The Armageddon Machine
Page 13
Chapter Twelve
Seoul, South Korea
June 1 -- 00:30 UTC/9:30 am local time
In the dim conference room David Diehl sat on one side of a long conference table with Agent Norwalk and Captain Violet Rhee. On the other side of the table were five senior officers of the National Intelligence Service, including Commander Choi Junseo. Everyone at the table had their chair turned so they could see the west wall of the room, where various images were being projected as Commander Choi spoke aloud, describing what they were seeing in heavily accented English. Agent Norwalk stirred a packet of sugar into his coffee, his eyes hollow and surrounded by dark circles. He hadn’t gotten much sleep in the past two days.
“What have you found out about the guys who killed Sergeant Jung?” Agent Norwalk spoke, interrupting Commander Choi midsentence.
David looked from Agent Norwalk to Commander Choi. They had received few answers on the identity of the men involved in the firefight on the day Sergeant Jung had lost his life.
“Yes; one moment, please,” Commander Choi said.
Choi riffled through some papers on the table in front of him, clearing his throat with a sound that sounding like a low-throttling engine.
“Here,” Commander Choi said, pulling one sheet out of a small pile of them. “The men were all identified through a combination of fingerprints and tattoos. They belonged to two rival criminal organizations, what you would call street gangs. Seoul gang squad believes they were meeting in Seongnam to smooth settle a territorial dispute between the two gangs. The meeting didn’t go as smoothly as planned, evidently.”
One of the men on Commander Choi’s side of the table laughed.
“Wait,” Agent Norwalk said. “What does this gang dispute have to do with Dragon’s Breath?”
“As far as we can tell…nothing,” Commander Choi said.
“So what happened--Sergeant Jung’s death--it was all for nothing, then.”
Agent Norwalk took a drink of his coffee. An uncomfortable silence filled the room for a moment. Commander Choi cleared his throat again, replaced the sheet of paper back to the pile from whence it came, and turned back to the projections on the wall. He updated them all on the latest NIS intelligence. Most of it was just rehashing what they already knew, and David started to drift away, but he sat up to attention when Commander Choi showed an aerial photograph of Tianjin and began relating what the NIS knew of what had gone down there three days previously.
“They completely closed the port for two days?” David asked.
“Yes,” Commander Choi said. “The port was reopened yesterday afternoon, though the Navy destroyer CNS Shenyang is still patrolling the waters nearby.”
“And they had an entire Marine battalion present for those two days, searching ships?” David continued, his eyes taking on a faraway look as the wheels turned in his head.
“Correct, along with civilian members of various border and port protection agencies. The Marines still have a heavy presence around the port, and the Anti-Smuggling Bureau has about doubled their own presence there.”
“Did they find what they were looking for?” Captain Rhee spoke up.
“I don’t think they did,” David said. “The Marines are still there, they’re beefing up their Anti-Smuggling force, and that destroyer is still prowling around. Sounds like they didn’t find anything, but they aren’t convinced yet that there isn’t something there to be found.”
“And they were looking for…” Agent Norwalk started.
“Dragon’s Breath,” David finished. “Those Violet Dawn bastards must have tried to smuggle it out through the Port of Tianjin.”
“Yes, we already thought of this,” Commander Choi interjected. “The Coast Guard has a list of ships that have left Tianjin in the past week. We don’t have enough manpower to search every one of these ships, so they are stopping and searching ships randomly as they come into our ports. As for ships that are headed for the North, or elsewhere, there is nothing we can do about them. Another complication is that we don’t really know what we are looking for. We must consider the possibility that Dragon’s Breath was extracted from its original containment vessel. If so, what does it look like now? How large is it? Could it be concealed as an everyday object? At the present time we don’t have any answers to these questions.”
“So if Violet Dawn did smuggle it out on a boat through the Port of Tianjin, it’s entirely possible we won’t be able to prevent it from going wherever it is intended to go?” Agent Norwalk asked.
“Possible, yes,” Commander Choi answered. “To be completely honest, perhaps it is even likely.”
“Well, at least we have one bit of good news out of this,” David said.
“What’s that?” Violet Rhee asked.
“I wasn’t convinced that the theft of Dragon’s Breath wasn’t just a cover, and that the Chinese weren’t actively aiding Violet Dawn. If the Chinese are willing to close down an entire port for two days to conduct a search operation of ships before allowing them to leave, it means that they are very serious about finding this thing before it leaves their borders.”
“Good point, Agent Diehl,” Commander Choi said. “However, this does not mean that there are not certain elements within the Chinese government or military who are acting in collusion with Violet Dawn.”
“That’s true. But if there are, they don’t have a free hand. If they did, they would never have allowed the port to be closed. That’s good news.”
Commander Choi nodded his head, conceding the point.
There was a knock at the door and a young woman ducked her head in and spoke a few words to Commander Choi in Korean. He gave a short response before the woman back out.
“Gentlemen, Captain, that will be all for now,” Commander Choi said, breaking up the meeting. “I’m afraid that I must attend to a pressing matter.”
Commander Choi gathered up his papers nodded his head in the general direction of Captain Rhee before leaving the meeting room. One of the men who had sat near Commander Choi shut off the projector. David, Agent Norwalk and Captain Rhee left the meeting room together.
“I don’t know about you guys,” David said. “But I’m hungry enough to eat a horse. Captain Rhee, do you know of any good Korean places around here?”
“Nope,” Captain Rhee said, unfazed by David’s lame attempt at humor. “But I know a great place to get a slice of pizza.”
“I’m not hungry,” Agent Norwalk said. “I think I’ll stick around here.”
David and Violet Rhee left and Agent Norwalk head to the cafeteria for refill on his cup of coffee. He was angry at the absurdity of Sergeant Jung losing his life simply because they had stumbled upon a turf war between two street gangs. There was one welcome development to come out of the whole affair, however. Both Agent Norwalk and David had been given back their sidearms.