The Repairman- The Complete Box Set

by L. J. Martin

  “Give me your phone!” he commands.

  “Don’t have it,” she lies. “Mr. Scroder took it from me.”

  Thomas Scroder gives her a wink, unseen by Von Reif.

  Sputtering under his breath, his face growing beet red, Von Reif spins on his heel and heads for a ladder that will take him back to his cabin. After two steps up from the sea-level deck, he turns back. “Scroder, you’ll pay for this…you and Houston Offshore.”

  “We’ll see. Now, stay out of the way. Black Gold has a brig, Von Reif, and with all the friends you’ve made aboard her, I’m sure we can get lots of help letting you spend some time there. Suggest you go to your cabin and find a good book to read.” He watches as Von Reif ascends the ladder. Then he turns back to the others. “Suggest you rejoin Mr. Weatherwax and see what we can do.” Then he moves a step and places a hand on Ji Su’s shoulder. “You still good to go?”

  “You bet your sweet ass. Let’s get it done.”

  “When we know what ‘it’ is, we’ll give it hell.”

  The ravioli de langoustines du Guilvinec, brushed with truffle oil, were beyond compare, but what would one expect from La Truffe Noir, one of the finest restaurants in the world?

  Half a world away from the Black Gold, Kim Hyun-hee is dabbing his mouth with a napkin, having just finished one of the finest meals in his lifetime, courtesy of the Chinese delegation. The ambassador feels a slight vibration on his inner thigh. He shares the table with five other Asians, including the Chinese Ambassador and his beautiful female aide, and three from the Vietnamese delegation.

  In various locations around the small restaurant, security forces stand aside and eye the participants and each other. Outside are a dozen cars filled with armed security and bodyguards who are smoking and doing their jobs, albeit somewhat at ease on a quiet night in Brussels.

  Kim Hyun-hee had taped the small cell phone to the inside of his thigh…and the vibration can mean only one thing.

  He glances at the Patek Philippe watch on his wrist, a gift from his Dear Leader, and sees that it’s just minutes after eleven PM, meaning it’s minutes after seven AM in North Korea.

  The ambassador rises, excuses himself, and heads for the men’s room. As he expected, Colonel Chu steps out from behind a huge bouquet of flowers in the entry and paces him.

  “Alone, please,” the ambassador says quietly, in Korean, to the large uniformed soldier who follows him.

  “Why?” Colonel Chu asks.

  “This is a Belgian restroom, fool,” the ambassador snaps.

  “So?”

  “So, it’s barely large enough for one, much less two. Wait outside.”

  “I will be near the door.”

  “As you wish.”

  The Ambassador enters the tiny restroom, a three-foot-by-four-foot toilet enclosure with a door that will barely clear a seated man’s knees, a urinal on the wall next to it, and a lavatory with a man leaning on it whom the ambassador has only seen one time, and that at a distance across the room.

  The man extends a hand, but the ambassador doesn’t take it and rather puts a finger to his lips. “Chu, just outside.”

  “Fine, invite him in,” CIA agent Rutgar Paddington says, in little more than a whisper.

  “You are sure?”

  “Sure.”

  The door swings inward, and Paddington steps behind it.

  Kim Hyun-hee opens it and speaks in Korean, “Chu, please,” and waves the man in.

  He barely clears the doorway when Paddington shoves a stun gun against his neck, and he goes down like a sack of rocks. Then the CIA agent reaches into his pocket, recovers a small plastic syringe, removes the needle cover, and gives Chu a quick injection on the side of his neck.

  “You have killed him?” the ambassador asks. “I did not want — ”

  “I’ve killed his will to fight…at least for a few hours.”

  “Aw,” the ambassador says, relieved. Then he asks, “My daughter and grand-daughters?”

  “Safe — out of country.”

  And the ambassador looks even more relieved.

  Paddington reaches into a waist-high trash receptacle and hands the Ambassador a thawb dishdasha, an Arab robe, and a ghutra, a headdress that would basically hide the face of the wearer should he wish it to do so. Then Paddington digs deeper into the trash, removes another set, and quickly puts them on. Then he removes a Glock 22 from the coat that he’d cast aside and shoves it inside his robe.

  “You ready?” he asks, and two men dressed in full Arab regalia exit. Rather than turning into the dining room, they turn through the reception area and out the door; in a few steps, they are on the pavers of Boulevard de la Cambre.

  A black limousine, one of more than a dozen limos and town cars parked nearby, cruises up to the curb. As they reach it, Paddington opens the passenger door and bows his head deferentially as the ambassador enters. As they pull away from the curb, a four-door black Mercedes, with darkly tinted windows, pulls away from the curb across the boulevard, flips a U-turn, and follows. In addition to the two agents in the limo, another four are stationed in the Mercedes.

  They turn onto the adjacent four-lane road, which sports a wide median, and accelerate away.

  Paddington lets out a long, nervous breath, gives the ambassador a tight grin, and says, “In twenty-eight hours, you’ll be with your family in a five-star hotel in Washington, D.C.”

  The ambassador merely nods but closes his eyes and leans his head back. It has been a long week awaiting that vibration on his inner thigh.

  Rutgar Paddington is not so comfortable.

  It has been too easy.

  26

  Bo is stiff and sore from bending in the narrow space beneath the pier, across the Potong from the Pueblo. As he’s almost a foot taller than Butch, the wait is much harder on him.

  He glances at his watch and announces to Butch, “It’s eleven hundred. Time to rock and roll.”

  “Let’s get ’er done.”

  Bo operates the controls to submerge the SDV, and both of them adjust their rebreathers. In less than a minute, they near the bottom of the Potong and pass under the grain barge into the sunlit water.

  Bo has to keep the bow turned upstream to offset the current. It takes nearly fifteen minutes to slowly make the crossing, but then they are in the shadow of the Pueblo. Both of them have their individual mission. Butch is to place a charge, two five-pound bricks of C4, directly beneath the keel, but it alone will not sink the ship, only flood her — but, hopefully, will kill everyone on deck above. She’s held in place by eight steel pipes each twenty inches in diameter, welded to the hull below the water line, pile-driven deep into the Potong’s muddy bottom. Each of those will have to be blown, and each receive a one-pound magnetically attached charge of C4. Bo is responsible for five of them and Butch for three, plus the hull.

  They meet back at the SDV and give each other a thumbs up and underwater high-five.

  The charges will be radio activated, as opposed to timers, as it is imperative the secondary targets, the Iranian visitors, are aboard for their luncheon and fatal dessert.

  Neither Bo nor Butch are aware of how the control room, TOC, will know the arrival of the visiting delegation of Iranians. All they know is that they are to receive a SATphone call when the time is right. The radio-signal activation is supposedly good for up to a mile, but, just to be sure, Bo maneuvers the SDV only one half-mile downstream, until he finds a warehouse with another pier they can hide under, and does so. The fact is that he’s studied every foot of the banks of the Potong for miles, thanks to SAT photos, Google Earth, and in-country agents.

  “Now we wait,” Bo says and notes Butch’s Cheshire cat grin.

  Butch can’t contain his enthusiasm. He guffaws and says, “I hope my ol’ daddy is perched on a cloud, watching.”

  Bo nods and adds, “And I hope we get most of NK’s nuke scientists and a good part of Iran’s.”

  As he speaks, he picks up the SATphone and
dials the single number that connects him to Black Gold.

  “Chong,” Pax answers. “Tell me you’re on schedule.”

  “Good to go. Awaiting your order to execute.”

  “Relax. Stand by.”

  “Ten-four,” Bo says and rings off.

  He turns to Butch. “Relax, the man said.”

  “Fucking easy for him to say,” Butch says but leans back and closes his eyes.

  With our bellies full of raw eggs, we keep moving east, back in-country, the opposite way, we presume, that any pursuers would go.

  We’ve walked only a mile or so when a paved highway joins the alignment of the railroad, on the opposite side of the tracks from our position. As I feared, after a dozen cars and a half-dozen trucks have passed, a military deuce-and-a-half comes along.

  “Shall we hide?” I ask Jin as the truck approaches. It will pass only a hundred feet or so from us.

  “No,” he says, emphatically.

  As I feared, they slow as they near, rolling to a stop opposite us.

  The driver salutes and yells something in Korean, and Jin returns the salute, waves, smiles, and then answers.

  They wave back and move on.

  “What?” I ask.

  “They offered us a ride. I said we were inspecting the track, and they bought it. Gave me an odd look, but bought it. We need to get the hell away from this track. They’re going to begin to wonder why an officer is walking track.”

  The track has picked up a parallel spur, one that, I presume, is used for one train to pass another. For a hundred yards, we walk between the two.

  There are two-dozen farmhouses and barns within sight, and I can’t help but wonder where the hell we’ll be able to hide, when my hopes are answered. Another train approaches.

  In fact, when I look behind, there is a second train coming, now one from each direction.

  We move down the rip-rap embankment to a stand of small trees and wait.

  Luckily the train moving west, with a dozen or so boxcars, pulls off onto the side spur. We hide while the eastbound train passes. As the westbound begins to move, we run up the embankment and swing aboard between the cars. It’s not the best spot, as we can be seen, but at least we are now traveling toward the Sea of Japan.

  Back the way we’ve come.

  I fire up the SATphone and dial.

  “Chong,” Pax answers.

  “Chee here. Traveling with the sun. If this keeps up, we’ll be looking for a lift in an hour or so.”

  “Shank’s mare,” he asks, again using lingo any NK listener will likely not understand.

  “Negative, Johnny Cash and the City of New Orleans.” Again, something an NK listener will not understand, but any music fan — and Pax is one — will know that’s a train.

  “Roger that. Standing by for coordinates.”

  With lots and lots of luck, we’ll be squeezing a lime in a Corona in the Black Gold wardroom in a couple of hours.

  With lots and lots and lots of luck.

  Bo and Butch are wondering if they’d ever see the Pueblo go up in flames and steam as she sinks, when Bo’s cell phone vibrates.

  “Tell me we’re a go,” he says, not bothering with “Hello.”

  “The party will be on in ten to fifteen mikes. You clear of any shock wave?”

  “Affirmative. We’re on the clock.”

  “Wait for my confirm.”

  “Roger that.” He rings off and turns to Butch. “Hang for fifteen; then the dance begins.”

  Again, Butch leans back and closes his eyes.

  “You okay?” Bo asks, seeing Butch grimace.

  “Never better. In fifteen, I’ll be able to die a happy man.”

  “Let me buy you a fifty-dollar-an-ounce Kobe beefsteak back in Japan before you give up the ghost, old man. You’ll get to palaver with your pa soon enough.”

  “I got a niece,” Butch says, turning serious. “My only relative. I told Reardon about her, but you should know as well. My dough goes to her. Jennifer McAdams, in Manhattan Beach. Got it?”

  “You’ll hand her a copy of your will after I buy you that massaged chunk of Wagyu.”

  “Yeah, right. But if I don’t, make sure Reardon follows through.”

  “Read you loud and clear.”

  The phone vibrates, and Bo slams it to his ear. “Tell me it’s button time.”

  27

  Pieter De Vries has butterflies in his stomach. He’s called in sick again and knows Sumi is suspicious of his illness, as he’s been moving from bed to small kitchen to the windows, as nervous as a cat in a dog pound. The binoculars he’s been given by his cook contact, Duri, are easily explained away. After all, their apartment is on the seventh floor, with a wonderful view of Pyongyang and the river and canals.

  The SATphone he carries is another problem altogether. Duri had managed to slip it to him; he’s managed to get it into the apartment…but it is hard to hide with an eight-inch antenna. Hard to keep out of the inquisitive, searching eyes of Sumi.

  But, for the next hour at least, he’s managed to get rid of her. Complaining of diarrhea, he’d sent her to a pharmacy for medicine. Much to her displeasure, but not so much as her displeasure of looking aghast at doing the laundry.

  From his window, he has a clear view, only a half-mile away, of the parking area of the Pueblo, and he’s both excited and nervous. His instructions are to report the arrival of limousines, and they are arriving. He waits until three line up as close as vehicles can get to the gangplank leading aboard and then makes his call. He says clearly, “Lunch time,” the code word he was given. Then he kills the call and quickly hides the SATphone in a plastic bag in the toilet tank. Then he returns to the windows and his binoculars and stays glued to the ship—he knows something is happening but doesn’t know exactly what to expect.

  And what effect it will have on him. He hopes his reporting is merely informational, but deep in his fluttering stomach, he’s sure it’s operational.

  He’ll know soon.

  Bo turns to Butch, who looks eager. “I wish we were close enough to see something other than smoke, but here goes.”

  Pushing the button on the controller, both of them smile as the report reverberates up and down the Potong. They’re close enough to the edge of the warehouse wharf they’re positioned under to see upriver and the billowing smoke and even solid pieces of the Pueblo that rise above the buildings that are in the way of their view.

  Bo turns, and he and Butch high-five. Then Bo says, “Let’s deep-six this baby and get in the current. Every gook in this shithole will be looking for someone to filet.”

  Butch laughs at the ex-SEAL of Chinese heritage using the term “gook.” He guesses he’s convinced him of the true definition of the word.

  “Take ’er down, squid,” Butch says, and in seconds, to the piercing sound of air-raid sirens echoing across the land, they are near the bottom of the thirty-foot-deep Potong and in the current, heading west at more than ten knots.

  Peter De Vries is both elated and fearful as he watches the Pueblo shatter, and then his view of her is occluded by smoke and flame. The three long, black limousines parked near the gangplank are rocked and their windows blown out.

  When the smoke begins to clear, he sees that she’s shattered, but not sinking. Then what’s left of her slowly begins to list to the river side, and she seems to shudder and then slips under the surface.

  He’s mesmerized by the sight, even if he feels like running for the elevator and trying to find his way to the border and out of the country.

  Under the circumstances, he decides he does not want to be found with the SATphone, in fact, under any circumstance. So, he retrieves it, hurries out of the apartment, and decides to go up to the roof rather than down to the lobby. Not trusting the elevator, he takes the stairs. In minutes, he’s on the roof, four stories above, and finds a four-inch pipe, a vent, probably a plumbing vent, that’s large enough and drops the SATphone. He stands quietly and listens to it rattl
e its way deep into the bowels of the high-rise apartment building. Then he hurries back down to his apartment.

  He’s surprised to see that Sumi has already returned.

  Before he can comment, she says, “You must be feeling better?”

  “Not really, but I had to go to the roof to see better what the explosion was.”

  “You didn’t take the binoculars,” she says, accusingly.

  “I forgot,” he replies. “Excited, I guess.”

  “Captain Soon of the MPS just called and asked for you. I had to tell him I had no idea where you were.”

  “MPS?” Pieter asks innocently but knows and fears the Ministry of Peoples Security.

  “The police. I would expect them to arrive here shortly.”

  “Why?” Pieter asks and shrugs as if he has no idea what is taking place.

  “Because you are a foreigner, and someone has destroyed a national monument?”

  “That boat?”

  “The Pueblo. The captured American ship proudly on display in our capital.”

  “I’m Dutch—”

  “And a foreigner. Expect to be one of many questioned.”

  Again, Pieter shrugs. But butterflies swarm his stomach, and he is so glad he’s dumped the SATphone.

  It is only minutes when a heavy knock announces someone at the apartment door.

  Jin and I continued to worry, as we were exposed between the boxcars, and two men with strange weapons, battle-rattle belts, and KPA officer’s uniforms look a little odd catching a ride on a freight train.

  So, we decide to see if we can get inside a boxcar and climb the ladder, located on each end of the cars, to the roof. “Yippee,” Jin says, with uncharacteristic zeal, “there’s a hatch.” He swings it open, and, in a heartbeat, we are inside and perched on crates, which, luckily fill the boxcar only halfway up.