by Larry Bond
“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.”
Ferguson 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.”
Ferguson turned off the lights, then veered to the right down the narrow dirt road that ran inside the perimeter fence. After about fifty feet he spotted a fire lane that led down to the lot in front of the warehouse.
“Hop out and hold the meter by them,” he told Guns, reaching up to kill the interior light.
As Guns got out, Ferg spotted headlights coming up the road in his direction.
He pulled forward into a three-point turn, ready to go.
“How much longer, Guns?” he called out the window.
“It’s still, like, calibrating.”
The headlights were growing larger very quickly.
“Never mind,” Ferg yelled. “In the car. Let’s go.”
The security patrol was less than a hundred yards away by the time Guns jumped into the car. The man inside turned on the side spotlight and moved the car into the middle of the street, trying to block their way.
“That’s the kind of crap that really annoys me,” Ferguson said as Guns hopped in. He stomped on the gas, homing in on the spotlight.
“Aren’t you going the way we came?”
“He’ll just follow us and radio to his buddy to cut us off. This is faster.”
“Jesus!” yelled Guns, covering his eyes with his arm.
The security officer, either taken by surprise or simply stubborn, remained in the middle of the road. Ferguson kept the pedal floored and, at the last second, jerked the wheel to the right. The car flew over the curb, rising up on two wheels.
Ferguson had cut it too close; his left fender and door sideswiped the security vehicle with a loud screech. The rental rebounded across a cement sidewalk, flattened a sign
, and then landed back on the access road.
Something was scraping under the car, but this wasn’t a good place to stop and investigate; the security officer had jumped out of his battered vehicle and was firing at them.
A tracer round flew past Ferguson’s window.
“They’re not screwin’ around,” said Guns.
As Ferguson reached the main entry road, a burst of red illuminated the rear of the car. Thinking at first this was just the reflection of a police light, Ferguson ignored it.
“We’re on fire,” said Guns. “One of the tracers must have hit us.”
“Shit. I hate that.”
Ferguson slammed on the brakes and threw the car into a skid.
“Out!” he told Guns as the vehicle stopped perpendicular to the road, blocking it. He yanked off his seat belt, grabbed his backpack, and threw himself to the pavement as the gas tank exploded.
21
OFF THE COAST OF NORTH KOREA
Rankin studied the satellite photo as the AH-6 Little Bird helicopter veered toward the North Korean shore. According to the GPS coordinates, the site where they had to plant the first cache “dump” was exactly three miles dead ahead, a few hundred yards off the coastal highway heading north.
While the highway was deserted at night—and indeed for much of the day—an unmanned Global Hawk reconnaissance drone was flying overhead just to make sure. The feed from the unmanned aerial vehicle was being monitored by Colonel Van Buren in Command Transport Three, a specially equipped C-17 flying a hundred and fifty miles to the south.
“Bird One, you’re go for Cache One,” said Van Buren.
“Bird One acknowledges,” said the pilot.
Their job, though dangerous, was relatively straightforward. Bird One would land in a field near the highway, where Rankin and the two soldiers with him would hide two large packs with emergency rations, weapons, a special radio, and a pair of lightweight, collapsible bicycles. The gear would be used by Thera in an emergency or by team members sent to rescue her. There were three spots along the coast, stretching from this one, about thirty miles south of the waste plant Thera was inspecting, to a spot on dry land in the marshes five miles north of the muddy mouth of the Ch’ŏngch’ŏn or Chongchon River.
Rankin didn’t see much point in leaving the gear. It wasn’t a mistake, exactly, just a waste of time. A forward rescue force would be parked on an atoll about twenty miles offshore. This was about seventy miles from the plant where Thera would be inspecting. If anything went wrong, they’d scramble in, grab her, and get out. The caches were just CIA fussiness, “just-in case” BS that the Langley planners liked to dream up to pretend they had all the bases covered.
That was typical CIA, though. They went crazy planning certain elements of a mission, then ignored others.
Like the possibility that South Korea might have nuclear material, for example.
“Here we go,” said the helicopter’s pilot, dipping the aircraft downward.
The helicopter arced over the roadway, the pilot making sure everything was clear before settling down in the field nearby.
Rankin and the two men in the rear of the chopper hopped out as the Little Bird settled down. While the other soldiers hauled the gear to the brush, Rankin located the large rock near the road that was to serve as a signpost. When he found it, he took out a can of white, luminescent paint and put a big blot on the stone. Then he ran to a set of rocks near where the others were burying the gear and sprayed them.
By the time he finished, the others were already hopping into the Little Bird. Rankin kicked some of the dirt where his paint had gone awry, hiding it, then hustled back to the helicopter.
22
NORTH OF DAEJEON, SOUTH KOREA
The heat from the explosion was so intense Ferguson rolled on the ground, thinking he was on fire. By the time he realized he wasn’t, he could hear sirens.
“Guns?”
“Here, Ferg,” yelled the marine from the other side of the car.
“We want the highway.”
“Yeah, no shit.”
Ferguson leapt to his feet and began running in the direction of the road, crossing toward the perimeter road and then climbing the fence; with his arm, he pinned down the barbed wire strands at the top, ripping his parka but getting over without tearing his body to shreds. As he hit the ground, he saw a car approaching from the direction of the highway. Ferguson ducked behind some trees. Once the car passed—it turned out to be just a car, not the police as he’d feared—he climbed one of the trees and looked back in the direction of the plant they’d just escaped from.
“What’s goin’ on?” asked Guns from below.
“They’re putting out the fire,” Ferg told him. He slid back down. “You got the gamma meter and the laptop?”
“Left it in the car, Ferg. I’m sorry. I got everything else.”
Almost on cue, a fireball rose from the vehicle. The laptop had self-destructed.
“Sorry,” said Guns.
“It’s all right. Wouldn’t have been a good idea to go back and get them anyway. Most of those guys were carrying submachine guns instead of fire extinguishers.”
23
OFF THE COAST OF NORTH KOREA
Thirty minutes after leaving the emergency supplies, the pilot of Bird One homed in on a small blot of black in the center of his green night-vision goggles. The blot was an uninhabited atoll eight miles east of North Korea’s Taehaw Island, itself a dozen miles off the mainland. During the early spring and summer, North Korea’s small fishing fleet regularly plied these waters, but in late fall the fishing was terrible, and the potential for ferocious storms kept the area nearly empty.
“We’re sixty seconds from go/no go,” the pilot told Rankin.
Rankin switched his radio onto the command frequency, linking with Van Buren.
“Bird One ready,” Rankin told Van Buren.
“You’re good to go,” said Van Buren. “Be advised there are two fishing vessels approximately three miles southeast of your target.”
“What are they fishing for at one o’clock in the morning?”
“Thinking here is that they’re smugglers, bringing goods back from China,” said the colonel.
“Thirty seconds from go/no go,” said the pilot.
“Roger. Team is committed,” said Rankin. He switched into the shared frequency, talking to the other three helicopters that made up the emergency extraction force. They’d all rendezvoused en route after dropping off their caches. “We’re committed. Two minutes to target.”
An officer might have said something like, “Make it look good,” but Rankin left it at that. The bullshit pep talks always bugged him when he’d been a member of Special Forces.
Technically, he still was a member of Special Forces, and, in point of fact, several of the men on the mission with him outranked him. But joining the First Team had put him into his own special category, not only in terms of rank—there was no question Rankin was in charge of the extraction team—but also in terms of the government bureaucracy. Officially, he was assigned as a special aide to someone at the Pentagon whom he’d never met. Unofficially, he worked for Ferguson and the CIA. They took their orders, to the extent Ferguson took orders, from Corrine Alston and maybe—Rankin wasn’t entirely clear because he didn’t get involved in that end of things—from the head of the CIA.
The First Team gig was the sweetest assignment Rankin had ever had, a grab bag of action that never got dull. Working with Ferguson was the only downside. The CIA officer was extremely clever and could handle SpecOps as well as the fooling-people spy stuff, but Rankin didn’t appreciate his wisecracks and know-it-all attitude. Without the CIA agent around, though, things were good.
“Beach is clear, sir,” said the pilot.
“Let’s get in,” said Rankin.
The helicopter zoomed over the rock-strewn beach and turned toward a small knot of trees. Rankin leapt out as it touched down, racing through the copse to mak
e sure no one had managed to hide themselves here. The two Special Forces soldiers who’d been in the back of the chopper fanned out, making absolutely sure the spies in the sky hadn’t missed anything.
The small island was barely two and a half acres, so it didn’t take that long to search.
“Landing area is clear. Chopper Two, come on in,” Rankin said over the radio when the reecee turned up nothing beyond a few pieces of driftwood. Then he went to help the pilot get the camo net on Bird One, just in case the smugglers decided to bury their loot here.
24
WEST REDDING, NEW HAMPSHIRE
Corrine Alston tried to look nonchalant as she was ushered into the back of the elementary school auditorium by one of the president’s traveling staffers. Three or four hundred kids sat at the edge of their seats, quizzing President Jonathon McCarthy about the presidency.
“What’s the best thing?” asked a gap-toothed third-grader in the fifth row.
“The best thing about being president is that no one can give me time-outs,” said McCarthy.
The kids thought that was pretty good and began to clap.
“Plus, I get to have ice cream at any time of day I want, and no one can tell me no.”
The applause deepened.
“And, if I want to stay up past my bedtime, I just go right ahead.”
There were loud cheers of approval. McCarthy segued into a story about a frog he had brought to school in his pocket when he was in second grade; the amphibian had gotten loose.
“Not that you should follow my example,” added McCarthy at regular intervals, relating the havoc the creature caused as it worked its way through gym class and into the principal’s office, where it cornered the principal for fifteen minutes before he rescued her.
“Now there’s an important moral to the story,” said the president, wrapping up, “which many people do not realize. And that is this . . .”