by Tom Clancy
The leader of the two shook his head no. Sweat drained down his temples.
The train began to slow for the 8th Street stop. In a voice that was demonstrative but cautious, because he didn’t want to startle the dude with the gun in his face, Dom said, “Everybody relax. I’m a federal officer. Nobody move until we’re stopped, but as soon as the doors open I want everyone to leave the train in a quiet and orderly fashion.”
The North Korean said, “No! No! No one leaves!”
Chavez said, “If either of you take your guns off of us to point them at these civilians, we will shoot you dead.” That sank in for a moment, then Chavez added, “Tell your buddy if he doesn’t understand.”
A college-age man sitting on the bench behind Dom said, “Sir, do you want me to—”
Caruso said, “I want you to do exactly what I just said. Nothing else.”
The subway car was quiet other than the rattling of the movement over the tracks, but when Caruso heard sounds behind him, a slight shuffling of clothing or a purse, he said, “Anybody who pulls out a camera phone will probably get themselves killed, but if you don’t, I’m gonna throw your ass in prison. Stay still!”
The sound behind ceased instantly.
It was a jolting stop at 8th Street; all four men stumbled a little, but the guns were back up and in their X in an instant. The men and women on the train—fortunately, it was late enough at night that no children had been on board—behaved even better than Dom had expected, and in seconds the train was clear.
Marleni Allende was one of the first off. Caruso and Chavez noticed that the North Koreans, though obviously on a life-or-death mission, had the good sense to not try to stop her. They were focused on their difficult predicament.
Caruso expected the train to stay at 8th Street. Surely someone would tell the motorman that there was an armed standoff on his train, and he’d sound the alarm and stay right there. But the doors closed and it began moving again.
He realized they were in the second-to-last car, and perhaps the people who’d scrambled off had been more concerned about getting the hell out of the line of fire and going to the exits and less concerned about running all the way up the platform to the front of the train.
Of course, everyone would be on their mobiles once they got to street level, or else they would tell the first transit cop they came across, so both Caruso and Chavez knew the train wouldn’t make it past Union Square, the next stop.
Chavez tried his hand at dialogue again. “The woman is gone. We can shoot it out over nothing, or we can just call it a night.”
The North Korean said, “We have diplomatic immunity.”
Caruso replied, “Who doesn’t, really, at this point?”
Chavez latched on to this. “Then drop your guns. You haven’t done anything that will get you more than an expulsion. It doesn’t have to end bad.”
The sweat on the Korean’s face made him blink, over and over.
His partner said something in Korean, and the two men started some sort of argument that got heated.
While they shouted at each other, getting more volatile by the second, Caruso spoke softly to Chavez. “They’re losing it.”
Chavez said, “Talking over the consequences of failure.”
Dom took in a slow breath. “Dead-enders.”
Chavez knew what he meant. These guys were coming to the realization they had nothing to lose, and this meant, to both of the Campus operators, they were in the same predicament.
There was going to be a point-blank shootout in a minute, and Chavez and Caruso had nothing to lose at this point, either.
The North Koreans had stopped their arguing, and both Americans took that to mean they had reached a conclusion. The train began to slow at the Union Square station, and all four men softened their knees to absorb the inevitable shift in momentum that came along with pulling into the stop. Although they couldn’t communicate it to each other, the Campus men both felt certain the North Koreans were going to fire right as the train made its final jolt before the doors opened. That was their best opportunity for success, and their best opportunity for escape.
Chavez said, “You trust me, Dom?”
It took Caruso a moment, but soon enough he thought he understood. “I trust you.”
“What are you saying?” shouted the English-speaking North Korean.
“I’m saying I give up,” answered Chavez.
He took his left hand off his gun slowly, and held it up in front of him, like he was telling the man with the gun on him he was going to surrender. Slowly he turned his pistol barrel away, changing his grip on the Glock so the gun rolled forward on his trigger finger. It hung upside down in his hand, the grip facing away from him. He turned away from the man he had been aiming at, and toward the man directly in front of him. “Here. Take it.”
As he said this, the man in front of Chavez, the one with the gun pointed at Caruso, took his eyes off his sights for an instant to look up at the man offering his gun to him. A change in the dynamic caused him a half-second of surprise as he reevaluated the situation.
As soon as his eyes shifted, Dominic Caruso swiveled his body to the right and shot the other North Korean, the man with the gun on Chavez, in the forehead.
The man with the gun pointed at Caruso startled at the movement, and his eyes flicked back toward his gunsight. He recognized he’d been caught off guard, looking at one man and aiming at another, but he was still on target, and he jerked his finger against the taut trigger of his semiautomatic.
But he never got a shot off.
Chavez flicked his pistol around in his hand so the grip was in his palm and his pinkie finger was inside the trigger guard. Though the weapon was upside down, the barrel pointed at the aggressor in front of him. He pulled his pinkie back and fired the pistol upside down. The round hit the North Korean in the upper chest and knocked him backward. He stumbled back, and his gun fired once into the ceiling of the train.
Dom Caruso swiveled his Smith & Wesson to the falling man and shot him twice more before he hit the floor.
The train lurched to a stop. Out the windows on the platform the two Campus operators saw a sea of dark blue uniforms running down the staircase twenty-five yards away. The police weren’t sure which car they were going for, so there was confusion at the bottom of the stairs.
Chavez turned toward the back of the train, away from the police, and started running. “We’re going for the tunnel!”
They leapt down to the tracks in the gap between the last two cars. Careful to avoid going anywhere near the third rail, they took off to the south.
Two cars behind them, the transit police held their weapons on all the cars. It would be thirty seconds before they boarded and another minute and a half before they suspected someone had left the train to run through the tunnel.
By then Caruso and Chavez were halfway back to 8th Street.
—
By the time they got to the 8th Street station, Caruso and Chavez had moved to the southbound side of the tracks. Since all the witnesses had climbed out of the subway car onto the northbound platform, the two Campus men expected there would be a police presence at the scene there, and they were right. A dozen or more police in light blue and dark blue uniforms, some carrying carbines or submachine guns, stood around with witnesses and other passersby.
But Chavez and Caruso climbed up on the southbound platform, fifty yards away from the gaggle of cops across the station, and they made it up to street level with no one noticing them.
Sam picked them up a few minutes later and they were back in the 79th Street safe house shortly after that.
—
By the time Domingo and Dominic sat down with a bottle of water and a gun-cleaning kit, Campus IT staffers had already reviewed all the relevant NYPD and Metropolitan Transportation Authority camera footage in the
area, and they saw nothing that identified their two operatives. There was always a chance some kid on the train had gotten his phone out, but this wasn’t an event likely to have been recorded, for the simple fact that everyone on that train was in immediate mortal peril and knew reaching for a phone or raising a hand to point a camera might have earned them a bullet to the head.
After spending hours on an after-action hot wash of the event with Clark in the living room of the safe house, they determined they had somehow managed to avoid compromise during the incident. No one had any idea just why the North Koreans were so hell-bent on killing a single member of the Sanctions Committee, but Sam’s assertion that Allende and Riley had not managed to come to terms on whatever it was they were meeting about made them all think it likely Riley had notified the North Koreans that the woman knew about the operation to coerce committee members, and the North Koreans decided to silence her before she could talk.
There was a lot of guessing necessary to come to this conclusion, but the facts all seemed to lead in this direction.
Clark said, “Just like in Vietnam, the North Koreans are playing for absolute keeps on this. In situations where some other bad actor might just pull up stakes and bug out, or else threaten a noncompliant party, the North Koreans are using lethal means. This is an ugly game they are playing, and we cannot make assumptions about how they will act without taking that into consideration.”
35
Adam Yao sat in a glass-walled conference room on the third floor of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. A window faced southwest and he looked out over a green forested hillside that obstructed the view of anyone driving by on the Capital Beltway. Adam was sure the hill had been built with security in mind, but it was nice to veg out for a minute and gaze at the greenery. But not for long. After a moment he looked down to the reams of books, notes, and briefing papers laid out on the table in front of him.
Time to get back to work.
He had spent a full week of sixteen-hour days prepping for Operation Acrid Herald, the attempt to place a CIA asset into a rare earth mineral mining operation in northwestern North Korea. He would be leaving for the West Coast in the morning, heading to the Valley Floor rare earth mineral mine in California, for more specific training and legend building, before heading to China, where the real work would begin.
Acrid Herald was a code-word operation; only a select few in the U.S. intelligence agency had any inkling what was happening. For purposes of operational security, no one at CIA Station Seoul would be informed, and certainly no personnel from any South Korean intelligence agency would be read in on the plan, because of the likelihood North Korea had a penetration agent high up in the South Korean spy services.
Even most at Langley HQ would be kept away. The op was, instead, run out of an office suite converted into a special operations center at the ODNI’s Liberty Crossing complex.
A portion of Adam’s week had been spent committing to memory all the code words, call signs, radio frequencies, and other information he would need in his weeks in the danger zone. His code name was Avalanche; this moniker had been computer-generated for him, and Adam liked the sound of it, especially because he’d been told a recent code name generated by the computer for a male agent had been Sunflower.
Adam felt bad for Sunflower, whoever he was, and hoped his mission went off without a hitch. Having to call control to request a quick-reaction-force extract for Agent Sunflower didn’t sound like something Adam would much enjoy doing.
He’d take Avalanche any damn day over that. This operation might have been an incredibly difficult and dangerous mission, but, Adam told himself, at least they’d outfitted him with a badass call sign before he left.
While the plan was for Adam Yao to go to Valley Floor to learn the computer system he would be operating in Chongju, he knew he would already need to know his cover legend back-to-front when he got out to California, so he spent the afternoon of his last day here at LX2 digging deeper into his legend. This type of work was familiar to him, learning the life story of a fictional character, and he actually enjoyed the study. He felt like an actor preparing for a role, and although all the lines he would use on the stage would be improvisational, the better he knew his character’s upbringing, circumstances, education, and life experiences, the better able he would be to bring his character to life.
According to his legend, Adam was Shan Xin, a thirty-five-year-old mechanical engineer and Chinese national from Nanchang who moved to the U.S. to go to the University of Chicago, but then overstayed his student visa by fourteen years. The gangster miners in Shanghai would be told that he then took a job in the mining sector, where he became an expert in ore-processing machinery, specifically the computers used to operate a hydraulic cone crusher, a massive grinding device that turned the ore into precisely sized smaller bits so that the rare earth minerals contained within could be removed through a series of treatments and processes, depending on the minerals themselves. The CIA had learned through its access to the Chinese gangster mining operation that the North Koreans already had the huge crushing machines, as well as the hydraulic system to operate them, all thanks to the Chinalco operation that had pulled out a year before, but the Chinese had taken their computers with them when Choi threw them out of his country.
A new computer was on the way from France via Bulgaria, and the CIA had already intercepted it at the warehouse of a shipping agent and implanted the hardware that would allow Adam to use the device as something of a direct-line telephone back to his command and control here at ODNI.
The fact Adam, or Shan Xin, had lived and worked in the U.S. for the past eighteen years would account for both his knowledge of the equipment and the fact no one in the illegal mining company had ever heard of him. As with all undercover work, of course, there was always the chance Adam would run into someone who had been to the places Adam claimed to have visited or knew the people Adam claimed to have known, so it was crucial he got his legend information down cold to pull this off.
Like every good non-official cover officer, Adam was an expert at the ability to fold his own life experiences into his backstory; this always helped with a cover story, because the more truth involved, the less the chance to be caught in a deception.
And he would hide the fact that he spoke Korean. He and his control officers on Acrid Herald were working under the assumption the North Koreans might speak more freely around the Chinese workers than they would if they knew one of their number could understand them. The relationship between the North Korean minders and the illegal Chinese workers was sure to be unforthcoming, and the CIA knew they wanted to hear as much as possible from the Koreans that was not filtered through channels going to the Chinese.
Adam’s Korean wasn’t great, but he was trying to “crash-course” his skill level up a notch with intensive language study on top of all the other work he was doing. This morning he’d worked on his language skills with a native Korean speaker, a translator and trainer at CIA. Additionally, he had listened to recordings in the evening for the past few nights, and this had retuned his brain to the language somewhat, but today they focused on vocabulary specific to the mining industry.
Adam’s study wouldn’t end when he left Virginia for California. Instead, he would travel to Valley Floor with his instructor, Myun, and she would play the role of his wife so they could spend the evenings studying together.
He expected to be in Valley Floor no more than a week and a half, but another ten days of language study might just make the difference between success and failure on the operation.
And it didn’t bother Adam Yao at all that Myun was an attractive woman. Unfortunately for him, she was married, and her husband, a blond-haired, blue-eyed CIA analyst from Boston, had popped in on them in the language lab a couple times. He seemed to Yao to be a nice enough guy, and although he didn’t know the nature of Yao’s operation or where Y
ao and his wife would be heading, overall he projected an air of support.
It was going to be weird to live in an apartment for a week and a half with a married woman, but Adam knew this wasn’t the weirdest thing he’d done working as a spy.
Normal rules did not apply in this life.
It was late afternoon now; he closed up one briefing book and reached for another. Just as he started to settle into some reading on ore processing, Mary Pat Foley knocked on the glass door to the conference room.
Adam waved her in and stood.
“Sorry to bother you, Adam.”
“Not at all,” Adam said. “It’s nice to see you again.”
She paused for a moment, then said, “Acrid Herald is a go. You leave in the morning.”
“Outstanding.”
She and Yao both sat down.
“They’re working you hard?”
“I’ve got the legend memorized. I’ve got the codes and commo tech down cold. I’ve boned up on the processing of ore and the mechanics of the crushing systems in place there, but I’ll learn the actual computer software in California. I’ll keep working on my language.” He nodded. “I’ll do my part in Acrid Herald.”
Mary Pat said, “And I’ll do mine, and see that others do theirs. I won’t micromanage this op, but I’ll be getting twice-daily updates from your control officers. I recognize the risks. I know I won’t be in the field with you . . . but—”
“Madame Director, I know you’ve spent a good part of your career in the field. Trust me, the fact you know what it’s like is very much appreciated at a time like this.”
Foley smiled.
Adam gave her a moment to reply, but when he realized she was holding back, he added, “And although I appreciate you coming to see me off, I am wondering if there is something specific you wanted to tell me.”
She looked out the window and over the trees. “I lost a good friend recently. An operative, not too unlike yourself, although much older. He was one hell of a foot soldier during the Cold War and even beyond.”
