The Korean Woman

by John Altman

  A stupid risk. She must not even consider it. They would triangulate her or install some tracking software onto the phone.

  But she wanted to call—so compellingly that something inside her seemed to crack when she thought about it.

  She wiped at her cheek and walled the idea neatly off from her mind. She closed her eyes again and set her head back against the pillow.

  They would be here soon. No time for more rest. Open your eyes, dummy. You’ve rested long enough. Get moving, already. You’re asking for it.

  She turned onto her other side, punching the pillow.

  Langley, VA

  Dalia sat at the conference table, watching Sam work his way through a bag of barbecue potato chips. The door to the conference room opened, and DeArmond came in, yawning. Bach, standing before the monitor with hands on hips, did not turn.

  McConnell caught Dalia’s eye and mimed raising a cup of coffee.

  They found their same table in the cafeteria’s ground-floor corner. Caffeine cut through the mist inside Dalia’s head. She felt as if she were surfacing from a long sleep. For the first time, she noticed the view outside the floor-to-ceiling windows: a sweet summer sunset, budding buckthorn and sycamore, dogwood and maple and fresh-cut grass. A small gray swallow perching on a low branch seemed to look directly back at her.

  As she surfaced, so did a thought that had been nudging around the edges of her mind. It involved her dream of thundering hoofbeats, a frozen pond, bloody ice. The dream, she guessed, had been inspired by the Battle of Austerlitz. One of the most decisive engagements of the Napoleonic Wars, widely considered Napoleon’s greatest victory. Faced with superior forces in the allied Russian and Austrian armies, le petit caporal had deliberately weakened his right flank, abandoning the high ground and encouraging attack by the enemy. The resulting heavy focus on his right side had weakened the enemy’s center. A fierce counterattack had routed them. And then, as men and horses fled across the Satschan frozen ponds, a bombardment from Napoleon’s artillery shattered the ice, plunging the fleeing army into icy water.

  She remembered the dream’s feeling of dread, of something dangerous right underfoot, all around. She had been trying to tell herself something. But her conscious mind had not heeded the message.

  Now her thoughts moved to another icy battle. During the Winter War of 1939, at Suomussalmi the Finns had dealt a crushing blow to a much larger and far better equipped unit of the Red Army. Eleven thousand Finnish infantry had defeated fifty thousand Russians supported by a tank brigade. The Finns had accomplished this unlikely feat through intimate knowledge of the terrain. They used skis and sleds where the Soviet heavy armor foundered on tank treads. And through morale—for the Finns, the battle had been existential; for the Red Army soldiers, it was merely political. Most importantly, the Finns had worn white uniforms. The Red Army had stubbornly—and disastrously—clung to its standard dun. Against the ivory snowdrifts, they had stood out like clay pigeons. Suomussalmi proved the value of camouflage.

  And that was why she thought of it now. Camouflage. Blending in, hiding in plain sight.

  Something dangerous right underfoot, all around.

  The thought came almost within reach … but then skittered away before she could grasp it.

  Jim McConnell stared dully into his cup. Behind his bifocals, he seemed very far away.

  Dalia sighed and drank more coffee. She looked outside again, into the deepening summer gloaming, seeking the swallow on the low branch. But the bird was gone.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Bach’s phone vibrated.

  Incoming message. He checked the display.

  The subject line was Alas Babylon.

  His hand began to shake. He turned in his chair to face the shaded window, so that his expression would not betray him.

  This was it. Here, now, finally. He felt excited, but also scared. Those words did not begin to touch the immensity of his feelings. Just as “surreal” had not begun to describe downtown Manhattan in the hours following the attack. He felt electrified, exhilarated, euphoric. And also terrified, tiny, trapped. Overpowered, overwrought, overcome. Galactic, transcendent. The hand was shaking harder. He had to leave this room now, or he would give himself away.

  He muttered an excuse, stepped past Sam, and walked to his office.

  He closed and locked the door, then read the message. A seemingly nonsensical string of hexadecimal characters. Today’s algorithm for GSC’s internal network.

  Just past 20:00 hours—four hours until the encryption changed.

  More than enough time.

  His mouth twitched. He could feel himself cringing now that the moment of truth was at hand. But that was okay. The reaction was understandable. Anybody would cringe. Many millions of innocent souls would perish by his hand in the next few minutes. Men, women, and children. Thankfully, he had rehearsed the next stage so many times that his body executed the necessary motions now without needing his mind to sanction them.

  He didn’t even need to power up his desktop. He could do it from his phone. On its way to Pyongyang, the encrypted algorithm would travel through four separate servers on four separate continents.

  Once he pressed send, there would be some small delay before the same algorithm registered on Sam’s radar as a message sent to Song Sun Young.

  He pressed send.

  In a few minutes, Sam would come and get him, eyes shining, declaring that the RGB had sent new instructions to its agent at last. Sam would request permission to forward the new encryption to Fort Meade. And then Luna Moth would accomplish, in a matter of seconds, something that no other computer in the world could accomplish before midnight came and the encryption changed.

  And very soon after, it would be done.

  Survivors of the initial blasts would face overlapping circles of burn, force, and radiation trauma. Winds would carry fallout. And, of course, the fat little madman, if he lived through it, would throw his final tantrum—one last blindly infantile destructive spasm. Twenty-five million people lived in Seoul, just thirty-five miles from the DMZ. Likely targets also included Kunsan and Pyeongtaek, hosts to the bulk of US airpower on the Korean peninsula. And Incheon and Busan, and Ulsan and Masan, and Mokpo and Pohang and Gwangyang. And the Yukosuka naval base in Japan. And Yokota Air Base, and Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni. And Sasebo and Atsugi and Okinawa. And, quite possibly, Pyongyang itself. The madman had shown many times his willingness to sacrifice his own people. And if a secret base unknown to Luna contained an ICBM capable of reaching Los Angeles or Washington or New York City, so be it.

  Because compared to possible alternatives, this remained the most contained and humane outcome.

  He felt weary. The burden would have been inhumanly heavy even to a healthy man, which he was not.

  He collapsed more than reclined on the bonded leather couch, closed his eyes, and heaved a long, papery sigh.

  * * *

  Minot Air Force Base, ND

  Benjamin Bach followed the second lieutenant down a corridor of industrial gray. The man had the pallid, hollow-cheeked look common among personnel at Minot, less than fifty miles from the Canadian border. Even now, on the trailing edge of spring, a biting wind howled across the low flatland outside.

  Inside a gray, functional room, Bach gave a dry smile of thanks. Once alone, he settled behind a gray, functional desk. He paused for a moment, gazing abstractedly through a gray, functional window. The slice of visible sky was bright blue, belying the fingers of cold feeling their way in around worn casements. Minot Air Force Base was nearly as notorious for its crumbling infrastructure as for its awful weather.

  He opened his briefcase. Took out the dossier. Squared it on the desk. But he did not turn back the cover. He had already gone over the case of Captain Guy Keller enough times to know the salient details.

&nb
sp; Like Bach, Keller had been born in the Bronx. He had been schooled at Fordham, managing a 4.0 GPA. Upon graduation, he had joined USAF. According to his application interview, he opted for Air Force because it offered the best deal—a free ride all the way through grad school.

  Bach fancied that he understood Keller. After all, they had in common not only the Bronx, but also the determination to leave the Bronx behind. Yet, while Bach had pulled himself up from SUNY to NYU to Columbia, from Langley to China and Korea, to station chief and now to head of the GSC task force, becoming his best possible self, Keller had at some point taken a wrong turn. Giving in to his demons, he had reverted to his roots, to the underhanded street kid he had almost managed to move beyond.

  Assignment to Minot may have triggered the devolution. Bach didn’t know who Keller had pissed off at the academy, but for an Air Force Academy graduate, Minot was the ultimate embarrassment. The Ninety-First Missile Wing was for the dregs: the malcontents, the moaners, the troublemakers. “Why not Mi-not?” they said with a philosophical shrug. Because what else could they say? They had been shipped out into the middle of nowhere, to Bumfuck, North Dakota, to crew obsolete equipment while earning the derision of their peers. The weather was shit, frozen half the year. The isolation was profound.

  Captain Guy Keller’s regular routine involved waking up at 4 a.m. for his daily briefing, then freezing his ass off as he drove three-plus hours through terrain so monotonous, it lacked even hills. By the time he went through changeover at his silo, he had been awake for eight hours already. But he was just warming up. He would spend the next twenty-four hours locked behind blast doors, manning equipment outdated during the Cold War. Sitting, waiting, stealing the occasional catnap. When something did happen, it was always a jackrabbit, a false alarm. And a good thing—the Ninety-First Missile Wing silos were so far out in the hinterlands, it took the Tactical Response Force twenty minutes to show up when summoned.

  And after his shift, going into his thirtieth consecutive hour on duty, Keller drove three-plus hours back to base only to find an understaffed facility, commissary closed half the week, wait at the clinic pharmacy ninety minutes on a good day. Adding to the indignity, he always seemed to pick the short straw in scheduling. For his first six months at Minot, Captain Keller had been steadily 8-0: eight active-duty shifts, zero standby. That was as tough as it got. He would have been lucky to grab a few hours’ shut-eye before the whole grim sequence started up all over again.

  No one would fault Captain Guy Keller for feeling some disenchantment. Plenty of people with ultimately fond memories of the military harbored some mixed feelings while they were in the middle of it. But Keller had made several critical mistakes. The first had been to shoot his mouth off inside the canteen after a few Rolling Rocks. Keller had given up his First Amendment rights when he swore to protect everyone else’s, relinquishing the privilege of pounding a six-pack and blowing off steam about his crap job.

  Someone had overheard. And so Guy Keller got himself put on a list. And when Bach started his task force, probing for weak spots in the wake of Cheyenne, that list had crossed his desk. Yet he could never have anticipated what he would find upon closer investigation: that the complaints were only the tip of the iceberg.

  Over the past five months, Keller, using dummy email accounts, had contacted embassies belonging to Russia, China, Venezuela, and Iran. He must have thought himself smart. He had not given his name; he had used a virtual private network to cover his IP address; he had avoided making any direct offers. But he had said enough to hang himself. He had described his position as missileer at Minot AFB, commanding a flight of ten Minuteman III LGM-30Gs. He had hazarded theoretical questions: Did the Air Force pay people like him enough to keep them loyal? What would his lifestyle be like after discharge? How would that lifestyle stack up against an offer of, say, five million dollars from a foreign agent?

  The Russian and Chinese consulates had not replied. They must have considered the offer either a hoax or a dangle from the CIA—too good to be true. Iran had requested sample intelligence, to prove Keller’s bona fides, that was beyond Keller’s ability to provide. But Venezuela had set up a meeting that would take place during Keller’s next leave. Reading the correspondence, Bach had felt an arctic chill. How many similar dramas played out unbeknownst to Global Strike Command? If he had not come sniffing around …

  Ah, but he had. And because he ran his task force as a restricted-access compartment, reporting to no one and keeping no records, the determination of Captain Guy Keller’s fate would be his and his alone.

  He squared the dossier on the desk again. The task force had originally been a means of getting closer to Woody Whitlock. Here, however, was the next best thing. Any second now, his last best chance would come walking through the door. And none too soon. America’s latest commander-in-chief was proving himself incapable of handling the fat little madman—taking the enemy at his word, handing over concessions and international respectability in exchange for hollow promises.

  Bach would help the man understand, one Bronx boy to another, what was at stake. Keller was looking at more than just getting cashiered. More than just a general or other-than-honorable discharge. He was looking at a straight-up general court-martial. Unless …

  Here Bach would trail off. Let Keller participate. Give him some ownership. Then, when the time came, he would be more likely to follow through. Psych 101. Bach had applied similar techniques every day at Seoul Station.

  Unless? Keller would prod at last.

  A sample of GSC’s internal network encryption, Bach would answer, was all it would take to set things right.

  The door opened.

  Captain Guy Keller entered the office warily. He was six feet four, with a heavy gabled brow, piercing blue eyes, and the pale complexion universal among those posted at Minot. He looked confused—not sure why he had been sent here, not sure whether he should salute the man in civilian clothing seated behind the drab desk—but also defiant.

  Bach half smiled. He gestured toward the chair across the desk and placed one hand significantly on the dossier.

  “Captain,” he invited. “Have a seat.”

  * * *

  Frantic knocking. Bach struggled up. He had locked the door, then passed out without unlocking it. He reached it, twisted the knob.

  Sam’s eyes were shining, just as Bach had pictured it. “RGB sent a new message. New encryption. Fort Meade …?”

  Bach nodded. He felt a prickling on the nape of his neck, a tingling of anticipation in his chest. The pleasure of putting the last piece into a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, seeing the picture finally come together just so.

  He followed Sam back to the conference room, slowly, as if moving underwater, through a dream.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “Ho, now,” Sam breathed.

  Bach was starting to tremble inside. This was it. At last …

  But the window Sam maximized did not contain decrypted data. It contained a Stingray feed that was monitoring Mark Abrahams’ cell phone. Unknown caller, second ring.

  They watched on a thermal, top-down, as Mark Abrahams staggered from his living room, where he had been collapsed with his children before an episode of PAW Patrol.

  “Hello,” he answered dully.

  Silence.

  A red dot appeared on the ARGUS map. “Cell tower,” Sam said. “Lake Togue, sixteen miles from Southampton.”

  Mark Abrahams said softly, “Where are you?” his voice as clear as if he stood in the conference room with them.

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  Song.

  Her voice broke. “And I can’t stay on the line. I just wanted to say I’m sorry. I love you, Mark. I miss you, and I’m sorry. Whatever else you hear—”

  Mark cut in. “Is he listening right now? Don’t hang up. They’ll trace …”

 
“Geolocation,” Sonny growled. “Goddamn it, get geolocation.”

  “Trying.” Sam’s fingers drummed across the keyboard. DeArmond was dialing his phone.

  “Tell the kids I love them. Whatever you hear, whatever they hear, they have to know that. And you have to know: I love you all.”

  “Mi, I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of this.”

  “I have to go. I love you. Mark, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t ha—”

  The connection died.

  “Mi?” Abrahams’ voice turned cold, dangerously controlled. “Mi.”

  “Got her,” Sam said. “Got her, goddamn it.”

  A second dot was on the map: the cell phone that had placed the call.

  The second dot was moving.

  The door to the conference room opened. Dalia entered, followed by McConnell, who carried a tray of coffee in Styrofoam cups.

  Her eyes moved to the wall-mounted monitor and the two dots, one moving, on the satellite map. Comprehension dawned.

  Bach nodded. “She couldn’t stop herself—family trumps tradecraft after all. Well, better late than never.” His voice sounded rusty. He cleared his throat.

  Dalia moved nearer the monitor. McConnell set down the tray and followed close behind, hand poised by her elbow.

  “Lake Togue,” Sam said triumphantly. “We’ve got her. Goddamn it, this time we’ve got her.”

  Lake Togue, NY

  She climbed into the old woman’s Jetta and keyed the ignition.

  The bag she had tossed onto the passenger seat contained a loaf of fifteen-grain bread, two cans of sardines, a liter of water, her cash and IDs, and the SIG Sauer.

  She backed out of the driveway. Streetlights had come on, giving the tree-lined avenue a vaguely sinister cast. She drove to the end of the block, through shadows obscuring other shadows, and then paused.