by Van Torrey
When the purser contacted Anne in her cabin and explained the situation to her, the shock of Chance’s presence on top of the trauma she had suffered at the death of her sister sent her into an uncontrolled episode of anguished weeping. “Oh my God!” she cried as she begged the purser to direct Chance to her cabin.
The next half-hour was a highly emotional scene, thankfully, at least for Chance, played out in the privacy of Anne’s cabin culminating in Anne breaking down in an inconsolable outpouring of grief and frustration about those events leading up to how the two sisters got here in the first place, and the tragic ending to their journey. Although Chance had sensed that all was not well with his father and Ann’s relationship, he did not know it had come to something as dramatic as this.
“Just try to calm down, Anne. I’m here for you. Be calm.” As he held her close she eventually stopped crying and shaking.
“Chance, I want to go home now,” Anne said as she straightened up, dried her tears, and looked at him directly in the eye. “I need to bury my sister and go back and face whatever the future holds for your father and me. I can’t run away from this any longer. I thank God you were here to comfort me! I love you so much.” The two embraced again for a full two minutes, as Anne Lyon clung to Chance like a frightened child.
*
Special Agent Searls struggled with the two points of the dynamic he faced. The wounded Korean was barely alive and in no condition to be meaningfully interrogated. Besides, he had been med-evaced to the Reagan and from there, who knew? It was painfully obvious that the Koreans were responsible for the terrorism and his only link to getting any information about the plot was the last Korean crewman, who had been brought to ground by the tireless and patient Delta operators. But the guy wasn’t talking. The FBI interrogators could not play “good cop-bad cop” with him as he believed all his comrades had escaped. He could not have known that they all, with the exception of Yim, had met a grisly fate. Since their harrowing escape from North Korea, he had been frequently coached by Yim to never confess anything if captured by American law enforcement. Yim had told him Americans had certain ethical and legal boundaries that prevented them from using force to extract information. Yim had always marveled at the inefficiencies of the Americans in this respect compared to their North Korean peers.
A full day went by with the FBI getting little from the Korean except his name, Lee Woo-sok, and the fact that he was an ethnic Korean. Special Agent Searls concluded his investigation was going nowhere fast. He had to call a conference of all the Americans, at least to show a veneer of good faith.
Searls, in an attempt to minimize the exposure of his failure to this collection of hard men, who were accustomed to producing exceptional results and succeeding in any given mission, met in the Captain’s quarters with Captain Sizemore and Chance Lyon, alone. “I have to be honest with you gentlemen, we’re getting nowhere with this guy,” Searls confessed. “On top of that Captain Sizemore is getting pressure from his boss at Gitmo to wrap this up and turn the ship back over to the Colombian skipper. The last of the American passengers, including the walking wounded are scheduled to be removed by sixteen-hundred today. We have finished with our forensics. I have to say I’m out of good ideas.”
Lyon let a period of silence pass before he spoke up. “Look gentlemen, you know why my partner and I are here. This Korean is our only shot at the truth in this matter. If we take him back to the Reagan we’re going to lose control of him and there’s going to be a tangible chain-of-custody lapse that can be traced by any lawyer who gets involved. We need to avoid that. Many Americans were killed and severely injured by this joker and his gang of thugs. If we can’t get him to talk before some hotshot defense lawyer gets ahold of him, this will dead-end, and we’ll never know shit.”
Unable to contain himself, Searls spoke up. “Where are you going with this Mr. Lyon?”
“GOING? I’m going for the truth, MISTER Searls!” responded Chance, raising his voice and looking at Searls menacingly. “If you want to fuck around with this asshole all day, go ahead, but you’re getting nothing. My job is to get some hard intel here. I’m going to get it whether you like it or not. Now, if you two gentlemen will excuse me, I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“Where are you going?” asked Searles anxiously.
“I have to discuss something with my boss,” said Chance.
Fifteen minutes later Chance had returned to the meeting with Special Agent Searles and Captain Sizemore. He sat down and waited until Searles’ sat phone rang.
“This is Special Agent Searls.”
“Please place the phone on speaker Mr. Searls,” said the person on the other line.
“Yes, sir,” Searls responded respectfully.
“Mr. Searls, you are to assemble your FBI team and evac from the cruise ship on the next available chopper. Captain Sizemore will be getting orders from his Commander shortly. The last four people to leave the cruise ship will be Mr. Lyon, Mr. Olyphant, the prisoner, and Captain Sizemore. We have informed the Colombians that they may take back control of their ship as of twenty-four hundred hours today. That is all.”
Searls looked at Chance Lyon with a mixture of disgust and anger. “I don’t know who you two are, but you must work for someone way further up the food chain than me.”
*
In less than an hour Special Agent Searls and his FBI team had flown off the Caribbean Star and headed back to Washington, D.C., via the Reagan. Sizemore had conferenced with his Commander at Guantanamo and had given his men the order to prepare to depart the cruise ship pending transport from the carrier. This left Chance Lyon and Blackie Olyphant to finish the job that had been started two days ago.
Lyon and Olyphant entered the Spartan room where Lee Woo-sok was seated smoking an American cigarette. “You speak English?” asked Lyon easily.
“Fuck you,” responded the Korean as he blew a plume of smoke in the direction of his new interrogator.
“This guy speaks perfect English,” said Lyon to Olyphant, who simply smiled in response.
“What is your name? We’d like to talk to you about what went on here two days ago. A lot of people were killed and injured and we have to find out what happened,” continued Lyon.
“Captain and other Americans know my name,” the Korean responded looking absently past Lyon at nothing. “I know nothing of any explosions. I’m a kitchen slave on this boat for rich people.”
“Where are you from?”
“I come from Miami.”
“Who do you work for on the boat?”
“I work for kitchen boss. He is a very bad man...always fucking with me and my friends.”
“I heard you work for Mr. Yim. Tell me about him.”
“Don’t know any Mr. Yim,” the Korean said stubbornly.
“Mr. Yim says he knows you,” said Chance calmly.
“That is lie. Mr. Yim is made-up name by FBI. FBI don’t know shit.”
Tired of the foreplay that was producing nothing and anxious to meet the time deadline imposed by Washington, Chance advanced toward the Korean and leaned over so he was face to face within inches of the Korean.
“Listen asshole, are we going to do this the easy way or the hard way? I’m not going to fuck around with you anymore. You either tell us about what went on here, or things are going to break bad for you. Now who is Mr. Yim and what part did all of you play in this attack on the ship?”
“I want a lawyer,” responded the Korean confidently. “In America you get a lawyer for free.”
“Well, we’re not in America...we’re cruising on the high seas, dipshit. The only lawyer you’re going to get is when we ship your sorry ass back to...where is it...North or South Korea?”
“North Korea will kick America’s and South Korea’s ass pretty soon,” he said.
“Well, I doubt that you’ll be around to see it,” said Lyon casually.
‘Fuck America!” said the Korean matter-of-factly.
“If
you don’t tell us what we want to hear you’re of no use to us and we are going to leave. We’ll just get the information from someone else. But if we have to leave without the information, you are going to die a very unpleasant death right here and get fed to the sharks. So it’s your choice.”
“You talk bullshit. Americans cannot torture prisoners,” said the Korean with a sudden twinge of anxiety.
“Okay, Blackie,” said Chance without replying. “Let’s prep this guy. I sure hope he’s taken a shit recently.”
Lyon and Olyphant bound the Korean’s wrists and ankles and laid him on his back on a folding table in the room. Then they ran a rope around his torso and pelvis to prevent him from rolling off the table. Lyon elevated the foot end of the table allowing Olyphant to place two folding chairs that effectively put the Korean in a sharp head-down position.
Once again, Lyon placed his face next to the Korean and said, “Do we get what we want easy or not-so-easy?”
Nothing but silence came from the Korean.
“Times a-wastin’,” said Lyon as he nodded toward Blackie Olyphant.
With that Lyon placed a large towel over the Korean’s face and Olyphant hoisted a five gallon bucket of sea-water and began to steadily pour it onto the towel that was draped over the Korean’s face.
At first Lee Woo-sok made noises through his mouth but that only exacerbated the effects of the flowing water. Then he began to sputter and his body began to convulse involuntarily against the rope restraints that confined him to the slanted table. Olyphant would teasingly reduce the flow giving the Korean a slight respite, but then he would suddenly increase to amount of water and the sputtering and bucking would begin anew. When Chance heard the tell-tale gurgling from the victim he signaled Olyphant to stop and he pulled the towel away. The Korean choked out a slug of water and look pleadingly at Chance through terror-filled eyes, nodding his head violently.
Works every time, Lyon thought. When I did this in SEAL training I was ready to confess being queer!
*
An hour later after wringing every ounce of useful information from the terrified Korean, Lyon left him to gradually recover under the watchful eye of Olyphant while he sought out Captain Sizemore.
“Sir, we have what we need from our friend. We are ready to recover to the Reagan at your convenience.”
CHAPTER 23
ANALYSIS AND DECISION
“The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness.”
Carl Jung
*
As soon as Lyon and Olyphant arrived on the USS Reagan, Lee Woo-sok, had a hood placed over his head for the purpose of obscuring his vision, as well as making it impossible for any crew to identify him or his nationality. He was turned over to the Master-at-Arms and escorted to a segregated cell in the brig area, deep in the bowels of the aircraft carrier.
Lyon had made arrangements while in flight between the cruise ship and the carrier with the Reagan’s Executive Officer that the prisoner be classified and identified only as “Detainee Number One”. “Sir, this person is not a U.S. citizen, perhaps even stateless, and has been detained as a suspected terrorist by U.S. military personnel on a foreign vessel in international waters. In my opinion, this combination of circumstances means disqualifying him from having rights that might be afforded a criminal suspect in the United States. Until we can sort that out, I suggest we hold him incommunicado in segregated detention in the brig,” argued Chance.
After checking with Captain Ferguson, the XO quickly agreed and gave the order for this unique protocol to his Master-at-Arms.
Lyon and Olyphant immediately went to work drafting an after-action report that would be coded and sent to FBI Director Wheatley.
*
Director Wheatley met in the Oval Office with Rachel Hunter, Philip Johnson, Raymond Rollins, Marilyn Mitchell, and the rest of the President’s National Security staff as he distributed copies of Chance Lyon’s after-action report.
Rachel Hunter began. “This report was sent over from the Reagan just over an hour ago. I thought it would be best if we could all digest it together. Based on what I have seen preliminarily, I think there is some actionable intel here.”
“Director Wheatley, since you received this first and have spoken with Mr. Lyon directly, perhaps you can brief everyone on the high points of the report and deal with any questions from the staff.”
“Thank you, Ms. President,” answered Wheatley.
“Our consultant, Mr. Lyon and his associate, Mr. Olyphant, were able to elicit a comprehensive confession from one of the surviving Koreans. The other surviving Korean is in serious condition in the sick bay of the Reagan until he can be moved to shore. The confession tells a chilling story of a sleeper-cell of North Koreans living in the U.S. while waiting for an opportunity to commit a terrorist attack on Americans.”
For the next thirty minutes FBI Director Clayton Wheatley briefed the President and her National Security Team on the details of Lyon’s and Olyphant’s report. The report revealed that the men from the sleeper-cell had been recruited by Yim while working on a labor farm in North Korea under the pretense of escaping from North Korea. Gradually Yim had taken two of the men into his confidence, essentially making them his assistants in managing the crew, and telling them that the escape was, in reality, a ruse engineered by the North Korean People’s Armed Forces Reconnaissance Bureau, the North Korean equivalent of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Yim was a veteran operator of this Bureau and had been chosen and trained to lead a terrorist sleeper-cell that would infiltrate into the United States and wait for orders to commit an act of terror against Americans. As for the make-up of the cell, the strategy was to use non-professionals for the majority of members so Yim could find it easier to manipulate them leading up to and eliminate them after the attack, allowing him to escape alone. Dead men tell no tales.
Infiltration into the United States had been relatively easy. Yim and the men would “escape” from the labor farm and stow-away on a North Korean freighter carrying raw materials going to Cuba, one of the DPRK’s few friendly trading partners. Once there, the Cuban military would arrange passage of the men to Miami through America’s notoriously loose southern coastal protection shield. The Koreans would then disappear into the Little Havana ghetto of Miami and live in a crash-house. From there they were provided with day work doing jobs that were abhorrent to even the Haitian refugees, who were considered the bottom of the working-man’s food chain in ethnically diverse Miami. As bad as conditions were for the Koreans in Miami, it was worlds apart from the drabness, danger, and constant hunger of North Korea. Yim sweetened the pot by promising the men riches and a chance for a real identity in America after their mission was over.
As for Yim, he had been given a cover scenario of posing as a human resource contractor working the commercial docks of Miami where he was able to offer the services of his Korean crew doing the many mundane maintenance tasks required on commercial boats docked there. The work was hard, the conditions often malodorous, dirty, and oppressively hot, but the boat owners paid in cash and asked no questions. It was perfect cover until the right time came along to pursue their mission.
Yim had been provided cash and personal documentation from an ethnic Cuban DPRK agent using a phony Mexican passport operating out of the DPRK Mission in Havana. This man was able to travel regularly between Havana and Miami via Mexico City and would meet Yim in the crowded outdoor markets and dive bars of the Little Havana ghetto where their activities went virtually unnoticed.
The Korean, Detainee Number One, said Yim had something that must have been a tablet, like an iPad or an Android hand-held device and that is how he communicated with someone who Yim called “Mario”. Yim always talked about an Internet message board, but he never told the detainee anything specific about it.
“What about the explosives, Cla
yton?” asked the SECDEF. “They didn’t just go to Home Depot and buy them, did they?”
“My guys drilled down hard on that,” answered Wheatley quickly. “When the Koreans were initially infiltrated, they were picked up south of Miami by a sport fishing boat from a larger Cuban fishing vessel and the men were crammed down into the hold and told to keep quiet. Our detainee said Yim had a very large duffle bag given to him when they transferred boats and told the men when they got to the crash house never to bother it. We suspect the explosives came with the men from Cuba.”
“And the possible whereabouts of the mysterious Mr. Yim?” asked Marilyn Mitchell.
“Again my contractors leaned on the prisoner very hard on this one. The plan, at least as it was revealed to our detainee - I’m just going to call him Number One from now on - by Yim, was they would all escape from the cruise ship by jumping into the ocean in the confusion following the explosions. The men would be in life jackets and holding light sticks over their heads so they could be seen and picked up by a small boat that had been launched from an independent coastal freighter standing by. One mystery still unanswered is that most of the men killed were carrying green light sticks, but the light stick left behind, presumably for Number One, was red, as was the one found floating with the wounded Korean who survived. This may or may not be important. We may be able to get some clarification on this point when we can interrogate the wounded Korean.”
“And...” asked Director Mitchell.
“They were supposed to be taken to Honduras by the freighter, paid thousands for their effort, and given passage to Miami along with a new identity that would allow them to work legitimately in the U.S.A. Well, we know what really happened to most of them,” Wheatley concluded darkly.
Rachel Hunter, a notorious intelligence wonk given her previous jobs of CIA Director and Director of National Intelligence, interjected and asked, “Since we do not have Yim, the apparent leader of this crew, can we be sure that what our detainee is telling us is the complete package? And do we have any idea about Yim’s whereabouts? It seems we should have an APB out on him.”