“My parents were killed in The Five,” she told Hail almost in a whisper.
Hail was shaken by her confession. He’d expected something bad, like she was raped or molested as a youngster or maybe something even worse if there was such a thing. But he didn’t expect what she had just told him. Every time, without fail, when someone told them they lost someone in The Five, it badly rattled him.
“And worse than that,” Kara continued solemnly, “they left me everything but nothing.”
Kara looked up at Hail, and he saw tears forming in her eyes.
She looked lost, like a child who had gotten on the wrong bus and was heading out of town.
“I’m sorry,” Hail offered, but it felt as if he had said nothing. I’m sorry didn’t really mean a thing. It was just something people said. Something that was expected to be said.
Kara ignored the sentiment and said, “I mean they were rich, and now I’m rich, but only in money. In everything else that matters, I’m dirt poor. All my life I had someone taking care of me. I learned to do nothing on my own. Did you ever see the movie, Arthur?”
“Yeah,” Hail said softly.
“Well, I feel just like that dumb drunk. The only difference was that Arthur was happy being a rich dumb drunk, and I’m not. I want to make a difference. Just like you. I want to find out who killed my parents. Not just what group killed them; I want to find the son of a bitch that pulled the trigger on the 9K333 Verba Russian-made missile. And then once I find him, I want to shove the hardened tip of that 9K333 Verba right up his ass and pull the trigger. Does that sound harsh, demented or unstable to you, Mr. Hail?”
Hail looked at her. Her eyes were still wet, but her rage was drying them out fast.
“That may be the sanest thing I’ve heard you say since you got on my ship,” Hail said.
Kara sniffed and dabbed the edge of her napkin under each eye. She then reached down and picked up her glass and drank another slug of sake.
“So that’s why you work for the CIA?” Hail asked.
“That’s why I became a CIA agent. I dropped out of college and joined the agency in hopes that I could find my parents’ killer and bring them to justice. Again, the same as you.”
“I didn’t drop out of school,” Hail said, trying to keep the subject light.
“Yeah, I know. You had already graduated. An MIT whiz-kid that became a kazillionaire.”
Hail said nothing.
“What plane were your parents killed on?” Hail asked after a minute or two.
“Mexico,” Kara said sadly.
Hail had no response.
Kara continued talking as if she were talking to herself. “It was around the time when Mexico changed their laws and allowed foreigners to outright own properties within the restricted zones,” Kara explained. “It was a boom for the lagging real estate business in America. My mom, being a super real estate queen, took advantage of the new law and was making a killing representing rich Americans who wanted to buy cheap Mexican land and houses. The money was just rolling in. She really didn’t need to work, but she loved it.”
Kara stopped talking and looked at Hail. He looked interested so she continued.
“My mom traveled all over Mexico during the time as my dad’s medical practice was winding down. He was getting close to early retirement, so he spent a lot of time in Mexico with my mom.”
Kara tilted the little glass and drained the rest of the sake into her mouth.
“So, did all their money go to you?” Hail asked. “Are you a kazillionaire as well?”
“Money, houses, cars, boats; lots of stuff that requires up-keep and payments and all the things that I don’t care about. I’m not sure how much we’re talking about. A kazillionaire sounds about right.”
“I understand,” Hail said.
Kara turned her head and looked out the window at China, or wherever it was that this video was taken.
She said softly, “It could have been any plane. I don’t know off the top of my head how many planes fly out of Mexico every day, but it has to be hundreds. My folks were unlucky enough to be on American Airlines 264 flying out of Mexico City on that day.”
Kara paused, turned back around and tried to drain even more drops out of her empty glass. She set it back on the table. She looked down at the wonderful food and realized she had lost her appetite. She reached for the bottle of sake and then changed her mind and drank a sip from her water glass instead.
She asked rhetorically, “What are the chances of that? You know. It was only five planes out of more than 100,000 flights per day worldwide, but they just happened to be on one of those five. Go figure.”
Kara looked at Hail. She thought he looked sadder than she felt at that moment.
“I’m sure you feel the same way,” she said in a sympathetic tone.
“Yeah, I do,” Hail said.
“Don’t worry about our date tonight,” she said. “I’ll pay for dinner. Can I borrow some Hail dollars from you?”
Hail laughed.
ACT III
Sea of Japan—Aboard the Fishing Trawler, Huan Yue
D
ingbang Wang was as happy as a captain of a smelly dirty Chinese fishing trawler could be. He hated fishing, and during the last few years he hadn’t been required to do that horrible job.
Dingbang felt truly blessed to be the captain of a smelly fishing trawler. After all, he had been born into abject poverty and raised in one of the poorest areas in southwest China, the mountainous Guizhou province. The only child of a peasant farmer, as far back as Dingbang could remember, he had worked to eat. If they couldn’t grow it, then he didn’t eat. Potatoes, potatoes, potatoes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. His mother had died when he was five during the birth of his brother. His unnamed brother had also died still trapped inside his mother. When Dingbang turned sixteen years old, his father contracted a staph infection from a mosquito bite he had been scratching. His father had died two months later after being covered in pus-bloated sores that had gone untreated. With no family left, Dingbang felt he had no reason to stay in his landlocked prison. He collected a bag of personal items, a bag of potatoes and eventually made his way south to the city of Zhanjiang.
Before he ever saw it, he could smell the ocean—the South China Sea. It was wonderful. He had never seen or smelled or swam in anything like it. And instead of potatoes, it was possible to throw a fishing line into the sea and pull out a fish. Being accustomed to hard work, before long, Dingbang found himself a job working as a common laborer on a fishing boat. It was wonderful. He had never eaten so much food in his life. Thousands of pounds of fish were hauled in each day, and he could eat as much as he wanted. Many of the fish were the wrong kind, and the captain would want to throw them out, but Dingbang would have them set aside so he could eat them later.
The young Chinese man from the mountains of Guizhou loved fishing. He loved being on the boat. Dingbang loved it every year of his life, until one year he liked it a little less. And the next year, even a little less. And that trend had continued as he worked his way from laborer, to a fisherman working the nets, to the first mate of a boat, and then finally to captain. By the time he had become the captain of the Huan Yue, he hated everything about fishing.
Dingbang also hated the men he worked with. They were young and from the city and had never been forced to work as hard as he had. They didn’t appreciate having a regular meal. They thought that they deserved more and looked down on Dingbang Wang and his humble background.
A few even made fun of his name because it rhymed. He had tried to explain that both his first and last names were the ten most common names in China, but they harassed him about it, nonetheless.
Most men who were around fish all day became accustomed to the smell. But as he became less enchanted with the business, he started to hate the smell of fish. The rotting smell of the dock and the fish tanks on board and the bait—it all made his stomach turn.
The only thing
he really liked these days was his boss. The current owner of the Huan Yue had changed his life.
Years ago, around the time Dingbang had turned fifty years old, his boss had told him to bring the Huan Yue into the docks at Shenzhen. While in dry dock, several men worked on the Huan Yue with cutting torches and grinders. He watched as a big crane lifted a massive piece of the Huan Yue’s deck off his ship. It had been cut free by the men with the torches and the grinders. The big piece of deck that they removed had covered the ship’s massive main holding tank. That piece of metal was then replaced with a tank cover that rolled open and closed on rails. He had never seen anything like it before. In the wheelhouse, Dingbang could flip a switch and the huge cover would roll open, leaving a massive hole in the middle of the deck that looked straight down into the cavernous holding tank. At the time, it didn’t make any sense to him. With no watertight hatches to hold in the water or the baffles that were removed from the tank, there was no way that it would ever function as a fish holding tank. And it never did. After the new tank cover had been installed, some other men had come onto his boat and had very skillfully painted the new rolling cover so it looked just like the old deck that had been removed. They painted the entire tank cover using colors that looked old to Dingbang. They even painted on fake watertight hatches using rusty hues and dirty tones. When he was standing on the deck, it was very apparent that his false deck was a painted illusion. But he assumed that the owner of the ship was more interested in what the eyes in the sky saw and not what the people on the ground saw.
Since the day his ship was modified, Dingbang’s life was much improved. Other than occasionally dipping his nets into the water for effect, his boss had turned his boat into a cargo vessel. It still looked just like a fishing vessel, but it didn’t act like one. Almost always in the middle of the night, something that he wasn’t allowed to know about was loaded into the Huan Yue’s main tank cargo hold.
Sometimes it was many little items, bundled and wrapped together, creating a few large and heavy items. Sometimes it was a massive box or a crate or even large pieces of metal of varying shapes and sizes. Sometimes the crates and boxes had scary markings on them. Markings that even uneducated fishermen like Dingbang understood meant danger.
After the cargo had been loaded, he would be sent a message on his new complicated encrypted radio instructing him where to drop off the cargo. Most of the time, the Huan Yue was sent to a port in North Korea. The younger men who worked on his ship all hated the North Koreans. They complained that the North Koreans were scum and evil and many other bad things. Dingbang actually felt more like a North Korean than he did Chinese. Most of the North Koreans were dirt poor, hungry, and if they knew any better they would escape their longsuffering country to seek a better life. That was essentially a summary of his early life.
And Dingbang thought that the Chinese people were just a bunch of hypocrites anyway. North Korea depended on China for everything: energy, food, military equipment and China delivered it all dutifully for one primary reason. If the North Korean government broke down, then there would be a mass exodus from North Korea. And all those poor and ugly North Korean refugees would head across the border and into China. That would wreak havoc on the precarious Chinese economy. And if the Chinese economy failed, then there was a good chance that the entire Chinese communist government would fall as well.
Those North Koreans that Dingbang had met, during the times when he dropped off cargo or picked up cargo, were nice enough. Most of them, those with money, asked if he could give them a ride to anywhere but North Korea. The owner of the Huan Yue had made it very clear to Dingbang that he wasn’t allowed to ever transport people or make his own deals.
He was being paid very handsomely not to fish, and he couldn’t be happier. He was paid to take non-smelly things to other countries, and he really didn’t care what they were. It’s not as if anyone was ever going to stop him. Most of the time, his trawler was traversing the Sea of Japan, the East China Sea or the South China Sea. The Chinese were not going to stop him. The Japanese were not going to stop a Chinese fishing ship. The Americans, even though Dingbang was told they were always watching him from the air, certainly were not going to try to board a Chinese boat.
So Dingbang, happy Dingbang, would never do anything to jeopardize his new and wonderful existence. If his boss told him to go pick up a huge metal cylinder in an obscure port in Russia and drop it off at the port of Wonsan in North Korea, he would be more than happy to oblige.
He never wanted to go back to fishing nets, hauling smelly fish, loading and unloading the wretched mass of seafood in and out of his boat.
Now he could sit back and relax and listen to the water and the clanking of the rigging and the occasional cry of an angry seagull that was very unhappy that his fishing ship had no fish to steal.
Dingbang reached over and turned off all the running lights on his boat. If eyes were watching him from above, then he would have just disappeared into the blackness of the ocean surrounding him. Of course, this was dangerous, so Dingbang flipped on the autopilot and activated the ship’s collision warning system. If a ship got too close to him, then the collision system would sound a warning and wake him up. He could then steer around it.
Dingbang leaned back in his captain’s chair and closed his eyes. An hour of sleep would feel good, since in a few hours he would be docked in Wonsan. There was no telling how long it would take to get the hunk of metal off his ship. Sometimes the North Koreans moved quickly. On other nights, they moved like they were scared of the dark.
As Dingbang drifted off to sleep, he heard the sound of the rigging slapping against the poles. But he never heard the tiny drone that gently touched down and attached itself with rare earth neodymium magnets to the roof of his wheelhouse.
Pongch’un-dong, North Korea—Boat Dock
A little north of the heart of the city of Wonsan, Victor Kornev and Trang Won Dong, watched the fishing trawler emerge from the darkness of the East Sea. Both men noted that the Huan Yue was running with no navigation lights, per their instructions. The large boat maneuvered slowly into a ring of light thrown down from a sodium vapor lamp mounted on a pole at the end of the concrete dock. Sitting on the dock behind them was a lowboy trailer. The substantial truck that was pulling the trailer had a large crane attached to its bed.
“How much does it weigh?” Trang asked Kornev in poor English.
“About thirteen tons,” Kornev replied.
He looked surprised. He turned and looked at the truck’s crane behind them.
“Are you sure that can lift it?” he asked.
Kornev didn’t say anything but just nodded his head.
The evening was hot and humid, and Kornev was dressed from head-to-toe in black clothing.
He turned to look at the man next to him.
The minister of state security for North Korea was wearing his country’s traditional grey military uniform. Both the right and left lapels of the older man’s uniform were studded with a mishmash of emblems and medals that held no meaning to Kornev. He was sure that Trang Won Dong had done nothing to earn them other than surviving long enough to put on the uniform. He wore a ridiculously large military hat. It was similar to an American military hat, but for some reason, the area between the visor and the top was comically enlarged. Victor thought that the hat resembled a giant mushroom. The hat made the small man look like a real-life bobblehead that could be placed on a car’s dashboard. He perspired profusely under the thick material, and Kornev wondered why he didn’t remove a few layers; even just the jacket. But the little man didn’t seem to mind or even notice the heat.
Kornev looked away from the smiling politician and back toward the boat that had just come to rest on the side of the dock. A few Chinese men from the Huan Yue tossed thick ropes to the North Korean soldiers that he had brought with him. The soldiers tied off the boat, and Kornev heard the ship’s engines power down. The Huan Yue’s Captain gave a wave to the N
orth Koreans from inside the wheelhouse. Kornev didn’t return the wave, but the minister did with a single crisp military flip of his hand.
Kornev and Trang Wong Dong walked over to the Huan Yue. Kornev looked up at Dingbang and made a twirling signal with his index finger. Dingbang flipped a switch inside the wheelhouse, and with a piercing screech of metal and a loud KA-THUNK, the deck cover on the Huan Yue began to slowly retract.
Kornev saw the second stage of the Russian-made R-29RMU Sineva ICBM come into view. The only thing it meant to him was money. Lots of money. This was one of the last shipments to arrive, and it would fulfill the multimillion-dollar deal he had made with the North Korean leaders.
But to Trang Won Dong, this missile section that was nestled in the hold of this ship, as well as all the others that had been successfully unloaded and taken to the warehouse, meant power. More power to him since he had taken over the deal after the demise of Kim Yong Chang. More power for his country, which meant increased power for his esteemed leader.
As the ship’s deck cover reached the end of its rails, the hum of the electric motor pulling it open clicked off. The night became very silent again.
Both Trang and Kornev looked into the hold of the ship. And then almost by habit, Kornev looked up. Not up at the stars in the clear night sky, but up at the invisible planes, drones or satellites that might be looking down at them at that exact moment. Kornev knew that the chance of that was remote, especially from that distance, but for some reason, he still felt eyes staring at them.
Maybe it was just his natural sense of survival, but Kornev thought it was more than that. He scanned the buildings and docks and hills around them. His gut told him they were being watched by someone.
Sea of Japan—Aboard the Hail Nucleus
Operation Hail Storm Page 29
