“Same thing.”
“Should we pursue?” crackled David’s voice over the open mike.
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” said Nang. “We’re outnumbered, and the DMZ is less than ten kilometers away. We’d have a tough time stopping them before they reach it.”
“Agreed,” said Alton. He studied the troops until they disappeared from sight, then confirmed with Nang that the entire North Korean force had withdrawn. “Now back to Silva,” he said, “before it’s too late.”
CHAPTER 29
Alton’s chest heaved. Frigid air penetrating his lungs rendered breathing all the more difficult. And as he pushed through forest debris and the occasional snow drift, pain shot through his damaged leg. But he couldn’t stop, not until he reached Silva. He’d had enough soldiers die under his command and would do all he could to keep that tally from rising.
Mallory looked back at her husband. “You okay?”
“Yeah, keep going. I’ll catch up.”
Moments later, Alton reached the site of a massive explosion. Snow had been stripped from branches, and soil-brown blast marks extended from a shallow crater located a few dozen yards from Silva’s prostrate form.
Alton limped across the blast site and reached the rest of his team, who crowded around Silva. O’Neil had removed a field dressing from its wrapper and kneeled down to apply its thick gauze pad to an evil gash running across the right side of Silva’s scalp.
“Heads wounds are always bleeders,” said the former soldier. He cinched the bandage’s twin wraps into a tight knot on the back of Silva’s head. “It needs pressure to stop the bleeding.”
“Good thing you brought the supplies,” said Alton.
“Yeah, I used to be the medic’s backup in my Special Forces days. Figured it wouldn’t hurt to be prepared, so I packed the standard med kit.”
“Good thinking.” Alton nodded. He leaned around David to get a closer look. “Where else is she injured?”
O’Neil exhaled and shook his head. “All over: neck, right arm, stomach, right thigh. If she hadn’t ducked behind a tree at the last second…”
Moving past David, Alton took his first good look at his wounded teammate. Blood oozed from dozens of scratches and several larger wounds. “We need to get her to a hospital.”
“I’ll take her,” said O’Neil. “After all, I have the medical training.”
“Go. Take one of the SUVs.”
“Corporal Ru can drive,” said Nang, turning to O’Neil. “That way, you can finish the first aid in transit.”
“Roger. There’s Woundseal in the med kit. I’ll use that on the way. Once I drop her off, I’ll be back as soon as I can.” O’Neil scooped up his fallen comrade. He cradled her in his arms and strode towards the personnel carrier with Ru at his side.
Alton watched them depart, then took a moment to survey the windswept surroundings. “Wait…this spot. It wasn’t on our line of advance. We’re closer to the Northerners’’ line than ours.”
David shook his head. “Yep. The commie RPG guy was lighting it up. Silva advanced towards the enemy line—said she was gonna try to take him out. He must have seen her and fired point blank. Like O’Neil said, she ducked behind a tree just as he launched. Otherwise, she’d be dead.”
Silva’s body had formed a depression in the snow. Copious blood stained the concave spot in which her head had rested.
“I know head wounds bleed like crazy,” said Alton, “but holy cow, that’s a lot.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty bad. Plus, we couldn’t get to her for a while. We had to wait for the enemy troops to fall back before we could reach her without being shot. She was bleeding out the whole time.”
Alton leaned onto his right leg, taking some of the weight off the throbbing in his damaged left one. “The bigger question is why North Korean troops were deployed here in the first place. The troops we just fought couldn’t be the same ones spotted further inside South Korea. If they had completed their mission, they would have kept going back home.”
“Couldn’t they have been doing that?” asked Nang, “and we caught them on their journey back?”
“I don’t think so. They were deployed along a line, waiting for something.”
“Us?” asked Mallory.
“Possibly, but why? What do they gain from a confrontation except casualties? Why not simply continue on home?”
“Maybe they were sent to help the invasion troops get back home,” offered David. “You know, to stand guard on their exit route and make sure it stayed open.”
“Could be,” said Alton. “They could have been sent to recon the area before the main force returns. But that still doesn’t square with their hunkering down to wait for our approach.”
Nang rubbed a grimy hand on his chin. “The SUVs are quite loud. The Northerners could have heard us coming from far away, certainly far enough in advance to hide. They probably hoped we’d drive past without seeing them. But since we approached on foot, they were forced into a fight.”
“Yeah, that could be,” said Alton.
No one spoke. A steady wind whipped tendrils of snow through the trees, obscuring the spot in which Silva had fallen.
“If that’s true, it means the main North Korean attack force is still somewhere here in the south…and presumably headed our way.”
CHAPTER 30
Even before entering the hospital room, Alton could hear the low beeping of Silva’s heart monitor—a slow, steady ping, mesmerizing in its regularity.
He walked into the windowless room but said nothing. Dim lights revealed sterile walls whose stark, white surface matched the snowy environment from which the patient had been rescued hours earlier.
Silva slept. Heavy bandages swathed much of her head and various other parts of her body. A collection of monitoring equipment and IV tubing ran between aluminum poles and her still form.
O’Neil had pulled a wooden chair with padded arm rests next to Silva’s bed, then nodded off during his vigil.
Alton couldn’t help but remember watching Mallory convalesce after a nearly fatal attack during their first civilian case together. At the time, he hadn’t known the depth of Mallory’s feelings for him. He had thought of her as a friend whose love could never be won. He had sat in a chair near Mallory’s hospital bed, a small distance in respect to space, but a great distance in respect to the heart. Upon discovering their true feelings for each other, they had married and continued to enjoy an ever-deepening relationship. Would it be so wrong for O’Neil to hope for any less from Silva?
The subject of Alton’s musings stirred in his chair.
Alton broke his reverie. Time to focus on the present.
The former Special Forces soldier sat up and stretched his thick neck. “Just arrive?”
“Yeah.”
“What are you doing here? I thought you were trying to keep the North Korean main force from escaping back over the border.”
“It’s covered,” said Alton. “The hostile force fled north. Nang managed to scrounge up some soldiers from the coast, along with some MPs from the South Korean Navy. They’ve plugged up the Seoraksan pass. If the Northerners want to cross the border, they’ll have to find another route.” He looked O’Neil in the eye. “What about you? I thought you were gonna report back to the team.”
O’Neil dropped his gaze to the floor before answering. “I…it didn’t feel right just dumping her here. If I had done a better job protecting our rear, maybe she wouldn’t have needed to advance…”
“She’s an experienced soldier who took a calculated risk. We all do that at one time or another.”
O’Neil nodded but didn’t speak.
Alton eyed the patient’s motionless form. “How is she?”
“Docs say most of the damage is more-or-less cosmetic. But a few wounds are more serious—the head wound, of course, and the ones in her arm and right butt cheek.”
“Sounds like she got lucky.”
“I guess. The d
ocs’ biggest concern is an infection, so they’re pumping her full of antibiotics.”
A short, plump nurse wearing scrubs patterned with a 1970s happy-face print entered the room. “Time for vitals and a dressing change,” she announced in a thick accent. At least she spoke English.
After checking Silva’s pulse and blood pressure, the nurse peeled back a swath of cotton dressing from Silva’s right arm, revealing an angry gash centered within a lattice of tidy stitches.
“She really did get it,” murmured Alton.
“It should heal,” said the nurse, “but she’ll always have a scar.” She searched the food tray and nightstand. “Where did I put those bandages? Oh, I’ll be right back.”
She scurried into the hall, and the room fell into silence.
O’Neil gave the slightest shake of his head. Steepling his hands over his mouth, he leaned forward and examined the wound with concern.
The agent stiffened. “Look at this, Chief.”
Alton limped over. O’Neil’s finger pointed to a dark speck embedded in Silva’s flesh a centimeter or two from the wound.
“Looks like dirt,” said Alton.
“That’s what I thought at first. But a second ago, it just, like…glowed for a second.”
“Are you sure—?”
Before Alton could continue, the speck emitted a scarcely discernable pulse of light, then returned to its dormant state. If not for the room’s dim lighting, he wouldn’t have spotted the pulse at all.
Alton froze. “What the hell?”
“I was hoping you’d know.”
Alton bent down to inspect the object more closely. It pulsed again.
“Could it be shrapnel?” asked O’Neil.
“No. Any blast powerful enough to embed this in her arm would fry the electronics. It wouldn’t be glowing like that anymore.”
“You think it’s some kind of electronic device?”
“Yep,” said Alton, leaning over Silva to study the speck from another direction. “Otherwise, it wouldn’t glow. And it’s no ordinary electronics. It’s tiny but contains its own power supply. If I had to guess, I’d say this is some sort of tracking device. If that’s true, there’s only one way something this miniaturized got in her arm intact.”
“Which is…?”
“The North Koreans…they planted it.”
O’Neil’s astonished countenance was almost comical in its effect. “How?”
His damaged leg beginning to ache, Alton sat back in his chair. “It must have been after Silva was knocked unconscious in the explosion.”
“In the middle of combat? They just waltzed over and stuck it in her arm?”
Alton ran a hand through his hair. “When Silva was knocked out, we couldn’t get to her for a few minutes. And she was closer to their line than ours. The North Koreans would have needed only a few seconds to inject it.”
“But why try to kill her with an RPG if they were going to plant this in her?”
“That does seem weird. I suppose it’s a calculated risk. They try to take out our team. But if they have the chance, they implant this device so they can keep tabs on us. Or maybe the plan all along was simply to wound someone, not kill them.” He rubbed his chin. “In a weird way, it makes sense. The North Koreans must know that if our team is wiped out, we’ll be replaced with another one. Using this GPS device lets them know where their opponents are located at all times. They could always stay a step ahead.”
The room remained dimly lit, but the spark of an idea illuminated Alton’s mind. “Maybe we can use this to our advantage.”
“How so, Chief?”
“If we can remove it from her arm, we could use it to leave a false trail. It would disguise our true location.”
O’Neil nodded. “Sounds cool. Should we fetch the nurse to get it out?”
“I don’t want to be paranoid, but we don’t know who’s on the North’s payroll. What if the nurse is on the take? Then we’d think we were leaving a false trail without really doing so.” He ran a hand through his hair. “You were a Special Forces medic, right?”
“Backup medic. And I patched people up. I didn’t take things out of them.”
“Give it your best shot. I’ll watch the door.”
O’Neil leaned over Silva’s arm and exhaled. “You don’t happen to have a scalpel on you, do you?”
“Use the alcohol wipes on the nightstand to clean your pocket knife. Hurry before the nurse returns.”
The towering soldier sanitized the knife as directed, leaned over Silva’s arm, and paused.
“Here goes nothing,” he said, licking his lips. With surprising gentleness, his beefy hand flicked the blade’s tip through successive layers of skin. The technique reminded Alton of the process one uses to remove a deeply embedded splinter.
Alton peered through a crack in the door. A doctor flirted with a petite RN at the nurse’s station, but no one approached Silva’s room.
“Almost there,” said O’Neil.
“Gently,” said Alton. “We don’t want to damage it.”
O’Neil slid the end of the blade into the wound. When he withdrew it, the tiny device lay on its tip. “Got it.”
The bug glowed again but didn’t pulse off as it had before. After shining steady for ten seconds, it fell dark.
“What happened?” asked O’Neil.
“I don’t know. Let’s see if it comes back on.”
A full minute of waiting produced no result. The device remained dormant.
O’Neil turned to his commander. “That ain’t good.”
“It sure isn’t,” replied Alton. “It must have some type of sensor that shuts it down once removed from its host.” He pulled his lips into a grim line. “Whatever advantage we might have gained from it is lost.”
CHAPTER 31
“Let me get this straight,” said Camron, who had returned from the Olympic village to join his teammates in a conference room deep inside Seoul’s National Intelligence Service HQ building. “You’re saying this thing in Silva’s arm was supposed to track us? Like some kind of GPS?”
“That’s our best guess,” replied Alton.
“Best guess? Can’t you just open it up and see what it does?”
“Yes, we can open it, but it’ll take time to determine its function. If the device still worked, it’d be easy. We’d simply assess its transmissions—assuming it made them. But now that it’s shut down, we have to open it, as you said. But most devices are a jumble of circuitry when you first open them, so we’ll have to examine its wiring and structure. That’s not easy, especially on something so small.”
Nang turned to Camron. “I have an analyst working on that now.”
“I think it’s reasonable to assume the bug will turn out to be a GPS locating device,” said Alton.
Mallory twisted a strand of hair around her finger. “I get that it’d help the North Koreans to be able to track us, but the whole bug-in-the-arm thing still seems weird, especially after they were trying to kill us.”
“And there’s another, bigger question,” said Alton. “The Northerners had to know they’d be discovered down here sooner or later. And if they have a mole somewhere in the South Korean Army—”
“Which is likely,” interjected Camron.
“Then they must know we’ve discovered their plot to move against the Olchin site,” continued Alton.”
“What’s your bigger question?” asked Nang.
“Why would the North Koreans plant a monitoring device on our team, then let us keep uncovering more details about their plot to storm the power plant? Why let us proceed unchecked? If they know we’re on to them and know where we are, wouldn’t they try to kill us at all costs?”
Nang folded his hands against his chest. “I can think of only one reason: the time to stop us has not yet come.”
“You think they’re waiting for the right time to lay a trap?”
“What else makes sense?”
Alton nodded. What, ind
eed?
An hour after the late-night meeting broke, Alton lay sprawled in a bunk in the NIS dormitory, exhausted yet awake. The day’s events rushed through his mind, a deluge of information that had only minutes ago started to wane.
What was the North Koreans’ end game? How did it square with keeping his team alive? The Northerners’ need to track his team made sense, but something about this explanation still bothered him. From the North Koreans’ perspective, letting the joint U.S./South Korean team discover so much about their plot represented a mission risk of the greatest magnitude.
Or was there more to it than that?
At last, the torrent of information rushing through his mind slowed to a trickle. A new thought, a new idea, now blocked out all others.
Yet the slowdown of thoughts also allowed physical exhaustion to pull his body into a deep slumber.
Just as an alternative explanation for the Northerners’ actions took full shape in Alton’s mind, the black shroud of sleep enveloped him.
CHAPTER 32
The wake-up chime on Alton’s cellphone must have been malfunctioning. Hadn’t he drifted off to sleep only five or ten minutes ago?
“What time is it?” asked Mallory from the room’s other bunk.
Alton leaned over just enough to shut off the device, then fell onto his back again. “Six-thirty.” He stared at the ceiling. Whirls in the surface’s knockdown texture formed strange patterns.
Strange patterns—why did that concept strike a chord?
Had he recognized a pattern last night, just as he had fallen asleep? Or was he remembering the remnants of a random dream or past case? He struggled to remember the elusive thought. Whatever it was, the idea had slipped away, as nebulous and insubstantial as any other dream.
But a lingering discomfort remained, like a pebble in one’s shoe. Had an epiphany struck last night? If so, what?
After a quick breakfast, the team assembled in the NIS’s electronics counterintelligence room—all but Silva, who remained hospitalized.
When the Killing Starts (The Blackwell Files Book 8) Page 9