This was the crux of the matter, wasn’t it? But Ramsey couldn’t seem to grasp the relationship between his research and the obvious pressure being exerted upon the major general, which had to be considerably more than merely financial in origin. All he knew with any kind of certainty was that however he answered the question, the course of his life was about to be altered in ways he could neither foresee nor forestall.
Ramsey licked his lips and stared at Aldridge for a long moment before he finally spoke.
“Sir, early experimentation on mice and rats demonstrated promising results, as I’m sure you know, but their anatomy and physiology differ so profoundly from our own that it would be irresponsible to proclaim success. Sheep are a different story, though. In this particular instance, they more closely resemble human—”
“You were scheduled to test the sheep this morning, correct?”
“’Were’?”
“Do you believe your experiment would have worked?”
“Yes, sir, but—”
“And when you proved your success and validated your results, you would have sought approval to initiate human testing.”
“Sir—”
“Then you’ll undoubtedly be pleased to learn that you’ve been given the green light to accelerate your timetable.”
“I’m not sure I completely understand what you’re—”
“You’ll be briefed on the plane, Dr. Ramsey.”
“Plane? With all due respect, sir, what in God’s name are you talking about?”
II
21 km Northwest of
Kansong, Republic of Korea
May 12th
5:04 a.m. KST
The black Bell UH-1 Iroquois came in so low over the tops of the evergreens that Ramsey instinctively lifted his feet. He glanced out the window to his right, half expecting to see an explosion of needles and bark from the rotors. Instead, he saw the pointed crowns of Olga Bay larches, Manchurian firs, and Jerzo spruces reaching from the steep slope, framed against the night sky. Massive granite slabs perched in their midst like dominos poised to topple down upon the valley into which they descended, where an ancient Buddhist temple crouched in a field filled with scrub oak and tall grasses that rippled with golden waves in the moonlight.
He didn’t know exactly what he had expected, but this was just about the furthest thing from it.
“This is your drop, Dr. Ramsey,” the pilot said through the cans on his ears. They were the first words he had spoken since they took off from Kansong, despite Ramsey’s best attempts to coax him into telling where in the hell they were actually going.
“This can’t be right,” Ramsey said. “They don’t really expect us to get out here, do they?”
“’Us’?”
The pilot’s laughter was so loud that Ramsey had to remove the cans.
* * *
Within minutes of his conversation with Major General Aldridge, Ramsey was escorted to a transport carrier that had begun to taxi down the runway before the door even closed behind him. A lieutenant named Gibbons had presented him with leather-on-nylon, Gore-Tex-lined boots and camouflage fatigues, a rucksack containing a hydro bladder, dry rations and supplies, a camo CBRN over-suit, a charcoal-activated respirator, a gas mask, and a sealed folder that looked just like the ones on the MG’s desk. He had denied any knowledge of the contents and excused himself from the cabin when Ramsey opened it. All he had volunteered was that his orders were to supervise the safe transport of sensitive cargo to a secure landing site in Kansong, a coastal town on the Sea of Japan, roughly forty-five kilometers south of the Korean Demilitarized Zone, where a Huey would be waiting to ferry the cargo to its ultimate destination. While Ramsey didn’t necessarily appreciate continually being referred to as “the cargo,” at least Gibbons had been kind enough to share his portable DVD player and his limited library of bad comedies, which helped distract Ramsey from dwelling on the contents of the folder.
He had read every page of text—all three of them—at least a dozen times and still knew little more than he had upon boarding. The phrasing was cryptic, the meanings implied, and the details non-existent. There was more written between the lines than in the lines themselves. If he understood correctly, both he and the equipment from his lab, which was presumably somewhere on the plane, were to be routed by helicopter from Kansong to an undisclosed rendezvous point of which the chopper pilot would only be informed after takeoff. There was no mention of their ultimate destination—which, Ramsey estimated, based on the Huey’s range, could be anywhere within a three hundred mile radius—or what or whom would be waiting when he arrived, only that further orders would be provided at that time.
All Ramsey could do was speculate.
He knew he would be expected to utilize his project to some end. Based on his limited conversation with Aldridge and his briefing, he believed it would be on a human subject, but why were they flying him to the other side of the globe to conduct the experiment? To circumvent international human testing prohibitions? And why South Korea? He wasn’t the kind of guy who immersed himself in politics and current affairs, but he’d heard enough to understand that he’d pretty much rather be just about anywhere else on the planet. A part of him had to admit that he was thrilled at the prospect of using his project on a human subject, though. He imagined himself setting up in a makeshift lab on one of the various Air Force bases or in the basement of an embassy, waiting for the body to be wheeled in so they could learn what the subject had seen that was of such dire importance.
But he couldn’t shake Aldridge’s question—Can you still handle a firearm?—or the simple and undeniable fact that he’d never been so scared in his entire life.
* * *
Now, here he was, fourteen hours later and halfway around the world, dressed in combat fatigues and preparing to alight in an isolated valley in the middle of the Taebaek Mountain Range where there wasn’t another soul in sight.
What the Sam Hill was going on here?
The helicopter bounced when it touched down. Before it even settled, the door beside Ramsey slid back and he was hauled out into the furious wind and the grass whipping around his legs. He barely caught a glimpse of a man with a black grease-painted face before the man’s grip tightened on his arm and they were ducking and running toward the small pagoda. The chopper rose with a roar into the sky behind them. By the time Ramsey looked back, it was cresting the mountains to the south, the thupping sound of its blades echoing into oblivion.
And then it was gone.
Without him.
They raced up the steps and into the small temple, which consisted of little more than a single room with cracked slate floors and petrified wooden support pillars. There were no windows or alternate egresses. The sparse moonlight from the doorway illuminated cracked images of the Buddha and praying disciples painted directly on the walls with an almost ethereal glow. A sculpture of the Buddha framed by a corona of flames rested in an arched hollow in the wall above a plain granite altar upon which several pots filled with sand, like old industrial ash trays, rested. The room was rife with the stale aroma of the snubbed incense sticks that protruded from the pots.
Ramsey gasped when two men materialized from the shadowed corners at the head of the room. All he could clearly see were the whites of their eyes. Another man entered the temple behind him without making a sound, his presence felt rather than seen. When Ramsey turned around, he saw that the man carried the two Pelican Storm Cases from his lab that had been custom-fitted with foam inserts to accommodate his equipment.
Four men, all taking his measure, staring at him as though waiting for him to do whatever it was he was supposed to do. And Ramsey didn’t have the foggiest idea of what that was. He decided to take the direct approach.
“So where should I set up?”
The man who had led him from the chopper looked to each of the other men in turn, and then finally back at Ramsey. With their helmets pulled down low over their painted faces and
nearly indistinguishable physiques, they could have passed for quadruplets. The man offered a crooked smile that could have passed for amusement, his ivory teeth a stark contrast to his features. And still he said nothing, so Ramsey kept going.
“I trust the subject is somewhere around here. Why don’t we get this show on the road so we can bring the chopper back and I can return to—?”
The smiling man thrust the backpack Ramsey had been issued on the plane into his chest.
“I hope you brought a comfortable pair of shoes, princess,” he said in a deep voice that contained just the hint of a Southern accent.
The other three grinned and suddenly Ramsey knew how Alice would have felt had she fallen through the looking glass and found herself surrounded by a rabid pack of Cheshire cats.
III
Ramsey had no idea how long they’d been walking, but the sky, when he actually stole a glimpse of it through the dense canopy, had begun to lighten to the east, if only by degree, which allowed him to gather his bearings. They were traveling northwest, single-file, following the topography of the steep valleys without ever straying from the cover of the trees. A stream paralleled them to their left, mocking them with its incessant babbling, but only occasionally revealing itself through the shrubs, branches, and trunks, a mere glimmer of moonlight on its silver surface.
They passed sheer cliffs where waterfalls fired from mist-shrouded bushes high above; dry creek beds where smooth stones had been stacked into gravity-defying cairns; twenty-foot-tall statues of the Buddha that appeared as if by magic from the forest; and the ruins of ancient dwellings long since claimed by the trees, which grew so closely together that their branches battled for the sunlight even as their roots waged war for the soil. The Taebaek Mountains were a world unto themselves, their beauty enhanced by their isolation. The detritus underfoot was pristine, as though no living being had ever dared to violate its eternal accumulation. Ramsey studied the sharp peaks high above him and the encroachment of the wilderness in an effort to divine their destination. All he could determine with any sort of accuracy was that if they continued on their current course, they would eventually breach the demilitarized zone and cross the border into North Korea, if they hadn’t already. He wished the men would tell him where they were going, but none of them had spoken to him since offering clipped introductions as they set out from the temple, and his feeble attempts to draw them into conversation had been met with looks that could have dropped a charging rhino in its tracks.
He had been with them long enough now to be able to differentiate them. Rockwell was the man who had dragged him from the chopper, and appeared to be in command. He assumed the point and moved through the foliage a dozen paces ahead of them like an apparition. He was perhaps a couple of inches taller than the rest of them, had a square jaw that was evident even from behind, and dark hair that had grown out just long enough to curl under the edges of his helmet. Wilshire walked directly ahead of Ramsey. He had skin the color of charcoal, a British accent, and shoulders so broad they tested the fabric of his fatigues and made his backpack look like a child’s. In one hand he carried the larger of Ramsey’s cases; the other held a Heckler & Koch G36 assault rifle with a 40mm AG36 underbarrel grenade launcher as though it weighed no more than a feather. Moya nipped at Ramsey’s heels. He was perhaps the shortest and least bulky of the men, but he radiated a kind of nervous energy that made Ramsey uncomfortable on a primal level. Moya’s nose was flat, his cheekbones broad and rugged, and his lips constantly writhed over square white teeth that appeared to have been designed for a mouth far larger than his. He shifted Ramsey’s other case and his rifle restlessly from one hand to the other. Grimstad brought up the rear, often vanishing into the scrub behind them and reemerging as though from a mist that clung only to him. No amount of face paint could mask his Scandinavian features or eyes so blue they were like polished spheres of amethyst. His movements were economical, and yet he looked as though he moved in jumps and starts, here and then gone, like a movie on an old reel-to-reel projector, only missing intermittent frames. They all shared one characteristic that Ramsey found more than a little unnerving.
None of them appeared to blink.
The eastern horizon was a blood-red smear through the branches, a wound inflicted upon the sky by the jagged peaks, when Rockwell slowed the exhausting pace he had set for them. Ramsey smelled the faintest traces of a campfire and spoiled meat beneath the sticky-sweet aroma of the evergreens. Wisps of smoke drifted through the canopy as they advanced. The path leveled, and for the first time Ramsey noticed several spots where the ground cover had been disturbed by footsteps. The stench of urine and feces made his stomach churn and forced him to cover his mouth and nose with his hand. A cloud of black flies buzzed from beyond the trees ahead and to his left, at the bottom of a ravine, where the bank of the stream was choppy with mud, the divots filled with standing yellow fluid. Heaps of feces as tall as termite mounds stood from the stream, its current too gentle to carry the piles away.
Rockwell stopped in his tracks, his silhouette wavering in the smoke, framed by the branches of the trees around him. He turned and Ramsey could feel the weight of his stare upon him. When Ramsey reached the man’s side, he found himself at the crest of a bowl-shaped valley, at the bottom of which several fires still burned, more ember and cinder than actual flame. The smoke was trapped in the valley like a gray haze of smog, swirling and eddying around a dozen tents constructed from mismatched blankets, sheets, and tarps over irregular frameworks of boughs broken from the large pines. The grasses and shrubs had been trampled flat, scorched black in sections, and were blotched with shapes that at first appeared to be logs, for all the definition he could glean through the smoke.
A soft breeze flowed down the mountainside, blowing the smoke into his face, and, worse, a stench so powerful that it hit him in the gut like a fist.
Rotting meat.
He barely had time to identify the putrid aroma before he was vomiting into the weeds beside the path.
Ramsey wiped his lips and tried to swallow back the taste of acid in his mouth as he stared down into the valley once more.
Those weren’t logs.
They were bodies, haphazardly scattered around the makeshift dwellings.
Jesus. This was why they’d brought him here.
“Welcome to North Korea, Dr. Ramsey,” Rockwell said.
* * *
The smell intensified with every step down the eroded slope. Ramsey was thankful he’d already purged his stomach, but that didn’t prevent the dry heaves. Like the smoke, the valley seemed to jealously hoard the stench. Ramsey fished around in his backpack and nearly cried with relief when he extricated the activated-charcoal respiratory mask, which fit tightly over his mouth and nose.
“They say all smells are particulate,” Grimstad said in a thick Norwegian accent.
“So breathe through your mouth and let me know how it tastes,” Wilshire said.
Ramsey tried to tune them out as he picked his way down the hillside, his vision blurred by tears, whether as a consequence of the smoke, the gut-wrenching aroma, or the sheer number of lives lost he couldn’t be quite sure.
“What is this place?” he asked as they neared the bottom.
“Refugee camp,” Rockwell said, his voice attenuated by his own mask. “There have to be dozens of them all along the border. These guys are like rats abandoning a sinking ship.”
Tendrils of smoke drifted along the ground like the ghosts of the dead searching through the remains for their lost bodies. There had to be at least a hundred corpses, some sprawled on their backs, others on their chests or sides, but none of them appeared to have gone peacefully. If anything, it looked like they had been felled in stride, brought down in the midst of their panicked flight, most of them around the perimeter of the camp near the edge of the woods. The dirt surrounding them was scuffed, the grass uprooted, but it wasn’t until he neared the first tent that he saw the copious amounts of blood and
had to avert his eyes. Only then did he notice that the conversation behind him had ceased and all four soldiers held their rifles at the ready. Their eyes roved across the carnage and the far wall of trees that ringed the meadow to the north.
The bodies that had fallen into the fire pits still smoldered, their burnt black flesh split, their skin and clothing now ashes that darkened the ground like polluted snow. The majority of the tents had been saved, while a few still burned as a result of the spilled kerosene that had leeched into the soil from the scorched and crumpled canisters.
Moya fanned out to the left toward the stream, while Grimstad headed to the right. Wilshire picked his way through the killing field en route to the far side.
Ramsey turned to find Rockwell watching him. The two Pelican cases from Ramsey’s lab sat beside him in the weeds.
“You know what you have to do,” Rockwell said.
Ramsey tried to tell him how his project had never been tested on a human being, how it was possible that it might not even work, but when he opened his mouth, no words came out. In his mind, he was already crouched over one of the bodies, his hands and arms crusted with blood to the elbows, wishing he was back in his lab with a steaming mug of coffee, a crisp white lab coat, and a sink with running water and soap mere feet away.
Rockwell’s eyes caught his, and within them Ramsey saw a flicker of disappointment, and perhaps even contempt.
“We don’t have time to screw around, Dr. Ramsey. Hostilities could boil over on either side of the border at any second now and we could find ourselves right in the middle of World War Three. We need to know exactly what happened here if we’re to have a prayer of averting it.”
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