Rings of Fire

by Gregory Shepherd

  When Patrick reached the entrance to the tunnel, he called out to Kirsten but got no response. The glare of the brilliant sun had rendered him temporarily blind in the darkness, but with his gun drawn, he began moving down the tunnel as cautiously as possible so as not to waste precious time while Kirsten was in mortal danger.

  In a meeting room at the far end of the tunnel, Casanova kept one arm around Kirsten’s neck while removing her handcuffs off her belt and securing her right wrist to a water pipe. He told her he’d kill her if she made a sound. As Patrick inched his way closer to the double door leading to the meeting room, Casanova followed his every move in a convex mirror used by support staff to round corners safely. When Patrick finally sprang around the corner in what he thought was a surprise move, Casanova was waiting for him with a knifehand strike to the inside of his elbow, knocking his gun away. Since the young North Korean hadn’t just shot him outright and Kirsten was obviously being held as a bargaining chip, Patrick sensed an opening.

  “You’re all being used!” Patrick yelled in Korean. Casanova squinted, taken aback by an obvious foreigner speaking his language. Patrick continued.

  “That’s right! The man you think is ‘Mister Lee’ is really Liu Jintao, a general in the Chinese Air Force. He doesn’t care about you or any of your friends. You’re just pawns. The reason for these attacks he’s had you carry out isn’t about restoring the Kim family to power in your country. It’s about taking over North Korea for its trillions of dollars’ worth of minerals that belong to the people. Here, look at this,” he said, and reached for the printout he had in the back of his waistband. Casanova raised his gun and was about to shoot when Patrick yelled again.

  “This is evidence of everything I’ve just told you. Read it, and if you don’t believe me, then you can shoot me.” He slowly reached behind him and took out the printout that Choy had made, the most prominent feature of which was the image of “Mister Lee” in the uniform of a Chinese general. “Look, here he is. Your glorious leader.”

  Casanova’s head moved forward to get a better look at the document Patrick held. His grip on Kirsten had lessened with each word Patrick spoke, and he reached his hand out to accept the printout.

  “I tell you what,” Patrick said, “I’ll guarantee you safe passage back to North Korea if you let her go.” Casanova looked up from the document.

  “This is real?” he asked. Patrick nodded emphatically. Casanova’s eyes went side to side, and Patrick knew he was weakening.

  “I’m going to pick up my gun, and I want you to put yours down. And I want you to open the handcuffs. It’s the only way you’re getting out of here alive.”

  “You promise safe passage?”

  “I swear it,” Patrick said even more emphatically. Casanova set his gun down and released Kirsten from her handcuffs.

  “Run,” Patrick said. Kirsten was about to exit through the same door Casanova had used, but Patrick called after her. “Use that door on the far side of the room.” He didn’t know if other members of his team would be looking for them with guns drawn. Kirsten took off across the wide hall and exited through a door leading to safety down a different part of the tunnel. Patrick watched her leave and then turned back to Casanova. At the sound of footsteps running toward the meeting room from the original door, Casanova immediately picked up his gun again. Patrick desperately hoped that whoever was there would not come in with guns ablaze. He knew he could still make the deal with Casanova, but since the youth had his gun aimed at him, he didn’t dare turn around. He called out.

  “Minoru? Tyler? No weapons!”

  But the surprise in Casanova’s eyes when he saw who was coming in made Patrick turn just in time. Pung was attempting to clap his hands over Patrick’s ears in the happa-ken “rupturing fist” attack of martial arts, one aimed at breaking the eardrums and causing instant violent pain and disorientation. Patrick saw him just in time before Pung could make full contact, but when he defensively reached for his ears, his Glock dropped from his hand.

  “I’ve been waiting so long for this moment,” Pung said in Korean.

  “Why didn’t you just shoot me when you shot the others?” Patrick asked in the same language.

  “What, and deprive myself of seeing your face when you realize you’re going to die? That would have been too fast. I want to take my time and enjoy this.”

  He took a hunting knife from his pocket and began moving toward Patrick.

  “Here, hang on to this,” he said to Casanova, passing him his handgun. Casanova took it but looked imploringly at Patrick.

  “Don’t forget what I told you,” Patrick said to the youth.

  Pung looked at Patrick and then at Casanova. “What did he tell you?” he demanded.

  “He said that Mister Lee is a Chinese general.”

  “And you believed him? Idiot!”

  Casanova’s eyes cut side to side. Suddenly, he threw the gun down and ran from the room through the same door Kirsten had used.

  “Come back here!” Pung shouted after him. But Casanova was gone.

  “Alright, never mind. Now it’s just you and me,” he said to Patrick with a malicious grin. He came toward Patrick with his knife at the ready, but Patrick threw himself at the much larger man and began slapping him back and forth across his face, a martial arts move designed to short-circuit the brain and throw the opponent off balance. The knife fell from Pung’s hand, and he stutter-stepped, recovered, then countered by stamping on Patrick’s foot while grabbing him by the hair. Patrick could tell a headbutt was on the way, so he pulled back at the last second, softening the impact, but throwing himself off balance and dropping to his knees. Despite the relatively mild contact Pung had made, a cut opened up above Patrick’s eye, and blood began pouring into his eyes. Pung picked his knife up off the floor. Thinking he had done more damage to Patrick than he actually had, he called to him in a loud voice.

  “I hope you can still hear me, because I’m sure everyone in the stadium is about to hear you,” he shouted as he extended his arm out for a stab to Patrick’s kidney. But Patrick’s instincts from his JSOC training resurrected themselves before Pung was able to plunge the knife. Despite the blood in his eyes from the headbutt, Patrick began thrusting a finger of each hand in rapid-fire jabs at Pung’s throat, hoping to land at least one directly above the super costal notch, a martial arts move known as atemi which is designed to crush the bundle of nerves that control the movement of the neck, instantly incapacitating the opponent.

  He finally landed one squarely into that exact nexus, but Pung’s neck was half again as wide as the average man’s, and he merely was thrown back a foot or two. When Pung came back for another attack, he attempted a slanting blow with the side of his hand just below Patrick’s nose, but Patrick fended it off with an arm bar, giving himself enough time to take the knife out of his boot. In JSOC Patrick had learned that in a knife fight, one should always kick and punch first rather than try to stab someone outright. Stabbing is a sucker move, since it exposes the body for too little potential gain. So he kept the knife close in and tried to slash Pung’s knuckles, or better yet, the insides of his arms and legs with their major blood vessels. If he got Pung in an artery, he would likely bleed to death, but Pung’s powerful leg-thrust kicked the knife out of Patrick’s hand and sent it skittering across the floor.

  Patrick hobbled as fast as he was able with his injured foot to the opposite side of the room, and Pung smiled. He was now toying with his prey, allowing Patrick to do as he liked. But a surprised look came over his face when Patrick tore off a foot-long section of sharp metal from the bottom of a storage rack and again began jabbing at Pung, who flinched in surprise. Now was the time to stab, Patrick knew, and he saw his opening: when Pung flinched, he lifted both arms, exposing his visceral cavity, and Patrick lunged forward in an attempt at driving the razor-sharp piece of metal deep into Pung’s gut.

/>   But Pung knew immediately what Patrick was up to, and he pivoted on his heels in a roundhouse kick to Patrick’s head, knocking him backwards and dazing him further. The right-hand man of Comrade Moon had toyed with his prey long enough. He was now going in for the kill.

  As he raised the knife over a disoriented Patrick, he called out, “Revenge for Comrade Moon!” But before he could complete the arc of the knife’s trajectory, he turned to the sound of someone running into the room.

  “Patrick!” a voice cried out. Patrick’s head immediately swiveled in the direction of Choy’s voice. The instant he had entered the room, Choy had assessed the situation and kicked Patrick’s knife back to him. Patrick grabbed it, and while Pung still had his arm lifted, he plunged the blade deep into Pung’s left side just below the ribcage and tore it straight up to his sternum with an awful ripping sound. Blood immediately began gushing out of the wound and a moment later out of Pung’s mouth. His legs went out from under him, and as he lay bleeding out on the floor, he turned his head to face Choy.

  “Traitor,” he rasped through blood-soaked lips, his face contorted in agony. He was seconds away from death, but Choy thought of his wife and child who had perished in the Arduous March as a result of people like Pung. He picked Patrick’s gun up off the floor and spoke the official words of the executioner in North Korea.

  “This is how miserable fools end up. Traitors who betray their nation will meet the same fate.’” He took aim at Pung’s head. Pung just stared at him with unrepentant hatred until the top of his head flew off.

  Choy hurried over to attend to Patrick.

  “Shall I get a doctor?”

  “No. Let me just rest for a few minutes and get my balance back.” The two of them sat together in silence while the stragglers in the marathon entered the stadium to enthusiastic support from the gracious audience. After ten minutes of slow, deep breathing to replenish the oxygen in his bloodstream, Patrick took hold of the storage rack and slowly pulled himself up into a standing position. Choy purposely didn’t come to his aid; he wanted to make sure Patrick had a good sense of what he could and couldn’t do next. When Patrick was fully upright, he turned his head from side to side, testing his balance as he took a few steps forward.

  “Not too bad, actually,” he said. “I was expecting worse.”

  Choy chuckled. “You and your powers of recovery. You sure you don’t want to run a victory lap around the track?”

  Patrick smiled wearily and walked back to Choy. “Too old for that shit,” he muttered.

  Choy set Patrick’s gun down on a laundry storage rack, took a sheaf of paper from his back waistband, and handed it to Patrick. It was a hard copy of another file he had printed off the Sky Heart folder.

  “Before you go run any marathons, read this first. It lays out pretty clearly the whole plan they had for North Korea. All the attacks were an attempt to get the world to accept the China Solution. When that didn’t happen, they were going to kill the U.S. president and vice president so that the next person in line would approve it.”

  Patrick took the document and began reading. “Dillard was going to accept the China Solution when they attacked. If they had waited ten minutes, they could have gotten what they were after.” Patrick scanned through the rest of the printout of the Sky Heart file, shaking his head from side to side. “Just incredible.” He looked up at Choy.

  “When you say ‘they,’ do you mean General Liu and the People’s Liberation Army? I mean, how high up does this thing go?”

  “Hard to say just from these files. I haven’t seen anything that implicates Zhongnanhai directly. There’s a lot more files I’ll need to look at first to find that out. I had to go through over a hundred just to find this and the other one.”

  “Thanks for sticking with it.”

  Choy shrugged. “It’s what I’m here for.” He went over to the door and retrieved the sandwich he had dropped when he first came into the room.

  “Lunch? After all this?” Patrick asked.

  Choy nodded. “Plenty for both of us,” he said, dangling the paper bag.

  “I think my appetite’s going to need a little more time,” Patrick said with a laugh.

  Choy picked up Patrick’s gun off the storage rack and passed it to him.

  Patrick reached for it. “Leave the gun. Take the bulgogi.”

  Choy laughed. “Bastard. I’ve been waiting forever to use that line.”

  Outside in the hallway came the sound of footsteps. Patrick pointed his gun at the door, but then immediately lowered it when Kaga’s face appeared. He had one of the two Bong Boy “acrobats” handcuffed and walking in front of him and two other JIA agents. The youth hung his head to his chest.

  “This guy and another one were the backup execution team. They were going to machinegun the VIP box from the oculus if Casanova wasn’t successful. I shot the one called ‘Tyson.’ This guy wisely surrendered and came down on his own. Allow me to introduce ‘Dreamboy.’”

  Patrick walked over to the youth. “Do you know who you were working for?” Dreamboy continued to stare at the floor, saying nothing.

  “You were being used,” Patrick continued. He held the photo of General Liu Jintao under Dreamboy’s face. “You recognize this man, I’m sure.” Dreamboy looked at the photo and lifted his head. His eyes widened slightly.

  “Mister Lee,” he said in soft surprise.

  “‘Mister Lee’ is actually General Liu Jintao of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. He doesn’t care anything about your country, and he was willing to sacrifice you and all your friends.”

  Dreamboy looked up. His eyes narrowed as though assessing the truth of Patrick’s words. “What will happen to me?”

  “That’s up to the judicial system,” Kaga said, and signaled for the other two JIA agents to take Dreamboy away. Just as Patrick and Kaga were about to exchange high fives, Kaga got a call on his cell which he took and quickly hung up after answering. “That was Proctor. The drone is seventeen minutes away from the stadium.” They both ran out of the room and up to the stadium floor.

  CHAPTER 49

  Drawing on his years of experience as a drone operator, Tyler opened an app on his smartphone and began scanning. Whether from a command module at Creech AFB or from a smartphone, control of a drone makes use of electrons in motion, and Tyler was easily able to locate the Predator hovering at fifty thousand feet, seemingly in a holding pattern and waiting for its next command. But it was also possible that it had been preprogrammed to attack at a specific time. With adrenalin-heightened senses, he ran through a dozen possible scenarios in his head.

  Meanwhile, down in his mobile command center outside the stadium, Proctor got word that a laser radiation analysis of the drone taken from a fighter jet that got to within a thousand feet established that the UAV had no radioactive materials aboard. However, nothing could detect if an airborne vehicle carried chemical or germ agents such as anthrax spores which could be dispersed throughout the stadium via an aerosol cloud. After kicking himself a thousand times for going to the Vegas casino and having his phone hijacked, Tyler forced the guilt from his mind and went back on high alert. When Patrick spread the word on the mic network that the drone was not equipped with a nuclear weapon, Tyler ran through one possible outcome after another, all of them lethal in varying degrees. One such scenario had the Predator running out of fuel and crashing down somewhere in the Tokyo area with who-knows-what as its payload. Or it could very well have been programmed to go into a death-dive directly into the stadium. In any case, Tyler desperately needed to somehow deconflict the UAV and bring it down safely. But where?

  He decided to try and redirect the drone by jamming any satellite and land-originated control signals it might be receiving, followed by a GPS spoofing attack that fed the UAV false geopositional coordinates to force it down in an area of Tyler’s choosing instead of crashin
g into the stadium. His phone was equipped with an Avtobaza radar-jamming and deception system, a sophisticated form of signals intelligence. After establishing access to the drone’s avionics, he began feeding it spoofing signals that might possibly allow him to override its avionics programming—unless the system had been programmed not to accept any overrides. When the UAV didn’t respond after repeated attempts, he had his answer. The drone would not accept overrides. Unless…He opened a hidden app on his phone, one he had created that didn’t show up on the phone’s settings.

  ___________________

  One of Proctor’s team had calculated that if the drone were suddenly to be sent into a dive from its current height of just under fifty thousand feet, it would hit the ground within four minutes, leaving not nearly enough time to evacuate the Olympic stadium. A thoroughly unfamiliar sense of helplessness came over Proctor as he sat watching the radar monitor of the UAV as it went through its seemingly endless lazy circles nine miles above Tokyo. Sooner or later, it would run out of fuel and fall from the sky. The solution that ran through his mind was to destroy it at a high enough altitude that the debris would at least be dispersed over a wide area. He switched to a closed frequency and spoke to the base commander at Yokota AFB.

  “Prepare MIM-104 Patriot for immediate launch. Await my command.”

  Proctor kept that information from Hayashida. He just told the JIA director and everyone else that the drone was in a harmless hover at fifty thousand feet and to hope for the best.

  ___________________

  Tyler opened the hidden app on his phone, one he had created but never used before. Making use of the knowledge he had learned for his master’s in aerospace engineering, he had designed it after a disastrous mission in Afghanistan where a Sentinel drone was hard programmed to monitor Kandahar, when, without warning, a mayday came in from a squad stranded near the Helmand River about fifty miles away. The Sentinel was the closest UAV to the area, but since its course had been hard programmed, another Sentinel eighty miles away was called in to assist, but was too late on the scene to save the eleven men of the squad. A dark silence had filled the operation room at Creech after the squad was lost, and Tyler took it upon himself to try and prevent the same thing from happening again. The app was untested, but he could think of no alternatives if the Predator hovering above had been programmed to attack. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, fighting the instinct to panic and willing himself into what others had called his “human Quaalude mode.” After a minute of stilling his mind, he went back to his phone. Just then, a call went out on the mic network. The Predator was going into a full-engine dive. Ordinarily, Tyler would have been too late to control its descent. But not this time.