Rings of Fire

by Gregory Shepherd

  Advance Praise for Rings of Fire

  “Gregory Shepherd’s Rings of Fire is a powerhouse of a thriller and a stunning look behind the border walls of North Korea. For fans of Tom Clancy, Brad Thor, and Vince Flynn, Rings of Fire is a novel not to be missed.”

  —Mark Greaney, #1 New York Times bestselling author of One Minute Out

  “Fast-paced and exciting, Gregory Shepherd’s expertise on the Far East shines through on every page. Everything a thriller should be!”

  —Ward Larsen, USA Today bestselling author of Assassin’s Run

  “In Rings of Fire, Gregory Shepherd has created an enigmatic, engaging, and thrilling portrait of the Far East—a tsunami of a thriller. No one writes thrillers set in Japan better.”

  —Alex Shaw, bestselling author of Cold Blood

  “Once again Gregory Shepherd pens a gripping and action-packed counter-terrorism tale set against the backdrop of the Olympics in Japan. You can taste the grit and hear the rifle’s crack as JSOC sniper Patrick Featherstone uncovers a twisted plot to kill. The clock ticks down to another unforgettable adventure in Rings of Fire, the must read of the year.”

  —Lt. Col. Hunter Ripley (“Rip”) Rawlings, New York Times bestselling author

  “Unstoppable. Rings of Fire is a geopolitical thriller that gathers speed like an avalanche.”

  —Timothy Hallinan, author of the Poke Rafferty series and the Junior Bender series

  “Freshly fierce! A uniquely crafted thriller chock-full of rich Asian cultural nuances and hard hitting JSOC mission execution.”

  —J.T. Patten, Author, Task Force Orange series

  Also by Gregory Shepherd

  Sea of Fire: A Thriller

  A PERMUTED PRESS BOOK

  ISBN: 978-1-68261-943-8

  ISBN (eBook): 978-1-68261-944-5

  Rings of Fire:

  A Thriller

  © 2021 by Gregory Shepherd

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

  Permuted Press, LLC

  New York • Nashville

  permutedpress.com

  Published in the United States of America

  “In war, truth is the first casualty.”

  —Aeschylus

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About The Author

  PROLOGUE

  Kaesong, North Korea

  May 1, 2017

  The day of the Glorious Triumvirate Celebration

  Comrade Ahn Mun-yin couldn’t get enough of the echoing silence of the cave system he explored for his job several days a week far from the crowds and noise of the “surface world,” as he called it. And the crowds and noise would be worse than ever today, the day of the Glorious Triumvirate Celebration, a national festival marking the radiant brilliance of the dynasty of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-un. His wife was content to spend a few hours relaxing topside on this beautiful spring day quietly reading to their child as she waited for her husband to emerge from the depths. An hour after his expected exit time, though, she began to worry, as did the man himself when he suddenly heard the sound of rushing water and realized the danger he was in. He hurriedly made for the cave entrance a quarter mile above, with the rumble of the flood pulse growing in intensity like an oncoming freight train. It took him a full hour to reach the surface, the entire cave shaking the whole time as if by an earthquake. He was only fifteen yards from the cave entrance when an enormous torrent of white water suddenly broke forth from the ceiling, spewing tons of falling rock and debris that almost completely blocked the cave entrance. He could just barely see daylight, but there was no way he could get out any time soon without help, so he checked for a signal on his cellphone. He was picking up one bar, but it flickered in and out of reception.

  He repeatedly tried calling his wife, but there was no answer, so he yelled at the top of his lungs toward the cave entrance over and over but again heard nothing. Sensing that something had happened to her husband, the wife had hurried back in the direction of Kaesong forty minutes earlier to try to get help. Her husband got as close to the cave entrance as possible and made a call to Pyongyang. Then he turned on his headlamp and began digging. When he emerged from the cave the next morning, he ran all the way home, but his house was deserted.

  CHAPTER 1

  Tokyo

  Four years later

  July 10, 2021

  I’m dead! Adrenaline ignited the shooter’s viscera, and his grip stiffened against the trigger. He relaxed slightly when he looked up into the rafters of the Olympic stadium and saw it was only a tombi, a type of hawk, carrying a midsized carp from the lake in nearby Akasaka Palace in her beak. The tiny squeaks of her hungry chicks in their raftered nest pinged off the canopy as their mother landed and began shredding the fish with razor-like claws. The man swore silently. Although he had breached the highest levels of security and made his way to his hide undetected in the middle of the night, he had just come close to a panic-pull of the trigger. Swearing again, he took several deep breaths, feeling his pulse gradually decrease.

  It was just after 3 a.m., exactly two weeks before the Games of the XXXII Olympiad were set to begin, that the squat, powerful-looking figure clothed entirely in black began his ascent of the south wall of the stadium. The raucous frenzy of nightlife in the area had evaporated after the last subway pulled out at midnight. Now the only sounds were the occasional shout of a drunk in the distance. Or the roar of a passing taxi. Or the stifled grunts of the solitary figure as he shimmied himself up the pylons, pausing every once in a while to rechalk his hands and look down on the main concourse. He had timed his ascent to the clockwork punctuality of the eight security guards who were posted below. None of them ever looked up. They had been
told that the 5G AI security system was fully operational, even this far out from the start of the Games, and that it was nigh impossible for anyone to fool sensors that could distinguish between those taxis in the distance, or that cat skulking in the shadows, or that human attempting to scale the south wall. But the solitary figure in black who was indeed scaling the south wall had trained at Keumsung Military College, where from morning until night he had hit things, broken things, had things broken on his head, driven nails through boards with his forehead, rolled around in broken glass, pulled trucks filled with soldiers, and hit tiny bull’s-eyes one hundred yards away. So breaching a stadium with state-of-the-art security? Child’s play, although even he had to admit that architect Kengo Kuma’s design, with its tiered gardens protruding twenty feet out on the way up, challenged his climbing skills like few structures had at Keumsung Military College. But now he was settled in his perch high up in the stadium and waiting for his targets to appear. His trigger finger was on hot standby as he beheld the stadium that surrounded him, lit only by starlight.

  Situated in what had been designated as the “Heritage Zone,” the area where the 1964 Tokyo Olympics were held, Kengo Kuma’s sixty-eight-thousand-seat stadium recalled Frank Lloyd Wright’s philosophy of creating structures in harmony with their environment. Kuma expressed a desire to go beyond the era of concrete and restore the link that Tokyo lost with nature during the reconstruction of the city after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. His stated goal with his design was what he figuratively called “defeated architecture,” by which he meant a stadium that would transcend its design. But if the man in the rafters had his way, defeated architecture would come to mean something quite a bit more literal in the weeks ahead.

  Having breached all manner of security on his way up the south wall, the man had found a recessed gap between the nosebleed seats at the top of the stadium and the rafters of the oculus that opened up onto the sky. The gap would be used for TV cameras during the Games, but for now it would serve very nicely as his sniper’s hide. He crawled inside and waited, enjoying the hum of quiet as the faint stars in the black sky began to fade into the spreading shades of purple and pearl of astronomical dawn. An hour later, he watched through his rifle scope as a hundred or so men in blue jumpsuits and peaked caps marched in smart files to the middle of the field. He noticed that his finger had unconsciously tightened around the trigger. He relaxed it. Not yet, he thought. Not yet.

  Up until a week earlier, security for the Olympics had been the responsibility of a joint venture made up of fourteen private companies, but Prime Minister Adegawa had decided that the measures that the joint venture had in place were inadequate for ensuring maximum safety, and thus had replaced it with the Japan Intelligence Agency (JIA), which reported directly to him. The JIA men on the field fanned out around the field and began, along with much of the country at the same time, what is known as rajio taiso, or “radio calisthenics.” The man in the sniper’s hide shook his head and smiled in amusement. It was exactly how they did it back home, right down to the little piano ditty that played over the loudspeaker system. He peered intently through his rifle scope, looking for a specific person, a foreigner with Mediterranean features who had grown up in Japan. The shooter had made the man’s acquaintance in North Korea four years earlier. Finally he found him. He’s dead! he thought. Adrenaline again coursed through his viscera. But then he relaxed his finger on the trigger. Not yet. Not yet…

  The foreigner with Mediterranean features had skipped the morning’s calisthenics, since he had gotten up at 3:30 a.m. to do his mixed martial arts kata back home in Kamakura, about forty miles away. He had been a star long-distance runner at Kamakura High School, and his eyes still had the inner intensity that came from churning out mile after mile around the seaside town with nothing in his head except the classical music he loved, especially that of Bach. “Loner music,” his father had called it, and he meant it as a compliment. As his eyes took in the stadium, the foreigner thought four weeks ahead to the day of the Closing Ceremony, when the marathoners would be sprinting into the stadium after their twenty-six-mile traversal of Tokyo in stifling heat and humidity. For the briefest of moments he wondered if he might have had a shot at the Olympics had circumstances been different, but he cut himself off in mid-thought. Coulda woulda shoulda. Total waste of time, especially at my age.

  He had eaten a quick breakfast and ridden his motorcycle up on the all-but-deserted Shuto Expressway, arriving at the stadium ready to begin his first full day with the men who would be serving under him, a foreigner. How Japan had changed in the years since his youth, he marveled, before remembering the many more things about Japan that would never change in a thousand years. He had been hired as chief security consultant for the 2021 Olympics, but many of the old hands in the JIA, Japan’s CIA, resented taking orders from a foreigner, xenophobia that had also raised its ugly head when the stadium’s first architect, the British-Iraqi Zaha Hadid, a woman no less, was summarily fired in order to bring in Kengo Kuma.

  The foreigner had been hired by the new director of the JIA because of allegations of corruption and possible treason within his own agency. Its former director was suspected of being in league with the Chongryon, a Tokyo-based organization with close ties to North Korea, a suspicion that was only strengthened when he bought that group’s headquarters on prime Tokyo real estate for a shockingly low price. The new director, Kazuo Hayashida, had been brought in to restore the Agency’s reputation, and to that end, he had retained the services of a total outsider, the foreigner on the field, making him instantly unpopular with people in the Agency who had been cozy with the ex-director. The foreigner had jumped at the opportunity since he was, frankly, bored. His newfound domestic tranquility was deeply satisfying on one level, but on a level that he kept to himself, he missed his old life: a hunter of men. He had no idea that at that moment, he was the hunted one….

  The sniper set the barrel of his rifle on the small bag of chalk that had given his hands traction on his climb up the south wall. He used the barrel to smooth the chalk powder down into a groove and peered through the sight. His eyes focused on the field below, where the men in blue jumpsuits were now standing in neat rows. He held out his hand in front of him. Steady and firm. His grip tightened around the rifle again, but only to the degree that he might hold one of the baby hawks in the rafters without injuring it. He peered through the optical sight and waited for precisely the right moment, cursing the heat that was causing sweat to pour into his eyes.

  The men on the field were cursing it as well. The late summer humid swelter of Tokyo, known locally as mushiatsui, or “steam heat,” rivals that of the jungles of Borneo to those unaccustomed to it. Adding to the discomfort is the cacophonous booty call of cicadas, whose 120-decibel chirp makes them the loudest insects on earth. As the temperature rises, the cicadas begin their search for a mate even earlier. Even now, at 7 a.m., with the temperature rising above 82℉ and the humidity already topping 90 percent, the brain-penetrating whine of the cicadas blared out of the hundreds of oak, cypress, willow, ash, and maple trees surrounding Kengo Kuma’s stadium.

  Down on the field, Seiji Naya, one of several assistant chiefs of security with JIA, felt himself getting hotter by the minute, and not because of the oppressive heat and humidity. As he read through the day’s security update, he swore silently and began storming toward the low riser from which the daily briefings were announced.

  The foreigner with Mediterranean features stood at the bottom of the riser, penciling notes onto a page and preparing to deliver the briefing. As the cacophony of the cicadas became more and more irritating, he considered that in a few short weeks they would just be dried out exoskeletons littering the ground, and the larches, oaks, and maples would be brown in another cycle of birth and death. An old haiku came to his mind: Nothing in the cry / of cicadas suggests they / are about to die.

  The shooter in the rafters followed the
action on field through his scope as Naya got closer to the foreigner. Deputy Assistant Watari saw that Naya was, once again, in one of his rages, no doubt with his usual complaint of having to take orders from a gaijin, a foreigner. Watari, of a more cosmopolitan world view, moved to intervene, but Naya pushed him roughly aside and situated himself face-to-face with the foreigner. As soon as he looked up from his clipboard and saw that, once again, he would be confronted by Naya, the foreigner set his jaw and raised his chin aggressively.

  “This is unacceptable, Mister Featherstone!” Naya began, a vein bulging in his forehead. “We’re talking about the security of seventy thousand athletes and spectators at any given time! How can you possibly argue that snipers should be the main tool to counter security threats? The threat can come from anywhere, even outside this stadium! Our Japanese companies have developed a state-of-the-art 5G facial recognition system that can tell identical twins apart. Besides, we in the JIA have been charged with providing security without interfering with the Games. Snipers will only frighten people! Your directive is, frankly, naïve. It’s completely beyond me how you managed to persuade Director Hayashida to adopt it!”

  He spoke in fluent but heavily accented English, knowing full well that Patrick Featherstone, who had been born in Kamakura forty-one years earlier, was stone-fluent in Japanese. Patrick intentionally used less than honorific verb forms in his Japanese-language response to Naya.

  “No one is saying that snipers should be our only tool, Naya-san, only one of our most reliable ones. The 5G AI facial recognition will be fully operational, but as you say, the threat could come from anywhere, and if you don’t realize the necessity of having properly positioned snipers as backup for technology that can be hacked, then maybe you shouldn’t be involved in guarding those seventy thousand people.”

  As Patrick said this, his mind went back to Pyongyang a few years earlier, when he and a hastily assembled team had helped to engineer the Rising Tide revolution that brought down the regime of Kim Jong-un, during which Patrick called upon his own sniper skills to take out a hostile shooter a half mile across the Taedong River from Kim Il Sung Square.