He didn’t dare maintain a straight line, however. The APC was firing again. Marcus blew through the next intersection and into another alley. He was clipping cars parked on both sides, but he wasn’t slowing down. He was now doing almost sixty down the narrowest of passageways. Despite all the chaos he could hear .50-caliber rounds whizzing past the vehicle.
Hwang’s left arm was bleeding badly, yet Hwang seemed unfazed. Quietly the physician reached into his backpack, resting on the floor beneath him, pulled out a tourniquet, and began methodically applying it.
Callaghan called for Hwang’s grenade launcher. Hwang paused from injecting himself with morphine, grabbed his M79, and tossed it to him. Then he went back to giving himself the shot.
Marcus glanced back just in time to see a 40mm grenade streak down the alley. The resulting explosion not only took out the gunner but caused the driver behind him to lose control. The APC smashed into a parked car and flipped over in a blaze of sparks.
Just before the next intersection, Marcus suddenly braked hard and turned the wheel all the way to the right. Too far. The minibus turned but was also now up on just two wheels. Fearing they were about to tip over, Marcus course-corrected, hopped the curb on the left side of the street, and clipped the side of the building. Then he pulled the wheel hard to the right again as everyone shifted their weight to the right. The other two wheels smashed back down on the pavement, and they kept moving.
In severe pain, Hwang nevertheless scrambled into the backseat and began attending to the wounded SEAL operator. Marcus, meanwhile, strained to hear the updates coming in over his headset. The other three cars were having far more success than they were. They hadn’t needed to zigzag through the city nearly as much. They were being chased, but their vehicles had proven faster and more agile. So far none of their men had been hit. Sanchez reported his car was just seconds away from the train yard. They promised to set up a perimeter and hold off the onslaught. Marcus hoped the Blue Team had managed to pick up Vinetti as planned.
Just then, a motorcycle policeman roared in from a side street, rapidly approaching the van. Callaghan saw him first. He pivoted, fired, and sent the man spilling off his bike and through the plate-glass window of a storefront. But now two more police motorcycles were coming up fast. Another APC also swerved onto their boulevard, followed in rapid succession by two more.
The lead APC was less than two hundred yards away. A moment later, its gunner opened fire. Marcus hit the brakes and took a sharp left turn, purposefully glancing off the right side of the alley this time to not flip over. The APCs had just enough warning to make the turn too, but Marcus had gained some ground. They were now two hundred fifty—perhaps even three hundred—yards back.
Though not 100 percent sure, Marcus calculated he was at least a good ten to fifteen blocks away from the train yard. There was no way he was going to be able to make it back. He could see only one APC behind him now. The other two had broken off, their drivers probably hoping to outflank him on his right or at least cut off any option of joining the other three escape vehicles.
He realized there was a growing possibility that they weren’t going to make it out of Tanch’oˇn alive. The minibus was running on fumes. He had only just noticed that the gas gauge was close to empty. Were they to stall, they were finished. They wouldn’t let themselves be taken alive. They’d fight to the end, no matter how bitter, but there was no point endangering the lives of the rest of the men who could still make it to the SDVs and back to the Michigan.
“Don’t wait for us,” Marcus now radioed to Sanchez. “Get to the SDVs. Start moving downriver.”
“We’re not leaving without you,” Sanchez radioed back.
“You have to,” Marcus said. “We’re cut off. Can’t make it to the rendezvous. Get moving and come to the bridge. We’ll try to meet you there. That’s our only shot. Sierra One, out.”
72
“I think he’s stabilized,” Hwang shouted. “What’s our ETA?”
It was a good question. Marcus didn’t have a precise answer. But he knew the man’s life depended on him now.
After the briefings with Berenger, Marcus had pored over satellite maps of the streets and alleyways of Tanch’oˇn as they’d crossed the Sea of Japan. But it was one thing to study them from above. It was quite another to navigate them at high speeds and while being shot at. Marcus was reasonably confident that unless the DPRK were able to set up enough roadblocks in a very short amount of time—a doubtful task under the circumstances—he could probably get his team to the bridge that crossed the Dongdae River about two kilometers downstream from the train bridge they’d crossed on foot. The issue wasn’t so much getting there as having enough time to stop and get all of them and their equipment and the body bags down to the river and into the water before being shot to pieces by the massive army and police forces bearing down on them.
Then came a new wrinkle. Callaghan announced a military helicopter was following them. Marcus could see a second one approaching from the west. He had no idea if there were sharpshooters on board. But even if there weren’t, there was no chance he could elude even aging and badly maintained choppers.
Marcus was blowing through intersections at higher and higher speeds. He was still zigzagging, trying to get closer to the river but taking fire from police and military units who were beginning to cut off certain streets. The DPRK had realized all the other vehicles had headed south. They were clearly determined to keep Marcus from following. So far, though, Marcus still had the initiative. His sheer recklessness was something none of the authorities had ever seen before. At times he was driving on sidewalks. At others he was smashing through bus stops, ripping up fire hydrants, and terrifying pedestrians and other drivers as the city awoke and began its day.
Then a new thought came to mind: What if he could make it to the port? It was on the other side of the bridge, maybe another kilometer or so. There’d be fairly tight security on the outer perimeter, and he had no idea whether the minibus—being torn to shreds and rapidly running through its last drops of fuel—could break through the front gates and still get them to the water’s edge. They’d still be tracked by the choppers, but if he radioed ahead to the SDVs, might they be able to make it there and set up a perimeter to buy them a few more precious minutes?
“Sierra One, we’re under the bridge—how close are you?” Sanchez asked over the radio.
“Three minutes, maybe four,” Marcus replied. “How long would it take you to get to the port?”
“Why?”
“The bridge might not work.”
“It has to,” said Sanchez.
“Why?”
“We just learned there’s a destroyer blocking the harbor. We’ll never get in.”
“Then standby one,” Marcus said. “We’ll see you at the bridge.”
Another idea flashed through his mind. It was crazy actually, yet the more Marcus thought about it, the more he concluded it wasn’t just an option; it was their only chance. If it were just him, he’d do it for certain. But the lives of the rest of these men were in his hands. He had to alert Callaghan and the others before he attempted something so reckless. And so he did, ignoring their shocked looks.
About four blocks from the bridge, Marcus tried to turn onto a side street running parallel to a major boulevard. He couldn’t read any of the street signs, and even though Hwang could, they were all blurring by too fast for any translation to be actionable. By the grace of God, he didn’t roll the van. But they did spin out and come to a full stop facing in the wrong direction. The only break they got was that the lead APC chasing them fared even worse. Not only did the APC not make the turn in time, it smashed headlong through the front of a building and erupted into flames.
That bought them a few more seconds, but not enough to do a K-turn and get pointed in the right direction, Marcus concluded. There was only one choice now. He jammed the van into reverse and hit the gas just as a second APC came screeching around the co
rner. It, too, spun out but didn’t crash. Still, its driver burned a good deal of time making the very three-point turn Marcus had forgone. Police cruisers moved into the gap and began gaining ground. Hwang and the SEALs opened fire.
To the astonishment of every man in the minibus, Marcus never slowed down even though he was still going in reverse. In fact, down the straightaway, he actually sped up. Only when they approached a turn—one of their last two—did he ease his foot off the pedal ever so slightly, making the turn more smoothly than he had when he’d been going forward. A moment later, Marcus made another nearly flawless turn, this one onto the boulevard leading straight to the bridge.
This wasn’t something he’d learned in the Corps. This was pure Secret Service training at work—“advanced reverse driving”—something he’d practiced countless times, though in an eight-ton armor-plated presidential limousine, not a crumbling North Korean van.
Sanchez came over the radio, announcing they had suffered a KIA. An operative had been killed in action. The news seemed to suck the air out of everyone’s lungs, and then Sanchez transmitted the name: “Nicholas Vinetti. We’ve got him, but he’s gone.” Marcus could barely breathe, barely think, yet he knew he had to force himself to stay focused for a few seconds more for the sake of everyone in his care.
The bridge was coming up fast, with a roadblock set up on the far side. Marcus could see not just police and military vehicles waiting for them but giant dump trucks as well. There was no way he was going to blow through those, and he was being pursued and blocked in on the near side as the fleet of police and army vehicles gained ground. At the last moment, he spotted snipers set up at the other end.
“Hold on, gentlemen,” Marcus ordered. “This is it.”
They were roaring up the bridge now. Marcus’s foot was pressed completely down to the floor. When they were almost at dead center—directly over the river—Marcus turned the wheel to the left as hard as he could. The back of the minibus smashed through the guardrail and plunged over the side.
Time seemed to stand still. In midair and falling fast, Marcus sucked in a lungful of air, closed his eyes, and held on for dear life. He could almost see the amazement in the eyes of their pursuers. But he would never actually see them again. None of them would. Live or die, they were leaving North Korea.
The van hit the water with such force that Marcus was thrown clear through the missing front windshield. Callaghan’s decision to knock out all the windows had just saved Marcus’s life.
The water was freezing. The current was fast. The real problem, though, was how muddy it was. Visibility was terrible. Completely submerged, Marcus could see only a few feet ahead of him. He was all turned around and disoriented, unsure which way was north and which was south. He was swimming against the current, fighting not to get swept away from the bridge. But his lungs were straining. His heart was pounding. The more energy he spent trying to stay in one place, the more oxygen he was consuming. He didn’t dare go up to the surface. That was a death sentence. Yet if he couldn’t breathe . . .
Just then he felt someone grab his shoulder from behind. He whipped around to find Sanchez staring back at him through a scuba mask. Sanchez held him tightly with one hand and gave Marcus his own scuba gear with the other. Marcus took the regulator, shoved it into his mouth, and began sucking oxygen. He gave Sanchez a thumbs-up sign, then donned the mask and flippers Sanchez now gave him and strapped his tank on. As Sanchez guided him closer to the SDV, he could see other SEALs helping the rest of Red Team and taking charge of the body bags.
Finding Hwang already in the SDV, Marcus reached over and grabbed his arm as he got into his own seat. Hwang slowly turned his head and opened his eyes, but his vacant expression would haunt Marcus for the rest of the trip back to the sub.
Sanchez took Berenger’s place as pilot. Marcus took his spot behind Sanchez, who quickly closed the hatch, shrouding them in darkness. The engine suddenly purred to life, and Sanchez began to steer them down the Dongdae and back to the Michigan.
Marcus shut his eyes. He tried to forget all he had just seen and heard, but it was impossible. Everything he had feared about this mission had just come to pass. Vinetti was dead. So were Berenger and two other SEALs. And they were coming away from the mission empty-handed.
73
CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
The first call Richard Stephens made was to Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv.
“Asher, we have a problem,” the CIA director began the moment his Israeli counterpart came on the secure line.
“You just sent a team into North Korea,” Gilad said. “Please tell me no one was injured or killed.”
Stephens was so caught off guard that the Israelis knew about the mission that he was, for a moment, speechless.
“We’re monitoring the North Koreans pretty closely—the coastlines and all phone and radio traffic,” Gilad continued. “That said, truth be told, it wasn’t actually my guys who picked up on it. It was the Saudis. Abdullah bin Rashid just called me a few minutes ago. He’s waiting for your call. We all have been. What did you learn?”
“Nothing, I’m afraid,” Stephens admitted. “It was a complete bust. By the time our men got there, our contact was dead. The DPRK ambushed them. Honestly, we’re lucky any of them survived.”
“How bad was it?”
“Four dead, two wounded.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It gets worse, I’m afraid.”
“The merchant ships.”
“Exactly,” Stephens said. “They launched everything they had. Very clever. It’s a giant shell game now, and we’ve got too few assets trying to track too many targets.”
“We’re ready to help you,” Gilad said.
“Talk to me.”
“At my recommendation, Prime Minister Eitan called the crown prince in Riyadh and the sheikh in Abu Dhabi,” said the Mossad chief. “They’ve all agreed to set up a joint surveillance operation. We’ve just looped in the Australians and the Indians as well, and my prime minister is on the phone with Manila as we speak. We can work with you to divide up the North Korean commercial fleet. We’ve already been trying to identify the fifty or sixty ships that strike us as the most likely ones to be carrying the cargo. Next we’ll begin dividing up the task among our various assets, limited though they are. Just give us the go-ahead to continue.”
The director of Central Intelligence was blown away. “Consider it given—my guys will set up a video conference immediately with all of you, and we’ll loop in the SecDef, who is coordinating our efforts out of the NMCC,” Stephens said, referring to the National Military Command Center, the joint war room located deep underneath the Pentagon.
In all his years in the intelligence business, Stephens couldn’t think of a single time the U.S., Israelis, Saudis, and Emiratis had ever worked jointly on an intelligence operation of such magnitude, much less in Asia or in coordination with so many other nations. The world was changing. It was good to have allies.
Back on the Michigan, each man bowed his head in a moment of silence.
But that was it. There was no time at present to mourn the dead properly. They had to get back to business. They had a new mission to plan, and yet again the clock was ticking.
The moment the SDVs had reached and redocked with the submarine, the fifteen officers and 140 crew members had begun coordinating a high-speed run for the Korea Strait. Located between the city of Busan on the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula and the city of Fukuoka near the southern tip of Japan, the strait had become the prime focus of U.S. naval intelligence in the hunt for the Russian nuclear warheads now believed to be on their way to Iran.
“Gentlemen, in the hours following your raid in Tanch’oˇn, the leadership in Pyongyang ordered their entire national fleet of commercial container ships to set sail from North Korean ports and head south,” the Michigan’s captain explained to Marcus and the SEALs in the crew’s mess, in his first briefing since they had
reboarded. “Hyong Ja Park’s objective here is obvious. By filling the Sea of Japan with every merchant ship he has, he’s desperately trying to mask which ship—or ships—are actually carrying the warheads, thus massively complicating our efforts to identify those ships and intercept them.”
The captain noted that it was still not clear to analysts back in Washington exactly how General Yoon’s superiors had caught wind of his plan to defect and pass along critical intelligence on the nuclear transfer. But he added it was likely that the plan to transfer the warheads to Iran had, from its inception, been predicated on the “flood the zone” concept. It was likely the brainchild of Mahmoud Entezam, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or his deputy, Alireza al-Zanjani, and something upon which Iran’s Supreme Leader had insisted.
Whoever’s idea it was, thought Marcus, it was a brilliant move, for it added some 240 merchant ships to the more than two hundred container ships that already transited the strait on a daily basis, not counting tankers carrying oil and liquefied natural gas, hundreds of fishing vessels, and untold yachts and other leisure craft. There was simply no way the U.S. could monitor every ship—or even most of them—with satellites, drones, or other surveillance measures. If that weren’t bad enough, the captain added that if the warheads were being transported in lead-lined storage cases, which they undoubtedly were, then they’d be almost impossible to detect from the air even by the most sophisticated American-built sensors.
Héctor Sanchez now stood and addressed the men. He explained that he had just received a call from the chief of naval operations in Washington, appointing him as the new acting commander of SEAL Team Six. He urged the men to compartmentalize the deaths of their teammates. They would honor them as soon as they possibly could with full-blown Navy funerals. The best way to honor their memory now, he said, was to complete this mission and not allow these good men to have died in vain.
The Persian Gamble Page 28