Rules of Engagement

by David Bruns

  Riley’s gaze went from Goodwin to Ramirez and finally rested on Janet. A warm feeling of pride filled Janet. Her team did this. Her team.

  Riley rubbed his jaw and smiled. “Well done, Midshipmen, dinner’s on me tonight.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Beijing, People’s Republic of China

  Rafiq peered through the smudged warehouse window into the grimy Beijing night. The air outside was a choking blend of smog and airborne dust blown in from the Gobi Desert. Car headlights from the never-ending traffic on the S30 Jingjin Expressway crawled along a mere stone’s throw from the window. Beyond the highway, the details of the twenty-foot-high double fences topped by razor wire were completely obscured by the thick atmosphere.

  China’s infamous Unit 61398 was housed there. A shadowy branch of the Chinese military, this elite unit was responsible for some of the most notable hacks in recent history, including The New York Times, the European Central Bank, and the US government’s Office of Personnel Management. This was the group everyone loved to hate, the group everyone in the world would be happy to blame for causing a cybercatastrophe. More importantly, Unit 61398 was in charge of cybersecurity for the entire Chinese military command and control network, a gateway to the crown jewels of the People’s Liberation Army forces.

  But how to get inside their impenetrable network? Rafiq had pondered this problem during his years as a guest of the Supreme Leader. For what he had in mind, he needed to upload gigabytes of code. Even assuming he managed to break in via a cyberattack, getting that much data on their servers undetected would be impossible.

  Unless he was already inside.

  The idea had come to him in a clash of two random events. During his indoctrination into North Korean culture, Rafiq had been shown the tunnels North Korean soldiers had dug under the DMZ into South Korea in the 1970s. The tunnels were two meters high, and wide enough for two soldiers to march side by side. The idea was to break through to the surface far beyond the well-guarded DMZ, putting hundreds of DPRK soldiers behind South Korean lines in advance of a military attack. The idea ultimately failed, but the concept stuck with Rafiq.

  Then, one afternoon not long before Pak brought him the Russian assignment, Rafiq passed a group of maintenance workers digging up the street in front of the Pyongyang Covert Actions Division headquarters. They had just opened a junction box with a Chinese label on the cover. The interior was filled with fiber-optic connections.

  Rafiq told his driver to stop, and he got out. The foreman of the work crew, a wizened man with only a few wisps of silvery hair, nodded to Rafiq as he approached, curious what this foreigner dressed like a North Korean wanted.

  “Where do these fiber-optic lines go?” Rafiq asked in his accented Korean.

  The man pointed to the Covert Actions building.

  “You can access any line going into that building?”

  The man shrugged.

  “Show me,” Rafiq said.

  For the next half hour, Rafiq watched as the IT worker in the crew attached an adapter to each line and measured the signal.

  “If I wanted to, I could read this traffic?” Rafiq asked.

  The IT worker seemed glad to be the center of attention. “If it’s unencrypted, you could read it.”

  “What about upload? Could I send a file on this line?”

  The IT worker shook his head. “Not on this line, but you could use one of the spare lines as long as it was connected on the other end.”

  “Show me.”

  The man pointed to the box. “We always draw extra cable and hook them up. That way when we do an expansion, we have the capacity ready to go without having to lay new cable.”

  By the time Rafiq got back to his car, he knew how he was going to hack the Chinese.

  The shrill beep-beep-beep of the Caterpillar loader backing up interrupted his reverie. The loader parked, and the operator shut down the engine. In the sudden stillness, Rafiq could hear the steady drone of traffic noises.

  He smiled to himself. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens had passed by this warehouse over the past three days and not a one of them could imagine what kind of crimes were being perpetrated behind these walls.

  But first they had to dig.

  He made his way to the table in the center of the warehouse floor, next to a six-foot square hole cut into the concrete. A ladder disappeared into the depths.

  He nodded to the man on duty, an impassive North Korean soldier dressed in the clothes of a common laborer. A dirt-smudged drawing was spread over a piece of plywood suspended on a pair of sawhorses. “Where are we?” Rafiq said.

  The man stabbed his finger on a city map of the area with underground utilities in dotted lines. A red pencil line was drawn across the highway outside. “Another hour more, maybe two,” he said.

  “Good. Wake up the tech team. Tell them to be ready to go.”

  The man nodded and stalked away. A second soldier, bare to the waist, climbed out of the hole carrying a load of dirt on his back. He dumped it in the bucket of the waiting Caterpillar. Rafiq wrinkled his nose as the man passed him. Last night, the digging team had mistaken a sewer pipe for their destination and raw sewage had partially flooded the tunnel.

  It took his team three hours to put a patch on the pipe. The amount of human waste, dead animals, fish carcasses, and all manner of other filth that entered the tunnel during that time was overwhelming, but they kept digging after the hole was patched. Twelve hours later, the heavy stench remained.

  Rafiq swung down the ladder and squatted to inspect the narrow conveyor belt his team had set up to move dirt out of the tunnel. He breathed through his mouth to avoid gagging on the smell.

  The tunnel itself was about four feet square. A tight fit for his frame, but a breeze for the shorter-statured North Koreans.

  Getting his team into China had been the riskiest part of the operation so far. These were soldiers, raised in a totalitarian culture, with no concept of how “normal” people acted. Still, with the number of people he needed to dig a tunnel and hack the fiber-optic network, it was too big a risk to use native Chinese. Someone would talk.

  So, while he’d come into China under a false passport as a Canadian businessman, his team had crossed the China–North Korea border disguised as laborers and driven north to Beijing in the back of a truck.

  He picked up the radio hanging on a ladder rung and called for the conveyor belt to stop. Clearing a space off the belt, Rafiq stretched out on his belly. The belt reversed direction, drawing him into the tunnel.

  A single light illuminated the two men at the end of the downward-sloping tunnel. One dug, the other loaded the loose dirt onto the belt. Smiles formed white slashes in their dirty faces. Rafiq willed himself not to gag, but these two men seemed unaffected by the smell.

  “Almost there,” one said.

  Rafiq nodded. He’d paid a small fortune for this warehouse and a copy of the underground schematics. If they were off by as little as a few feet, they would miss the concrete pipe housing the fiber-optic lines. The incident with the sewer pipe worried him. He’d allowed his enthusiasm to cloud his judgment. It would not happen again.

  “Continue,” Rafiq said. He squeezed to the front and picked up a spare shovel, hacking at the thick clay. He lost track of time as he sweated and breathed in the dank air, rich with the smell of human waste.

  His shovel struck something solid. Rafiq exchanged a glance with his digging companion and they both redoubled their efforts. Soon they had the side of a concrete pipe exposed. It was smooth and professionally finished. This had to be it.

  “Bring down the concrete saw,” Rafiq said to the man moving dirt onto the conveyor.

  * * *

  Three hours later, they’d cut a two-foot-square plug out of the concrete pipe, careful to angle the edges so the piece could be replaced and sealed. The ground around the pipe was soupy from the water they’d supplied to the concrete saw, which only added to the sewage aroma. Rafiq’s
ears rang from the scream of the machine, but he didn’t care.

  Yun So-won arrived on the conveyor belt, holding a small plastic suitcase. She slipped into the narrow hole, shimmying out of sight. “I can see the junction box,” she said, her voice muffled.

  Rafiq stuck his head in the hole. She was ten feet forward. All he could see was the bottom of her shoes and the halo of her headlamp.

  He wanted to be there, wanted to watch her probe each connection, but there was no space for him. The success of the entire operation rested on the shoulders of a twenty-four-year-old North Korean girl who until last week had never left Pyongyang.

  He heard her crack open the case. “I’m going to start,” she said.

  “Okay.” Rafiq’s voice stuck in his throat, so the response came out like a croak.

  If he angled his head just so, he could almost see her clamp a device on a fiber-optic line. “Active,” she said. She repeated the process until finally she said, “Dark.”

  Rafiq held his breath as she connected her suitcase to the junction box. Another interminable minute passed before she said, “I’m in.”

  Rafiq let out a sigh.

  “Come,” he said, pulling a thumb drive from a lanyard around his neck. She wriggled backwards until their hands touched.

  He heard her slip the drive into the USB slot and tap the keys of her panel. “Uploading,” she called.

  Rafiq held his breath. If they were going to be discovered, this was the moment. Two minutes passed … four minutes … eight minutes. He lost track of time.

  “It’s done,” she said.

  * * *

  Rafiq emerged from the hole in the warehouse floor and turned to offer So-won his hand as she stepped off the ladder. Mud plastered his body from the waist down, and he smelled like a public toilet. The entire team gathered around the hole, watching him.

  He held up her hand like he was announcing a winner at a boxing match and let out a shout of approval. The group stared at him. They’d never seen Rafiq show any positive emotion before.

  Then they raised their hands and screamed along with him.

  When they stopped, the only sound was the roar of the Beijing traffic outside the warehouse window.

  “Fill in this hole,” Rafiq said. “It’s time to go home.”

  CHAPTER 15

  CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  Brendan slid into his seat next to Baxter in the secure conference room and accepted a stack of three dossiers from his former boss.

  “Here’s the guys you’re going to meet,” Baxter said. “Good operators, but private companies sometimes have lower standards on behavior, so calibrate your expectations.”

  “Well, I guess once you’re no longer an officer, you don’t need to do the gentleman part either,” Brendan replied.

  Baxter gave a short laugh and shot an inquiring look at the videoteleconference technician.

  “Still waiting on the team from Brazil, sir.”

  “All right, just put up the other two teams for now,” Baxter said. “If the third team shows up, you can patch them in.”

  The screen lit up with two faces. Brendan shuffled the dossiers so the order of the files matched the lineup on the screen.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” said a square-jawed black man. Nigel Okumbe, his file read. Former Delta Force operator.

  “Greetings, gentlemen,” Baxter said. “We’re waiting on one more to join us, if you can stand by for a few minutes.”

  The second man nodded but said nothing. Brendan checked his file. Soohan Kim, former SEAL.

  “I assume you’re waiting for Dickie Davis, sir?” said Nigel. “I heard he was your man in South America. If I know Dickie—and I do—he’s knee deep in some—”

  The third screen lit up and a red-haired man with white, freckled skin appeared. “Aw, fuck you, Nigel. I thought I was going to work with some quality contractors this time.”

  Brendan started to smile, but a look at Baxter told him his boss did not find Davis’s banter amusing. He scanned the file on Richard Davis. Washed out of Air Force Combat Controller training, left the service after four years to join the former Blackwater group. Investigated for excessive use of force in Iraq, but no charges filed. A note at the bottom of his file listed BASE jumping and free-diving as his hobbies. An adrenaline junkie.

  Baxter cleared his throat. “Gentlemen, let’s start again. Now that your teams are in position, we’ll have a weekly meeting to update you with any new intel on Roshed. To my right is your briefer today, Captain Brendan McHugh. Brendan has had personal experience with Roshed. If we get immediate actionable intelligence, he will get it to you via secure comms.”

  Brendan picked up the briefing. “Roshed’s last known location was Africa and we believe he still maintains a strong network there. He also has ties with Hezbollah, so we’ve placed another team in Lebanon. Our analysis shows Roshed has been hiding out in North Korea, acting as a special projects man for the Kim Jong-un regime. In this capacity, he travels outside the DPRK. That’s where you come in.”

  “So why am I fucking off down here in South America then?” Davis said.

  Brendan frowned. “In the mission briefing material provided to your company, it says that Roshed has family in northern Argentina. Two kids.”

  “No wife?”

  Nigel rolled his eyes, and Brendan gritted his teeth. “Wife was killed when the Iranians tried to roll him up a few years back.”

  “Oh,” Davis said.

  “We’ve got continuous surveillance on all modes of transit exiting North Korea. If we pick him up on the outside, we will task one of your teams to go after him.”

  Baxter broke in, clearly annoyed by Davis’s lack of preparation. “I want to make one thing clear. This is a kill mission, but we require positive proof of Roshed’s death before payment is made. You have biometric kits. We require pictures, DNA, fingerprints, the whole shebang. It’s all in the kit, so no mistakes.”

  All three nodded.

  Davis spoke up. “So that’s it? We’re just going to sit and hope he comes out of his hidey-hole?”

  Brendan could feel Baxter bristling again.

  “This is not Pakistan and Osama bin Laden,” Brendan said, working to keep the irritation out of his tone. “There’s no way we could do a clean op in North Korea. They’re nuclear-capable now and the Supreme Leader is bold enough to threaten to pop one off if he thinks he’s being attacked.”

  Davis shook his head. “That’s not what I’m talking about, Brian.”

  “Brendan.”

  “Whatever. Listen, we hold the keys to the kingdom. Let’s make him come to us.”

  Brendan and Baxter exchanged glances. Baxter’s dark skin was flushed with anger.

  Davis held up his palms to the camera. “Hear me out here, Baxter. We have his kids, right?”

  “We’re not using his children as bait,” Baxter replied.

  “Not what I’m talking about,” Davis said. “What if we picked up some random North Korean diplomat”—he waggled his fingers as air quotes—“and rough him up a little. Then we tell him to deliver a message to the Supreme Leader’s pet that we’re coming for his kids.”

  “Too risky,” Baxter said. “We would be letting the regime know that we’ve located Roshed.”

  “We don’t even know if he cares about his kids anymore,” Brendan said.

  Nigel broke in. “Wait a minute, Brendan. Your intel package says he sends flowers to his wife’s grave every year on the anniversary of her death, right? That doesn’t sound like a man who’s given up his family. Isn’t it at least worth a shot? It might flush him out in a way that we can use to our advantage.”

  “I’m not authorizing you to use a man’s children as bait!” Baxter said.

  Davis gave an exaggerated wink at the camera. “Got it, boss. We are directed to sit like good little boys and wait for an international terrorist to come to our town.”

  Nigel and Kim stayed silent.

 
“Dammit, Davis, you listen to me—”

  “Easy, Baxter, I’m just messing with you.” Davis’s tone was not convincing.

  As they ended the call, Brendan noticed that Baxter was gripping the edge of the table.

  CHAPTER 16

  Chinese frigate Yangcheng 10 miles off the Senkaku Island cluster

  Captain Li Sandai pushed through the door onto the bridge of his ship. His ship.

  Finally, after twelve years of groveling and fighting for scraps, he had his first command at sea. First in his graduating class at Dalian Naval Academy to get a command pin. Not bad for a boy from Wuhan who’d never seen the ocean until he joined the PLA Navy.

  “Report, Mr. Wei,” he snapped. The key to command was to be unpredictable, make his crew think he was watching them as individuals. Keep them on their toes. Then they would respect him.

  “No surface contacts within ten thousand meters, Captain,” the officer of the deck replied from the red-lit bridge. The sun had gone down only a few minutes ago, and Li noted with satisfaction that his OOD had already rigged for night running.

  “Very well,” he said as he strode onto the bridge wing.

  This command wasn’t much as far as ships went—only a frigate, after all—but he’d turn this into a platform to really launch his career. After two years of command, he’d secure a shore tour in Beijing at the People’s Liberation Army Navy headquarters. From those contacts, he could get command of a cruiser. Maybe even an aircraft carrier someday.

  The line of the horizon was clear against the darkening sky. The stars were just starting to gain real brightness.

  “Mr. Wei,” he called into the bridge. “Set a course to take us within five miles of the Diaoyus.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” came the prompt reply.

  The ship heeled to starboard and the engines thrummed under Captain Li’s feet. A white wave curled out from the bow as the Yangcheng—his ship—cut through the water. He smiled into the freshening wind.