by Brian Parker
“Wha—”
The door opened, silencing them all. “Did we give you enough time?” Pete asked.
“Pretty much,” Knasovich replied for Grady. “We were just clarifying the specifics of our contract and the payday at the end of the mission.”
Pete glared at the sniper. The DIA analysts didn’t know they were briefing The Havoc Group for a mission, they were told they were simply providing an overall brief of the underground facilities on the Korean Peninsula. Now, because of that blowhard, they might have picked up on the fact that he said they were going on a mission after the briefing.
“Good,” the old SEAL replied. “Everyone in agreement that they’re in?”
“Yeah. Let’s get this briefing going so we can start designing The Havoc Group’s underground facilities training campus,” Grady said, reasserting himself as the team lead responsible for the establishment of a non-existent training center. He thought it made a good cover story as to why they requested the brief, even if he had no idea what Pete had told them was the reason for the briefing.
The old sailor smiled and gestured toward the two briefers. “Alright, Jerry. You’ve got the floor.”
Jerry thanked him and told his partner to man the laptop to flip slides. “Good morning, gentlemen—and lady,” he said as an aside to Hannah Dunn.
“As mentioned earlier, I’m Jerry Sands, and my partner is Todd McShay. We work for the Defense Intelligence Agency down at Fort Belvoir, specifically for the Underground Facilities Activities Center. Our mission is to find and track the development and use of underground facilities worldwide. To accomplish our mission, we utilize a wide range of detection methods—primarily satellites with the ability to take hyperspectral imagery and record geophysical data. We were asked—”
“S’cuse me, Jeff,” Chris McCormick said, raising his hand.
“Jerry,” the DIA man corrected him.
“Jerry, sorry,” the mechanic corrected himself. “What is geophysical data? You said you used that to analyze the evidence of tunnels. What is that?”
“Sorry, I brief so many people that sometimes I forget that what’s commonplace for some is not for others.”
“What’s that s’posed to mean?”
Jerry’s eyes moved up and down the big mechanic. “It’s not an insult, sir. Just like I wouldn’t know how to fire a weapon or go and do…well, any of the things that your organization is capable of. I meant that this sort of intelligence isn’t your specialty, so I shouldn’t assume that you know all the technical terms. I’ll try to keep that in mind throughout the brief, and if anyone has a question, please don’t hesitate to stop me and ask it, like this gentleman did.”
“You won’t have to worry about any of these fellas being shy,” Grady assured him, eliciting several chuckles from around the table.
“Right,” Jerry said, clearing his throat. “Geophysical data is a catch-all term for information that we can collect regarding the physical world. Things like seismic activity, acoustic observations, and even electromagnetic indicators of disturbed earth. We use all of that collected data to help determine evidence of the facilities in adversarial countries.
“Mr. Thompson requested that we brief what we know about the underground facilities in North Korea, since that is our nation’s most pressing need at this time. From what I gather talking with him, The Havoc Group is interested in developing a training center based, in part, on what I can tell you about the North Korean complexes that we know about. I’ll try to be as specific as I can, where I can.”
Grady nodded his head and yawned internally, hoping that he hadn’t inadvertently opened the gates for the analyst to discuss tunnel dimensions, means of construction, and that sort of boring shit.
As the briefing went along, they covered a variety of facilities that ranged from mildly interesting to mostly useless. Jeff spent a lot of time discussing the missile production and fueling facilities on the northeast coastal region. That was probably what most people in the government wanted to hear about.
As he got closer to the capital of Pyongyang, Grady’s ears perked up.
“We know through our collection efforts and from corroborating stories from multiple defectors that the North Koreans maintain underground hangars at Puckch'ang Air Base, which is thirty-four miles northeast of Pyongyang along the Taedong River.”
“What type of aircraft is at the Air Base?” Hannah asked.
“Um, Todd, do you want to handle that one?”
“Yeah,” Todd said, minimizing the briefing slides and clicking on a folder marked SECRET—RELEASABLE TO APPROVED OUTSIDE AGENCIES. He scrolled around for a moment and then clicked on an Excel spreadsheet. A list of vehicles and aircraft with odd names that, for the most part, Grady didn’t recognize appeared on the screen.
“So, it looks like a mixture of attack and fighter aircraft, along with about half of their transport fleet and about fifty or so helicopters.”
“Holy shit,” Hannah breathed. “How big is that tunnel?”
“It’s not a tunnel,” Jerry stated. “That’s the key thing to remember here. What we think of as underground tunnels from Afghanistan are not what we have in North Korea. They have entire facilities, infrastructure, buildings, even cities underground. We saw this quite a bit in Vietnam, but the North Koreans have taken it to a new level of sophistication.”
“Not normally a word that people use regarding that place,” Carmike grumbled.
“You’re right,” Jerry said, ducking his chin. “They are one of the least sophisticated nations on Earth when it comes to things like education, non-political infrastructure, banking, their electrical grid…but they’ve figured out intercontinental missile ballistics. What makes you think they can’t apply themselves when it comes to matters that are important to the Regime?”
“I was just making a statement,” Carmike replied. “You ever see that NASA photograph of Earth at night? The whole country is pitch black.”
“Yes, I’ve seen the photo. It’s a stark reminder of how much one man can bend the will of an entire nation. They live in horrid conditions and adore their dictator for it. He’s like a god to them.”
Jerry pointed back at the spreadsheet on the screen. “So those are the types of aircraft in the facility. You need any more time?”
Hannah scribbled a few notes and Grady looked over at the paper. She’d written IL-76, AN-2, AN-24, Mil MI-2, Mil MI-14, and Mil MI-24.
“Can you fly any of those?” he whispered.
She shrugged. “I don’t know yet. I just wrote down the transport aircraft and helicopters, I’ll do some research tonight to see what they are. I’m rated to fly smaller airplanes, not giant passenger or cargo planes. Pretty sure I can figure out the helos, but I’ll download manuals just to be sure.”
Grady turned back to Jerry. “We’re good.”
“Switch back to the PowerPoint, Todd.” Jerry waited while his partner closed the spreadsheet and began talking when the slides reappeared. “So you can see that these massive underground complexes are fairly sophisticated. The larger ones have air circulation, blast doors, and plumbing.
“They used to dig at eighty feet below the surface, but after seeing our capabilities on display in Iraq and Afghanistan, they began to go to approximately a hundred and twenty feet—more than enough to defeat our bunker buster bombs.
“The blast doors are described as different designs at different facilities, ranging from simple large doors to circular vault-type doors that are several feet thick. At some facilities, they have multiple doors to account for overpressure.”
He turned to Todd and said, “Slide.”
The next slide was a black and white satellite image on a slight angle, not from directly above as Grady would have guessed it would be. He couldn’t really tell what he was looking at though.
“Build,” Jerry said.
Todd clicked on the presentation and several ovals, circles, and squares of different color appeared on the screen,
overlaying the satellite photo. With the help of the graphics, Grady was able to determine that something was there, just not what.
Jerry cleared his throat and took a drink of water, making Grady think they were getting to the meat of the briefing. “We were asked to develop this briefing about a medium-sized complex about an hour outside of Pyongyang that we’ve been watching for a few years. That’s what you’re looking at. Frankly, we don’t know what they do there, but since we know it isn’t nuclear, there has been a lack of interest in the Intelligence Community.
He pointed at the screen. “The green ovals indicate the facility’s footprint, the yellow circles are the entry points, and the purple circles are air exhaust vents. The red squares are the fake facilities. From initial satellite observation, we can see these fake facilities being built all over the country. We know that they’re fake based on the amount of spoil—that’s the dirt and rock that’s excavated and dumped at a different location. For the 4,000 legitimate facilities that we know about, there are ten thousand fake facilities all over the place. Some of the fake ones are near real facilities like this one, some at unrelated locations.”
He rolled his hand. “Go ahead and build one more time, Todd.”
This time, the outline of an underground complex appeared as a ghostly image superimposed over the same hill complex. “With the assistance of satellite-based ground penetrating radar, we are able to map out some facilities—of course, we have to know to look there first, it’s a big country. When we get either a tip from defectors or happen to notice new construction occurring, we can task one of these satellites to orbit the target area.”
Grady examined the tunnels in the image. It showed several hard turns which then led into a long, straight section, before opening up into a larger area with several rooms off of the main chamber. As the tunnel went deeper into the mountain, the graphic became less distinct. They had no idea how far back it went. “Can you speak to the defenses of these tunn—ah, facilities?” he asked, catching himself midway through.
“All of our information about the inside of the facilities comes from defectors. We know that the Regime has sent fake defectors to give false information and to act as spies once they are integrated into the South Korean workforce, but there are enough matching descriptions of the insides of these facilities to tell us that they are well-fortified and prepared to defend themselves.
“The first step is getting past the blast doors,” he continued, “which we know can range from easily breached to nearly impossible to open from the outside.”
Jerry used a laser pointer to trace one of the hard angles Grady had noticed earlier. “According to multiple sources, these angles are their ambush sites. There are machine guns set up in the corners to fire into anyone attempting to come into the complex.
“And finally, depending on the site, there could be a company, battalion, or even a brigade worth of soldiers down in the facility—if it’s being used, of course.”
“What do you mean?” Grady asked.
“Our sources say that nobody likes going into the facilities because the air circulation is pretty bad in most of them,” Todd stated from behind the laptop. “When they’re ordered into the tunnels for drills, they only stay a night or two, and then leave to sleep outside. The conditions are apparently terrible.”
“But if a unit were to be there when the facility was in use, then…”
“Then it’d be a suicide mission,” Jerry stated. “That’s something you have to stress in your training. These things are built specifically to hold out as long as possible, so avoiding them at all costs is the best bet. Bypass—isn’t that what the military calls it when they decide to go around an obstacle?”
“Yeah. We—they—try to fix and bypass bunkers, obstacle belts, and strongholds whenever possible,” Pete replied.
“Exactly. When you establish your training center, the first lesson should be about not getting sucked into a battle inside of an underground facility.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Grady said. He quickly amended, “When I design the program of instruction.”
TEN
* * *
QUANTICO, VIRGINIA
TWO WEEKS BEFORE THE OUTBREAK
“Run it again, dammit!” Grady ordered.
“Sir?”
“You heard me, Gunnery Sergeant. My guys are gonna run the scenario again.”
“Sir, I’m the OIC of this range,” the old Marine stated. “You’ve been here, running the same scenarios for more than fourteen hours, with live ammo. This is becoming a safety issue.”
“There are no safety police downrange.”
“You don’t have to tell me that. I’ve been there—more times than you want to know. However, there are regulations regarding stateside training. You’re risking a catastrophic injury by continuing to operate today.” His voice softened, “You may not see it, sir, but your people need a break.”
Grady looked at his group. They’d been pushing the shoothouse scenario all day, like the Marine said. The walls had been rearranged to resemble a series of twisting, winding turns that opened into a main chamber. In between each run, the range staff would move the walls, set up different combatant and non-combatant tracks, and make it as unique as possible.
His team was already proficient with shoothouse procedures, but they were still allowing themselves to be drawn into the lines of fire from the machine gun nests in the corners when they thought they could get the target. Every one of them, including himself, had been hit multiple times with remote detonated beanbag shotguns.
Adding to their woes was the fact that they had to use personal weapons instead of weapons owned by The Havoc Group that they normally used on missions. Pete and the Havoc crew had thought of everything to ensure that there were as few paper trails leading back to the company as possible. Added to that problem was that two members of his team didn’t have their own long rifles, just pistols, so Grady loaned an M4 to Hannah, and Alex let Chris McCormick borrow one of his many MK17 SCAR-H rifles.
Grady was tired and sore, both from the day’s training and from his long night with Olivia. She was incredible. Guarded, but incredible nonetheless. As a single mom, she’d been burned more times than she could remember, so she hadn’t allowed the date to progress beyond the bar. While he’d obviously wanted the night to end with them sleeping in the same bed, he understood and would never push beyond someone’s comfort zone. So they stayed late into the night drinking and laughing. He felt like he’d really gotten to know the receptionist that he’d been acquainted with for years. If they wanted to pursue the relationship any farther, they’d have to deal with Havoc’s strict fraternization policy once he returned from the mission.
“I’ll make a deal with you, Gunny,” Grady offered. “We’ll run through one more time, then we’ll help your guys police up the brass so you can get out of here early.”
The man considered his answer before replying. Grady was offering him an unnecessary compromise. If he’d wanted to push the issue, the team from The Havoc Group had been given unlimited access to the Quantico shoothouse and its staff for twenty-four hours. They could press on through the night if they wanted to.
“Alright, sir. One more time, but I want you guys to slow down on the runnin’ and gunnin’. All it takes is one trip and—”
“We got it, Gunny,” he interrupted. “We’ll walk this last scenario. I want my team alive just as much as you want to avoid a safety incident on your range.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Grady nodded, deciding to avoid the tired old joke that he wasn’t an officer and worked for a living. He glanced at his watch. It was 9 p.m. Neither McCormick nor Dunn were special operations when they were in, so he wanted to get them as much time on the range as possible. Hannah had been in SF support units, but support guys didn’t get the extensive trigger time that operators did. Throughout the day, tempers had flared over mistakes that the two of them made which were second nature t
o the others.
The team needed a break from each other or the wheels would fall off this cobbled together mission quickly. Grady pressed .45 ACP rounds down into his pistol’s magazine while the Marines rearranged the walls into a new design once again.
The final run took a full twenty-five minutes as Grady slowed it down to a walk phase. He needed to ensure the team knew their mission parameters—which were basically none as far as he could tell. There weren’t any ridiculous self-imposed restraints limiting the number of casualties on the mission, but they damn sure better infiltrate the target on the first try. He didn’t anticipate that there’d be a second opportunity.
Once they were done, true to his word, Grady’s team stayed to help the Marines move the walls into their storage positions and collect up the spent cartridges for turn-in. They were thankful for the added support, cutting their closeout time to less than thirty minutes instead of a couple of hours. The gunnery sergeant thanked them for their help and the Havoc team packed up their gear, and then left the installation.
None of them made plans to get together after the day at the shoothouse. They needed the space from each other and had a 10 a.m. report time for their loadout tomorrow. That didn’t give them much time for anything besides a shower and some rack time anyways.
By the time his Mercedes Benz G-550 hit the I-95 Mixing Bowl—the local term for the Springfield Interchange where I-95, I-395, and I-495 met—Grady was ready for bed. He was feeling the long day’s work and knew that he’d have to force himself to take a shower instead of simply falling down on his bed and passing out.
His phone rang, startling him. He hadn’t been expecting any calls. Glancing at the dashboard, he saw that it was Hannah. “Oh geez,” he grumbled, feeling like he was in for either a heart-to-heart counseling session to convince her that she was the right person for the mission or some type of argument, probably centered around why Knasovich, the team’s sexist asshole sniper, shouldn’t go.
He considered ignoring it, but decided to face whatever problem she had so he could begin problem solving tonight. Grady pushed the accept button on his radio display and waited the half second for his Bluetooth to connect, then he said, “Hey, Hannah. What’s up?”