“Yes, sir.”
“Still playing some football?”
As a middle linebacker, Shane Stidham had been heavily recruited by sixteen different colleges in the South. The coach at Auburn University had called him the next Bo Jackson. Bad grades and an incident with the law brought him to the Marine Corps, and a tour in the Marines gave him the maturity to go back to school, get a degree in physical education, and become a teacher and assistant football coach at Jordan High School in Columbus, Georgia.
His service with the Reserves helped him stay in shape and involved. When he wore his dress blues, Shane Stidham also wore two bronze stars—recognition for deeds done with Will in the Gulf.
“No, sir,” said Stidham. “I do more coaching than playing.”
“And Gunny Moncrief.” Parker turned to the last and shortest of the three Marines.
A muscular man, Moncrief made up for his shorter stature with a much taller attitude. “Yes, sir. Be just my luck to work for an officer who would drag me out to a godforsaken, cold-ass place like this, sir.”
“At least your attitude hasn’t changed,” said Will.
“Yes, sir. I imagine it won’t, either,” Moncrief said.
“Okay, Mr. Scott, what’s the plan for us?”
“We thought we’d give you two or three days to acclimatize,” said Scott, “then move up into the mountains later this week.”
“No, we’re ready to go now,” Will said.
“O-kay,” Scott said, more a question than an acknowledgment.
“My thoughts about this phase are that we work on small unit tactics and get our coordination back up,” Will said.
“Yes,” said Scott. “And get familiar with some of our new cold-weather gear.”
“Unless my team disagrees,” said Will, “we’re ready to go right now.”
“Yes, sir, we’re ready,” said Stidham, his deep Southern accent slow and thick.
“Me, too, sir,” said Moncrief. “I’ve been here a week, sitting around staring at the four walls.”
“Yes, sir. Me, too. I’m ready to go,” Hernandez said.
“Okay,” said Scott, “we’ll go up to the gymnasium and outfit you with your cold-weather gear and then head on into the mountains.”
Chapter 26
Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Center, Pickel Meadows, California
Scott led the way to two Humvees parked at the edge of the helicopter pad. After sloughing through the melting snow at the lower base camp level, Will climbed into the front right seat of the first Humvee with Scott in the seat behind him, then covered his eyes as the snow-reflected sun temporarily blinded him.
“Here, you’ll want these.” Scott leaned over from the backseat and handed Will a pair of black wraparound sunglasses.
“Thanks.”
Others would have immediately felt a shortness of breath as they adjusted to the 7,000-foot altitude of the base camp, but not Will. While others would have suffered through frequent gasps for air, the fast pace of daily ten- to fifteen-mile runs had made Will more easily adaptable.
The jeeps pulled away from the helicopter pad and wound their way up the small mountain trail, past several stone and block buildings, to the upper road above the small base. More than a true military base, Bridgeport was a national park camp. In fact, for many years, it had been on loan to the Marine Corps from the Department of the Interior, with the hope that one day it would be returned to the Park Service. But the threat of North Korea and other cold-weather war scenarios had the Marines constantly renewing the lease. With each renewal, the Marine Corps, like a cousin who came to visit but wouldn’t leave, built more buildings. After September 11, the Corps sought and signed a long-term lease for the space.
The two Humvees stopped short of the entrance to a gymnasium on the top ridge overlooking the small camp. Scott and Will exited the vehicle.
“Okay, this is Captain Phillip Burke,” said Scott.
A young Marine in white pants and white parka stood at the entrance to the gym. Aware of both Parker’s reputation and rank, he cracked a swift salute to Will. “Yes, sir,” said the captain, “welcome to the Mountain Warfare Center. I’m in charge of the instructor team here.”
“Yes, Skipper, I know all about your teams.”
“If you Marines will come with me,” Burke said as the rest of the team left the Humvees, “we’ll get you set up.”
They walked through a green metal door into a small gymnasium. In the center, on four tables, were parkas, other clothing, ropes, and MOLLE packs stuffed with gear. Strapped on top of the packs were titanium snowshoes only slightly larger than cold weather boots. All the equipment was white, including the boots.
“Sir,” said Burke, “you’ll find your equipment on the far left table. The gunny’s table is next, followed by the two staff sergeants. We believe they correspond to your sizes.”
“Good job, Skipper,” said Will.
All the clothing was made using the latest in extended cold weather clothing system technology. Will lifted up a Gore-Tex parka with a mixed white-and-black camouflage pattern. The pattern had a broken patch of black, browns, and whites that looked odd in the building but would blend in well in the mountains. Each of the Marines stripped down on the spot and put on the ECWCS underwear and Gore-Tex cold weather gear. From the table, Will removed a pair of white silk socks and two white boots. “Mickey Mouse boots,” the military affectionately called them. Oversized and rubber-insulated, they did their job extremely well. Even when Will had worn them without any socks at all, his body heat soaked the tightly sealed boots. They were the same sort of insulated, cold weather boots he had used at Bridgeport when last here years ago.
The suited-up men walked out to the Humvees. In his MOLLE pack, Will found an arrangement of green suspenders and pouches with pockets and straps could be added or removed, another set of sunglasses, suntan lotion, and lip balm—all the essentials for sun exposure at high altitudes. This equipment was of the highest quality—little of it typical government-issue—and all altered to appear Russian made, complete with Russian labels and stitching.
The two Humvees took off from the upper camp to Bridgeport and followed a gravel, snow-covered road up the valley toward Sonora Peak. The road led through the wide-open meadow, toward the pass that would connect summer hikers to the other side of the High Sierras. Deep snowdrifts had closed the road for several months. The Humvees made a rattling sound as their snow chains grabbed snow, gravel, and rock.
The men said little during the ride. Moncrief sat in the back of the lead Humvee, cleaning and checking his M4 rifle. Will sat in the front right seat, next to Burke, who was at the wheel.
“Sir, this is your Beretta.” Moncrief handed the shiny new pistol, already in a shoulder holster, to Will, who removed it from the holster, dropped the clip from the weapon, and spotted fourteen shiny, brass rounds already loaded. When he pulled the slide back, another round popped out of the chamber, hitting the window of the Humvee and falling to the floor.
After a twenty-minute ride climbing farther up into the pass, with wheels frequently spinning in the snow, the two Humvees came to a small clearing just below a large cliff, where they stopped and turned around.
“Okay, sir, we’re well within the pass.” The captain leaned over the Humvee’s center console, peering at a GPS map of the mountain range.
Will smiled grimly to himself, realizing by the captain’s actions just how much a threat Nampo was to the U.S. military. Light was fading fast, the sun blocked out by dark clouds moving rapidly to the east.
“What was the original plan, Skipper?”
“We scheduled a week of acclimatizing,” Burke replied, “some cold-weather survival classes, and then a five-day tactical exercise. Our hardest exercise is long-distance patrolling, with food available only at certain locations.”
“Oka
y, let’s go straight to that,” said Will.
Moncrief let out a long moan.
“Sir, here’s map coordinates for three locations of LRPs,” said Burke, pulling out a map. “Each location will be heavily patrolled by our enemy teams. You want to eat, you have to get to the spots.” The long-range patrol rations, or LRPs, were concentrated, high-calorie meals.
Will glanced at the coordinates as he pulled the captain’s map toward the light of his window.
“Each of these coordinates is on a mountaintop. Each has full exposure to both your teams and the worst weather.”
“Yes.” Will smiled, thinking this sounded like a Gunny Punaros mission. “Okay, what happens if we don’t get to them?”
“No problem, sir,” said Burke. “All you have to do is follow the lights down into the valley.”
“You mean give up.”
Moncrief let out a bellowing laugh. “Yeah, right, Skipper. You’ve never served with this Marine.” He said this in as sarcastic a tone as possible.
“What’s the weather doing?” said Will.
“Sir, here’s the most recent fax,” said Burke. The thin sheet of paper was covered in tight, circular lines from top to bottom, clearly showing bad weather moving from the northwest down to the southeast.
“Bad, bad snow.” As Will said this, he looked up to see the first snowflakes coming down at a driving angle. “So, either quit or get through this storm for five days.”
“Yes, sir. Nothing for fifty miles in any direction,” said Burke. “And the exercise is through terrain so rough that some unfortunate wagon trains resorted to cannibalism a hundred and fifty years ago.”
“Thanks, Captain, we get the point,” said Gunny Moncrief.
“Okay, when and where on the fifth day?” said Will.
“Twelve-hundred hours at that gym. You have enough food for half a day,” said Burke.
As Will swung the Humvee door open, a gust of snow-driven wind pushed it back against him. He felt the cold, wet flakes strike both his face and eyelashes.
Once Will explained the plan to Scott, Stidham, and Hernandez in the other vehicle, the Humvee convoy, carrying Burke and Scott, headed back down the valley road. The four remaining soldiers looked like abandoned wayfarers grouped together with their packs and snowshoes.
For a moment after the vehicles left, the deep woods were completely silent. The cold, quiet air was a short respite for Will and his men, but it was rapidly getting darker and the winds were building.
“We know what to do. Visibility is going to go to zero shortly, so I’ll lead and let’s run a rope,” said Will, pulling a rope from his backpack. “Each of you hook on with Moncrief.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know what to do at the tail.”
“Yes, sir, just like Greely.” Despite all his chatter, Kevin Moncrief was the team’s second expert on cold weather survival. He had spent a winter as a Marine liaison instructor at the Army’s cold weather survival school at Fort Greely, Alaska. Moncrief grabbed the end of the rope, tied a loop, and locked on a carabineer. The other two team members grabbed the end of the rope, twisted loops, tied them off, and locked carabineers from their MOLLE packs onto them.
Will pulled the parka over his head and fixed his goggles. He strapped a compass onto his wrist with a large illuminated dial and pointed to a heading northwest.
Moncrief moved into Will’s line of sight and gave him a questioning look.
The three peaks were more to the northeast of the valley. Will’s course seemed to take them farther northwest and deeper into the Sierras.
Chapter 27
A Secret Base near Kosan, North Korea
“He’s arriving!”
The petite young scientist belted the words out as she hung up the telephone at the console in Nampo’s operation center. Like her, everyone in the operations center was ecstatic. The launch had succeeded, orbit had been achieved in less than fifty minutes, and the small explosion from the warhead had hit something—as it turned out, the target, an American GPS satellite. And now, the nation’s leader himself, Kim Jong Il, had come to visit the facility to award Dr. Nampo the People’s Medal.
“Calm yourself, girl,” said Pak Yim, Nampo’s assistant director, his stoic face giving no hint of approval.
The underground command center rarely had more than the minimum number of people needed to man it: a Nampo directive issued at the project’s beginning. But today, the large room was crammed with white-jacketed scientists and engineers, both men and women, many of them lined up against the rear wall.
“You know, the Americans just don’t understand,” Pak said to two of the engineers standing next to the main console. “If they had as their leader the son of George Washington, maybe they would.” Since birth, the people of North Korea had been indoctrinated not only to respect the country’s founder, Kim Il Sung, but to regard him with a spiritual reverence. And Kim Il Sung, in turn, had propagated myths about his son—he had been born under a double rainbow, his birth marked by a bright star.
The young woman, barely out of her teens, hovered next to the command center door as if waiting for a rock star to arrive. As the visitors came down the tunnel to the doors, she felt the beating of her heart.
Enthusiasm energized the room, and the people moved closer to the door as a short, pudgy man with wild hair and oversized dark-rimmed glasses entered. He wore an olive-drab Mao suit cut almost like a tunic, with matching olive-drab pants. The only things that made Kim Jong Il stand out were black, highly polished, European-style shoes, custom-made for him by the dozens, in a Tokyo shop. The shoes contained lifts to compensate for his barely five-foot-three stature: another of the well-kept secrets of Kim Jong Il.
Trailing behind the leader was the undistinguished-looking Dr. Nampo and another young man with a round, pudgy face. Nampo wore a scientist’s white lab jacket, a gold star medal on a blood-red ribbon hanging awkwardly on its lapel. Nampo had received the highest decoration Kim Jong Il could bestow on citizens. Kim Jong-un was dressed like his father, following the group.
“My comrades,” Kim Jong Il said as he stopped into the center of the room, signaling to the people to back up and bow. “Today, after years and years of dedicated service by each of you to your country, we have tasted our first victory. Without Dr. Nampo and his team, this project would never have reached this great success. All citizens of our great democratic republic, including my father if he were still with us, are overwhelmingly proud of your accomplishments.”
Kim Jong Il worked his way around the room like a Chicago politician, shaking hands with each of the scientists. This was rare for him. His security guards almost never allowed him to be so exposed, but this was as safe an audience as Kim Jong Il would ever see. Each scientist had been handpicked and trained by Nampo exclusively for this project and for this center.
“Attention,” yelled a gold-braided North Korean general from the back of the room. The building’s intercom system belted out North Korea’s national anthem and on the last note, Kim Jong Il turned, and with an escort of generals, left the operations center.
On the way out, he stopped and grabbed Nampo’s arm again, looking the scientist directly in the eyes. “You have had great success here today,” he said, “but we still have a long way to go to reach our goal. Can I trust you to ensure this is just the beginning?”
“Yes, Comrade General Secretary, it is just the beginning,” Nampo said to the leader.
As soon as the dictator and his entourage departed, Nampo turned to his assistant and said, “We need everyone out of here except the essential steering committee.” He paused, then yelled, “Now!”
As fast as they had scurried in, all but five gray-haired scientists filed out of the entrance and down the tunnel, away from the operations center.
Nampo walked to one sizable chair at the end of the conf
erence table and sat, pulling out a cigarette, lighting it up, and nervously inhaling. Then he began bouncing his leg up and down, rattling the table with his nervous twitch.
The five scientists joined him at the table, two on each side. The last to arrive was Pak, who, after closing the doors to the command center, sat in the chair opposite Nampo.
“Let me see if I understand fully what we know to have happened,” Nampo said, again inhaling his cigarette. “First, launch was a success, and thirty-eight minutes into launch, we reached the GEO synchronization orbit.”
“Yes, sir, thirty-eight and a half minutes into flight,” said a gaunt, gray-haired scientist to the left of Nampo.
“And when it reached the GEO synchronization orbit, we thought it acquired the targeted West Coast GPS satellite.”
“Yes, sir,” each of the scientists nervously chimed in, expecting the hammer to fall at any moment.
“But we also know that the rocket was at least ten nautical miles from the actual target when the conventional TNT explosive discharged.”
“Yes, sir.” Again, in synchrony.
“And because our payload weighs no more than ten kilos, the explosive sent out a shock wave that merely jolted the targeted satellite.”
“Yes, sir,” said the oldest scientist, sitting next to Nampo. “In fact, as best we can understand, the explosion probably flipped the satellite several times and changed its orbit slightly. Then, when it came back online, the satellite’s computer reset the correct orbit.”
“Gentlemen, what we have now,” said Nampo, “is a three-hundred-million-dollar firecracker that’s far from being a weapon of devastating impact.”
There was no response from any of the scientists.
“In fact, either we have to improve our accuracy in acquiring the target, or we have to finish the miniaturization of a nuclear device and use a sufficient warhead, so we can overcome our lack of accuracy. Wouldn’t each of you agree?”
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