by David Archer
Noah nodded and leaned back against the bulkhead he was sitting beside. Neil leaned a little closer to him. “Did he just say this thing is made of fiberglass?”
“They’re not that uncommon,” Randy Mitchell said softly. “They call them smugglers’ subs. Drug smugglers use them in the Gulf of Mexico to bring dope up from South America. Very hard to spot, but they travel along at about three knots, just barely deep enough not to leave a wake behind them on the surface.”
Neil looked at him for a moment, then closed his eyes and leaned his head against his arms, which were propped on his knees. Except for a low whirring sound that must’ve been the electric motors, the interior of the vessel was almost completely silent.
“Wish it had portholes,” Jenny whispered. “I’ll bet there’s some beautiful fish out there.”
“Probably,” Noah said, “but even this little bit of light might show up on the surface if it did. For what they’re doing, it’s better to run dark and silent.”
Slipping past North Korean border security and naval patrols required the little submarine to swing out to the west a couple of miles before cutting back to the north, then turning east again to reach the shoreline. The entire voyage took nearly five hours at such a low speed, and all of them were delighted to get out of the vessel when it finally broke the surface.
A small but effective periscope was raised, scanning the shoreline. There was no sign of anyone observing, so the hatch was opened and the inflatable boat quickly carried up the ladder. An electric air pump was passed up, and five minutes later Noah and the others were told it was time to disembark.
As quietly as they could, they climbed up the ladder and onto the boat, each of them carrying the small duffels they had been provided, and slipped into the boat as it lay atop the hull. Two of the men expertly pushed it off and jumped in, and one of them took the tiller. The motors came to life as the submarine hatch closed, and the vessel sank beneath the surface before they had gone twenty yards.
The next fifteen minutes were nerve-racking, as they were completely exposed on the open water. The nearer they got to shore, however, the less it became likely that anyone would spot them bobbing across the waves. The boat ran up onto a muddy shoreline, and both teams quickly got out and made their way to the undercut bank.
“Wait until you hear a diesel motor stop just above you,” said the man who had stayed in the bow. “That will be your ride into Pyongyang. When you are ready to return, they will bring you back to this place and we will watch for you each day at this time. Good fortune to you.”
He pushed the boat out into the water and jumped in, and the two of them were gone.
The teams waited less than twenty minutes before the sound of the diesel engine could be heard approaching, and when it stopped almost directly above them, Noah stood and peeked over the bank. An enclosed truck stood on a gravel roadway that ran along the shore just above the bank, and two men were standing beside it sharing a cigarette. One of them spotted Noah’s face and reached up to open a door on the side of the cargo compartment, then looked at Noah and nodded.
“That’s our ride,” Noah said, and then he was up and over the bank. The rest followed, jogging low until they got to the truck and then hopping inside. The door closed and left them in darkness, but it was easy to find places to sit behind what appeared to be hanging bales of produce. A moment after the door was closed, the truck began moving again.
This leg of their journey took another ninety minutes, and the truck seemed to stop often. Each time, the teams prepared themselves for discovery, but the doors never opened. The truck would start moving again, and the whole thing would be repeated a few minutes later.
“Stop signs,” Neil muttered, “or maybe traffic lights.”
“Long as that’s all it is, I’m happy,” Marco said.
Finally, the truck drove slowly along for several minutes and then came to a stop. They heard the cab doors open and close, and then the side door swung away to let the midday sunlight come in. One of the men looked inside and smiled.
“This where you go,” he said. “Safe house. We come back every day this time, see when you ready to leave.”
Once again, Noah led the way and hopped out of the truck. The “safe house” appeared to be a run-down shack surrounded by several small gardens and a number of chickens scratching at the ground. A young Korean woman stood in the doorway of the shack, motioning for them to hurry inside, so they did so.
She closed the door as the truck drove away and turned to look at them. “I am Soo Mi. You already know who I work for, so we don’t need to go into that. Follow me and I’ll show you where you can rest for a while. You’re probably exhausted.” They followed her through the little shack to what appeared to be a kitchen, with a tiny gas stove and an ancient refrigerator sitting next to a sink with a pair of ancient faucets. She turned one of the knobs on the stove and lit the burner with a match, then grabbed it and swung it aside.
“The knob controls the locking mechanism,” she said. “Nobody would ever think of that, because they’d smell the gas when they turn it.”
“Isn’t that cute?” Randy asked. He looked at Soo Mi and grinned flirtatiously. “Almost as cute as you.”
The girl grinned back, and didn’t even object when Randy crowded in close to her, obviously grabbing her butt for a second. While this might be considered some form of sexual harassment in other situations, men and women in the assassination business tend to have a cavalier attitude about such things. Should the opportunity arise, the two of them might act on the obviously mutual interest, but they also knew that the mission had to come first. Soo Mi just rolled her eyes and pointed down, where a hole had opened up under where the stove normally sat.
A ladder led down into a cellar, and she went down it first and turned on a light. When the others had followed, she showed them a set of wooden shelves, and how to press on a particular bolt head to make it swing away and reveal a door into another room. She led them inside and they were surprised to find what looked like a nicely furnished hidden apartment with a small kitchen much nicer than the one upstairs. There were two other rooms that each held four bunks, and a smaller one that had a single full-sized bed.
“I call dibs on the bed,” Jenny said quickly.
Soo Mi smiled at her. “If they don’t give it to you, let me know. I’ll kick their butts.”
“Oh, deary, don’t worry,” Jenny replied with a saucy grin. “They all know better than to mess with me.”
“Okay.” She pointed to a panel on the wall beside where they had entered. “That’s an intercom that reaches upstairs to me. If you need something, push the red button and wait for me to answer. That button makes the lights upstairs flicker, and that signals me that you need to talk to me. The yellow button opens the door we came in through, and there’s a rope hanging beside the ladder. Pull that rope, and you can push the stove out of the way without turning on the burner.”
She turned and indicated the refrigerator and cabinets. “I keep that pretty well stocked, so you should be able to find plenty to eat. There’s also some soft drinks and coffee, can’t do without those.”
She pointed one more time, at a very small door that stood beside the sink. “Bathroom is in there, and it’s small, but the shower has great pressure and hot water. Don’t worry about making noise, unless you plan to sing opera or something. This whole thing is pretty soundproof, but nothing is perfect.” She pointed at some boxes that were sitting against one wall. “Weapons and explosives. The big box holds seven IWI Tavors, each with six 30-round magazines. The smaller one has a dozen grenades and six blocks of C4 with radio-controlled detonators and a trigger transmitter. Oh, and there’s a couple of Colt .45’s upstairs that I can spare, and I’ve got a couple mags for each of those.” She looked around at them. “Any questions?”
Jenny raised her hand again. “I got one. I’m just wondering how you learned to speak English so clearly?”
“Oh, th
at’s easy,” Soo Mi said with a smile. “I grew up in Bakersfield. My grandparents moved away from here during the Korean War, and settled in California. When I was recruited by the CIA, it was specifically to come back to my family’s homeland and run this place for them.” She made a happy little face. “But you no worry, I do good Korean accent, too. Even speak language, learn from grandparents.”
Jenny squealed with delight and clapped her hands. “Oh, that was so cute,” she said.
Neil looked at Noah and rolled his eyes. “Boss,” he said softly, so only Noah could hear, “please tell me we’re not gonna be stuck with this woman for good.”
“Nothing to worry about on that score,” Noah said just as softly. “Allison says she’s almost as good as we are at getting the mission done, so she wants to get her back out on her own as soon as possible. If it hadn’t been for the screw-up in Bangkok, we’d probably never have worked with her at all.”
“Then that’s two reasons I’ve got for wanting to kill whoever did this to Sarah!”
EIGHT
The spaghetti had been absolutely fantastic. Who would have ever believed that Chinese cooks could turn out such wonderful Italian food? The Parmesan cheese had been some of the best she had ever tasted, the sauce had been awesome, and the garlic bread—there just weren’t words.
Chung had been her only dinner companion, which she had expected. He was indeed one of the most charming men she had ever met, but she didn’t let herself forget that it was only a role he was sent to play. His job was to try to woo her to the point that she would be willing to tell him what he wanted to know, but she was determined not to let that happen. While some people considered China to be one of the U.S.’s allies, Sarah wasn’t the political sort and didn’t really care. What mattered to her was that anything she said might end up harming Noah or Neil. As for Marco, she was privately convinced he had to have been the one to sell her out. If she could finagle her way into a chance to relieve him of his manhood, she was fairly sure she’d be more than willing to do it. She might even be willing to seduce him, at least as far as getting his pants down. After that, it’d be all up to the knife.
The new room she’d been assigned was also pretty wonderful. A big, fluffy bed, a TV with satellite service, so she could actually find channels she could understand, chairs that she could be comfortable in, its own bathroom—one of the nicest jail cells she could ever imagine, but there was no doubt that’s what it was. Two soldiers stood guard outside her door, and there were four of them on the ground outside her windows. If she tried to leave, Chung had warned her, they had orders to take her alive. Unfortunately, that didn’t mean unhurt. The guards were experts at aiming for the legs, he’d explained.
Still, she’d had the best night’s sleep she’d gotten since the whole mission began. She had looked in the closet and dresser and found clothing that was close enough to her size, including a very comfortable nightgown. She had run herself a bath and soaked in it until it got cold, then crawled in under the big comforter on the bed and was shortly dreaming.
The dream wasn’t disturbing, but she found herself lying next to Noah. She had wrapped her arms around him the way she always did, and felt his hand clasp hers, pulling her arm tighter. That was something she always loved when he did it, but it was only when he was sleeping. She enjoyed the feeling for the fleeting moment it lasted before the dream faded out.
Sarah had awakened refreshed and taken care of morning necessities before slipping on a dress and a new pair of sandals. It was only a few minutes later that Chung knocked on her door, and he smiled appreciatively when he saw her.
“My goodness,” he said, “but you do look lovely this morning. Compared to you, I look like I fell out of bed and landed in a pile of my dirty laundry.”
Sarah gave him a sarcastic grin. “Very funny,” she said. “You look like you’re dressed for a business meeting or something. Why the suit and tie? Going somewhere today?”
Chung’s eyes went wide, and he looked down at himself before turning back to her. “Is this not the way a man should dress if he expects to be in the company of a lovely young lady? Or have all of my American etiquette books become outdated?”
“Okay, now I know you’re pulling my leg,” Sarah said. “Nobody would use an etiquette book today, they’d just look things up on the Internet. And if you did that, you’d find out that the only time a guy gets dressed up for a girl is if he’s taking her out on some kind of fancy date, like to a restaurant or something. Not just to hang out and interrogate her.”
Chung couldn’t keep the smile off his face. “Why is it that you see through me so easily? Is that something you were trained in? Psychology, perhaps?”
Sarah just shook her head. “Okay, so what are we doing today? What devious plan have you come up with to try to get information out of me that I have no intention of revealing, even if I know it?”
“Well, I thought we might begin with breakfast, if that’s all right with you.” He stepped aside and extended his elbow. “Would you care to accompany me to the dining room?”
Sarah rolled her eyes, but tucked a hand inside his elbow and let him lead her to the dining room once again. A pair of Chinese girls, different ones from those who had served them the night before, placed bowls of rice and cream before them both, and Sarah found it delicious.
They chatted about simple things while they ate, such as what kinds of movies Sarah liked to watch, and her choices in music and reading. The conversation was pleasant. Sarah knew that it would become more serious at some point, and that no matter how charming he might be, Chung was still an interrogator. Sooner or later, if she failed to give him what he wanted, he would be forced to resort to less pleasant tactics.
When breakfast was over, Chung invited her to walk in the courtyard again. They strolled around for a few minutes, and then sat on a lovely wooden bench. There, in a Chinese garden, Sarah found herself wishing that Noah was with her.
“Will you tell me your thoughts?” Chung asked.
Sarah looked at him with a sad smile. “I was just thinking of my fiancé,” she said. “He probably thinks I’m dead.”
Chung’s face looked sad. “I am very sorry about that,” he said. “Unfortunately, that is beyond my control. And yet, I am surprised that someone employed as you are pursues a romantic relationship. Does he know what you do?”
She started to say that of course he did, but caught herself. “No,” she said, turning to look at a tree in a different direction from his face. “He knows I travel a lot, but that’s all. Under circumstances like these, the plan is to let him think I was kidnapped by some local gangsters or something like that. That way, if I turn up alive, we can always say I got lucky.”
Chung was silent for a moment, then touched her shoulder. “Is it difficult? To have such a relationship, when you must keep so many secrets?”
The answer came easily to her, because she had wondered about that back when she had first been recruited. How would someone like her have a relationship, if it was with someone who didn’t know about E & E?
“Well, he knows I work for the government, but he thinks I’m just kind of a messenger. When we started dating, I had to explain to him that I wasn’t allowed to talk about what I do, and he said that didn’t matter. It wasn’t my job he wanted to date, anyway.”
“Ah,” Chung said. “That sounds very wise.”
Sarah turned and looked at him. “What about you? Are you married? Got a girlfriend?”
He shook his head. “Unfortunately, the position I hold does not allow me to have any personal entanglements. It is considered to be a security risk, since a foreign agent might use someone I care for against me. To help you understand, imagine that your fiancé was in our custody. If one of my advisers were to threaten him if you did not answer a question, would you not feel the need to protect him?”
Sarah let her face go cold. “Is that some kind of threat?”
Chung’s eyes were suddenly wide as he
tried to portray the picture of innocence. “Oh, no, no, no,” he said. “I was merely trying to illustrate the reason why I am not allowed to have a girlfriend or wife. I can assure you that we know nothing about your personal life, or who your fiancé might be. In fact, I give you my solemn promise that I will never even reveal that you have mentioned him. He will have nothing to fear, I promise you.”
“But aren’t you required to report what we talk about? I wouldn’t want you to get into trouble.”
Slowly, he let himself smile again. “There is no reason to worry about me,” he said. “I have been given considerable autonomy in dealing with you. If you share something with me that I believe should not be reported, I have the authority to keep it secret, between us.”
Sarah nodded. “A way to build my trust in you, right?” She slowly smiled at him. “You are definitely a charmer, I’ll give you that. The thing is, Chung, I really don’t think I know anything that’s going to be important enough to keep your—what did you call them, advisers?—from deciding to use whatever kind of torture techniques are popular with them these days.” She turned and looked across the courtyard again. “One of the first things they explain to you when you take a job like mine is that if you’re ever captured, you are almost certainly going to die. You and I both know that’s what’s going to happen to me, in the long run.”
She felt his fingers gently touch the back of her hand as it lay on her thigh. “Sarah,” he said softly, “here is something you may believe. I do not wish to see you tortured, and so I shall do all that I can to prevent that from happening. For as long as I can, I will contrive to keep you with me.”
She looked at him again, and this time he saw the doubt in her face. “Chung, why would you do that? The only thing that could do is blow up in your face, and then mine. Yes, you’re very charming, but I am not interested in living my life inside these walls. Sooner or later, you’ll have to let me go, and then other men will do whatever they think it takes to break me. That’s how this game works, remember?”
