by Dalton Fury
Then, out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed a man separate himself from the crowd, make a turn around a corner, and vanish. Hawk couldn’t be sure who had left, and quickly scanned the crowd like a counter sniper’s spotter picking out a hostile in a crowded alley full of noncombatants. Hawk saw the two women and the two gray-suited South Koreans. Then she counted the penguins as nonchalantly as possible, conscious of moving her lips as she mouthed each number. Nine in all; one was missing.
Before she could make a decision, Hawk was interrupted by a female servant looking every bit the part of an expensive porcelain geisha doll, offering small hockey puck–shaped chocolate and lime green sweets and gold-crowned cups half full of hot tea. Simply following the lead of the others, Hawk helped herself to one of each.
Hawk drilled down, stepped through the crowd, trying to gain a position of advantage to see the faces of each Korean man dressed in a black suit. If not the face, at least enough to recognize Seamstress’s distinct narrow build compared to the others.
No luck.
Was that Seamstress that moved away from the group? By now Hawk knew it must have been. She was certain she had covered the entire foyer, made a complete sweep, stolen a glimpse of every man there, and confirmed her target had left.
Shit!
Hawk ran the options quickly. She knew he wasn’t trying to escape; maybe slip out a back door to make a mad dash for the MDL and the safety of South Korean soil. No, that would be suicide, even Seamstress knew that much. If that happened, the Czech CZ-82 pistols would be drawn and bullets would be flying, at least one of them having Seamstress’s name on it. Besides, if he wanted to kill himself, he didn’t need to take a long, impossibly slow ride on a bumpy train all the way from Pyongyang first.
The men’s room! Gotta be it.
Hawk allowed herself to settle back down a bit, realizing she was over-amped. Seamstress hitting the head was natural; hell, the guy was pushing seventy. Trying to tag Seamstress in the men’s room wasn’t necessarily a bad idea, but definitely a high-risk idea.
As Hawk turned her attention back to the mingling crowd she noticed a female North Korean soldier enter the same door she had used. She was dressed similar to the men, but wore a fat olive beret with a gold emblem affixed to the front center. Like a Little League ballplayer, she wore her headgear slipped back high on her head, affixing her straight black bangs perfectly flat to her forehead. Definitely not a looker, but she was just as armed and dangerous as the others. The soldier held up a brass bell and shook it rapidly, no different than a daycare teacher summoning the kids in from recess.
“Please, attention please,” she said, “before have our discussions, we must secure hand-carried items and pocketbooks. Forbidden items are no allowed the Kim Il Sung Memorial Conference Room.”
Hawk froze. The lady trooper’s English was a little off, but Hawk knew exactly what she was saying.
Hawk tensed, shook violently inside, awakening a lot of haunted memories from the deepest recesses of her consciousness. Images of being inside the interrogation box at Black Ice, being beaten by Nadal the Romanian for days on end in that seedy hotel, and feeling her designer heel penetrate the terrorist’s brain stem just before she ate two 9 mm slugs were now front and center. In those instances, like now, Hawk was unable to do a damn thing about it. If she had a pair of balls, they certainly had her by them now.
Forbidden items, yes, that’s what she said.
Hawk knew she was facing mission failure, and she hadn’t even so much as given a friendly greeting to Seamstress. Forget about tagging him now. No purse meant no RRD tags, no quantum dots. Sure, she might be able to hold on to her cell and Bluetooth, but for what benefit? Nobody wanted to hear from her again until she had done her job. Not until she had tagged that old man and sent him on his way back to the train at Panmun Station and the waiting SEALs.
Mission failure at Panmunjom was looking more and more possible. But what about her own status within the Unit? What would failure here look like to the men back at Bragg? She could go back to the training cell if she called in a favor. Maybe Kolt could help, or even Colonel Webber might take pity on her. The NBC shop could use her too. Or, she could get those PCS orders to Fort Riley back. Yes, pack her shit, kiss her Special Forces boyfriend Troy good-bye, and top off the Volkswagen Beetle to begin the long drive.
Hawk had plenty of options if she wanted to fail, but only one option if she wanted to be knighted as a full-fledged Delta operator. An operator on par with the male operators in the Unit. Someone given equal pay and equal responsibility, someone held to the same standards and expectations. If Hawk wanted to make history within the special operations community, be the first female operator, she needed to make some Unit history in North Korea first.
“Miss Tomlinson, I’m sorry, can I have your purse, please?”
Hawk flinched as she looked dead in the eye of one of the dwarfs. She was kind enough all right, just doing her job, and as she reached for Hawk’s pocketbook Hawk shuffled back in her heels, bumping into the snack table and knocking over one of the half-full teacups. Hawk quickly set her own cup and chocolate on the white tablecloth before clutching her lifeline tight to her chest. Lose control of the RRD tags and Q dots and she might as well Bluetooth the SEALs direct to tell them to bug out.
Hawk had to do something and she was out of time.
“Yes, ma’am, but in a minute,” Hawk said, as she winked at the South Korean lady. “It’s, uh, that time of the month and I really need to freshen up first, you understand.”
Spinning ninety degrees on the balls of her feet, Hawk didn’t wait for a response, and headed for the corner where she’d last seen Seamstress. She nodded politely to a second geisha, and without making a big deal about it, continued on for the hallway. Hawk hoped nobody noticed, at least not enough to question her, and if the bathrooms were just ahead, she had the perfect cover for action.
Hawk walked quickly down the solid white hallway, strangely sans any pictures or other decorations, save for the large and ubiquitous gaudy framed paintings of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. Her heels sounded off with each step on the polished tile floor as if they were sending a coded warning to Seamstress or a beacon to the North Korean soldiers.
Up ahead, she saw two hardwood doors, each with several Hangul letters that she couldn’t understand. Hawk hurried to the doors, hoping they were the men’s and women’s rooms, and before she had to guess which one to enter, the left door swung open.
Seamstress!
Hawk held her purse close to her hip, lifted her heels, and jogged the last few steps toward the door. Seeing her approaching, Seamstress froze in the doorway, still holding the open door with his left hand. Hawk lifted her right hand, palm facing Seamstress, and laid a forward-moving Heisman on him that knocked him back into the restroom and onto his ass.
She quickly closed the door, turning the lock to secure it behind her. She knelt down next to Seamstress, who had already gone from shocked to pissed off. He was spouting off something unintelligible to Hawk but she knew it would make a hungover sailor proud.
“Mr. Pang,” Hawk said, “do you speak English?” She wanted to dig into her purse and secure the tags, but knew she needed to confirm his identity and pass bona fides first.
“Yes, yes,” Seamstress said. “Where is American CIA?”
So much for bona fides.
Hawk reached down, grabbed both of Kang Pang Su’s hands, and held them palm up, waist high.
Large mitts, like an infielder’s glove, but not really fat.
Not the correct protocol, or what Hawk was told by Myron Curtis to expect, but good enough for her, given the circumstances. He spoke English, obviously pretty good English, and at the moment Hawk knew that was a surprise party gift even Curtis couldn’t predict.
“Great!” Hawk said. “Stay calm and give me a second.”
Hawk pulled her designer purse sling over her head and placed it on the marble bathroom floor. She opened i
t and pulled out the two RRD tags and set them on the floor. She reached back into the purse, fished around in the small side pocket, and found the three light green egg-shaped Q dots. These she placed into the two pockets of her blazer. As soon as she placed the RRD tags she would be applying the Q dots next.
“Please take off your jacket,” Hawk said. “We have to hurry.”
“I defect, yes?” Seamstress said. “For political and ideological reasons me relinquish my status as a North Korean citizen.”
Hawk heard every word, but it didn’t register. “Your jacket, hurry!” Hawk said. “I need to mark you before you get back on the train.”
“No, no, me no going back to Kaesong Station,” Seamstress said. “You take across border now.”
What? This guy’s delusional.
Hanging her ass out on a singleton mission to place a tag on some old dude was one thing, humping his ass across a two-klick-wide demilitarized zone crammed full of land mines, razor wire, and interlocking machine-gun fire was another.
“Please, I beg you!”
“The jacket!”
“They will feed me to dogs,” Seamstress said. “I know they on to me.”
“That’s not my mission, Mr. Pang,” Hawk said. “I can’t do that.”
“I survive no another day.”
“You have to get back on that train,” Hawk said firmly. “It will be okay.”
“No, I no can, no can,” Seamstress said, showing obvious stress for the first time, “better shoot me here than let savages tear limbs off.”
You can do this! she told herself, not really sure how.
Seamstress was scared shitless, but sneaking out of the building and running for the safety of South Korea was not part of the plan. As Hawk stared at the trembling Kang Pang Su, she allowed herself a moment to consider, what if? What if she audibled the mission and bolted with Seamstress? That course of action certainly had its advantages. For one, the SEALs would be off the hook. Beaver and Bear wouldn’t need to be destroyed; they could melt back out of the country, nobody the wiser. Second, if Seamstress’s angst was legit, if they really were onto him, then his personal scrutiny had likely changed. More North Korean soldiers surrounding the country’s latest traitor inside the armored car would create definite trouble for SEAL Team Six, especially with the sketchy plan to use the less-than-lethal MAUL ammunition.
Conversely, Hawk knew the probability they would successfully make it out safely was ant-shit low, not even promising enough to register on the scale.
“Please, madam, you help me,” Seamstress said as he cupped Hawk’s right hand with both of his.
He shook so hard, Hawk began to worry he was going into shock.
“I can’t help you,” Hawk said. “You must get back on the train.”
“I will not!” Seamstress said. “I defect today, I die trying.”
Then it hit Hawk. This was fucking Delta Force, the premiere counterterrorist unit in the entire world. Paid, trained, and expected to solve the nation’s most pressing national security problems. She remembered what Colonel Webber had said when she started her operator training course, almost two months ago now. Operators are trained how to think, not what to think. Yes, Gangster’s comprehensive color-coded matrices, animated PowerPoint slides that Bill Gates would marvel at, and the SEALs’ concept of operation were all good, while they lasted. But now, on the X, when the enemy gets a vote, all that plan A stuff had been overcome by events.
Fully knighted as the first female operator or not, on that morning, at that moment, as Carrie Tomlinson kneeled on the hard marble floor, she knew she was the most important member of Delta.
“Okay,” Hawk said, nodding and smiling at Seamstress, “I’ll help you defect.”
Seamstress scrambled to his feet like anything but a man a few years shy of seventy. “Thank so much! Thank you! Thank you!”
He pulled out a folded piece of paper, about the size of a credit card, and handed it to Hawk. Surprised, she quickly unfolded enough of it to see a handwritten message in Hangul.
“What is this?” Hawk asked as she quickly refolded it.
“For my family.”
Hawk yanked her left pant leg up to her knee, exposing the top of her knee-high hose. She peeled the edge back just enough to secure the note, pushing it an inch or so past the edge to be sure. She fixed her pants, grabbed the two RRD tags off the floor, and pushed to her feet, careful not to turn an ankle or bust a heel. Now standing face-to-face with Seamstress, she was stunned by how short he was, even accounting for her heels. She figured he was only about five foot three; five four, max.
Hawk reached into Seamstress’s coat pockets, dropping a tag inside each as smoothly as a Times Square pickpocket when the ball drops. The SEALs wouldn’t have to worry about him, but if they ran into trouble, somehow got separated, they might have a chance at recovering him.
“There back door,” Seamstress said, squeezing Hawk’s left arm, “I know way.”
“Okay, but you have to stay calm,” Hawk said. She pulled her cell from her pocket and powered it on.
Hawk cursed the slow startup sequence, watching it run its security protocols, tapping the Call Log button several times before it activated.
C’mon, c’mon.
“What doing?” Seamstress said, almost in panic mode. “We must now go!”
“Getting us some backup,” Hawk said, “and maybe a safe lift over the land mines.”
TWENTY-ONE
Objectives Beaver and Bear, North Korea
Ghillie-suited Master Chief Kleinsmith dropped both knees into the hardscrabble hillside that marked the SEALs’ last covered and concealed position just as the sun was already shining high over the treeless hills to the east. The happy mounds, Korean graveyards crafted out of giant grass-covered dirt piles that resembled upside-down half grapefruits, where the dead were entombed in a seated position, provided their only cover for several hundred meters.
“That took longer than I wanted it to,” he whispered to his mates only a few feet away.
Kleinsmith took a few deep breaths of the morning air. Strangely thick, it seemed to hang in his lungs, without a hint of wind moving across the hills. They’d had some trouble at OBJ Beaver, trying to get the C4 placed without making any noise that would certainly carry for miles, but happy to have finally placed the bulk explosives on the four vertical railroad track support beams with nobody the wiser.
But now, as the Six Team leader looked around the immediate desolate area, void of bushes or branches to build even a simple hide, not a rodent or bird or even an insect in sight, he wondered if they might have been safer back at the bridge. In fact, if not for the one water buffalo they’d bumped into last night moving to the shanty, North Korea was almost as lifeless as the moon, the result of a nationwide famine in the 1990s.
Kleinsmith didn’t like it. He didn’t like their current location, devoid of the basic requirements of any tactically sound operation—cover and concealment. He knew that, ghillie suits or not, anyone with a pair of binoculars would pick their torsos out from a klick away. This wasn’t Afghanistan, where the sharp craggy rocks and rich foliage in the mountains offered protection to get the job done.
He cranked his head toward South Korea, running his eyes slightly downhill, searching for the ghillie-suited silhouettes of the other half of his Red Squadron troop.
Where the hell are the others?
“I don’t see ’em,” Kleinsmith said, not really expecting any comment from the others. “They should have beaten us back here.”
“Me neither.”
“We’re an hour-plus behind schedule, I’m breaking radio silence,” Kleinsmith said as he rotated onto his right side and reached for his push-to-talk near his left shoulder.
“Satan Seven-Two, Seven-One, check?”
Nothing. He waited a few long seconds, trying not to let worry enter his thoughts, or worse, let his fellow SEALs feel his angst. They had been through much tougher times, had co
me through much more complicated targets than this, and at the moment nobody was shooting at them. But, Kleinsmith also knew that the other team had half the distance to travel to reach OBJ Bear, and unless they had the same issues, dicking around with the explosive placement, his natural sixth sense couldn’t help but peg hard right.
Sure, Satan Seven-Two could have engaged someone and he wouldn’t have heard. Like him that morning, all his frogmen were running with cans. But, had they drilled someone, or been hard compromised, they certainly would have broken radio silence to fill him in.
“Satan Seven-Two, this is Satan Seven-One in the blind, over.”
Kleinsmith heard one of his men whisper heavily, “Hold up, I see them.”
Relieved, Kleinsmith released his hand mike and eased back to his belly to lower his silhouette. He looked around to his men, making sure they all were aware of the approaching patrol.
“Hey, heads up, friendlies,” Kleinsmith said, “nine o’clock.”
Eyeballing the SEALs slowly weaving through the shallow draw, the heads of the crouching SEALs just a foot or two below the far crest, his eyebrows popped.
“Who the hell are they carrying?” Kleinsmith asked.
Eight ghillie-suited SEALs in dark earth-tone patterns stopped about sixty feet short of Kleinsmith. He watched the leader, Machinist’s Mate Danno, slowly move his left hand, palm facing toward the ground, up and down a few times, signaling the others to take a knee.
Kleinsmith’s radio cracked. “Seven-One, Seven-Two, check?”
Kleinsmith reached for his mike again to answer Danno. “Seven-One, check.”
He watched as two SEALs slowly lowered two bodies to the ground and rolled them on their backs.
“Whatya got?”
“Soft compromise,” Danno whispered.
“Dead?”
“Negative,” Danno replied coolly, “heavily sedated.”
Kleinsmith slowly moved to his feet, tapped his prone partner on the back of the thigh, and whispered, “Back in a second.”
