“I am Sun-Hi, silly!” said the young woman, still hugging him, her small face buried in his stomach.
“She played Koppun in Flower Girl,” added Hassan dryly.
Sun-Hi didn’t break her grip on Jonah until she noticed the map on Vitaly’s screen. And then she bolted over, seizing the monitor with both hands and shaking it as though she could force it to refresh from a frozen error on the screen. Unaware of the Scorpion’s new mission, she clearly expected to have been discovered, once far away from North Korea.
“We go now, please?” she said, pointing at the screen. “Why we here? No good, no good! We must leave! If army find us, they shoot us!”
“She does have a point,” Marissa said.
“Yes, Captain,” mimicked Vitaly. “Can we go now, please?”
Jonah considered her for a minute until Hassan spoke. “What do you want me to do about her?”
“We could confine her to quarters,” suggested Marissa.
“Look at her—she can’t hurt anybody!” said Alexis.
“I have killed the most men with my smallest knife,” interjected Dalmar.
“That cannot be true,” protested Marissa, glaring at the pirate. “You are so making that up.”
Sun-Hi just stared between the members of the crew as they considered her fate.
“I won’t turn down local knowledge while we have it,” Jonah finally said. “Besides—out of all of us, she seems the most motivated to not return to North Korea. Sun-Hi, how did you hide from the Japanese?”
“I hide in laundry!”
“See?” demanded Marissa. “See? I told you the laundry wasn’t a shitty hiding spot!”
“For her maybe—she’s all of half your size,” retorted Jonah. “I could hide her in a pair of Dalmar’s tube socks.”
There was a general murmuring of agreement among the crew as Marissa glowered at Jonah with renewed fury.
“Hassan, Alexis, Dalmar, Sun-Hi, you’re with me,” ordered Jonah. “Full SCBA respirators and tanks from the firefighting gear. Keep an eye on each other’s gauges and mask seals as well as your own. We go by rule of thirds— we’ve got thirty-minute tanks, I want us turned around and headed back for the Scorpion within ten.”
“Arms?” asked Dalmar.
“Nothing visible—and no rifles. Anything you can carry on your person is fine by me.”
“Like this?” asked Dalmar as he lifted his shirt to reveal several high-caliber pistols holstered against his ridiculously chiseled abdominal muscles.
“Yeah, that works,” said Jonah as he pulled, press-checked, and replaced his nickel-and-pearl .45 at the back of his jeans.
“What do you want me to do?” asked Marissa.
Dalmar reached over the frizzy-haired shipping heiress and pulled an oversized black assault rifle from a hidden wall compartment. He shoved it into her hands, waiting until she gripped the weapon before releasing it to her.
“Do not allow us to be boarded,” the pirate warned.
“Um . . . OK.” Marissa gulped and looked at the gun in her hands.
Dalmar leaned over her, eyes wide and teeth shining white as he whispered into her ear. “And if you cannot hold them back,” he rasped. “Do not be captured alive.”
“Knock it off, Dalmar—” Jonah chided as he pulled a clear plastic full-face mask and bottle from the command compartment’s cache of emergency firefighting supplies.
The rest of the landing party began to don their own masks as well, and Alexis showed a reluctant Sun-Hi how to adjust and tighten the straps around the back of her head.
“You going to be OK?” asked Jonah, his voice muffled through his fogging mask.
Marissa looked down at the rifle, then at Dalmar, and back to Jonah again. “No!” she exclaimed. “No, I’m not going to be OK!”
“Don’t worry about anything,” insisted Jonah as he ascended the conning tower ladder to the lockout chamber above. “We’re just taking a peek around—back inside twenty minutes tops.”
CHAPTER 9
The lockout chamber unlatched with a heavy clunk, seals hissing as the thick watertight door swung open and the toxic atmosphere of the underground North Korean submarine base swirled invisible around them. Jonah stepped from the conning tower interior and onto the deck of the Scorpion. Behind him, Hassan, Alexis, Dalmar and Sun-Hi emerged from the tight compartment. He took a deep breath through his respirator facemask and was rewarded with a lungful of dry, odorless air. Good—his SCBA unit was in working order; the gauge on the tank read fully in the green. It’d give him thirty minutes of air if he was careful, maybe forty if he kept his breathing slow and pulse even.
Jonah scanned the chamber from end to end before staring up at the concrete ceiling above him through the curved clear plastic of his facemask. He paused, taking in the crumbling, hand-painted DPRK flag that loomed overhead. It looked like it hadn’t been tended to in years. Strange for a country where symbols were generally regarded as more important than people.
“I see we are still without any greeting party.” Hassan gazed over the empty, pillared gangway and darkness beyond. Freed from tide and swell, the Scorpion floated, bow rake gently scraping against the concrete moorage. The design and dimensions of the long, horseshoe-shaped submarine waterway resembled a steep-walled irrigation channel, albeit one sequestered deep beneath the surface. One way in. One way out. And no way to turn the submarine around. Jonah tried to imagine how much rock and earth was between them and the surface. Two hundred, maybe three hundred feet? The facility was certainly deep enough to protect the submarine base from the capitalist missiles and rockets the hermit kingdom had spent generations preparing for—but how deep exactly, he had no idea.
“Anybody else getting that itchy feeling?” asked Alexis, her voice muffled by her SCBA respirator as she glanced around the chamber for any signs of life.
“Only in my trigger finger.” Jonah could practically hear Dalmar’s toothy smile from the other side of his facemask.
“What is itchy mean?” asked Sun-Hi as she tugged against the back of Jonah’s shirt, her hand uncomfortably close to the butt of his nickel-plated pistol.
Jonah didn’t have time to answer her. He and Dalmar edged down the side of the unanchored submarine’s curved deck, the two men steadying themselves before they leapt onto the concrete landing. They worked together to lift the nearest wooden gangplank and slide it over the edge of the moorage, pushing the plank until the far end rested securely against the hull of the Scorpion. Jonah gave the platform a good couple of stomps before waving anyone over. Single-file, the rest of the landing party gingerly made their way across the heavy board and onto the concrete.
“I think I saw lights,” said Jonah, pointing into the darkness. “Let’s go.”
They passed through the line of thick columns running parallel to the submarine channel, the walkway behind the pillars funneling them into a long tunnel-like corridor leading away from the moorage. Dying fluorescent lights flickered from their ceiling mounts, but their illumination was inadequate to the sheer scale of the hall. Some of the walls looked a half-century old with their fading painted slogans and peeling propaganda posters. The party made their way through the thirty-foot wide tunnel. Two lines of recessed railroad tracks interrupted the smooth concrete floor, no doubt used to load heavy weapons and supplies into waiting submarines.
“Where are people?” asked Sun-Hi.
No one answered.
Jonah and his crew turned on their assortment of flashlights and headlamps, illuminating the long corridor. Even after a hundred meters distance, the brightest light was swallowed by the all-encompassing darkness. The sound of Jonah’s own breath hissed uncomfortably in his ears, forcing him to remember the deadly atmosphere around them. One breath, two breaths, he’d be okay; maybe some nausea and a bad headache for a few hours. Drop his mask or let the tank bleed dry, and he’d have minutes before the spins took him. And then it’d be just a matter of time before unconsciousness set in an
d his heart stopped.
“I’ve got something over here,” said Hassan as he pointed down the corridor, his light fixed to a recessed steel doorway in the distance. A single, sneaker-clad foot stuck out from the threshold, toes-down.
Jonah, Dalmar, and Alexis unholstered their pistols, but Hassan instead removed a pair of latex gloves from his satchel, stretching them out with a snap as he pulled them over his hands. Jonah rounded the corner with gun drawn, his flashlight spilling across the facedown, motionless body. The man was young, certainly younger than Jonah, and he looked like he could have walked out of a metro center in any cosmopolitan city in the world with his snug black leather jacket, Levis, and fashionable sneakers, complete with a shaggy haircut. Only his truncated stature and delicate features identified him as North Korean. But, long since grown to adulthood, the dead man retained all the hallmark signs of chronic childhood starvation.
The room around the man was small and boxy, only fifteen by fifteen, and was swept clean except for one large crate of blocky, plastic-wrapped paper a few feet from the corpse.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” breathed Alexis.
“Flip him over,” ordered Jonah. Hassan and Dalmar grasped the frail body by the shoulder and rolled it to one side. The man’s face—opened-eyed—was flushed and lifelike, his skin still pink and lips red. Only the dribble of dried foam gathered around the corners of his mouth indicated that something had gone very, very wrong.
“He not alive?” asked Sun-Hi.
“No,” said the doctor. “He’s not alive.”
“Why he so pink then?” said Sun-Hi. “He still look alive. Maybe you give him medicine?”
“It’s the carbon monoxide post-mortem colorant effect. It’s not dissimilar to the way commercial meats are dyed prior to sale. I assure you—he’s quite dead.”
“Oh,” said Sun-Hi. She may not have understood every word, but she’d gotten the gist of it—the man wasn’t getting up. Ruddy and lifelike as his body might be, it was only an illusion.
Dalmar stood, walked to the large crate and flicked open a knife, using the naked blade to slice through the thick plastic wrapping. He reached inside and withdrew several taped stacks of American hundred dollar bills. Jonah stared, unmoving. If the rest of the money was the same denomination, the plastic-packaged crate could have easily held a hundred million dollars or more.
“Counterfeit?” suggested Alexis. “You figure this is what McSlappy wanted us to find? He wasn’t exactly forthcoming with the details.”
“Whatever we’re looking for, I think we’ll know it when we find it,” said Jonah.
“Well, I hope we find it fast,” said Alexis, tapping on her already diminishing tank gauge. “We stick around too long and we’ll end up just like our friend.”
Dalmar pulled big fistfuls of the counterfeit money out of the packaging, allowing nearly a million dollars of fluttering, loose bills onto the concrete floor next to the body.
“Aren’t we in deep enough shit already?” barked Jonah as he stood. “Leave it alone. We don’t have time for souvenirs. Dalmar, cover the hallway while the rest of us explore. I don’t want anybody sneaking up on us.”
Dalmar glared through his mask as he drew a second pistol, exiting into the main corridor to stand watch, a weapon in each hand.
“Let’s split up; we can cover more ground that way,” suggested Hassan.
Alexis kicked the doctor in the shin and waved an angry finger in his face.
“What on earth was that for?” Hassan winced.
“You don’t watch a lot of scary movies, do you?”
“It’s not a good thing to say,” agreed Dalmar from the other side of the door, patting the doctor on the back as he passed. “Bad luck.”
“I am itchy now, too,” Sun-Hi said with a shiver. “I see many scary movie.”
“Stow it. We’re low on time, and it’s a good idea to split up,” Jonah ordered. “Radios on, but stay within earshot of Dalmar; and yell if there’s trouble.”
The group began to spread out in different directions down the dark corridor, each selecting different doors under the watchful eye of the dual-gun-wielding pirate. Only Sun-Hi stuck close to Jonah.
Jonah’s radio crackled within moments. “I found the printing press!” announced Alexis from her room across the hall, her voice high and tinny in his earpiece. “And more bodies. Five of them. And they all look the same as the one we found earlier. Believe me, I’m never going to look at a crawfish broil the same way again.”
“Narcolab,” announced Hassan from his own unseen room. “Three bodies as well. Given the preponderance of evidence at hand, I believe they were packaging methamphetamines and counterfeit pharmaceuticals for foreign distribution.”
Jonah acknowledged them over the radio as he purposefully strode the dimly lit corridor, Sun-Hi still in tow. He’d never in his life been happier wearing a humid, uncomfortable facemask. It was quickly becoming clear to him that the entire facility served solely as a contraband trans-shipment site, the corrupt narco-state underbelly of a failed socialist dream. He jiggled the handle of the steel door he’d selected and then checked the diminishing gauge on his SCBA air tank. Shit. He had maybe five minutes before reaching the self-imposed safety margin and the door was locked from the inside. There wasn’t enough time—not nearly enough—they’d barely explored a fraction of the underground facility and were still no closer to understanding why they’d been sent to investigate, much less why the submarine base was filled with dead men.
Jonah held his breath as he broke the seal of his mask, slipping his sleeve in to rub away some of the condensation that had been collecting on the clear plastic. At least a facility with bad atmosphere wasn’t as dangerous as cave diving, where you were either breathing or drowning. Even if his tank ran dry, he could probably still drop it and make a run for the Scorpion before the poison set in. What did the old timers used to say about gear malfunctioning during a dive? Oh yeah—don’t stress about it; you have the rest of your life to fix it.
He slipped the mask back on, then raised his leg and cocked back a kick. His foot slammed into the locked door, hinges rattling. He aimed a second kick, using just enough force to crack the low-grade concrete and allow the rusting steel door to swing open with an eerie creak. Sun-Hi winced at the sudden noise, casting a worried look over her shoulder towards the sneaker-wearing dead man, lest the sound wake him. Light from the corridor fell on rows of long tables, each layered with digital cameras, computers, and drafting paper surrounding boxes of partially-disassembled military technology. The sheer scope of the collection was immense. Gear ranging from body armor to missile avionics, even shredded chunks of stealthy composite skin from an American helicopter, was stacked in rows of boxes. Jonah walked up to the box on the nearest table and reached inside to pick up a flame-licked, partially disassembled pair of four-optic panoramic, night-vision goggles.
Alexis came in from the corridor, peeking through the broken steel door for a moment before joining Jonah at Sun-Hi’s side. “What’d you find?” she asked, eyes poring over the military gear.
“It’s mostly American,” said Jonah, sweeping his hand over the collection. “A smattering of EU and Russian tech, too.”
“I’ve read about insurgents paying for pharmaceuticals in arms and captured gear,” said Alexis. “Never figured I’d actually see it with my own eyes.”
“Looks like the North Koreans are in the business of reverse engineering and selling specs. Not that they have a hope in hell of manufacturing much of it for themselves.”
The engineer shivered from behind her thick mask. “This place gives me the creeps. It isn’t like any naval base I’ve ever been on. And I’m not even talking about all the dead guys.”
“I don’t think this has been a naval base for decades,” said Jonah. “It’s an Office 39 facility—an outfit that spits out counterfeit currency and drugs, launders money, and deals arms. North Korea is desperately poor and economically blockade
d to the gills. Ever wonder how Kim Jongun’s wife gets a two thousand dollar Dior handbag while her husband drinks Hennessy and shoots hoops with Dennis Rodman? This facility pays for it all. His Fendi yacht to boot.”
“So much for the sanctions.” Alexis scanned the room. “We’re walking through their slush fund and retirement plan, all in one.”
Sun-Hi pointed up at the ceiling. “So many wires!” she said, pointing to the thick black bundles as they traced their way across the low concrete ceiling towards a small back room.
“That looks like coax cable,” said Alexis. “Every camera feed in the facility probably leads through here.” She and Jonah followed the cables with their flashlights as they approached the doorway to a small office. They slipped through the unlocked wooden door to find another body, this time, an older North Korean man in an olive-drab coat and oversized military visor cap. He was slumped face-down over his internal surveillance computer workstation, as though sleeping. The entire wall behind the dead man was taken up by ceiling-high servers and a massive regional map, which marked the location of the Office 39 base, as well as nearby barracks, airstrips, military depots, and fixed artillery.
“He’s a general.” Jonah reached out to lightly brush the three silver stars on the man’s collar with his fingertips. “Maybe head honcho of this facility?”
“Look!” said Sun-Hi, pointing to the corpse’s bare legs behind the metal desk. The dead man was missing his pants. Alexis just silently nodded towards the nearest vent where the general had unsuccessfully attempted to plug the duct with his uniform trousers. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway—the entire facility was saturated with carbon monoxide.
“Remind me to die with my pants on,” grunted Jonah. He grabbed the general by the back of the collar and pulled his rolling chair out from behind the desk, and then tipped the body onto the concrete floor. He took the chair for himself, saddling up to the computer workstation.
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