by Ward Larsen
“It wasn’t a firing squad. They used a 170mm self-propelled howitzer.”
Slaton looked away momentarily, then gathered his thoughts. “Okay, that’s original—and pretty off your freakin’ rocker. So what—you’re saying this made an impression on Park? He figures that in two years, maybe three, he’ll be the one standing on the bull’s-eye with a sabot round coming at him?”
“In part. But he isn’t the only one. Park began as an officer in the Korean People’s Army. That means he’s close with a number of generals high in the command structure. They’ve all witnessed the same stunts, seen the brutality of Kwon’s rule.”
Slaton was beginning to see it. “So we’re looking at a coup? Park told you the military is going to take over?”
“It’s not so straightforward. Park said he confided in a handful of friends, and that he found some support. But there’s never a shortage of vipers in a pit that deep. If word was spread too widely, sooner or later someone would play the loyalist and inform Kwon that a plot was being hatched. In the end, Park and his small circle decided that Kwon might be toppled, but not without a crisis. They needed to find a way to humiliate him, both internationally and internally. A reckless act the world couldn’t ignore.”
“Which is where stolen weapons-grade uranium comes in?”
“He didn’t tell us that much, but apparently so. Park has gone through the motions of planning an attack, and without Kwon’s knowledge. As head of SSD, he’s the only one who could. He gave us almost no details as to how it would be carried out. He only told us it would be delivered by sea, and involve some kind of weapon of mass destruction. That could mean nuclear, chemical, or biological—he wouldn’t specify.”
“So when I called and brought up his name … that’s why you came straight to Frankfurt.”
She nodded. “We’ve been busting our butts trying to figure out this threat. As you can imagine, we don’t trust Park completely. The information you uncovered about the uranium stolen from IAEA—that has to be tied in. Park has promised to give us enough notice to snuff out this attack. On his cue, we’re supposed to intervene. He said the team chosen to deliver it could be easily overpowered. The device itself won’t be hard to deactivate—a simple switch with a clock, and we’ll have ample time. At that point we go public, show enough detail to convince everyone of the seriousness of the threat. We’ll have dodged a bullet, and the Kwon regime looks incompetent.”
“And the CIA gets a brilliant counter-terrorism victory.”
“No, David … this is not about us. It’s about Park fueling enough embarrassment to doom Dear Leader’s internal support. Anyway, what would you have us do? Park is going forward with his scheme. Knowing as little as we do, we have no choice but to play along.”
Slaton shook his head slowly.
“What?” she asked.
“It doesn’t make sense. For this to work, the attack has to be credible. With HEU, we’re not talking about a dirty bomb—this is going to be a full-blown fission weapon. How could Kwon ever consider a strike like that? He knows that if North Korea hits the United States with a nuke, you’d retaliate a thousand times over.”
Sorensen got up and began pacing the tiny cabin. “I know,” she said. “That’s the one thing that didn’t compute in my mind either. But when he met with our operative, Park was very specific on the point. He said he conceived this attack very carefully. He guaranteed that as long as the intervention was successful, the plot could be tied to North Korea. Not only that, he said it would be obvious that if it had succeeded, they might have gotten away with it.”
Slaton considered it. “I guess a nuclear blast has a way of destroying evidence. This has to be where the material pilfered from the IAEA comes in.”
“No doubt.”
“Tell me … by CIA estimates, does North Korea have any highly enriched uranium of their own?”
“Yes. The weapons they’ve tested and built to date are all plutonium designs. Yet we know they’ve long had a small stash of HEU—it’s a by-product of their early efforts to get the bomb.”
“So let’s allow that they’d know how to make one using uranium. And if an HEU bomb were to be set off, and at least some of the material is identified as having been sourced from places like Pakistan and Ghana, the North Koreans could claim innocence. It would eventually be discovered that the material was stolen by El-Masri through IAEA—a murdered Egyptian in the chain to complicate things further. Effectively, North Korea contributes their bomb-making know-how, maybe a bit of their own material, but separate themselves from the strike in every other way. Equipment, delivery, targeting.”
“They might even use surrogates to deliver it.”
“Surrogates?” said Slaton. “Like mercenaries or something? Who in their right mind would take that kind of assignment?”
“I know, it’s a stretch. But Park mentioned it in his meeting—he said the strike team wouldn’t be North Korean.”
“Have you talked to him since then?”
“We have a line of communication set up, and I can tell you it’s being monitored very closely. He’s used it once, two weeks ago, to tell us the attack would occur soon.”
“How soon?”
Sorensen hesitated over what had to be incredibly sensitive information. She relented. “Sometime in the next week, a target in the Pacific region.”
“That’s it? The Pacific? It leaves a lot of ground to cover.” He tried to wrap his mind around it, then leveled a hard stare at Sorensen. “Do you understand how dangerous a game this is?”
“Yes, I do. As does the director of the CIA, the full national security council, and the president. They’ve all been briefed in.”
“I think I’m beginning to see what Park gets out of this.”
Sorensen didn’t reply.
“Will he be any better than Kwon Il-sun?” Slaton asked.
“Could he be any worse?”
He looked at her severely.
“Our national leadership has decided the potential of a new, relatively friendly regime in North Korea is worth the risk of letting this play out. The only alternative is to go public with the entire affair, in which case Kwon would clean house.”
“That would spell the end for Park,” Slaton said.
“No doubt.”
He shook his head. “What a mess.”
Sorensen sighed and sat in one of the plush chairs. “I agree. But burning Park to the regime doesn’t do anything to lessen the risk. I promise you we haven’t been sitting around idly. None of us would be doing our jobs if we didn’t pursue this with everything we have. We’ve been watching the DPRK closer than ever. We haven’t seen anything relating to the strike. Not until you called yesterday. Now you’ve given us leads—good leads.”
Slaton ratcheted down. He knew she had a point, at least from her “agency” point of view. Seated in the swivel chair across the narrow aisle, he thought Sorensen looked tired, spent. He too was feeling the fatigue. Too little rest, too many time zones. He would try again for sleep before they landed. Preparation. No different than topping off a magazine or freshening the batteries in a tactical flashlight.
But what were the chances?
His family’s position seemed more impossible than ever. Not only were Christine and Davy being held deep inside the most repressive police state on earth, but now the country’s leadership was facing an attempted coup. They were actually inside the home of the main conspirator. A man who was plotting a faux nuclear strike against the United States.
The number of potential disasters seemed incalculable.
Sorensen clearly read his distraction. “David … I’ll do everything in my power to help them. But now that you know what’s at stake, you understand what my priorities have to be. I’d like to have your help.”
He paused reflectively, then nodded. “Yeah, I get it. And I’ll help you as best I can. But just to be clear, I don’t care about your priorities. I don’t give a damn about regime change in North Korea or your
agency or your spy games. All I want is to get my wife and son back safely.”
“And I just showed you exactly where they are.”
He nodded slowly, then leaned forward to close the distance between them. Not a threat, but a demand for clear understanding. “If I help you out of this mess,” he said, “will you do what’s necessary to get my family back? Whatever it takes?”
Because Sorensen was a spy, the shift in her expression was negligible. But there was something. Something he trusted.
“Yes,” she said. “You have my word.”
SIXTY-EIGHT
In the basement of the hillside residence, Khang stood gingerly. His leg hurt like hell. He drummed his fingers incessantly on the table where an array of secure comm units were mounted. The room was General Park’s personal communications center, with direct lines to various agencies in Pyongyang, including SSD headquarters. Yet for all the available links, the handset he was holding was unique.
Khang had been here a number of times before—always with the general’s permission—to talk to headquarters about missions or to make security arrangements. The receiver in his hand, however, was unfamiliar. Indeed, he had never even seen it used. It was supposedly a secure device, hardwired to a Chinese-made system that dated back to the eighties. He knew it routed signals underground—not through the air where the Americans and South Koreans could intercept them—and that it employed some manner of encryption.
The phone offered but one lighted button, and when Khang had selected it and lifted the handset five minutes earlier, it had taken three tries to get a good connection. In the end, however, it worked. Now, as expected, he was waiting for the person he needed to reach.
Khang had become increasingly troubled in recent days. He didn’t like what had happened in Vienna. Five good men lost. He was furious at having been shot in the leg by an assassin—a man he should have gotten the better of. He didn’t like being ordered to Mallorca to snatch a pair of Westerners. That seemed incredibly reckless.
But what bothered him more than anything was what was going on upstairs at that moment—a continuation of the general’s peculiar behavior. After dispatching Khang to Mallorca, Park had followed up with strict orders: be respectful to this woman and boy, handle them carefully. Now the general himself was treating them as if they were long-lost family. It seemed inconceivable to Khang—especially given whose family they really were.
A shot of pain fired through his ankle.
He also wondered why the schedule was being moved up. By necessity, he’d been involved in the strike since the early stages—he wasn’t privy to every detail, but enough to do his job. He’d arranged security on a tiny island in the South China Sea. Requisitioned two small transports and the pilots to fly them. Eliminated two scientists in Vienna. The ultimate goal—an attack that now appeared imminent—Khang knew to be very closely held. He himself had not been told the target, but he’d overheard enough in the general’s meetings, seen enough details in messages, to discern the ultimate aim: to vaporize Pearl Harbor.
Khang always assumed the attack had approval from on high. Yet now, with the general’s behavior so increasingly erratic, doubts had begun worming into his head.
Thankfully, there was one way to find out.
The phone remained silent, nothing but a low hiss to prove the connection hadn’t been broken. Khang looked warily at the empty staircase.
He shifted his stance, putting weight on his good leg. It had been all he could do to not show weakness when he’d walked the woman and boy inside.
The assassin’s wife and child, he thought. If it were up to me—
The operator interrupted. “Your call is going through,” she said.
A familiar voice came on the line. Chong Su-lok was an old and trusted friend. The two of them had been forged in the same fires: bunkmates in army boot camp, and later the same class during Special Forces training. Side by side, they had risen in concert, bonded in ways only soldiers could understand. They had eventually reached parallel positions at the apex of the state security service. Chong, in essence, was Khang’s counterpart in the chairman’s office.
As such, he was but one step removed from Kwon Il-sun himself.
* * *
Boutros rounded up Sami and Rafiq, and they went ashore in the launch. Saleem remained on board to mind Albatross. Once again, assignments that were quite intentional.
The residual voyage to Green Island was laughably short for a crew who’d halved the Pacific in recent days. In the early dawn they saw thick colonies of birds nesting on the northern half of the island. As they neared shore, with a steady trade sweeping in, they began to smell them as well, the stench of guano carrying on the wind.
Everyone clambered ashore, Sami and Rafiq uncertain on sea legs. After securing the launch, they set out in search of the runway, the sun bathing the horizon with its warm copper glow. Rafiq suddenly stumbled over something, and the procession came to a jagged halt. All three men looked down in unison, thunderstruck.
“This can never work!” said Sami, his tone disconsolate.
They found themselves standing on the runway, yet it was barely visible. Whatever material it had been constructed from seventy-five years earlier—concrete or smoothed coral or some amalgam of the two—seemed to have reverted to its natural state. Weeds and small shrubs grew to hip-height along the entire length of the strip, which they could now see was no more than a few thousand feet. The surface was pitted and crumbling, more a gravel path than anything meant to support an aircraft.
“How could an airplane land here?” Sami asked.
Boutros considered it. He knew a little about unprepared landing sites, having served in Saddam’s navy during the war. But this did seem extreme. “Perhaps it is possible,” he said. “The Koreans would not have planned a landing here without taking a look at the place.”
The others regarded him uncertainly.
After a prolonged silence, Boutros announced, “We should do something useful.”
“Like what?” Sami asked.
“We will perform a survey.”
* * *
The inspection took twenty minutes.
The three men spread out and walked the length of the derelict landing strip. Boutros told the others to look for obvious trouble spots, and they found surprisingly few. Near the lagoon-side edge, Sami discovered a pothole the size of a car tire. Boutros pulled away an old fishing net that had ended up near the runway’s centerline. Rafiq was the busiest of the three—walking along the seaward edge, he found endless bits of plastic flotsam that had washed onto the runway’s eastern shoulder. He threw the biggest pieces back into the sea.
On reaching the far end of the strip the meeting reconvened.
“It looked bad at first glance,” Boutros said, “but the grass and weeds are misleading. I see few real problems.”
The other two appeared skeptical.
“We should go back to the boat,” said Boutros. “I will send a message about the condition of the field. While I do that, the two of you must move the fuel ashore.” The twenty-two jerry cans brought to refuel the airplane had yet to be transferred.
There were nods of agreement. As they walked back to the launch, all three men found their eyes drawn to the sky.
* * *
Back on Albatross, Boutros fired up the satellite unit. It was only to be used for urgent contingencies, but he decided this qualified. He typed out: RUNWAY IN POOR CONDITION. LANDING MAY NOT BE POSSIBLE. ADVISE.
A MESSAGE SENT confirmation echoed back.
Boutros waited. He watched Sami and Rafiq struggle with the big jerry cans of aviation fuel. Once they had ten in the launch, they went ashore and unloaded, then came back for the rest.
Boutros kept watching the sat-comm screen hopefully. They had received only a handful of messages on the device, and this was the first time they’d tried to initiate contact.
The sun rose higher and the heat began to build.
&nbs
p; The screen remained blank.
SIXTY-NINE
The airplane arrived shortly after nine o’clock that morning. Sami, who had the youngest and sharpest eyes, was the first to see it. It began as no more than a speck, a fleck of hope in the bluest of skies. The distant drone of the engine was next, a low-frequency vibration violating the dense tropical air.
Boutros hurried to the launch with his landing party, once again leaving Saleem to mind Albatross. With the last of the jerry cans ashore, the boat was feather-light as its bow slid onto the now-familiar spit of sand—the closest thing to a beach on Green Island. All three men clambered over the gunnel. No response had ever come to the warning Boutros sent about the condition of the runway. Now the point was moot. Given the airplane’s expected fuel state, if the pilots didn’t land on the runway they would be taking their chances in the lagoon.
The airplane gained definition as it came closer. Boutros discerned two stacked wings and a single engine. The design seemed familiar, although as a navy man he couldn’t remember the type. Something Russian perhaps that had flown in Saddam’s air force. It looked stout and utilitarian, with thick main tires that might give it a chance on the rough surface.
The airplane flew straight toward the southern edge of the runway, although it didn’t appear to be slowing. Moments before Boutros thought it was going to crash, the pilot leveled out and buzzed the length of the strip.
“He’s checking the surface,” Rafiq surmised.
“Yes,” Boutros agreed.
They all watched the biplane execute an ungainly, climbing turn to the left. After a wide oval pattern, the pilot again maneuvered toward the end of the runway. This time the airplane’s speed was noticeably slower. Indeed, so slow that Boutros began to worry.
“It’s barely moving,” he said.
“It will fall out of the sky,” seconded Sami.
“No, there is a strong headwind,” Rafiq argued. “It will be fine.”
By the time the airplane crossed the coral-sand beach it seemed to be practically hovering. They could clearly see the pilot through the side window—a Korean wearing some kind of headset and a baseball cap. He was concentrating intently.
