge fund used to look at patterns in the stock market and then predict what was going to happen next based on those patterns. Kami had already done with different software what Samantha needed to do with Rolex: read terabytes of real-time data in nanoseconds in order to predict the future.

  Without telling Kami any classified information, she explained the challenge.

  “You need to be able to know the pattern in the first few seconds,” said Kami. “You need to slice off the first few seconds of the signals events you’ve already catalogued, then isolate them versus all other signals.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’m going to send you an access key to an algorithm I wrote that enables us to see certain patterns in commodities prices and then drive a trade. It’s designed to react to the pattern within a fraction of a second. If the pattern is the one we trained it to watch out for, our computers automatically start buying or selling, as the case may be.”

  “Sounds perfect,” said Samantha.

  “Do you know your way around MATLAB?” said Kami, referring to the computing environment her algorithm had been built in.

  “Yes,” said Samantha.

  “Obviously don’t tell anyone.”

  “I owe you dinner next time you’re down here.”

  56

  SITUATION ROOM

  WHITE HOUSE

  One floor belowground was the White House Situation Room, a windowless, high-tech conference room where the president of the United States and his most trusted military, intelligence, and diplomatic advisors convened during times of crisis.

  It was after two in the morning.

  The walls of the room were covered in OLED screens, eight in all, all lit up with a variety of maps, live satellite feeds, news coverage, and interagency, multiparty communications. The same group that had briefed President Dellenbaugh in the Oval Office was gathered in the room, along with several mission, technical, and intelligence experts.

  The president sat at the head of the table, again with Calibrisi on his immediate right. Next to Calibrisi was Jenna.

  Phil Tralies, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sat at the opposite end of the table from Dellenbaugh. Tralies was presenting the three military attack scenarios the president had ordered up. Tralies had a small device that enabled him to control one of the OLED screens. The screen showed a digital map of North Korea. Tralies clicked it and the number “1” appeared on the screen. As Tralies spoke, the OLED displayed digital representation of the military scenario.

  “First scenario, Mr. President, is a non-nuclear option. Without getting too specific, this would involve an all-hands-on-deck preemptive air-bombing campaign, using every available military asset the United States has in the Pacific theater. Missiles and bombs.”

  The screen showed a swarm of red digital lines representing missiles as they moved toward North Korea. Hundreds of lines crossed the screen.

  “Final targeting protocols are being run right now and will be live by the end of this meeting,” said Tralies. “We’re talking about military installations and population centers, sir. Casualty estimate: thirty to forty thousand. The downside is, the North Koreans keep their missiles on missile vehicles, so we don’t know where their nukes are at any given moment. We’re going to have to bomb pretty much everywhere—and even then we might not stop the North Koreans, especially if they’re going to use a missile vehicle.”

  “What are the odds we blow up the devices?”

  “My rough estimate, one in six.”

  Tralies clicked the device in his hand and the screen was wiped. The number “2” appeared.

  “Two,” continued Tralies, “is also a non-nuclear option. This involves infiltration of North Korea using manpower, delivered by water, with one primary objective: removal of Kim Jong-un. Within the last hour, a fire team of Navy SEALs has been moved to the USS Benfold, currently off the eastern coast of the Korean Peninsula. The SEALs would be inserted along the coast somewhere with the goal of getting to Pyongyang and assassinating Kim.”

  The screen showed a digital representation of the Benfold, then a smaller craft moving to the North Korean coast.

  “As you can imagine, the odds on this working are not great. As confident as I am in these guys, it’s going to be hard to move into the country without detection, not to mention finding the guy.”

  “How much time would this require, General?” said Dellenbaugh.

  “From the time we say go, at least six hours. That’s without complications.”

  “And the odds of success?”

  “One in twenty.”

  The room was silent. Dellenbaugh nodded, indicating he wanted Tralies to continue.

  “Finally, option three is a nuclear-based attack scenario. This scenario involves a preemptive nuclear attack on military and population centers. The targeting would be optimized to try and destroy where we predict the missiles will be coming from, though we won’t be sure, and for this reason Pyongyang is the primary target. That’s where the order will come from. If we wipe out the people giving the order before they give the order, then they can’t give the order, can they? As with option one, we won’t know if we’ve succeeded, but the odds are much higher. We believe option three has an eighty percent chance of averting a nuclear strike on the U.S. Unfortunately, as you might expect, the casualty count is dramatically higher, somewhere between one and a half and two million people.”

  “How many devices and which ones?”

  “Nine Trident II D-5 nuclear missiles, Mr. President. This would be accomplished by two Ohio-class submarines now within tight range of North Korea: the USS Tennessee and the Nevada.”

  The OLED suddenly showed two red objects on the map, representing the submarines, spread out in the Sea of Japan, off the coast of North Korea. Then, bright green lines shot from the subs and flew into North Korea. There were nine lines in total. Silent digital explosions appeared on the map, then circles showing the range of the nuclear fallout.

  “What about THADD, General?” asked Dellenbaugh.

  “THADD defenses are as ready today as they were a week ago,” said Tralies. “I’ve instructed the Missile Defense Agency to raise their internal alert levels to the highest level and be prepared at any moment for activity. In addition, Aegis BMD, or Ballistic Missile Defense, is on high alert, as are various other systems designed to shoot down enemy ballistic missiles.”

  Tralies hit the r
emote and a larger map hit the screen, displaying the entire world. Tralies hit the remote again. A series of bright blue lights appeared, showing the locations of the THADD arsenal. “We have a total of sixteen active delivery vehicles with eight missiles each, a total of one hundred twenty-eight defensive objects that can be used to shoot down enemy missiles. We don’t believe KPA will have dummy rockets, but we do anticipate the possibility of more than one ICBM. In addition to THADD, we’ve activated all Ground-based Midcourse Defense systems, or GMD, in a state of Active Priority. Our missile defenses are as prepared as they’ve ever been. That being said, when you’re playing defense you’re not playing offense. There has never been an authentic real battle test involving enemy ballistic missiles and THADD, BMD, or GMD.”

  “And what’s your recommendation, General?” asked Dellenbaugh.

  “It hasn’t wavered, sir. We are at imminent risk of nuclear attack. My recommendation is an immediate preemptive nuclear strike, option three.”

  Dellenbaugh nodded. He looked at Brubaker.

  “I agree with General Tralies,” said Brubaker. “Kim is going to attack. I think we have until Sunday.”

  “North Korea time?” said Dellenbaugh, “or U.S.?”

  “Who the hell knows?” said Tralies.

  “We should assume Pyongyang time,” said Calibrisi.

  “That’s eight hours from now,” said Tralies. “We have time—but we can’t let the clock pass midnight in Pyongyang. We—you, Mr. President—have an obligation, sir. If a nuclear bomb—or God forbid more than one—hits an American city, it would be catastrophic. We knew about it and yet we waited too long? We need to act before midnight in Pyongyang.”

  Dellenbaugh pointed at Dale Arnold, the secretary of defense.

  “Where are you on this?” said Dellenbaugh.

  “I agree with Phil,” said Arnold, “but I want to hear what Will has to say. If we can reliably count on knowing when Kim is fueling up the rockets, I’d be okay with waiting. I don’t want to destroy North Korea but it really isn’t the U.S. who’s responsible for this situation. It’s Kim.”