Dangerous Grounds

by Don Keith

  "Gentlemen," the old soldier began, his eyes catching up in turn with those of each man at the table. "I do not need to emphasize that what we confer about here today has the highest possible classification. Nothing can be discussed outside of this room."

  The warning was no more than a formality. Extreme secrecy was a way of life for this group. Still, there was a faint rustling as the members sat up straighter and paid closer attention. The General was too powerful a man to trifle with. Any plan he presented had to be given the most careful consideration. There was also something in his voice, in his demeanor today, that seemed to give special import to what he was about to tell them.

  "As most of you already know, my people have been in negotiation with certain officers of the Russian Pacific Fleet at Vladivostok which would allow us to purchase two nuclear weapons." Heads around the room nodded. There was even an impatient shrug or two. This was old material. The negotiations had been underway for over a year. "I can report to the Committee today that the weapons have been safely delivered to the Peoples Army Special Weapons Agency.” More shrugs. A few sets of eyes looked to the ceiling. Very little escaped their attention. They were well aware of the delivery of the weapons. Dai-jang paused a moment for effect before going on. “I can also report that my people are now in the process of modifying the torpedoes for our purposes. That is what I want to discuss with the Committee today."

  All eyes were back on the soldier. Now he had their attention again.

  "But Comrade General, I do not understand." The Chief of External Security was the first to interrupt. "Why are you modifying these weapons? I thought we had negotiated to sell them to the Abu Sayuff rebel leader. We need the hard currency to cover our expenses."

  General Dai-jang gave the little man a hard look. Despite his being a master spy, the man did look and think like an accountant at times. The thick lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses accentuated the stereotype. But he was asking the question that was on the lips of each of those assembled.

  "Sabul u Nurizam will get his weapons and he will deliver the cash to us in due time, precisely as planned," Dai-jang answered.

  The chief spy started to protest, to insist on an explanation of the change in plans, but General Dai-jang raised his hand to stop him.

  "If you will allow me the courtesy of continuing, it will all be made clear shortly. Nurizam and his Abu Sayuff movement will get their torpedoes, but there will not be a functional nuclear weapon inside either of them. We have carefully constructed a duplicate warhead for each one that looks exactly like the real one. It even contains a small amount of plutonium, enough to show up on radiation detectors."

  The General stopped again to allow the information to sink in. He took a small sip from his water glass as he studied the puzzled expressions on the faces of his colleagues. He had enticed them to nibble the bait. Now he would set the hook.

  "When Nurizam and his followers decide to use the weapons, the high explosives will still work. In the process, the blast will spread enough plutonium around the detonation site to convince anyone making a cursory examination that the weapon was faulty, that it resulted in only a low-order detonation. As we all know only too well, that is not uncommon for Soviet-made weapons."

  The Chief of External Security smiled wryly and nodded. The men around this table had, for many years, dealt with Soviet-made junk foisted on them by their erstwhile former ally. They knew from bitter experience the lack of reliability that Dai-jang described.

  Another member of the Committee seemed about to ask a question, but Dai-jang stopped him with a raised index finger and slight smile. He went on.

  "The plutonium we are putting in the torpedoes came from a small shipment that our agents acquired in Bulgaria. It was originally from a Russian reactor facility at Zelenogorsk, the same facility that made the plutonium for the real weapons. Even an isotopic analysis will point to a Russian nuclear weapon."

  The head spy could remain silent no longer.

  "So the world will know that Nurizam tried to use a faulty nuclear device. I still do not understand. What good does that do for us?"

  Dai-jang’s smile grew. It was time to reel in the catch.

  "It leaves us with two fully functional nuclear weapons that no one knows exist. We can use them judiciously and nothing will point to the D. P. R. K. being involved." The soldier leaned forward, putting his weight on the fists he had placed on the heavy conference table. He looked like an angry Doberman, about to leap at its victim's throat. "Gentlemen, we in the D. P. R. K. have been the world's outcasts for too long. We are laughed at and our rightful demands are disregarded." By the last words, an angry Dai-jang was almost shouting. His smile had vanished, replaced with a chilling scowl. "Our people starve and our factories are idle while the gluttons in the West feast. Even China turns her back on us in pursuit of capitalistic riches."

  The general eased back, wiped his upper lip with the back of his hand, and switched on his smile once again. This time the smirk was positively wicked. Even the Chief of External Security shuddered at the sight of that evil grin. It revealed pure hatred. Everyone in the room knew that General Dai-jang had lost his parents and a younger sister in an American bombing raid during the War for Reunification. The general-to-be escaped with his life but was forced to listen to the screams of his dying family as he crawled from the rubble. The terrible incident scarred the young boy. Dai-jang had worked hard, clawing his way up through the D. P. R. K.'s military, his ambition fueled by his hatred for the West. Now, after decades of banking the fires of his revenge, he was in a position to ignite the flames.

  His voice was low, raspy, when he spoke again. The malicious grin did not go away. The words were clipped, brittle, icy.

  "We will use our two nuclear devices to pit the West against the peoples of Islam. If we make each side believe that the other is resorting to nuclear attacks, the resulting conflict will be cataclysmic. One weapon for each side is all we need. We will slip one into Mecca and vaporize Islam's most holy site. The faithful will assume the attack was from either America or Israel. We will detonate the second in India. The world will assume that it was an attack from Pakistan. The confusion will be total. While they all kill each other. The Arabs will destroy Israel. The Indians will strike Pakistan. Counter retaliation will follow retaliation. The nuclear fires will spread from the Middle East to envelop the West. Then we will march into Seoul and reclaim our southern provinces."

  There was a moment’s stunned silence, then each man on the committee leapt to his feet and cheered his approval.

  The old soldier settled back into his chair as if exhausted.

  Midshipman First Class Jim Ward wiped the sweat from his eyes and made his way down the pier. The hot afternoon sun burned down from high in the pale blue sky over the minuscule island of Guam. Not even the constant breeze off the Pacific Ocean to the west did much to give relief from the tropical heat. The young man had already decided that this climate would take a little getting used to.

  Ward was exhausted and it had nothing to do with the cloying humidity. The long series of flights from Norfolk, Virginia, halfway around the world to Anderson Air Force Base, Guam, had crossed nine time zones. That left his internal body clock scrambled. He glanced at his watch one more time and tried to calculate what time it was back home. As near as he could manage, it was sometime last night. Or was it yesterday afternoon?

  Oh well, one thing he was sure of. It was today here on Guam. And it was time for him to report aboard his first submarine, even if it was only for the summer.

  He shielded his eyes from the sun. The turquoise-blue water of Apra Harbor stretched out before him, broken by the high gray bulk of the stern of the USS Frank Cable. The big submarine tender was moored stern first to the end of Wharf A. A long brow reached up from the wharf to the submarine tender's quarterdeck, towering high above where Ward stood on the pier. This seemed the obvious place to start looking for his submarine.

  Jim Ward hefted h
is heavy green sea bag onto his shoulder and started the long climb up to the quarterdeck. He had to stop at the first platform to adjust the load before continuing the ascent.

  At the head of the brow, Ward stopped and dropped his bag to the deck. He faced the national ensign, which was flying from the jack staff above his head, and snapped a sharp salute. Then he turned and saluted the Officer of the Deck who was standing nearby and Ward barked the words he had been silently rehearsing on the flight all the way across the Pacific: "Request permission to come aboard, sir!"

  The Chief Petty Officer, dressed in an immaculate tropical white uniform, returned the salute and answered crisply.

  "Permission granted."

  The grizzled old chief looked as if he had spent most of his life on the deck of a ship beneath a tropical sun. His face and arms…or at least the few patches of skin on his arms that weren't covered with colorful tattoos…were burned the color of old saddle leather. The chief glared sternly at the fresh-faced midshipman for a few seconds as Ward struggled with his sea bag. Then a friendly smile broke out across the old sailor's face.

  "Where you reportin' to, son?" he asked.

  "I have orders to the Corpus Christi,” Ward answered. “How do I get there?"

  "She's moored to the port side. Drop down the ladder through that hatch." The chief pointed to a large hatch directly in front of them. "Go forward ‘til you get to the machine shop. You'll see the ladder down to Corpus outboard at the forward end of the shop. Can't miss it."

  Ward smiled and once more hoisted his sea bag back up onto his shoulder.

  "Thank you, Chief," he said as he started toward the hatch.

  "Welcome to the submarine Navy," the chief answered.

  Ward scurried down the ladder and along the narrow mid-ships passageway. He had been aboard submarines before with his father, but he had never visited a tender. He was amazed at the size and the scurrying activity all about him. After passing many office doors with nameplates understandable only to someone better versed than he in Navy jargon, young Ward found himself in a large machine shop. It stretched clear across the tender and at least fifty feet forward. It looked as if there were enough lathes and machine tools here to build a submarine from scratch if need be.

  The young midshipman followed a pair of yellow and black lines painted onto the gray deck. They seemed to mark the lane where it was safe to walk among all the whirring machines. At the forward end of the shop, just before the lines disappeared through a huge steel watertight door, another path led to an open portal in the side of the ship. Ward walked the few steps to the door, looked down, and saw his new home for the next few months. There, thirty feet below where he stood, the low, black bulk of the USS Corpus Christi nestled up against the tender's high gray hull. A steep steel ladder reached from Ward's perch down to the submarine's rounded main deck.

  It was time to report aboard his new boat. It was time to start learning how to be a submariner.

  The Advanced KH-11 Enhanced Imaging Satellite, commonly called the Keyhole EIS, silently maneuvered as it crossed the Arctic Ocean, high above Canada. By the time its elliptical orbit brought it out over the Bering Strait, steering rockets on the fifteen-ton spy satellite had nudged it a few degrees farther to the west. As it sped across the Kamchatka Peninsula and out over the Sea of Okhotsk, the bird downlinked a continuous stream of digital imagery, pictures of the terrain below that were sharp enough so anyone looking at them would be able to read road signs. But the National Reconnaissance Office wasn't paying $1.5 billion dollars a copy to track Russian road signs. The sensors on this bird were designed to keep tabs on far more dangerous activities.

  The KH-11 flew across the northern tip of Hokkaido and down the middle of the Sea of Japan. It passed a hundred miles off the North Korean coast on its southbound journey.

  By the time it had passed over the South Korean Peninsula, the satellite had transmitted all its imagery up to another bird, a communications satellite that was sitting in a geo-synchronous orbit, appearing to hover high over the Pacific Ocean. Three minutes after they were taken over North Korea, the images were already being printed out on the high-resolution monitors at the National Reconnaissance Office headquarters in Chantilly, Virginia.

  Ten minutes after that, Admiral Tom Donnegan was studying the same images in the office of the National Security Advisor. Dr. Samuel Kinnowitz, the NSA, looked over the admiral's shoulder as his fingers danced across the keyboard, making the computer zoom in on the Korean coast around Najin. Together they searched the desolate coastal mountains and dirty industrial towns, trying to find something that would point toward the missing nuclear weapons they had learned about.

  Donnegan shook his head.

  "Nothing,” he mumbled. “Not a damn thing there."

  "What about the gamma spectrometer?” Kinnowitz asked. “Shouldn’t we be able to see the weapons directly from that?"

  "Normally, yes," Donnegan agreed. "That's why we spent so much to put that thing in the Keyhole in the first place. And it works real well over the Russian steppes or down in Iran, but these granite mountains are screwing everything up. There's so much naturally occurring radium in all that rock that it's masking everything out."

  Kinnowitz looked away for a second, then in a quiet voice he asked, "How do we find out for sure if there are nukes there, Tom?"

  The admiral hesitated for a second before he spoke.

  "There’s only one sure way. The old-fashioned way. We have to send someone in and let them have a look," Donnegan answered matter-of-factly.

  Kinnowitz chewed on his lower lip for a moment then looked Donnegan in the eye.

  “So what you’re saying, Tom, is that we are going to put American operatives on North Korean soil and send them off on some kind of a scavenger hunt? You know what it would mean if they get caught. Or if they have to do some dirty work there and the rest of the world finds out it was us who did it.”

  Tom Donnegan’s black-coffee face seemed even darker than usual. He didn’t dodge eye contact with the president’s top security advisor.

  “You and the president want to ponder the alternative? Two nuclear weapons in the inventory of the most dangerous regime on the planet, or getting loose in the hands of God-knows-what wild-eyed bunch, bound for Tel Aviv, London, Chechnya…Wrigley Field? If there were a better way of finding out for sure if those things are in North Korea, I’d be recommending it. There ain’t!”

  "That's what I thought. You go set it up. I’ll brief the president."

  8

  Rain beat down hard on Rangoon. Or “Yangon,” as it was now called. The Southeast Asian country was ruled nowadays by a military dictatorship and was renamed “Myanmar.” The sea breeze blew in the sudden monsoon rain. It gave blessed relief from the May heat. The first drops sizzled on the hot macadam but then turned to a downpour that washed the streets clean of the dry season's accumulation of dust. The sprinkles became a torrent, overpowering the ancient drains and turning the streets into rivers.

  The normally light afternoon traffic slowed to a crawl, unable to move through flooded streets. No one seemed to mind, though. There were no honking of horns and drivers seemed content to not try to plow through where the flood was too deep. The water would drain away soon enough. The shopkeepers along Kon Zay Dan surrendered, closing for the afternoon. No one would be buying vegetables for dinner in this downpour.

  The old, black Morris cab, a British relic from the fifties, chugged down the boulevard, oblivious to the cloudburst. Inside, Sabul u Nurizam sat back and watched the hypnotic sweep of the wipers as they attempted to clear the windshield. After the squalor and bustle of Isabelle City, the wide, clean streets of Rangoon were distinctly strange. Even a little disturbing. He chewed on the nail of his thumb and prayed that the driver would not send them crashing into something solid or plunge off into a flooded canal.

  Kon Zay Dan Road ended at a small marina on Pazun Duang Creek. The broad stream ran muddy-brown as it wound arou
nd Dawbon Myothit on its way to join the Bago River. The cabbie pulled to a stop where Nurizam directed. The radical cleric paid the driver, opened the door, and plunged out into the downpour. By the time he reached the small dinghy tied at the foot of the marina, his clothes were drenched and his hair was in his eyes.

  The open dinghy didn't offer any protection from the warm rain either. Nurizam gingerly boarded the pitching little craft and grabbed the sides for balance. The wind and storm churned the stream into a frothy, choppy maelstrom that threatened to swamp the little boat even before it left the pier. But the boatman seemed oblivious to the waves. He cast off as soon as his passenger was aboard and headed out into the river. Splash and spray from the river joined the rain in soaking Nurizam even further as he maintained his grip on the boat’s sides.

  Minutes later, the dinghy approached and tied up alongside a decrepit looking old junk anchored out in the center of the creek. The vessel was one of several of the ancient style craft that were looking for shelter from the storm there. A rude rope ladder draped over the vessel's high wooded side. It swayed precariously in the wind and looked much too hazardous to climb, but there was no choice except to grab it. The boatman tried to hold the little dinghy steady as Nurizam grabbed the ladder and then held on for dear life.

  He took a few steps upward then looked down. That was a mistake. The dinghy had moved away and there was nothing beneath his feet but turbid, brown-green water.

  Nurizam had no fear of the bullets from the gun of an infidel. He was not frightened of the knife of a would-be assassin. But he was deathly afraid of water. Learning to swim had never been a priority for him as a child. Even now, when so many wanted to deal him a horrible death in so many potential ways, his nightmares were always of drowning.

  The sodden cleric took a deep breath, clutched the swinging ladder even harder, and scurried up.

  When Nurizam reached the top of the rope ladder and climbed over the high, slippery gunwale, he found the junk's owner standing there to greet him. The beauty of her face, of her dark, deep eyes, struck him. That was about all he could see of her.