RW14 - Dictator's Ransom

by Richard Marcinko

  Was it enough explosive to set off one of the bombs at the back?

  Surely not, or it never would have been put there. On the other hand, if it went off now, it would keep the warheads nice and safe until Uncle Sam’s bunker busters could find them.

  “Junior, you’re wearing the watch Doc gave you, right?” I shouted.

  “Um, yes.”

  “Come here.”

  By now, my eyes had adjusted so well to the darkness that I could see the screws that connected the wire from the door locks to the explosive. I teased the wire strands from the crevice they had been pushed into, then put my teeth into one and broke it off.

  As I did, the thought crossed my mind that a clever Demolitions expert would have set up the detonator to blow as soon as the circuit was broken.

  Luckily for me, whoever had set up the booby trap hadn’t been that clever. I bit off a second wire and stripped the ends with my teeth as Junior walked down into the bomb room, his hands feeling the space before him like a blind man.

  “Dick?”

  “Here, Junior.” I reached out and grabbed him. “Give me your watch.”

  “But—”

  “Not now, Junior.”

  He slipped it off. I’d noticed it when we first met; it did everything but open beer bottles. Probably his belt buckle did that.

  “How do you get the alarm function?” I asked.

  “Hit the bottom left-hand button twice. What are you timing?”

  “Nothing. I want to use it as a timer for the explosives.”

  “I haven’t been able to get it to time more than ten minutes in years.”

  “Ten minutes will do. How do I set vibrate?”

  “Vibrate or vibrate and beep?”

  “Either one.” I took the watch and pried off the back. Timers from watches can be used as part of a bomb circuit, but even your basic geek watch didn’t come ready to be used for one. My idea was much simpler. I hooked the back of the watch through one of the wires, then perched it precariously over the other wire. When the alarm went off, the vibrations would knock it from the ledge. The wires would cross. Boom.

  “Ten minutes?” I asked Junior, who was still standing near me in the dark.

  “You got it, Pops.”

  I laughed, then set the watch down and backed away. “Come on. Out of here.”

  Kim Jong Il leaned against the wall of the tunnel on the other side of the gate, frowning in Trace’s direction when we joined them. Trace frowned back. Given Kim’s enlightened attitude toward women, I’m sure he found it humiliating to be guarded by her. Then again, given Trace’s attitude toward scumbags, she probably felt more than a little put out to be guarding him rather than shooting him.

  “We have nine and a half minutes,” I told them. “Let’s go.”

  There were noises in the tunnels as we ran back toward the intersection where we’d turned down. I got ahead of the others as we reached the intersection, looking down both ways to see if it was clear.

  It wasn’t. A knot of men was running up from the direction of Kim’s den. I saw them before they saw me, which meant I was the last thing they saw—six North Koreans fell over in a clump as I shot through the AK47’s magazine.

  “Go, let’s go!” I yelled. “Come on.”

  We headed straight down the passage that Yong Shin Jong had marked for us for the exit. We were about seventy-five yards from the manhole that led upward when the lights came back on.

  “Uh-oh,” said Junior.

  I didn’t share his apprehension until I saw something drop from the ceiling ahead. Something big, and with a gun.

  Something else dropped behind it.

  “Junior, give me your gun,” I said, grabbing his AK47.

  “But—”

  I pulled the weapon up and fired, point-blank, into three Korean soldiers.

  Or would have fired, had it been loaded.

  “It-it-it’s out of ammo,” stuttered Junior.

  Doom on Dickie. Doom on us.

  I twisted around. There were more soldiers coming up behind us.

  “Dick,” said Trace.

  I turned around. The three soldiers had formed a line in the corridor in front of us. Right behind them was Yong Shin Jong.

  Who was pointing an MP5 at us.

  “Even better than I hoped,” said Yong. None of the soldiers with him were the hires I’d left with him outside.

  Kim Jong Il said something in Korean to the effect of “Here you are.” I couldn’t make out Yong Shin Jong’s answer, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t “Oh, sweet daddy, I’m so happy to see you.”

  Just to make the party complete, several more soldiers and General Sun came up behind us. Rifles bristled; the conversation continued in loud and rabid Korean.

  Trace, Junior, and I were in the middle of a three-way standoff. I was holding Junior’s AK47 at Kim’s head, but this didn’t have much of an effect on the other two men, who clearly wanted him dead. In the meantime, Junior’s clock was ticking away. The explosives it would set off were clearly not enough to make the tunnels collapse. The air shock from the explosion, however, would blow through the complex, and I couldn’t be sure how forceful it would be. And I really didn’t want to find out.

  “Listen, I’d love to stay for your party,” I said loudly. “But I’ve radioed in the position of your nukes and they’re about to drop a pair of bunker busters on them. If we don’t get the hell out of here, we’ll all be buried alive.”

  Everyone was so busy threatening each other, they didn’t hear a word I said. The Koreans now were arguing bitterly, Kim probably calling the others rat-faced traitors, the others no doubt calling him a slime of the worst sort. I couldn’t have disagreed with any of them even if I’d known how to speak their language.

  Sensing time was running out—my internal clock had drained to thirty seconds—I shouted a second warning.

  “I radioed in the location of the Great Dictator’s nukes,” I told them. “An American B-2 bomber is circling overhead, about to drop a pair of bunker busters on them. There’ll be two bombs, one right after the other. The second’s a nuke. We’ll be fried, sizzled, and roasted, and not in that order.”

  Sun turned from the others and looked at me.

  “A bluff,” he said. “Typical American horse shit.”

  “Mr. Rogue Warrior is so full of shit his eyes are brown,” said Yong Shin Jong.

  Very nice use of an American idiom, but we’ll save the compliments for his English teacher.

  “I have read Marcinko’s books,” Kim said, looking at me. “This is not the part where he bluffs.”

  They started to argue again in Korean, this time about me. I glanced at Trace, swinging my eyes up toward the manhole and our escape route, then did the same for Junior.

  “We have to go!” I shouted emphatically.

  At that instant, the timer went off. The watch buzzed, the wires fell together, and the explosion sent a shock wave through the tunnel.

  [ IV ]

  IT’S SURPRISING HOW powerful air can be. Push around enough of it, and a locomotive can leap up off its tracks and sail halfway across a station before setting down again. There were no locomotives in the corridor when the bomb exploded—a good thing, because the force of the wind shock would have thrown it against us. As it was, all of the Korean soldiers and leaders, along with Trace, Junior, and I, were blown against the far wall of the tunnel like pieces of paper. Trace, Junior, and I were the ham and cheese in a Korean sandwich, but our spot in the middle of the scrum probably protected us from much greater injuries—those closest to the bomb spray were peppered with concrete splinters and other debris loosened by the explosion, and those farthest were smashed directly against the wall, absorbing most of the impact.

  The explosion knocked out the lights again, this time taking the emergency lamps as well as the regular overheads. I pushed my way through the pile in the darkness. Trace had been right next to me when the explosion went off; I felt her elbow in m
y rib and pulled her free from the tangle. As I did, I nearly tripped over a Korean I thought was probably Kim Jong Il.

  He was too good a prize to pass up. I grabbed him and started hauling him up over my shoulder.

  “Dick, where’s Junior?” yelled Trace behind me.

  Good question. I called for him, yelling over the moans. As they pulled themselves to their feet, the Koreans began to panic. They thought the explosion was just the first of two, and the next would be a nuke.

  “Junior, where the hell are you?” I shouted again.

  “Dick, the ladder is over here. Get Junior and let’s go!” yelled Trace.

  A heap of bodies lay next to me on the floor. It was still dark, and the only way to identify Junior was by touch. To do that, I had to let go of Kim Jong Il.

  I tossed him aside, then began pulling bodies from the pile. Finally I heard a familiar moan. I grabbed Matthew by the shirt and threw him onto my back.

  He was a hell of a lot heavier than he looked. I staggered through the Koreans toward the ladder. The soldiers who hadn’t been injured by the blast were pushing and pulling at each other, trying to get their bearings and get away. Finally Trace tugged my shoulder, moving me to the ladder. With one hand on Junior’s back, I started climbing.

  Trace kicked one of the soldiers aside, grabbing his rifle as he fell. The gun wasn’t necessary though—the Koreans were all running for their lives, heading toward the perimeter fence. I hesitated for a second, thinking maybe I would go back and grab Kim Jong Il. But Trace’s shouts convinced me to forget about him and just go.

  Our truck with the Korean troops should have been waiting for us near the entrance we had used to get in. But claiming to have received a message from me, Yong Shin Jong had dismissed the men, sending them into the city to wait. We looked around and spotted something nearly as good—a Land Rover belonging to one of Kim’s lackeys.

  It took me exactly thirty seconds to hot-wire the truck. We got in, Junior in the back, Trace riding shotgun. I revved it toward the utility entrance. We were just about to the main road when the ground began to sway. Before I could say the words “holy shit,” the ground dropped and then rose, as if it had suddenly become liquid.

  “Dick?” said Trace.

  “We’re out of here,” I told her, stepping on the gas. I held on as the road jerked beneath me. The Rover pitched hard right, the wheels leaving the ground, but I was able to get it back on all four. Then a fissure opened up in front of us. There was no way I could stop in time—I put the gas pedal all the way to the floor and held on as the Rover flew over the gap in the pavement. Within seconds I was veering left and right, ducking rifts and small asphalt mountains in the highway.

  A fresh tremor threw the vehicle into the air. Had this been a road back in the States, we would have come down in the middle of a pile of rubble. But the highway had been engineered to withstand bombing attacks, and it remained in one piece. I drove on, passing men running to defensive positions as air-raid sirens screamed.

  My original escape plan called for us to head to an airport north of the capital, where a chartered Russian airliner (with a filed flight plan to Vladivostok) would take us to Japan. But given what was going on, and that Yong Shin Jong knew of the plan, I realized we had to find an alternative.

  And one presented itself at the end of the road.

  “Trace, you up to flying that helo?” I asked.

  “What helo?”

  “The one in front of us,” I said, jerking the wheel onto a dirt fire emergency road behind Kim Jong Il’s private helipad. There were two brand-new Sikorsky S-92 helos—pretty civilian helicopters of the same basic type as the president’s helicopter, Marine One.

  “Shit yeah,” said Trace. “Those new Sikorskys? I’ve never flown the type but we trained on an S-70.35 Very sweet. They practically fly themselves.”

  “Not that one. One of the old Russian crates,” I said, pointing the Rover toward a pair of Hind helicopters at the far end of the small field.

  “God, Dick, they look older than you.”

  “Thanks for the compliment.”

  The Korean helicopter crews were mustering with the alert. The newer ones—Sikorsky S-92s—were Kim Jong Il’s personal aircraft. The Hinds—and Trace was right about them being older than me—were escorts. I chose the older aircraft for two reasons. First, I figured that Kim would be much more upset about losing his shiny new toy than he would be an older aircraft. Second, and more important, the Hind had weapons and the Sikorsky didn’t.

  The Hinds were very early models, more primitive than the ones we used on the raid with the Russians earlier. Their configuration was different and more complicated. The cockpit was larger and bulkier, looking more like a green house than the two-level, one plus one arrangement that became standard in the later aircraft. In this version, the gunner sat in front of a pilot and copilot, and there was a hell of a lot more room to work the weapons. And while they didn’t include a kickass cannon beneath the nose, there was a nice array, including rockets, antitank missiles, and a 12.7mm four-barrel machine gun that made a hell of a noise when it was fired.

  Which I found out when two Korean troop trucks came toward us across the tarmac just as Trace powered us up. The gun blew out the engine compartments of both trucks. Soldiers swarmed out and began returning fire.

  “Get us out of here!” I yelled as the helo spun around on the ground.

  “I’m trying!”

  The engines kicked into some higher gear, drowning out the machine gun. We taxied forward, picking up speed but not altitude. Losing my angle on the Koreans, I sat back and strapped on my restraints, hoping to enjoy the flight. Sitting in the nose of an aircraft can be picturesque—except when all you’re seeing is an eight-foot steel fence held in place by thick girders.

  “Up!” I yelled. “Get us the fuck up!”

  Trace pulled on the stick or the collective or whatever the hell it is you pull on to get a helicopter into the air. We jerked into the air, scraping the fence but still going.

  Pyongyang stretched out below us—though not far enough below us. Antiaircraft batteries were coming to life all over the city, throwing streaks of red in our direction. More of a problem was the row of buildings directly in front of us as we flew. They weren’t very high, but neither were we.

  “Up, up, up,” I yelled. “Trace!”

  The helicopter jerked hard to the left—toward a hail of tracers.

  “We have to broadcast to them and say that we’re on their side,” yelled Junior, picking an excellent moment to regain consciousness. We’d thrown him in the back when we’d climbed aboard. “They think we’re the enemy.”

  Junior got into the copilot’s seat and began hitting switches to turn on the radio. The kid certainly had the right idea, but since none of us spoke Korean, there was no way to follow through on it. Saying “Don’t fire at us” in English wasn’t going to do it.

  A stream of bullets ripped through the right side of the helo as Trace jerked out of the way of the latest spray of flak. Shrapnel exploded through the cockpit; I felt a familiar hot pain in the shoulder and neck as slivers of metal bounced past the seat and hit me.

  “Get us going south,” I said, probably only to myself. “Get us over the border.”

  Trace was already working on that, ramming the Hind’s throttles into overdrive. Junior was yelling on the radio, using the odd bits of Korean he’d managed to pick up. For all I know, he was asking where the restrooms were, but either his messages worked or we finally outran the outer ring of defenses, because the gunfire gradually stopped. Our low altitude—we were still barely at treetop level—may have helped; we were too low for most radars to pick us up, and by the time the antiair gunner realized we were there it was too late to fire.

  The shrapnel had torn some nice holes in my flesh as well as my shirt, but the fact that I was still conscious told me that nothing important had been cut. Even so, I was still losing a decent amount of blood; the entire l
eft side of my chest was covered with it. I tore off the right sleeve of my Korean ninja shirt, wadding it up to use as a bandage. I pushed it against my neck and then wedged my head back against the seat, compressing the wound. As I leaned in, I felt a sharp tweak of pain—the metal or whatever the hell it was still inside. I grit my teeth and stuck my fingers in the wound, trying to fish it out.

  Don’t try that at home, kids. My fingers were dirty as hell; despite the flowing blood I probably infected the wound. I got the metal, a little frag no bigger than a paperclip. For some reason I thought it was important and slipped it into my pocket. Then I put the wadded shirt back and pressed on my neck. My head was swimming, starting to zoom around in circles above my body.

  A stream of fresh tracers off the port bow told us we had a new problem—the other Hind helicopter had scrambled into the air and was trying to shoot us down.

  Now it was Trace’s turn to shout at me.

  “Dick! He’s coming around to the right! Nail the son of a bitch. On three.”

  Trace counted three, then pushed the helicopter to the side, trying to give me a clear shot. I was so dazed I couldn’t aim the machine gun for shit. I grabbed at the gun control and fired the trigger, watching in vain as the bullets flew to the right when I wanted them to go to the left. I pushed the gun but it was too late. The Hind ducked away, circling to try to get behind us. Trace wasn’t about to let that happen. She jinked hard left and pushed our nose toward the ground, sending what was left of my blood sloshing to the roof of my skull.

  If you’ve ever sat in the front car of a roller coaster and tried firing a machine gun at a passing seagull, you know how I felt. I gripped the trigger of the Hind’s forward machine gun, firing wildly as the other Hind danced in front of us, then disappeared. We whipped back and forth as tracers flashed through the sky. Then the other Hind appeared so close on my right I could have opened up the window and shaken the pilot’s hand.