Luke Stone 03 - Situation Room

by Jack Mars

  “Okay, but if both countries claim the mountain, why does that make him Korean?”

  Trudy shrugged. “The script below the mountain uses the Korean alphabet. It says Mount Baektu. In English, it means Whitehead Mountain. The Chinese don’t even call it that. They call it Mount Changbai, which means Ever White Mountain. It’s a subtle distinction, but I think one that stands. By his use of the Korean alphabet and the Korean name, you can see which side of that debate he comes down on.”

  “All right,” Luke said. “That’s one point for Korean.”

  “And here’s another,” Trudy said. She flipped through various images until she found one of Li on his back. The crazy surreal landscape of tattoos continued on this side. Just above his heart was another scrap of calligraphy. Trudy zoomed in on it.

  主體

  “These are hanja characters,” Trudy said. “They are basically the Korean usage of the Chinese alphabet. It’s not to be confused with Chinese, though. The Koreans use the Chinese characters, but they retain their intricate classical pen strokes. Modern Chinese characters, as used by the Chinese themselves, tend to be simplified.”

  Ed had joined them. He had one of Swann’s plush towels wrapped around his waist. “What does it say?”

  “It says Juche,” Trudy said. She pronounced it like “Chooch-eh.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the political ideology of North Korea. It technically means ‘self-reliance,’ which is part of why the North isolates itself from the rest of the world. But it’s also a control mechanism, and the foundation of the cult of personality surrounding the Kim family. Juche is basically the religion for a country of godless communists. It helps them overlook the fact that in a nominally socialist country with no class distinctions, there is in fact a carefully stratified and rigidly enforced system of hierarchy, partially a holdover from the medieval caste system, but mostly just the Kim family and their friends at the top, and everyone else beneath them.”

  “People believe in this?” Ed said.

  Trudy shrugged. “It’s a religion. People will believe anything, if you start them young enough.”

  “Anything else?” Luke said.

  “Oh yeah,” Trudy said. “There’s more. Here’s a rising sun, and not the Japanese version. A rising sun in Korea is the symbol of Kim il-Sung, the first Supreme Leader. And here’s a symbol that refers to Arirang. Arirang is an ancient Korean folk song about two young lovers who have been separated, and who can only reunite in the afterlife. It is the unofficial anthem of both Koreas. In the modern North Korean version of the story, the young lovers are kept apart by an evil landlord. I’m sure you can guess who that is. This story is so important in North Korea that they hold an Arirang Festival every year for weeks on end. It’s going on right now.”

  Trudy looked at Luke. “And those are just the tattoos I can see in these photos. If we had the body, I’m sure I could find more.”

  Luke thought about what she was saying. It seemed, at first blush… interesting. But it wasn’t proof of anything. No one knew quite who or what Li Quiangguo was. Luke was now convinced he had duped them into believing he was terrified of waterboarding just so he could kill himself. A guy who could do that…

  “You think the North Koreans are behind these attacks.”

  Trudy raised a finger like a schoolteacher. “I think Li Quiangguo was North Korean. That’s all I said.”

  Luke thought about it. “You told me at the prison that the Chinese are too cautious for something like this.”

  “The Chinese are too cautious to do something like this directly. That much is true, and I stand by it. But they’ve been known to use the North Koreans as their cat’s paw before.”

  Luke pondered this, a thought coming to him, one he wished he’d never had.

  “What if it’s the reverse?” Luke asked. “The North Koreans are the desperate ones here. They’ve been threatening to attack the US for years. They are more desperate than they’ve ever been. What if they’re really doing it this time? What if those first cyber attacks were just a test, a warm-up to something bigger? And what if they are using Chinese plants to throw us off course, to make us think it’s China? And to simultaneously spark a war between us and China that will lead to further damage for us?”

  “That would damage China, too,” Swann added. “Why would they bite the hand that feeds them?”

  Luke gave him a look.

  “Do you know how many times they have defied China?” he asked.

  A long silence fell over the room as they all pondered it. To Luke, it seemed to make awful sense.

  “I want to show you one more thing, Luke,” Trudy added.

  She tapped through a couple of screens. In a moment, she arrived at a still from a grainy black-and-white surveillance video. She pressed the horizontal triangle in the middle, which started the video. It was shot from the upper corner of a room. A very thin Asian man sat at a metal table, smoking a cigarette. He wore a prison jumpsuit. His entire body was shaking.

  Someone off screen was speaking to him, and in between inhalations from the cigarette, he replied. English captions appeared at the bottom of the screen.

  You say a big attack is coming?

  Arirang is coming. The end of the story. Reunification.

  What does that mean to you?

  The people are going hungry. We must reunite, if we are brothers.

  It can’t happen now.

  All the same, it will happen now. The border will be dissolved. The Americans can’t stop it. They will be helpless soon.

  The video ended.

  “What is it?” Luke said.

  Trudy closed it with a tap of her finger. “Swann pulled that brief segment off a South Korean intelligence data server, and had a friend of his translate it last night. He was searching for any South Korean intel on Li Quiangguo, and he found that instead. It’s a snippet of footage of a North Korean deserter who apparently walked across the border sometime in the past few days. They found him yesterday, wandering in the Gangwon Province wilderness. He managed to evade both North Korean and South Korean forces until he was ten miles into South Korea. He claims that an attack is coming. He appears to be convinced of it. He crossed the border into South Korea to warn them.”

  “There’s always an attack coming from North Korea. That’s part of the fun of dealing with them.”

  Trudy shook her head. “I wouldn’t write this off, Luke. With tensions ramping up between us and China, the Chinese may have promised the North Koreans that if a war starts, the North Koreans can attack the South. They might even let them attack preemptively, as a way of commencing a war without actually involving China.”

  Luke let that one sink in. He had seen the estimated casualties if a new war started on the Korean peninsula. North Korea was bristling with weapons. They were, per capita, the most thoroughly armed nation on Earth. Seoul, South Korea, was a city of ten million people, and it was only forty miles from the DMZ. It had been utterly destroyed in the first war. More than that, there were about 30,000 American servicemen and women stationed in South Korea, almost all of them within a few miles of the DMZ.

  They were the most vulnerable American troops on Earth. All scenario planning suggested that if a war started, more than ninety percent of them would be dead within a few hours.

  “The Chinese, or the North Koreans, or both, are testing our infrastructure,” Luke said, trying out Trudy’s theory. “Probing it. They want to see if they can degrade our response capabilities ahead of a new war on the Korean peninsula.”

  “It’s not that far-fetched,” Trudy said, as if Luke was the one pitching the idea and she was merely agreeing with it.

  Luke looked at his team.

  “We’re never going to get to the bottom of this,” he said. “The only way is…” An idea began to form, one so crazy that he didn’t even know if he should say it. Then, finally, he did:

  “We need to talk to that deserter ourselves.”
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br />   They stared back at him.

  “How do we manage that?” Swann said. “I pulled that video off a secure server. No one in the West even knows that guy exists.”

  Luke shrugged. “We know.”

  “Right, but we’re a band of desperados right now,” Ed said. “Nobody’s gonna give us access to their prisoner. We’ll be lucky we’re not all in jail ourselves by the end of the day, never mind doing a teleconference with some guy who jumped the fence from North Korea. We can’t even show our faces anywhere. The minute we surface…”

  Luke shook his head. “We’re not going to surface. Don’t worry about that.” He looked at Swann. “Can I borrow a secure phone line?”

  * * *

  Luke stood in the morning sun on Swann’s deck, a black satellite phone pressed to his ear. The line was blank. While he waited for something to happen, he soaked in the view. It was glorious out here. Far out on the sun-dappled ocean, he watched a big sailboat pass from left to right.

  In some strange way, it delighted him that Swann owned this place from long ago criminal activity, and had never mentioned it. His people, even though they were no longer his people, really were the best. What other secrets were they sitting on?

  He glanced over at them, the three of them standing there in a row, ten feet away, near the sliding glass doors. They were staring at him.

  Far away, on the other side of the world, the phone started ringing.

  “Luke, who are you calling?” Trudy said.

  He raised a hand. He mouthed the words: “Hold on a minute.”

  A female voice answered. He didn’t quite catch what she said to him. The words went by in a blur.

  “Yeoboseyo,” Luke said. “Nan e mun-ui hal su issseubnida Park Jae-kyu?” Hello, may I speak to Park Jae-kyu?

  Luke watched his team watching him. Trudy’s shoulders dropped. All the air seemed to go out of her body. Ed just shook his head. Swann nodded, like he knew it all along.

  “Je ireum-eun Luke Stone imnida.” My name is Luke Stone.

  “Naneun olaen chingu.” I am an old friend.

  The woman’s voice went away. Luke turned from his team and gazed out at the ocean again. In his mind, he pictured the man he was calling. Park Jae-kyu. About his age, good-looking guy, phenomenal athlete, maybe five feet, four inches tall. In high heels. Luke nearly laughed to think of him.

  Luke had spent eight months in South Korea when he was in the 75th Army Rangers. He had done most of that time along the DMZ, staring across barbed wire fences and small green hills at heavily armed North Koreans. It was a bleak place and a lousy assignment. Except that he was buddied up with a member of the South Korean 9th Special Forces Ghost Brigade.

  That buddy was tiny Park Jae-kyu, 5th Dan Tae Kwon Do Master. A guy who could do 200 pushups without stopping, then go out at night while on R and R and knock back twenty drinks. He and Luke used to spar on their off-hours. Man, would they go at it. Their fights were the stuff of legend. Park’s highly trained, ballerina-like striking attacks against Luke’s highly improvisational blocking and counter-punch boxing style. They were like chess matches at warp speed. Beautiful.

  Luke sighed. To be young again.

  The deep, stern, no-nonsense voice came on the line. It already sounded like an admonishment. Or an accusation.

  “Yeoboseyo. Park-Jae-kyu.”

  Luke grinned. “What’s up, Gangnam style?”

  “Stone?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “When my secretary said your name, I thought it was a hoax. I figured you must be dead by now.”

  “Nine lives,” Luke said. “I’ve got three left.”

  Luke had kept an eye on Park from afar. After his military service, Park had joined NIS, the Korean National Intelligence Service. They were an outfit with a bad reputation. So bad, in fact, that they had to change their name. Up until recently, they had been called the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, the KCIA.

  Their fingers were crusted with every kind of dirt imaginable. Assassinations. Kidnapping. Torture. Bribery. Blackmail. Manipulation of election outcomes. You name it, they were into it. But Park was a good guy. That was how Luke thought of him. He was NIS, and NIS was bad news. But South Korea was firmly in the gun sights of the North, and maybe even China. And sometimes, when in a position like that, you did what you had to do. Isn’t that what everybody in this secret world told themselves?

  Park got right down to business. He had always been that way. A sparring session, a drinking session, a firefight on a hillside—they were all the same to him. What are we waiting for?

  “You’re calling for a reason,” Park said. “And it isn’t nostalgia for old times.”

  “True enough,” Luke said. “You’ve got a prisoner, a North Korean deserter. He came over the border at Gangwon.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Stone.”

  “Skinny guy, came in about half-dead. He’s probably gone up to three-quarters dead since your boys have started talking to him. I’m hoping to get a word in with him before they finish him off.”

  “Skinny guy from North Korea?” Park said. “It doesn’t—how do you say it?—ring a bell. The people in the North are starving, Stone. You might as well tell me you’re looking for a fat guy from America.”

  Luke nodded. Now he remembered why he used to spar with Park so much. Sometimes he just wanted to punch that mouth of his.

  “I know you have him, Park. I’ve seen video of his interrogation.”

  There was silence over the line. Luke waited a moment to let the statement sink in. This was the deal. We’re friends, but we spy on each other. It was easy to forget sometimes. And it hurt to be reminded of it.

  Luke went on. “There’s no reason to play around, that’s all I’m saying. I know you have him, and I know he has a lot to say. I need the information he’s sitting on. I’m asking you for a favor. Yes, for old times’ sake. We’ve got big problems over here.”

  “I have a hunch,” Park said, “that we have bigger problems than you do.”

  “That may be,” Luke said. He thought of the bristling North Korean arsenal, a monstrous cache of weaponry, missiles, tanks, mortars, most of it pointed directly at Seoul, a hyper-modern city of ten million civilians, well within range.

  “If that’s the case, then let me help you.”

  “Stone, what can you possibly do?”

  Luke stared out to sea. The big sailboat was just dropping over the horizon. “You might be surprised.”

  Park’s voice dropped almost to a whisper, as if whispering would somehow help. As if whispering would stop someone from overhearing you in an era when any phone call on Earth could be collected, digitally enhanced, copied a thousand times in half an hour, and listened to by operatives from two dozen countries.

  “I can’t talk about this over the phone,” Park fairly hissed. “I can’t confirm or deny anything you’ve said to me.”

  “Is it bad?” Luke said.

  “Bad? I wish it was bad. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever known.”

  “Listen, I need to talk to this guy.”

  “It’s not possible,” Park said. Luke knew that Park had shaken his head. NO. From half a world away, through the phone lines of suburban Seoul, bounced into space from one black satellite to another, then back down to this oceanfront rooftop, Luke could almost see him do it. The movement was sudden, fast, spare, over before it started. It was a head shake that cut off any further discussion.

  “Park…”

  “He is the highest-value prisoner alive.”

  “I need him,” Luke said.

  A long moment passed. Neither man said a word. It went on long enough that Luke began to think Park had hung up. But then his voice came back on the line, softer now, his English less clipped.

  “You have to come here,” Park said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  8:15 a.m.

  Newark International Airport – Newark, New Jersey

 
“Next up, we’ve got a breaking story with possible bombshell news about the husband of the President of the United States.”

  The woman sat slumped on a bench near the gate, staring mindlessly up at the overhead TV set. Her flight was already delayed half an hour, and it could only get worse from here.

  She was a young mother with two young children. She was tired, and this was not her idea of fun. She had awakened at 3 a.m. in her home in Burlington, Vermont. Without waking her husband (who had to work today), she had climbed out of bed, gotten the girls ready, packed up and taken the cab to the airport. They caught the 6:15 flight down here to Newark, then raced through the airport to their next gate.

  This gate. Only to find out that the next flight was delayed. The girls were already agitated and irascible. The next flight was a long one, from here to Phoenix, Arizona. They were going to visit her parents, who for some unknown reason had moved to Arizona when they retired. The young woman shook her head at the thought of it. Vermont was beautiful. It was a rolling green paradise. Arizona was a blazing, highway-choked hell on Earth.

  It was going to be a long day.

  The news came back on. They were going to talk about the President. The young woman perked up just the slightest amount. Despite everything that had happened, she still liked the President. More than that—she looked up to her. It was amazing to have a woman President. It was amazing for the girls to be growing up while a woman was Commander in Chief. It meant anything was possible. You couldn’t blame Susan Hopkins for the terrorist attacks. That could happen to anybody.

  A female newscaster’s head filled the TV screen. She was a beautiful mixed race woman, the races mixed in such a way that it was impossible to say exactly what she was. Maybe she was Hispanic, or Asian, or black, or some combination of all of them. Her name was Audrey. That didn’t help much.

  “Chuck, we’ve got a breaking story with possible earth-shattering implications. It’s about high-tech billionaire Pierre Michaud. Most of you know him as Mr. Susan Hopkins, husband of the President of the United States, and father to the President’s twin daughters. But for much of his life, he’s also been known as a computer pioneer. In the early 1990s, he was among the first to see the profit potential in something that folks used to call the information superhighway, known to us today, of course, as the internet.