When the Killing Starts (The Blackwell Files Book 8)

by Steven F Freeman

  “Nearly there,” called out Mallory.

  Several hundred yards ahead, a clearing in the thick, snow-covered tree line heralded the fuel depot’s entrance.

  Alton decelerated. He slowed the vehicle to a crawl before turning into the dense forest a hundred yards or so short of the entrance, which looked to be a dirt road running off the highway.

  Mallory slipped him his cellphone. “All ready to go.”

  “Thanks,” said Alton. He grinned at his wife. “Keep the doors locked ‘til I’m back.”

  She rolled her eyes. How many times had he said the same thing while running into the grocery store?

  Bundled up in winter camo to ward off the chill, Alton high-stepped through the snow. Mallory had been right. Before traveling twenty yards, the exertion sent stabbing bolts of pain through his bad leg.

  He was glad Mallory hadn’t argued the point of sending someone else on this side mission. Truth be told, he hadn’t felt comfortable assigning such a risky task to a subordinate, especially since the idea had been his. Besides, it wasn’t as if he lacked combat experience.

  His speed tapered off as he neared the entrance road. He crept forward several steps at a time, then moved behind cover and inspected the surroundings before proceeding.

  Now within ten yards of the road, he lingered to give the location a longer assessment.

  Twin walls of waist-high bricks lined both sides of the entrance, a strange flourish for such an isolated location. And a grimy guard shack bisected the side road. The ramshackle structure sat unoccupied. Not surprising, really. It had probably been years—if ever—that any sort of emergency requiring an actual guard had occurred here.

  The entrance road curved as it trailed away from the highway, obscuring almost the entire view of the fuel depot itself. Only the corner of a faded green building with curling paint peeked out from behind roadside trees. In the distance, a chain link fence cordoned off an enormous vat, presumably one of many containers in the fuel depot’s tank farm.

  Alton turned on his cellphone camera. He tiptoed the last few yards to an evergreen bordering the entrance road. Reaching his arm around the tree, he laid it on the ground.

  But did the camera have the right angle to provide a view of the entrance road?

  After checking the surroundings, he darted his head around the tree and touched the screen to activate the camera. Yes, perfect: a wide view of the entrance road just in front of the guard shack.

  “Stay still!” shouted a voice in a thick accent. “Don’t move, or we’ll shoot.”

  Alton remained motionless. The burning in his leg from squatting became a raging blaze.

  His leg gave way, and he topped over.

  “Don’t shoot,” he cried. “I have a bad leg. I can’t sit like that.”

  “Stand up!”

  Alton laid his hand on the evergreen to help push himself up. His body now between the hostile voice and his phone, he palmed the still-active device behind the thick, gathered plastic wristband of his winter coat.

  He turned to encounter a score of angry soldiers clutching AK-47s.

  An officer stepped forward. He trained a mean-looking revolver at Alton’s chest. “We’ve been waiting for you. Why don’t you join us down there,” he said, gesturing in the direction of the fuel depot, “at Papa’s House?”

  CHAPTER 56

  Mallory and the other occupants of the Santa Fe listened in terrified silence to live audio of Alton’s capture.

  After five minutes, the sounds of crunching footsteps ceased, and a sharp, metallic noise—a slamming door, perhaps—crackled over the cellphone still ensconced in Alton’s coat.

  Chaos erupted in the SUV.

  “Now what?” said Camron, fear written all over his face.

  “Let’s go get him, before it’s too late!” said O’Neil, his countenance a mask of fury.

  Mallory sized up the situation. “Before we decide what to do, let’s retreat a ways. If the North Koreans were waiting for Alton, it won’t take them long to come looking for us. They know he didn’t walk in on foot.”

  She crawled into the driver’s seat and fired up the engine. Popping the vehicle into reverse, she swung it around, four-wheeled back to the highway, and headed south.

  After putting four or five miles behind her, Mallory pulled off-road and bounced across the forest until the road faded from view behind a haze of snowy trees. Gusts of wind obscured the Santa Fe’s tire tracks in seconds.

  She ground to a halt and killed the engine. “Now we have time to think.”

  “How the hell did this happen?” asked David.

  “Monitoring at the border,” said Camron. “They must have picked us up as soon as we entered.”

  “I agree,” said Chegal. “This has been my fear ever since we decided to cross the DMZ. That zone contains all manner of explosives and detection devices, primarily motion-sensor cameras.”

  “If we were gonna avoid something at the border,” quipped O’Neil, “I’m glad it was the explosives and not the cameras.”

  “But now they have Al,” said David, “And our mission to confront the Wave Two team is compromised. They know we’re here, so the ambush won’t work. What do we do now?”

  “We have two objectives,” said Mallory, swiveling in her seat to face the rest of the team. “The first is our original one: determine what the North Koreans were doing at Heat Wave and implement the necessary countermeasures.”

  “But what about Al—” began David.

  “You think I’m not going to go after Alton?” asked Mallory. “That’s the second objective: get him back—not just because he’s my husband, but also because he’s our team lead. We have the best chance of returning to Seoul with good intel on the North Koreans’ mission if he’s back with us.” She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “It seems to me we can’t work on either objective until we know a little more.”

  “About what?”

  “Their intentions for Alton…the layout of Papa’s House…Wave Two’s mission. And if Alton is able to keep his phone on, undiscovered, we might learn enough to form a plan for both objectives—and synch them up.”

  “You mean we try to create a plan to rescue Alton and counterattack the Wave Two team at the same time?”

  “Yes. Once we know enough, we craft a plan to penetrate Papa’s House. But we’ll only have the element of surprise once. We ought to take as much advantage of it as possible.” She turned up the volume on Camron’s phone. “For now, we listen and wait.”

  CHAPTER 57

  While his captors marched him deeper into the compound, Alton kept his head in a deferential stoop but darted sharp eyes around his surroundings.

  As he trudged along the bend in the road, the long front wall of faded-green barracks moved into full view. The dilapidated structure’s flaking paint, rusted steel doors, and boarded-up windows presented an uninspiring sight. Apparently, the Northerners put little stock in building maintenance.

  The size of the building became clear only when he passed it. Hundreds of troops must be stationed here, many more than would be needed to man the fuel depot. The battalions stationed here must double as a defensive force against any South Korean aggression.

  Alton marveled as he walked along the side wall. It exceeded a hundred yards in length. If the interior exhibited the same lack of maintenance as the exterior, surely the building would be close to collapse. Good thing his captors had no reason to take him into the living quarters; the shaky structure was best avoided.

  The officer behind Alton barked a command. A private opened a rusty steel door on the barracks’ side wall and grunted for Alton to enter. So much for avoiding decrepit buildings.

  Alton stepped down an oxidized metal staircase enclosed within broad, concrete walls. While descending the stairs, he feigned a motion to scratch and used the opportunity to slip the cellphone from his coat’s wristband into the tight elastic of his thermal underwear. Small chance his captors would disc
over it now. He stopped at the bottom of the stairwell.

  The private opened a windowless door and ushered Alton inside…to an ultra-modern laboratory that would have plunged the most well-funded American scientists into fits of envy.

  Wall-mounted cabinets of gleaming steel circled the room. Inside the cabinets and on matching steel tables rested all manner of scientific equipment—some for heating, some for precision measurement, others for spectroanalysis and generating waveforms. At the far end of the lab lay a clean room containing the specialized machinery used to fabricate printed-circuit boards.

  Administrative offices and windowless rooms, perhaps storage space for more equipment, lined the massive room’s longest walls. Dozens of lab-coated workers moved with purpose between the tables and leaned over equipment to adjust settings and take readings. To the left, a short woman eyeballed a bluish liquid in a glass decanter.

  Alton’s head fought to make sense of all this. Clearly, the barracks had existed for decades. They couldn’t have been camouflaged to look old; brand-new construction of a structure this massive wouldn’t have escaped the notice of Camron or his South Korean counterparts assigned to analyze spy-satellite photographs.

  The North Koreans had retrofitted the structure, leaving the decayed shell of the old building and modernizing the interior. It was the only explanation that made sense. And it was a brilliant tactic—the old building constituted perfect camouflage. U.S. and South Korean analysts would continue to ignore an out-of-the-way fuel depot that had existed for decades. Even the coming and going of the hundreds of vehicles needed to execute the massive retrofitting job would pass unnoticed. After all, that’s what fuel depots were for—the refueling of vehicles.

  The officer walked Alton to a well-appointed office in the lab’s far corner. He waved Alton inside but didn’t enter himself. Instead, he stationed four men at the door and departed.

  “Come in, come in,” said a scarecrow of a man seated behind an enormous desk of rich mahogany. “No need to be shy, Agent Blackwell. Or should I say Mr. Blackwell, now that your NSA days are over?” The man spoke English with a thick but intelligible accent.

  Alton took a step forward and stopped next to a bookcase overflowing with scientific journals. “You seem to know all about me, Mr.…?”

  “Doctor Tong. And don’t look so surprised, Mr. Blackwell. Why shouldn’t I know your name? You and I have been playing a chess game, and I’ve been three moves ahead of you from day one.”

  Alton kept his face expressionless. Maybe the doctor was right, but Alton wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of crumbling into a babbling mess. “You’ll pardon me if I don’t share your assessment.”

  Anger flickered across the doctor’s face. “That’s because you’re not a scientist, Mr. Blackwell. If you were, you wouldn’t resort to baseless grandstanding. You’d be more capable of analyzing facts and coming to reasonable conclusions.”

  “And what reasonable conclusions are those?”

  “That you never had a chance from the beginning. We’ve kept a close eye on your activities, a very close eye, since the day you arrived in Seoul.”

  “Yet you lost track of me recently, I think,” said Alton.

  Tong examined Alton through narrow eyes. “Yes, we did. I’m surprised you knew that. Perhaps we’ll examine that fact another day. But no matter,” he added, perking up. “We picked up your trail again when you crossed the DMZ. You weren’t…how do you say it…off the radar for long.”

  “So you say. It sure looked like we made it across without being spotted.”

  Tong laughed and shook his head. “Do you think we are amateurs? We have cameras across every kilometer of the border.”

  “In that case, why let us in? Why not capture us then and there?”

  Tong smiled. He stood and began to pace the room, the university professor lecturing a freshman student. “Who knows to what use your incursion could be put in the media? No, much better to give you and the rest of your team plenty of rope to knot your own noose before we tighten it.”

  Like you’re doing right now with your incessant bragging. The more you keep talking, buddy, the more information you’re giving the rest of my team, wherever they are. Alton hoped his phone’s signal would continue to transmit, now that he had been forced inside the barracks.

  “Speaking of your teammates,” said Tong, glancing over Alton’s shoulder into the lab beyond, “where are they?”

  “You’re the one who already knows everything,” said Alton, mustering the angriest face he could. “Or didn’t you know they’re already dead or wounded? Two were killed at Olchin, the rest at the Heat Wave site. Except one. He’s still in the hospital.”

  Changing his mask to one of despair, Alton sidled over to a brown plastic chair and fell into it.

  “You appear to be wounded yourself,” observed Tong. “You’re limping.”

  “Not recently, but yeah, I took a hit a few years ago.” No point in lying about information the doctor must already know, thanks to Nang. Alton glared at Tong, hoping he wasn’t laying the anger on too thick. “Yeah, it’s too bad the others aren’t here. They’d love to have a chance to get to know you, especially O’Neil.”

  “You mean Daniel O’Neil, former Special Forces soldier and now an agent of the NSA?”

  Alton feigned surprise at Tong’s intel. Thanks to Nang, the enemy scientist would have a full dossier on every member of Alton’s team. But thanks to Alton’s deceptive messages after Nang’s death, the scientist believed his mole to remain undiscovered and alive, albeit in a hospital bed.

  “That’s the one,” said Alton at last. “You seem to know all about him.”

  “Indeed I do.”

  “He would’ve loved the chance to plan an attack against this place.”

  “I’m sure,” sneered the scientist. “It’s almost too bad he’s dead. But he is.” Tong stopped his pacing to look Alton in the eye. “As I said, I’m three steps ahead of you. I have been from the beginning.”

  CHAPTER 58

  From the SUV hidden in a secluded patch of woods a half-dozen miles from Papa’s House, Mallory smiled—a thin one, but a smile nonetheless. “That was good…very good.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Camron.

  “Alton knows we’re planning to move in.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Several reasons. He switched his phone to camera so it’d send audio, then hid it somewhere on his clothing. He told them we’re dead so they won’t come looking for us and so they won’t be as on-guard for an attack. And he even came out and said O’Neil would be the best team member to form a plan for penetrating the enemy stronghold.”

  “He did?”

  “Of course. Remember he told Dr. Tong something like O’Neil would’ve loved the chance to plan an attack on the fuel depot? I know my husband. He wasn’t just making conversation.”

  Camron cracked a knowing smile in Mallory’s direction. “You two have been working together a long time, haven’t you?”

  “Dude,” chimed in David, “you have no idea.”

  “So what do you think, O’Neil?” said Mallory. “How’d you like a chance to plan an offensive against that enemy stronghold?”

  “Can’t wait. But I’ll need Dunlow’s input. He’s Secret Service. Establishing a good defense is his thing.” He turned to David. “If you were setting up the security for Papa’s House, what kind of defenses would you put in place?”

  David rubbed his chin. “Depends on how bad I wanted the place locked down.”

  Mallory rolled her eyes. “Assume it’s real bad.”

  “Well, I’d start with limiting site access to a few points manned by armed guards. And I’d post cameras and motion sensors—maybe even booby traps—in a perimeter around the site. And I’d camouflage the crap out of it to keep it hidden from enemy surveillance. Is that enough to go on?”

  “It’s a good overview of general defensive tactics,” said O’Neil, “but we don’t k
now the layout of the site…how those tactics are applied.”

  “We need more intel,” said Mallory. “If I know my husband, he’ll feed more to us before long. Let’s sit tight for a bit longer and see what comes in.”

  CHAPTER 59

  “Three steps ahead, huh?” said Alton.

  “You’re in my custody, aren’t you,” replied Dr. Tong. “Obviously we are.”

  “If you say so.” Alton ended with a noncommittal shrug.

  Tong took a step forward and leaned towards the American, his mouth pulled into a thin line. “Downplay this situation all you want, Mr. Blackwell, but the fact is that your teammates are dead, and you’re my prisoner. Can you explain those facts by any other reason other than being outmaneuvered?”

  “No.”

  The scientist straightened. “You see, you can reach the right scientific conclusion if properly guided.” He grasped his hands behind his back and took a step forward. “You should consider yourself lucky. You’d be dead, too, if I hadn’t told my military advisor to spare you.”

  “That was generous of you.”

  “Not really. I simply needed to assess how much you know. And more importantly, the commotion provided by your intrusion into North Korea will distract the world from my activities.”

  “I guess I am lucky.” Alton swept his hand towards the sprawling laboratory floor. “A moment ago, you spoke of scientific conclusions. What exact problem is all of this scientific activity designed to solve?”

  Tong studied Alton’s face for a good twenty seconds before answering. He sat on the corner of his mahogany desk. “I suppose it won’t hurt to tell you. Even if my cousin decides to let you live, you won’t be seeing the outside of a jail cell for many years—if ever.”

  No need to ask why he’d land in jail. Alton had called out this possibility to his teammates before their incursion into North Korea.