11
[ I ]
YOU’RE LATE. WHAT kept you?”
The voice, speaking English, was about the last I would have expected.
It wasn’t Doc—it’s never surprising to see him turn up when I’m in trouble. Nor was it Kim’s goon General Sun. The voice spoke English with a decided American accent.
Jimmy Zim?
The Christians in Action have never been that good.
Sean? Shotgun? Mongoose?
“Junior!” yelled Trace. “What the hell is going on?”
“I was supposed to meet Dick about an hour ago. I’ve been waiting.”
“We were having too much fun to leave,” I told him. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
The NSA had intercepted communications from the port that indicated we were in custody and where we were going to be held. Junior, monitoring things on Sado-ga-shima, had tried to get ahold of Doc to ask for advice. But Doc was still on the submarine, and incommunicado. So he decided to take things into his own hands. With help from Jimmy Zim—a lot of help—he’d set up a rescue mission. The soldiers who’d swarmed over us were South Korean “hires”30—men used to working with the CIA and longtime acquaintances of Jimmy Zim. Zim had also helped Junior make the money transfers that got him hard cash to rent a pair of he li copters, which had dropped them off nearby. He’d also hooked Junior up with a South Korean intelligence agent who had connections inside the camp. He’d used those connections to contact me and set up the meeting.
The agent had also provided a safe house. We set out for it, boarding a pair of Korean military vehicles Junior had procured along the way.
“That Jimmy Zim is quite a guy,” said Junior as we drove toward the safe house.
“Oh, yeah, a real peach,” I said, knowing that few Christians in Action had ever done anything out of the kindness of their hearts. Jimmy Zim obviously needed me for something else.
We couldn’t have driven more than thirty miles as the crow flies, but the rugged, winding roads through the mountains were so difficult to travel that it took us over two hours to get there. The farm house belonged to a prominent government official who had fallen out of favor with the regime nearly five years before and hadn’t been heard from again. The Korean agent helping us was his son.31 I only learned the back story later on; he remained quiet and aloof the whole time he was with us, either brooding or simply being professional.
The North Korean spy network is notorious around the world for its long arms. While many of its operations make no sense to us in the West, they’ve been able to infiltrate South Korean institutions with relative ease, and have made decent forays into Japan and almost certainly China, though the Chinese don’t like to talk much about that. Their South Korean brothers, on the other hand, have a much lower profile. But they have done an equally good job infiltrating the North. They have been helped by numerous recruits like our host, men embittered by the dictator’s actions or eager for an end to the insanity that defines life in the Workers’ Paradise. As a general rule, greed is the biggest motivator in the spy business, but North Korea is probably the exception that proves the rule. Not that don are ever likely to be refused, even if they are counterfeit.
Yes, counterfeit. And even better quality than the twenties and fifties Kim’s father flooded us with back in the nineties.
The Korean agent had his own men watching the place. He was waiting when we arrived. He wore a cap pulled down over his face and dark glasses, even though it was still fairly dark. He let us in, told us we had the run of the downstairs, then disappeared.
“Jimmy Zim wanted you to call him,” Junior told me, handing me a sat phone. “He’s going to arrange for the boat to pick us up.”
Ah, the sound of the other shoe hitting the floor.
While incredibly hospitable, the North Korean agent appeared to be a teetotaler, and the strongest thing I could find to drink was green tea. After two steaming cups my antioxidant level was restored sufficiently enough to survive a conversation with an employee of the federal government, and so I took the sat phone from Junior and went to find a place where I could talk privately. The only place without anyone sleeping in it was a covered patio area at the back of the house. I settled down on the wooden bench and dialed in my new best friend.
Jimmy Zim picked up about midway through the first ring.
“This is Marcinko. What’s going on?”
“Ah, Dick. I was beginning to get worried. Matthew is very enthusiastic, but he is still wet behind the ears.”
I’ve never understood exactly what that expression means, but I let it pass.
“Are you okay?” continued Zim. “Were you tortured?”
“It was no worse than sitting down with my accountant and talking about taxes. Can you get us out of here?”
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to stay put for a while. We’re watching the Russian ship and don’t want to tip off the North Koreans.”
Jimmy Zim told me that the ship that I had been following was still sitting outside the port, surrounded by small North Korean vessels. The plan was to wait for the exchange, then follow the ship out to sea, where it would be boarded and the weapon confiscated.
“Which is where you come in,” he added.
“I’ve had enough boardings this week.”
“Actually, the Pentagon suggested you get closer to the port so you could observe the exchange. They’re looking for legal cover.”
“Legal cover?”
“The lawyers want something to hang their hat on when the ship is boarded.”
“How about we hang the lawyers instead?”
Jimmy Zim snorted. It was the most useful thing he’d said since the conversation began—a snort that spoke volumes.
You think I’m kidding about the lawyers, don’t you? You think it’s another of Demo Dick’s convenient fictional devices, designed to add conflict to an already crowded plot. I hate to disabuse you, grasshopper, but lawyers play a far greater role in military decisions than anyone wants to admit. Every major action is reviewed by a legal staff to make sure it meets muster, not just with the law, but with international standards.
Is it a good idea? Imagine Eisenhower running D-day before Judge Judy for approval.
The CIA is even worse. Reportedly a whole floor at Langley is staffed by nothing but lawyers.
“I thought you had the area under surveillance,” I said to Zim.
“We do. In fact, we saw Polorski go ashore.”
“With Yong Shin Jong?”
“I can’t say. But I’d bet on it.”
“Get Yong Shin Jong and I’ll cut the same deal Polorski did,” I told him. “Simple.”
“Washington says we can do nothing officially involving Yong Shin Jong.”
“I’m sure the SEALs will be willing to act unofficially.”
Jimmy Zim sighed. It was an if-it-were-only-up-to-me sigh, long and full of spit at the end.
“Where did Polorski go?” I asked. “I couldn’t say.”
“Couldn’t or won’t?”
“I do have a Global Hawk following a truck west.”
Global Hawks are robot spy planes. Just about everyone knows that we use satellites to spy on foreign countries these days. But there are a lot of misconceptions about that. First of all, it’s not possible to keep satellites locked in to position above every part of the world. A geostationary orbit—for us laymen, that’s an orbit over a fixed position on Earth32—is only practical near the equator. Most of the places we want to look at, North Korea for example, are nowhere near the equator. So the satellites we send up to watch them are always moving. To avoid them, all you have to do is hide when they’re overhead.
Satellite paths are extremely predictable; even the satellites that we have that can change their orbits still have to obey the basic laws of physics, and therefore can be tracked through the sky, generally with nothing more sophisticated than a good telescope and a scientific calculator. Probably you could
do it with a good slide rule, too, though I haven’t seen one of those outside of a museum since my days at Officer Candidate School—aka Organized Chicken Shit.
Even if you don’t know when a satellite is overhead—and believe me, even the French can figure it out—the most you’re going to be exposed for is ten minutes or so, depending on the satellite and your position beneath its orbit. That makes a satellite great for finding something that doesn’t move, but pretty lousy at following a truck.
That’s why spy planes are still so popular. One of the most famous aircraft in the U.S. inventory is the U-2—the plane came first, then the band—whose basic design dates back to the Cold War. We also have the SR-71 Blackbird, which is capable of flying three times the speed of sound, good enough to outrun most missiles fired at it. The air farce retired the Blackbird several years ago, only to have to pull it out of retirement in the early 1990s because of an intelligence gap. Last I heard, there are still two Blackbirds operational; they’re somewhat expensive to fly and are only used for special missions. Still, they’re probably the sexiest black birds on the planet.
The real work horse of aerial reconnaissance these days are robot airplanes—UAVs or unmanned aerial vehicles that can fly halfway across the globe and back without a pilot in the cockpit. In fact, there is no cockpit; the planes are flown from a hangar at Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas. They have a lot of advantages over satellites, since they’re much more maneuverable and can stay where you need them for as long as you want. And unlike the U-2 and SR-71, if their pilots get tired, they can call the next shift in without having to return to base. The main reconnaissance UAV available is an aircraft called the Global Hawk, which can spend a couple of days “on station” and which flies somewhere around sixty-five thousand feet.
Now one of the main ideas of using robot planes is that people won’t get killed if they get shot down or in an accident. (Accidents are actually a lot more common; a number of pilots and mission specialists were killed during the SR-71’s heyday just landing the damn thing.) But that doesn’t make the aircraft expendable. The air farce really likes its toys, and so has a long list of when and where they can be used. They don’t want them too close to missile sites. Even though the Global Hawk is much smaller and stealthier than most airplanes, it can still be seen on radar under the right conditions. Like all shiny toys, it’s real easy to break, especially when someone’s flinging high explosives and shards of tungsten at you.
I’m just guessing, but it was clear from his pauses and sighs that Jimmy Zim knew the air farce was going to order its toy home as soon as it got near Pyongyang, where the air defenses are designed to shoot down U-2s—higher fliers than the Global Hawk. Zim wanted to make sure someone was still watching Polorski, even though he couldn’t directly tell me to do that.
To this day, I don’t know exactly how much Zim knew of my real mission; maybe he knew it all, maybe he knew nothing. He told me the Global Hawk had just passed the city of Changghung-ni, heading west along a road that cut through the mountains. We were roughly fifty miles away by air, much farther by car.
“Possibly, they are heading toward Pyongyang,” said the CIA officer. “There was a transmission intercepted by the NSA that indicated a Russian and his party should have free passage.”
“I need a helicopter,” I told him.
“You’re not going to go, are you?” Jimmy Zim’s mock alarm wouldn’t have fooled a deaf man.
“I need a helicopter.”
“I don’t have one to give you.” His voice had become serious again.
“Otherwise there’s no way I can catch up.”
“They’ve been stopping roughly every hour. Whoever is with him has a weak bladder.”
“So for the record, you’re telling me not to go,” I said.
“For the record.”
That was the end of our conversation. I grabbed Junior and asked if he could find me a map of North Korea. He went one better—he pulled out a small, handheld computer, attached the satellite phone to it, and went online to Google Earth. The view of North Korea was a few years old, but North Korea is not exactly setting records for new development.
I fiddled with Junior’s map. The small screen and tiny buttons made it difficult to focus.
“Hey, Junior, what does this look like to you?” I asked finally, handing him the computer.
“Um, a trombone?”
“Can you get it to zoom in closer?”
He tapped the controls. The image remained blurry. Now it was an orange trombone, without the bell-shaped horn.
“Google doesn’t use the best technology,” he said finally. “I think I could hack into the Russian system and get better resolution if you give me a half hour.”
“Not enough time,” I told him. “Get your gear.”
[ II ]
WHAT LOOKED LIKE a trombone to Junior was actually the improved area of an airstrip about midway between Irhyang-dong and Namsong-dong. It was a small field, even by North Korean standards, able to support only a few propeller-driven airplanes. That suited me just fine: I only needed one.
Roughly an hour and a half after I killed the sat connection with Jimmy Zim, a company of North Korean soldiers led by a brusque civilian drove through the main gate at the base. The civilian waved dismissively at the sentry who came out to question him, shoved an ID out the car window, then barked an order to the men in the truck to follow him to the headquarters building. The driver stepped on the gas, spewing dust and pebbles everywhere as he swung up the dirt road to the building, which was perhaps fifty feet away. It wasn’t hard to identify as the headquarters building; not only did it have a large picture of the Dear Leader above the door, it was the only office building on the base.
“I have important prisoners,” said the civilian, bursting through the doors. “We must get to Pyongyang by nightfall.”
The man who’d been mopping the floor in the hallway appeared unimpressed, though he did take more interest when three American prisoners were ushered in by a company of soldiers at gunpoint. He pointed down the hall, then grimaced as the troops trampled dirt across his floor.
I was one of the prisoners. Despite the janitor’s nonchalance, our arrival was a major event—in fact the only event that had taken place at the airstrip all year. The local air force commander, who doubled as the base chief, squadron commander, lead pilot, and quite possibly the stewardess, jumped to attention as we marched in. He bowed deeply and repeatedly, insisting that he was glad to be of service and honored by the visit.
But most air farce officers are cut from the same namby-pamby cloth no matter which country they serve, and when it became clear that we actually wanted this major to do something, the protests began. His squadron was currently undermanned. His allotment of fuel was spoken for. His windscreen had just been washed and he didn’t want to get any nasty bugs on it.
The civilian—supposedly a member of General Sun’s security staff, though you know him better as the spy who’d helped arrange our escape—listened to these objections carefully. Then he answered in the only language that C233 officers understand.
“Please spell your name so that when I call General Sun I get it right,” he told the officer, a major.
The air farcer turned pale.
“I must get authorization first,” he told our spy.
“Of course. Which general should I call?”
The North Korean major swallowed an imaginary brick, then told the spy who to ask for.
Trace and I were in chains—real chains, nice touch—just outside the office. We were being held by the “soldiers,” who of course were the hires in their fake North Korean special force uniforms. Junior, meanwhile, was down the hall with two other soldiers, looking for the utility closet so he could cut into the phone lines. Once that was accomplished, he would wire in a new handset and hand the phone over to one of the men with him. That man would pretend to be an aide to the commander’s boss. He would order the major to cooperat
e with us posthaste.
A good plan, except that it depended on the Korean base having a semimodern phone arrangement—modern meaning something dating to maybe the early 1970s. Junior had settled on the closet as the most likely location for the PBX or network box, since it was near where the wire exited the building. But the only thing Junior found in the utility closet were brooms and cleaning supplies. There was literally only one telephone line connecting the base to the rest of the world.
Junior spent some time hunting around before realizing what he was dealing with. Finally he cursed—I believe it may have been his first good curse while in my employ—and ran outside to cut the wire itself.
In the meantime, our spy got a real operator. Connected with the group commander’s office, he found himself talking to a real aide, who demanded to know who the hell he was. Our spy hiccuped a bit, but pressed on—right up until the aide demanded to know why General Sun’s office had not filled out form 43-D in triplicate, as the regulations clearly required.
Just on cue, there was a click. Junior had finally connected. Some quick verbal jujitsu—or karate, to use the country-appropriate term—followed.
“I accept your craven apology,” said the spy haughtily, handing the phone over to the bewildered major.
The major, who was already standing at attention, stiffened and began repeating “dwaetseoyo” (okay) and “joesonghaeyo” (I’m sorry) as he was reamed out according to plan. He hung up the phone contritely, bowed deeply, then grabbed his jacket and headed for the flight line.
“Oh, my God,” whispered Trace as we marched toward the plane. “Dick, you didn’t tell me the Wright Brothers made this plane.”
The “squadron” based here had two planes, only one of which had an engine. Not that it inspired visions of the wild blue yonder.
The aircraft was a Y-5 Colt, a Chinese rip-off of the Russian An-2. The Russian version first flew in 1947, but the basic design goes back much further. A biplane, the Y-5 is powered by a single engine at the front. The plane can hold eight combat troops; more if they get out and push.
RW14 - Dictator's Ransom Page 26
