The Fifth Doctrine: The Guardian Series Book 3

by Karen Robards

  That must have penetrated Yang’s fog, because he lifted his head and looked around as if not quite sure where he was. He tried to shift positions, and suddenly seemed to realize that he was confined. He started to struggle. Bianca gripped his leg above his knee, hard, and squeezed. He yelped and jerked his leg away.

  “Stay still,” she ordered him in English.

  Their eyes met. This time she knew he recognized her. He looked around again, and she saw from his expression that he was still a little foggy but that his situation was becoming clear.

  She could chop him again, but if the guards wanted to see him before allowing them to pass through the gate, finding him unconscious in the back seat might prove problematic. What they wanted was as little scrutiny as possible.

  “Trade seats with me,” she said to David. They traded seats so that Bianca sat beside Yang.

  “You are trying to escape,” Yang said to her. “You will never succeed. You will be recaptured, and you will die a thousand painful deaths. All of you will.”

  “If we die, you’ll die first. Right here in this limo.”

  “Do I go or do I turn?” The note of urgency in Lee’s voice was even more intense in Irene’s translation.

  An ugly glint in Yang’s eyes warned of trouble. She needed a bit more time to decide how best to deal with him. On the other hand, the longer they drove around inside the camp the more likely it was that someone would discover the dead guards. Then they’d have no chance of getting out of there.

  Forget Russian roulette. The game she was playing here was called 101 ways to die in a God-forsaken hole a million miles from nowhere.

  “Go,” Bianca said, and showed Yang the Ruger. “One wrong move, and you’re dead.”

  The limo kept going straight, started to slow—

  “The guard’s coming out. I’m getting ready to brake,” Lee said, and Irene translated with a touch of hysteria.

  “Here we go,” David said.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Tim muttered.

  Lee said something under his breath that sounded like a prayer. That, Irene didn’t translate.

  Yang smiled.

  Bianca thrust the gun beneath his coat and jammed it hard against his privates. He gave a pained grunt, and his eyes shot toward her.

  “One wrong word out of you, and I blow it off,” she said. Then as the car slowed in preparation for stopping she threw the words he’d said to her earlier back at him. In Korean. So he knew that if he spoke out of line to the guards she would know. “If you think to fool me you will suffer.”

  The passenger partition rolled shut just as the car stopped. The tension in their closed compartment was so thick you could stir it. David and Tim sat bolt upright. Bianca could almost hear their hearts hammering. The partition had a smoky tint, but she could see through it. A guard in his puffy billed hat leaned down to peer through the tinted driver’s window. Lee rolled the window partway down.

  Lee spoke before the guard could say anything. Because of the panel, Bianca couldn’t hear what he said—she imagined something along the lines of “I serve General Yang!”—but she saw the guard’s reaction. His eyes widened. He snapped a look toward the rear of the car. How much he could see of who was who and what was what in the passenger compartment Bianca didn’t know.

  She had to assume that if she could see the guard, the guard could see her. And Yang.

  Yang took a breath. She could sense it: he’d figured out he had nothing to lose. He was going to flop around. He was going to yell.

  She ground the gun harder into his privates.

  The guard stepped back.

  The window rolled up.

  The gate opened.

  The car drove through.

  An hour later, when they were safely out of the valley and climbing up through the mountains, Lee pulled the car over on Bianca’s orders.

  There wasn’t a choice. It had to be done. Telling the others to stay in the car, she dragged a protesting, struggling Yang from his seat, marched him to the side of the road and shot him dead.

  One bullet, through the heart, as she’d been taught. The mark of a professional. He didn’t suffer, which was more kindness than he’d shown his many victims.

  Bianca was turning away when Lee, having emerged from the car, passed her to stare down at the general’s body.

  She reminded herself that he might be a kid, but he’d seen far worse.

  He lifted his hand, which she saw with some dismay held a gun. He pumped three shots into Yang’s body.

  “For my father,” he said. “And my uncle. And my cousin.”

  Then he turned and walked back to the car.

  31

  Wednesday, December 18th

  A wooden fishing shack on a low ridge overlooking the meandering Tumen River was not the ideal place to spend a snowy December midnight. But there they were, eight of them, freezing their asses off on the Chinese side of the river despite the fire blazing away in the metal stove in the center of the one-room structure. On the other side of the water, the lights of the North Korean city of Musan emitted a pale glow a few miles away.

  Colin was freezing his ass off more than most, because he was outside in the pitch-dark walking up and down the edge of the windy, barren bluff doing his best Lion King imitation as he struggled to find a signal so he could use the state-of-the-art satellite phone that allowed him to talk to Doc. He needed a satellite phone because Doc was in one of Thayer’s safe houses, a presumably cushy apartment in London with presumably central heating, working the highly sophisticated radar equipment that had been installed there.

  Thayer, damn him, was inside the fishing shack by the fire.

  Colin’s men—he’d brought along all six that had been with him in Paris, on the theory that he might need firepower—were down on the riverbank, scouting around for any sign of Bianca. Before they’d lost contact with him, word from Doc had been that she was on the move—in a vehicle, judging by her speed—heading across the mountains in the general direction of Musan. Then she’d turned off the main road onto a smaller road that led north along the river.

  Then they’d lost her signal.

  Then they’d lost Doc.

  Sources in the region had directed them to this, the narrowest part of the Tumen River. On a dark night like this, with the river frozen, it was the best place in a hundred miles to cross, they said. Anyone attempting it who knew anything would come here.

  Despite the dozens of armed guards patrolling the banks on the other side.

  The question was, did Bianca know that this was the place to come?

  Over the course of what had been an eventful day chasing a temperamental signal across a couple of continents, Thayer hadn’t shown a whole lot of fatherly concern.

  “She’s resourceful. She’ll figure it out” was what he’d said when Doc had relayed the news that her locator beacon indicated that she was near the village of Hwasong, in all probability locked up in the notorious prison camp there. His amusement at the anxiety Colin hadn’t quite been able to keep hidden would have annoyed Colin if he hadn’t been so, well, anxious.

  And if he hadn’t had more important things to worry about.

  The initial relief of knowing she was alive had given way to a horrible, gnawing fear that she might yet die.

  Then Doc had relayed the news that she was out of Hwasong and traveling north.

  Colin had come up with various contingency plans to go in and get her if she didn’t show up somewhere safe within a few hours. For a small military force, which was what he and his men basically were, to breach the borders of a country like North Korea could cause a major international incident if it should be discovered. The bigger problem was, once inside North Korea he would almost certainly lose the connection with Doc, which would make locating Bianca like finding a needle in a haystack.

  “You do that,” Thayer had said, settling down in a folding camp chair by the metal stove. “Me, I’m just going to wait right here.”

>   Suddenly the tiny green light on the satellite phone that indicated it had found a signal lit up.

  Colin looked at it for what felt like a full minute before his brain registered what he was seeing.

  Ironically, he’d turned back and was now just feet away from the shack.

  “Doc, you there?” he said into the headset he quickly put on.

  “She’s coming toward your position.” After more than an hour of no contact, during which Colin had felt himself developing white hairs, Doc’s voice was as clear as if he was talking from a couple of miles away. Doc knew their position because Thayer, whose cool competence Colin had actually found pretty impressive even if his concern for his daughter was lacking, had outfitted himself with a tracking device that allowed Doc, once tuned in to the proper frequency, to track him, too.

  Colin pictured them as two bright blips on a dark screen. Or vice versa.

  “How far?” he asked, clipping the phone itself to the holster he wore over the black parka that was all that was keeping him from sprouting icicles.

  “A couple of miles. On the other side of the river. I’ve got coordinates.”

  “Hang on. Let me get to the map.” Which was inside the shack. “We’ve got her signal back. She’s only a couple of miles from here,” he told Thayer as he entered.

  Thayer was sprawled out in the chair with his booted feet close to the stove and his hands laced over his stomach, and at the news the only thing that moved were his eyes, which flicked a look at Colin.

  “Told ya,” he said.

  Busy pinpointing the coordinates Doc was giving him on the map he’d already pinned to the wall, Colin didn’t reply.

  Boom.

  Colin’s head came up. The explosion was distant, but it was definitely an explosion.

  “That’ll be her,” Thayer said, and stood up.

  The man was outfitted in an arctic parka and pants. He zipped the parka, grabbed the rifle that had been resting beside him, slung it over his shoulder and headed out the door.

  Colin snatched up a pair of night-vision goggles and followed.

  Thayer was standing just outside the shack looking across the river, where a huge blaze burned about half a mile from the riverbank. Whatever was going up was big.

  “How do you know that’s her?” Colin asked.

  Thayer glanced at him. “Diversion,” he said. “She likes to blow things up.”

  “She’s right across the river from your position,” Doc said. “Heading toward you.”

  Thayer started down the bluff. The camo he wore blended so well with the snow-dappled, frozen mud that he practically disappeared in the dark.

  Colin started down, too, adjusting the channel on his headset so he could communicate with his men as well as Doc.

  “The package is on the way. Rendezvous at Point A,” he said. Point A was a dilapidated wooden dock that extended a short way out into the frozen river.

  When he got to the dock, his men were there. They were all wearing night-vision goggles. Colin put his on as well and looked toward the opposite bank. Not that there was much to see, except a curving ribbon of river that was shiny black with ice beneath a light frosting of snow. The scruffy pine woods that covered much of the mountainous northern region reached almost to the river. Except for the fire burning fiercely in the distance, everything was dark and still. If guards were on patrol, he couldn’t see them.

  Maybe the diversion had worked.

  “We’ve got her heading toward the river,” Colin told them. “Get ready to provide cover fire as necessary.”

  Thayer stood off by himself, using a pair of binoculars to scan the opposite shore.

  Colin spotted what he at first thought were shadows moving among the trees across the river. Then the shadows emerged from the woods and headed toward the ice, and he realized that he was seeing people. In multiples. Like, five.

  What?

  No matter. It had to be her.

  “Doc, I got a visual,” he said into the headset, not wanting interference if he needed to communicate with his men. “I’m turning you off.”

  “Say hi to the boss for me.”

  “Will do.”

  He turned off Doc’s channel, unslung his rifle, said “Heads up” very quietly into the channel he had left, pointed to the dark figures now on the ice and gave his men the go signal.

  They headed out.

  The ice was slippery. Running was not an option. Weapons at the ready, Colin and his men advanced toward the group that was slip-sliding toward them. They were being super quiet, as were he and his men. He frowned as they got closer. What he was seeing were soldiers in uniform.

  He knew the exact moment they spotted him and his men: four of them slithered to an ungainly stop.

  The fifth checked for a second, then kept coming, motioning at the others to follow.

  Bianca.

  It didn’t make him particularly happy to realize that he would recognize her anywhere. Even across an icy river in the dark in a North Korean soldier’s uniform.

  His gut had twisted itself into knots shortly after the explosion in Paris. He felt it untwist now, and knew he had a problem that went way beyond the gastrointestinal.

  A whole different part of his body was involved.

  Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

  Rifle fire from the North Korean shore exploded through the night. Bright muzzle flashes flared in the darkness. Judging from their position, the diversion had worked. The shooters ran through the woods toward the river at an angle that suggested they were returning from the blaze.

  “Return fire.” Colin gave the order over his headset, and started firing himself as he and his men skate-speed-walked across the ice toward Bianca and friends.

  She and her party skated toward him even faster. Then one of them slipped and fell and another stopped to help.

  Bianca whirled, and started returning fire with a pistol to cover her fallen friend.

  Colin’s heart seized up. All alone out there in front, she made a hell of a target. He cursed, rapid fired and skated faster. Her friends picked themselves up and slip-raced toward the advancing line of his men.

  Two went past, snaking in between Wilson and Parrino. He overtook the other two, the one who’d fallen and the one who was supporting, and, still firing, reached Bianca, who was snapping off rounds and skating backward at the same time.

  Nice trick if you can do it.

  She looked over at him as he fell in beside her. She didn’t look surprised, so he was guessing she’d recognized him across the crowded ice, too.

  “Next time I’m going with the CIA kill team.” She had to raise her voice to be heard over the gunfire.

  “Good to see you, too, beautiful. You blow something up over there?”

  “A car. Some propane tanks. A barracks.”

  “Doc says hi.”

  She smiled.

  They caught up to his men, or, rather, his men caught up to them. A slip-sliding backward skating retreat while engaging in an all-out firefight with an enemy was new for him. He never wanted to have to repeat it.

  Once they reached shore, the opposing gunfire stopped. Just stopped, like someone had pulled a plug.

  They were on Chinese territory, and safe. Unless someone decided to break the rules, or sell them out, or just plain hated foreigners. Which was a problem more often than he cared to think about.

  “What happened?” he asked her. Surrounded by his men, with her friends being swept along with them, they were beating a hasty retreat back toward the shack, where the SUVs they’d taken from the airport waited.

  “Long story. We did it, by the way. I think. The head of the RGB plugged the flash drive into a computer that I’m almost positive is part of their military computer network. A laptop was connected to the same computer at the time.” She patted what he saw for the first time was a black messenger bag that hung over her shoulder. “I’ve got the laptop. And the ChapStick, too, by the way.”

  She hande
d the bag over.

  He slung it over his own shoulder and smiled at her. “You’re a hero.”

  “Yeah, that’s me. Saving the world, one ChapStick at a time.”

  One of her friends fell back and said to her, “Lee is scared. He said if the Chinese catch him they’ll send him back and he’ll be killed.”

  Colin was surprised to hear a girl’s voice under that uniform. In the dark, it had been impossible to tell.

  “That’s not going to happen.” Bianca sounded strong, sure and protective. She looked at him. “This is Irene. She was kidnapped from South Korea last summer. Her friend Lee is North Korean. His family was executed and he wants asylum someplace safe. The other two are Americans who were imprisoned for disrespecting something or other. They just want to go home.”

  “Imprisoned?”

  “In Hwasong.”

  “Sweet Jesus, did you bring prisoners out with you?”

  Irene said, “She helped us escape.”

  By then they’d reached the top of the bluff.

  Bianca stopped dead. He looked around to see why, and found that she was looking at Thayer, who was sitting on a flat boulder not far away.

  Her face was wiped of all expression.

  “You should have told me he’s your father,” Colin said.

  She flicked him a look. Then she said, “Need to know.”

  “You know, I’m starting to hate that phrase.”

  “You and me both.” She seemed to take a breath, then said, “I need to go talk to him. Take those four—they’re kids—and keep an eye on them, would you? Make sure they stay safe. Go ahead and load up or do whatever you need to do, and I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed.

  “Hey,” she said. He looked at her. “Thanks for coming for me.”

  “Anytime.” He cast another look at Thayer—a dark shape among other dark shapes, he was as unmoving as a statue—and walked away.

  32

  She’d never wanted it to come to this.

  But as soon as she’d seen Mason sitting there in the dark, she’d known.