Fires of War - [First Team 03]

by Larry Bond

  Thera snapped open the suitcase. Four cartons of cigarettes sat at the side of the bag.

  The man looked up at her expectantly. Thera, guessing he wanted one of the cartons, nodded. The customs official took one, slit open the end, and poured the boxes of cigarettes onto the table. He chose one pack and opened it, again emptying its contents. Then he selected a cigarette.

  I should light it for him, Thera thought to herself, but before she could, he had pushed the cigarette back into the box and began to repack the carton.

  He put the boxes back and went through the rest of the things. Thera reached into the pocket of her jacket and took out an unopened pack of cigarettes.

  “You could have one,” she said, holding it out to the man. “Sir?”

  The custom official’s face turned beet red. He shook his head quickly, then, without even looking in her pocketbook, shoved her suitcase to the side and waved the next person toward him.

  “I’m sorry,” whispered Thera.

  “Go now,” said the man, without looking in her direction.

  ~ * ~

  20

  DAEJEON, SOUTH KOREA

  After talking to Slott, Ferguson spent a few hours lining up new backup hotel rooms and renting cars under a new set of pseudonyms, erasing any connection with the man the Seoul CIA officers had called on. If he’d been operating somewhere else—Cairo, for example—he might not have gone quite so far; it seemed unlikely that they had been followed. But he didn’t know Korea, and the last thing he wanted was to be blindsided here because he wasn’t careful enough.

  Running a bit late, he found Guns in the National Science Museum, puzzling out a historical display of Korean weaponry. The captions were almost entirely in Korean, but the marine had a connoisseur’s appreciation of the tools of the trade.

  “Better than rifles, huh?” said Ferguson as Guns bent over an ancient sword.

  “Not better exactly, but I wouldn’t mind putting it to the test.”

  “Maybe later. You have lunch?”

  “Like two hours ago at the hotel.”

  “Come on and have some again.”

  They found a small, inexpensive restaurant about a mile away, took off their shoes, and sat at a low table. A laminated menu hung on the wall next to them. All of the words were in Korean, punctuated by idealized pictures of the dishes that both men had learned from experience had little to do with what they’d actually end up being served. A gas burner sat in the middle of the table; they ordered steak and grilled the raw strips themselves when the dish was brought over.

  Ferguson, who hadn’t eaten in more than twenty-four hours, wolfed the food down as soon as the meat reached medium rare. He also devoured most of the kimchi and rice. Guns, still adjusting to the spicy food, looked on with a mixture of wonder and shock as the meal disappeared into his companion’s mouth.

  “So what’s the next move?” he asked when Ferguson came up for air. “We go in and look for the material?”

  Ferguson shook his head.

  “OK,” said the marine.

  That was one thing about Guns, Ferg thought: He always went with the program. No muss, no fuss.

  “So what do we do?”

  “Talk to a man about a truck,” Ferguson told him, counting out his money to pay the bill.

  ~ * ~

  T

  his is all you got?” said Corrigan after Ferguson uploaded the photos to him.

  “What, the driver isn’t smiling?”

  “Jeez, Ferg, these are blurry as hell. I can’t even read the logo on the grill.”

  “Get some truck expert to look at it. Once you get the make narrowed down, we can talk to the police, get a list of licenses.”

  “Even if we could talk to the police, which we can’t,” said Corrigan, “you know how many trucks there are in Korea?”

  “Corrigan, stop whining and see what you can find out.”

  ~ * ~

  W

  hile they were waiting for Corrigan to come up with something, Ferguson and Guns drove back to the highway near the waste plant and found a spot to plant two video units, hoping they might spot the truck if it came back. The units were outfitted with miniature hard drives; time-lapse photography let them record for thirty-six hours before transmitting their images to The Cube and starting all over.

  Ferguson guessed it would be a long shot that the truck would return. He also had no idea if it was important or not. But he couldn’t stand just hanging around with nothing to do.

  They were on their way back to Daejeon when Corrigan called Ferguson on the sat phone, greeting him with a question about what truck model was the most popular in Korea.

  “Ford?” guessed Ferguson.

  “Hyundai,” said Corrigan. “This isn’t that. You know what number two is?”

  “Daewoo.”

  “Exactly. This isn’t one of those either. It’s pretty rare, Namhan Hoesa Teureoka, South Korean National Truck Company.”

  “Very creative. Who owns the truck?”

  “I don’t know. They were only made for about two years. This was about a decade back. See, there was this rich guy named Park tried to set up a company to compete with the Japanese and—”

  “Whose truck is it, Jack?”

  “I told you, Ferg. I don’t know.”

  “Have you ran the registrations?”

  “I can’t just call up the division of motor vehicles.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “For one thing, they’d get suspicious. Slott says we’re not supposed to do anything that will tip anyone off, especially the government.”

  “Lie to the Koreans. Tell them it’s a drug thing. Just get me a list.”

  Ferguson snapped off the phone.

  “Problem?” asked Guns.

  “Corrigan still thinks he’s in the army.”

  Guns laughed.

  They passed a Hyundai sedan whose side had been caved in from an accident.

  “Hey, back up,” Ferg told Guns.

  “What?”

  “I want to grab a picture of that banged-up car. Turn around.”

  Guns checked his mirror, then jammed the brakes and made a U-turn.

  “What are we doing now?” he asked after Ferguson came back with two digital photos of the car.

  “Looking for a police station. We just had an accident.”

  ~ * ~

  F

  erguson reasoned that he was more likely to find a sympathetic policeman in a small town, and so he and Guns got off Route 19, wandering around the local roads. They finally found a likely looking place just outside of Baekbong, where buildings with curved-tile roofs clustered behind a row of two-story stores on the narrow main drag. After brushing up on his Korean with the help of his handheld translator and a phrase book, Ferguson left Guns up the block and went inside.

  “I want to report an accident,” he said in Korean, addressing the squat woman behind the desk at the police station. “Sagoga nasseoyo.”

  “Dachin saram isseoyo?” said the woman.

  It took Ferguson a second to untangle the phrase, even though he was prepared for it.

  “No, no one’s hurt,” he told her in English, “but my car was damaged.”

  “Da-majj-ed

  Ferguson pulled out the camera with the picture of the damaged car. “It was a little road near Songnisan National Park, about a mile from the highway.”

  By now three other officers had appeared. One spoke excellent English and began acting as translator.

  “I need to fill out this insurance paper,” Ferguson told him, waving a form from the rental agency. “I need to find the truck.”

  “What was the registration?”

  “I’m not sure, but I know the kind of truck: Namhan Hoesa Teureoka.”

  “Namhan Hoesa?”

  “Maybe I’m not saying it right. The words mean ‘South Korean National Truck Company.’”

  The officer gave him a strange look, wondering how he would know wha
t the words meant if he could not pronounce them properly

  “I have never heard of the truck,” said the policeman. “Are you sure it was not a Hyundai?”

  “No, I’m positive. That’s why I figured you could help me track it down. Probably it would have damage on it. Couldn’t we search on the computer?” Ferguson stepped around the desk, pointing to the workstation. “For trucks? It’s an odd model—”

  Going behind the desk meant passing over the invisible line separating police from civilians and was a major faux pas. The Koreans reacted quickly and fervently, shouting at Ferguson that he must get behind the desk. Ferguson raised his hands and backed away, trying to cajole them into giving him the information, but it didn’t work, and in the end he retreated, probably fortunate that he wasn’t arrested as a public nuisance.

  “Didn’t work?” asked Guns when he got back to the car.

  “Fell flat on my face.” Ferguson smiled. Then he reached into his pocket for his synthetic thyroid hormones, which he was due to take.

  “Pep pills?”

  “Oh yeah.” Ferguson dumped two into his palm, then swallowed. They tasted bitter without water.

  “Why do you have to take that stuff, Ferg?”

  “I never told you, Guns?”

  The marine shook his head.

  “I don’t have a thyroid,” Ferguson told him.

  “Wow. How’d that happen?”

  “Birth defect. Let me see if Corrigan has anything new.”

  ~ * ~

  C

  orrigan—or rather the analysts working for him back at The Cube—had managed to come up with a list of the South Korean National Truck Company vehicles registered in South Chungchong Province. As rare as the trucks supposedly were, there were nearly three hundred.

  “We’re working on the rest of the country, but this is a start,” said Corrigan.

  “I thought you said this was a rare truck?”

  “It is. You know how many trucks there are in Korea?”

  “We have to narrow it down.”

  “There’s about fifty that look like they might have something to do with hospitals or different companies, that sort of thing,” Corrigan added. “They deal with radioactive waste. Why don’t you start with them?”

  For once, Corrigan had a good idea. Ferguson hooked the sat phone to the team’s laptop and downloaded the information from an encrypted website. Then they headed to the nearest hospital.

  Parked near a small laundry building on the hospital grounds was a trio of trucks. One was a National.

  “Wait for me a second,” said Ferguson. He got out of the car and walked over, took a picture of the license plate, and then used a handheld gamma detector to scan for radiation. The needle didn’t move off the baseline.

  The gamma meter was designed specifically to find trace material. As powerful as it was, it couldn’t definitively tell whether the truck had been used to transport material, since properly shielded plutonium could have been transported without leaving any trace material behind.

  Ferguson, though, theorized that the shipment hadn’t been well shielded at all, which would explain why all of the tags had turned positive the first time Thera visited the site. He also thought it possible that the plutonium had been moved after that first day, one possible explanation for the weaker hit on day two. And what better place to hide millions of dollars worth of plutonium than in a laundry truck?

  None, but not in this truck. Ferguson opened the rear door and climbed into a compartment filled with stacks of linens bundled between brown paper. The needle still didn’t move.

  “Anything?” Guns asked when he got to the car.

  “Nada.”

  “You think this is worth the effort, Ferg?” asked Guns. “I mean, all that’s probably going on is that these guys are illegally dumping waste, you know?”

  “Yeah.” Ferg reached down for the bottled water. “Here’s the thing, Guns. We want to get into the site, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We can parachute in, or we can go over the fence. Either way is doable, right? Because me and Rankin just did it, and anything me and Rankin can do, you and I can do better, right?”

  “I don’t know about better, Ferg.”

  “But let’s say there’s something in there that’s pretty heavy, and we want to take it out—”

  “Oh.”

  Ferguson made his hand into a gun and fired at his companion.

  “How’d you get to be so smart, Ferg?” asked Guns as they left the parking lot.

  Ferguson laughed. “I’m not that smart.”

  “You are, Fergie.”

  “My dad taught me,” said Ferguson, suddenly serious. “He was the smartest guy I know.”

  “He’s a spook?”

  “Was. He died about a year and a half ago.”

  “Oh.” Ferguson smiled, realizing the unintended double entendre. “Yeah, he was definitely a spook. A good one. The best. So good he got screwed.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  “Long story, Guns.” Ferguson unfolded the map to find the next truck. “Basically he trusted somebody he shouldn’t have.”

  “Double agent?”

  “No. His boss.”

  ~ * ~

  F

  erguson and Guns found the next hospital but couldn’t locate the truck, nor did they find one at the next place they tried, a small machine shop. This area of the city—technically, it was one of the suburbs, though a visitor would find it difficult to find the border—was a curious mix of business and science, part Berkley and part Silicon Valley, with what looked like old-line factories thrown in every so often for variety.

  Two trucks belonged to a company whose name indicated it was a medical testing lab. Confused by the Korean street signs, Ferguson and Guns had a hard time finding it, and when they finally did they were stopped by a security patrol outside the building. Ferguson grabbed the map, hopped out, and began pointing excitedly, saying in Russian that he was truly, truly lost. The officers did not speak Russian, but one of the men patiently began to explain in Korean and then halting English how to get back to the road.

  After a few minutes of gestures and nodding, Ferguson thanked the man profusely and stuffed a business card into his hand. This was an honorable gesture in Korean culture that could not be ignored, and the security officer not only examined it carefully but reciprocated by giving him his own.

  The card came in handy an hour and a half later, when they checked on a trio of trucks owned by Science Industries. Ferguson drove through the main entrance without spotting a guard, only to find a pair of security officers standing in front of a gate a short distance from an intersection a quarter mile from the entrance. Before Ferguson could decide whether they should go left or right, one of the officers approached the car with his hand out in the universal sign of “halt.”

  His other was on his holster.

  Ferguson rolled out his Russian again, then went to pidgin Korean, saying he had lost his way. When that didn’t work, he found the other guard’s card and handed it to the man. Mollified, the security guard called over his partner for advice on how to best send the foreigners on their way.

  Ferguson got out of the car to better understand the directions and to get a better look around. There was a loading dock at the side of one of the buildings about a half mile away, down the road that was outside the gate. Three trucks were parked in front of it.

  The security officers agreed that his best bet was to go back the way he had come, taking a right on the main road and then heading to the highway a short distance away. From there he would have an easy time finding downtown Daejeon, his supposed destination.

  “This way?” said Ferguson, pointing in the direction of the warehouse.

  “No, no, straight.”

  “Straight, then this way,” said the other guard.

  Ferguson thanked the men and got back into the car. He turned around and began heading down the road.


  “Those the right kind of trucks?” he asked Guns.

  “Hard to see from here, Ferg.”

  “Yeah, hang on.”