[ II ]
I’D SEEN YONG jump to the deck. I’d seen where he landed. Yes, it was night and the ship was wrapped in smoke, but it was only thirty or so feet from me. There was nobody between me and Yong Shin Jong. There was no way this wasn’t Yong Shin Jong.
And yet it clearly wasn’t.
THE MAN I’D towed to the raft was a sailor dressed in a jumpsuit who was about the same weight as Yong Shin Jong, but was clearly Russian. He was also dead. Cursing myself, I unceremoniously kicked his corpse into the water, hoping he’d become what he deserved, shark shit on the bottom of the ocean.
I cursed even louder when I realized the GPS unit had been damaged somewhere along the way, possibly by the fall into the water. The device refused to update itself, then finally went blank altogether—maybe fainting because of my language.
Having gotten rid of my ruck, I’d also gotten rid of the sat phone. We tried broadcasting on the radio, but they were designed for short distances, and it was unlikely that Doc was close enough to hear. (The military’s SINCGARS radios are good for about thirty-five kilometers or so. Our units in theory were a bit better—partly because they didn’t have to worry about interfacing with analog and what the industry politely calls “legacy” equipment. But their range was limited by design—the farther a signal can go, the more people theoretically who could intercept it.)
By now, we’d moved more than a mile away from the ship, which was continuing toward Korea. We unstowed the oars from the bottom of the raft and began paddling in its direction. I didn’t think I was going to catch up, though Trace for one would have welcomed a chance to get back on board. I figured that the closer we were to the ship, the better chance we’d have of being seen in the morning when Doc managed to convince someone to look for us.
Trace looked like she’d spent the past twenty-four hours in the back of a cement mixer. I told her to get some rest. She was her usual compliant self, and being even more cheerful than normal due to fatigue, told me not only that I could “F” myself, but that I could do it in several unnatural positions. She took her oar and punched at the water, no doubt taking out some of her frustration at not having gotten Polorski. If the ship had been a little closer, she might very well have dove into the water and started swimming after it, punched hand-holds into the skin of the ship to climb up, bulled her way to the bridge, and torn Polorski to pieces with her bare hands.
I let her get her aggression out on the waves while I took stock of the raft’s supplies. It was a quick inventory: six bottles of water, a flare gun with six charges, and six signal mirrors. Obviously whoever packed it thought six was a lucky number.
While we were setting a westward course, the Greenville’s skipper was headed north, following the GPS signal from the cabin cruiser, whose finicky rudder had steered it back toward Russia. It was roughly an hour before the small boat was spotted, and another half hour or so before it could be recovered and inspected properly. At that point, Doc drew the obvious conclusion, deciding that Trace and I must still be on the merchant ship, or at least nearby. With the help of some other navy assets26 and an assist from Jimmy Zim, they set a new course and began moving at flank speed in that direction.
Under normal circumstances, that would have brought them to our position just after daybreak. But what is the definition of “normal” in an operational setting?
If you answered “all fucked up,” go to the head of the class.
The North Korean navy is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a formidable outfit. The one area where you might—emphasis on might—give them a grade of “D-” rather than their normal “F” is in the area of special operations support. They have a number of submarines, from fleet-sized to midgets, which can and have been used for special operations against South Korea and Japan. (The value of those operations is another story, but going into detail here would take us many pages.) They also have a number of small craft that are useful for inserting shooters, including two different types that can be flooded to make them less visible from shore (nothing like arriving at the battle wet as well as bruised) and U.S. made “hand grenade launches,” which are extremely fast craft that are closer to speedboats than your run-of-the-mill invasion launch. (The man who managed to procure them for the North Koreans was granted free room and board at a hotel run by Uncle Sam.)
When it comes to conventional ships, however, the North Korean navy is pretty typically North Korean. The vessels are old, beaten to shit, and were never very good to begin with. They have a couple of frigates and corvettes—the latter is the escort-sized baby destroyer, not the Chevy with the big wheels and throaty exhaust. They also have dozens of patrol craft ranging in size from missile gunboats to dinghies with machine guns. Modern or not, they have a lot of them, and it seemed as if nearly every one of them had been scrambled to meet the freighter.
We were too far from the merchant ship to see it in the dark, so our first hint that something was up came in the form of a red flare arcing near the horizon. Twenty minutes later, a pair of jets streaked somewhere overhead. The planes were probably old MiGs or maybe larger two-engined patrol bombers from one of North Korea’s air bases near the coast, but of course we had no way of knowing. We kept rowing westward, night giving way to nautical twilight (the false dawn before dawn when the ocean turns from black to purple-gray). Four or five patrol boats came out in our direction. It was unlikely they saw us, either with binoculars or radar; they were probably just running a patrol to screen whatever was going on closer to the coast.
We still couldn’t see the freighter, but it wasn’t hard to guess that they had arranged a rendezvous. And if the Koreans were getting Yong Shin Jong, then Polorski was getting the nuke.
I had to tell Doc that. I might not have had a working radio, but the Koreans surely would.
It’s very possible that the Korean patrol boats would have missed us if we hadn’t done anything to call attention to ourselves. It’s a big ocean, after all, and they were focused on the freighter. Still, the sun was coming up, there were an awful lot of them nearby, and there were airplanes flying overhead. I’d put the odds at fifty-fifty that they would have spotted something, and sent someone to investigate.
Maybe more like thirty-seventy, but in any event, there was no sense waiting around for it to happen. I took the flare gun and fired off a shot, then another for good measure. One of the patrol craft, and then another, turned in our direction. We dumped the radios and GPS unit, even though it wasn’t working, and waited.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Trace asked as the first patrol boat closed in.
“You forget, I’m a personal friend of the Great Leader,” I told her, combing my beard.
The Korean boat that came for us was a 190-ton Russian Project 215, also known as an SO-1 patrol boat. The ship had probably served with the Soviet navy around the time I was in high school. Intended primarily for ASW27 missions, even with the Koreans, it had a pair of 25mm machine guns as its main armament. The Project 215s were not known for seaworthiness. They would roll in a bathtub, let alone the ocean. The vessel lurched in our direction; it took three tries before they managed to get a line over to us.
None of the crew who waited for us aboard the ship spoke English, which suited me just fine.
“I need to talk to General Sun,” I said very loudly. I took out the card Sun had given me and waved it over my head. “The general sent me on a special mission for the Great Leader, and I must report to him immediately.”
The enlisted men who heard me had no idea what I was saying, but they were fairly well programmed to respond to authoritative voices, and even the two sailors armed with AK47s fell in behind me as I marched in the direction of the ship’s communications shack. I barked out my intentions as I went, striding quickly through the narrow passageway. Sailors pressed themselves against the bulkheads as I came, then joined our parade; I had quite a little army as I marched into the communications compartment, which was about the size of a ph
one booth. Incredibly, three North Koreans stood inside, an officer and two enlisted men hunched over equipment so old it probably worked off tubes rather than transistors, let alone circuit boards.
“Contact General Sun, immediately,” I told the lieutenant. “Tell him Dick Marcinko needs to speak to him immediately.”
The man said something in Korean. I couldn’t understand the exact words, but the expression on his face made his meaning clear enough: who the hell are you?
“I’m on a mission for General Sun. I have to speak to the Great Leader. Immediately.”
My tone and conviction convinced the man either that I was very important, or very insane. In any event, he decided to do what any C2 officer would do—he began pushing through the crowd to find a higher authority to tell him what to do.
“Here, put me on,” I told the seaman sitting in front of the set, taking his microphone.
The other man—clearly an NCO—started to object, but I silenced him with a stare.
“This is Dick Marcinko. I’m reporting to—” I stopped and looked down at the radio operator. “Is this damn thing on? Working? Does it work?”
The man blinked.
“I have to get a message to General Sun,” I said, pressing down on the mike’s transmit button. “I’ve located the Great Leader’s son aboard a Russian freighter four or five kilometers from here. You might want to check it out. I’d watch the people who have him very carefully. I wouldn’t trust them to keep their end of the bargain.”
I repeated the message several times, switching through the standard Korean fleet frequencies to the international emergency band to make sure our guys would pick it up. Knowing that the longer the transmission lasted, the better chance the Greenville would have to home in on it, I expanded my bit as I went, saying that Trace and I were looking forward to a good breakfast with our North Korean hosts. I’d have thrown in a traffic report if the ship’s captain hadn’t arrived. With a red-faced shout he ordered the radio turned down and had me taken to his quarters.
The captain didn’t speak English, so he didn’t know what I said. He clearly thought it wasn’t going to boost his career, however, and he went red in the face screaming at me. He was a runt of a man, barely five-two, with arms skinnier than lollipop sticks.
“If I’m causing any trouble, I’ll be glad to go,” I told him, starting for the door to his cabin.
This provoked even more angry words from him; he began hyperventilating so badly I feared for his health.
I cracked open the door. Trace, and about ten of our escorts, were waiting in the passageway.
“He says we should go,” I told her.
We got back out to the main deck before two sailors with AK47s stopped us, standing before us with their rifles in firing position. Our entourage was joined by other seamen; there were enough of us in one place for the patrol craft to list decidedly to starboard. The captain pushed his way through the throng and stared at me for a few seconds, not entirely sure what to do. We now had six other patrol craft of varying sizes and descriptions floating around us. Most of their complements were on deck, some with binoculars, trying to see what was going on. I was the most exciting thing that had happened to the North Korean navy since six sailors had tried to defect to South Korea by stealing a minisub a few years before.
All this excitement brought over the pride of the North Korean fleet, corvette no. 531, rusting—excuse me, I mean rushing—to see what was going on. The ship was armed with two 100mm guns—round ’em up and call ’em four-inchers—and some 30mm antiaircraft weapons, but her main armament were Styx antiship missiles. The weapons were probably more dangerous to 531 than to a potential enemy; the launchers were situated so that the missiles would fire directly over the crowded ship, and one mishap with the finicky missile system would surely sink it. But that’s not the sort of thing the Great Leader worries about when he orders his ships equipped with the latest, or almost the latest, toys.
The 531 sent over a launch and a lieutenant who spoke Korean-style pigeon English.
“You come now,” he told me after he boarded the patrol boat. “You come to ship.”
“How well do you speak English?” I asked.
“You come now.”
“I got that part—how well do you speak English?”
“You come now.”
“Is that supposed to be a sexual innuendo?” Trace asked.
The lieutenant turned toward her and with a solemn expression said, “You come now.”
The members of the security detail that had accompanied him had an even more limited vocabulary, but it was much more eloquent—they showed off their Type 79 submachine guns, clicking the select fire buttons from single round to auto and then pointing them in our direction.
Ugly-looking guns, especially when viewed from the business side of the barrel.
[ III ]
BY THIS TIME, the Greenville had found the cabin cruiser and was about to head back south. They were still on the surface when I began making my transmission.
Unfortunately, the rest of the navy was listening as well, and apparently sent word of what was going on to the State Department, either to Fogglebottom or some other functionary whose head was positioned where his digestive track should be. A few minutes later, the Greenville’s captain received a message telling him that under no circumstances was he to initiate any action that might “provoke or tend to provoke an international incident.” The Russian ship was not to be molested in Korean waters. Further orders would be pending.
The skipper immediately ordered the vessel below. As a matter of courtesy, he then went and told Doc what was going on.
Doc’s response was anything but courteous. When he calmed down—even Doc realized it wasn’t the captain’s fault—he asked that he be given an inflatable, claiming he had more than enough people to effect a rescue.
There was no way that was going to happen. The captain said something to the effect that he appreciated Doc’s concern and admired his loyalty, but orders were orders. He then turned to the rest of my guys, none of whom had said a word, and declared very loudly that anyone caught staging a mutiny would be shot and disposed of through the torpedo tube. Shotgun raised an eyebrow, probably considering whether getting shot out a torpedo tube would be fun or not, but wisely said nothing.
CORVETTE 531 was bigger than the patrol boat, but it was also twice as crowded. Sailors were everywhere. Most of them weren’t even trying to look busy, a violation of time-honored sailor etiquette that I can only blame on a severe lack of training. They also had the worst fitting uniforms I’ve ever seen, possibly due to the fact that they were all starving. The crew could have passed for boat people.
“We are very pleased to be honored to invite you aboard,” said the lieutenant who met us. “You will surrender your weapons and to be searched.”
Trace, always a stickler for proper grammar, objected to being searched by a man who didn’t understand the proper use of the verb “to be.” In fact, she objected to being searched by any male—a problem, since there were only males aboard. The Korean lieutenant appeared embarrassed but firm; Trace was only the latter. The compromise was a hands-off search—Trace pressed her hands against her clothes, proving that they did not conceal any weapons.
The North Koreans managed to be both polite and dictatorial at the same time. Men with stethoscopes and flashlights poked various parts of our bodies, though whether they were concerned about our health or worried that we might be carrying infectious diseases was impossible to tell. We were offered dry clothes. Trace accepted khaki trousers and a shirt that fit her frame reasonably well. Mine were several sizes too small, and so I opted to remain in my combat wet suit.
We were now ready for an audience. The officers’ wardroom was probably the most luxurious space on the ship, but it would have embarrassed a tugboat back home. A pair of tables were pushed together and filled the room. All told, there may have been space for a dozen normal men. I’d guess three
dozen crammed into the space, and there were more in the passageway outside.
The bulkhead was covered with speckled green melamine board that looked like an artist’s attempt to imitate the spatter of finely ground vomit. There was enough of a 3-D quality to the paint job that you almost thought it was the result of projectile vomiting after a meal gone bad. None of the awards or commendations you’d typically find in a Western ship were hung on it. Instead, a pair of large paintings stood facing each other port and starboard—Kim Jong Il and his father, right and left, or left and right, I forget which.
The interior spaces of destroyers and smaller escorts are notoriously and traditionally cramped, but this set new standards. Sacks of rice sat in front of the cabinets at the back of the compartment. Boxes were piled in another corner, reaching all the way to the overhead. A series of pipes also ran overhead. These were used as a storage rack for cans, a few of which were hanging down through their netting. As far as I could tell, there were no labels on the cans; either there was an invisible sorting system in place or the cooks played surprise meal every night—though I suppose it’s possible one or more of the pipes carried hot water, and the contents of the cans were being cooked.
Lunch consisted of fish and rice in an oil so smelly it cut through the stench of ammonia and sweat surrounding us. It tasted a bit like seasoned anchovies, with marinated eel gizzards mixed in—not bad, really.
The captain didn’t know exactly who I was, but the fact that I had Sun’s business card and could refer to the Great Leader as a client clearly impressed him. Even more interesting for him was the fact that, like most North Koreans, he had never seen an American in the flesh before. I was part guest, part prisoner, part zoo animal.
North Koreans are taught two very important things from a young age. The first is that they are members of a superior race. The second is that America is the devil. It committed all manner of heinous crimes against Koreans during the Korean War, which, incidentally, has never ended. Individual Americans are the spawn of the devil. Given the chance, they will gladly cook your children and eat them for dinner.
RW14 - Dictator's Ransom Page 22
