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“Bear’s working OT on the Sat intel,” Barbara Price assured Brognola. “If anybody can use that kind of data to find a needle in a haystack, it’s him.”
“I hope you’re right,” Brognola said. “I could use some good news right about now.”
The rail car finally came to a halt at the underground entrance to the Annex. Brognola followed Price to the Computer Room. The large chamber was subdivided by a handful of computer stations and the far wall was lined with a bank of large, flat-screen monitors. Normally the Farm’s entire cyberteam would be on duty by this time and the area would be a bustle of activity, but at the moment only two of the computer stations were being manned.
Carmen Delahunt, a vivacious, middle-aged redhead recruited from the FBI, glanced up from her keyboard long enough to tell Price and Brognola, “Give me two seconds. I’m in the middle of a download on these defectors.”
“Go ahead,” Brognola told her.
The only other person in the room was crew chief Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman, a burly, middle-aged man confined to a wheelchair in the aftermath of the first—and most deadly—of several attacks made on the Stony Man compound during its existence. Kurtzman was a computer genius and had done a yeoman’s job of staying on top of each new development in the ever-changing field of high-tech intel gathering. Not that anyone would know it by looking at his workstation. The cubicle was in its usual state of cluttered disarray, anointed with coffee spills and strewed with food crumbs, sticky notes and enough clipboards to stock an entire football coaching staff. To the untrained eye the area may have seemed chaotic and disorganized but, as Kurtzman had proved time and again, he could reach through the chaos at a moment’s notice and track down specific material faster than his more orderly counterparts.
“Morning, troops,” he called to Price and Brognola as they pulled up chairs. “Are we having fun yet?”
“As always,” Brognola deadpanned.
“Have either Hunt or Akira checked in?” Price asked.
“Zip from Hunt,” Kurtzman said, referring to Huntington Wethers, the one-time Berkeley cybernetics professor regarded as the most analytical member of the Farm’s cyber crew. Wethers was presently in Baltimore, serving as part of the newly founded National Scenario Group, a think tank established to condense daily briefs submitted by the country’s various intelligence agencies into a one-page overview that would hopefully convey a concise view of recent international events and anticipate possible future developments based on the new data. Additionally, NSG had allowed the intel community’s right hand to know what the left was doing, leading to better cooperation and efficiency in field operations.
“As for Akira, he checked in about an hour ago,” Kurtzman went on. “He says the ‘ghosting’ operation is going well, but it’s been a little hit-and-miss trying to tap into any KPA military intel. At least so far. Give him a few more days, though, and I bet it’ll be different story.”
“I’ll second that,” Price said. “Did he manage to squeeze in a visit with those relatives he was talking about?”
“Actually, he said he’s had trouble reaching them,” Kurtzman said, “but I’m sure he’ll get around to it.”
Akira Tokaido, the youngest member of Stony Man’s cybernetic crew, had been born in America but was of Japanese descent and still had relatives living overseas, including a Japanese-Korean cousin living in Seoul. In fact, the latest developments in North Korea had coincided with plans Tokaido had already made to visit his cousin, prompting him to arrange a working vacation whereby he’d squeeze in family get-togethers between stints as a consultant for a U.S. Army Intelligence unit operating out of Camp Bonifas, just south of the DMZ. For months now, AI had been honing in on North Korea’s state-based radio signal and then overlaying counter-propaganda on the so-called “drift band,” a nearly identical frequency that, in certain reception areas, could crowd in and replace the regime’s signal. The “ghost” broadcasts were announced by North Korea defectors who could imitate DRNK spokespersons and were written in such a way as to discredit Party views and make everyday citizens more aware of the extent to which they were being brainwashed by their so-called Great Leader, Kim Jong-il.
“Okay, now that everyone’s accounted for,” Brognola said, setting aside his cigar long enough to retrieve a set of notes from his shirt pocket, “we’ve got a lot of ground to cover, so let’s dive right in, shall we?”
“Works for me,” Kurtzman said. “You want me to go first?”
“Yeah, go ahead,” Brognola replied.
Kurtzman punched a few commands into his keyboard, uploading a display map of the Korean peninsula onto a large wall screen, then turned his attention back to his own monitor, splitting the screen several times so that he could quickly access the spate of Sat-Link images he’d spent the past twelve hours sifting through.
For the past few months the U.S. and her allies had stepped up satellite surveillance of North Korea in hopes of pinpointing areas the KPA might use as launch sites for ICBMs. Kurtzman had loaded the lion’s share of these images into his computer and, frame by frame, he’d gone over them in hopes of turning up something the other intelligence agencies may have overlooked.
“Okay,” Kurtzman began, “the only good news—and I’m afraid it’s not much of a newsflash—is that we’ve ruled out any launch by sea. Their sub fleet just isn’t equipped for the task, and the only times they’ve touched port has been for open-air maintenance. Even David Copperfield couldn’t have slipped missiles onto the subs without us spotting them.”
“Understood,” Brognola said. “We’re talking land-based. But that’s been a given all along, so we don’t need to go there.” He absently tapped his cigar against the inside of his right knee as he scanned his notes. “At the briefing, NSA was leaning toward Taechon. Something about truck movements there the past week. You got anything on that?”
“Yeah, right here.”
Kurtzman dragged his cursor to the screen listing image files of Taechon, a city on North Korea’s northeast coast where a half-built two-hundred-megawatt nuclear power reactor had been mothballed during the Clinton administration under terms of the 1994 Agreed Framework. Despite worldwide objections, the plant had been started up earlier in the year and there was concern that its primary function had been the processing of spent fuel rods for the plutonium needed to fashion nuclear warheads.
Kurtzman highlighted a file and a few seconds later the large screen on the far wall displayed a satellite shot that vaguely reminded Brognola of the grainy images that years ago had triggered the Cuban missile crisis. A convoy of three eighteen-wheelers could be seen wending its way up a winding mountain road where there was no visible trace of outbuildings or any other development.
“This is about halfway through a sequence of about twenty shots taken three days ago,” Kurtzman explained. “The trucks pulled out of a warehouse three miles from the nuke plant in Taechon and headed for the hills. The thing is, the road there doesn’t go anywhere. It was supposed to be an overland route to Hyesan, but they wound up building another road out of Kimchaek, about twenty miles to the north.”
Price was intrigued. “Maybe they’ve got a facility tucked away in the mountains somewhere,” she ventured.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too,” Kurtzman responded, “but I ran with it and came up empty.”
He quickly clicked through the next series of images, which detailed the trucks’ advance up the mountain grade, then stopped on a shot in which the vehicles had disappeared beneath a tree canopy. “The convoy stops here for a couple hours, and there’s enough cover that they could have unloaded something. But check this out.”
Kurtzman typed a few commands, converting the image to an infrared scan of the area. “If there was any kind of facility here,” he went on, “we’d get some kind of a heat read. And if there were nukes in the mix, they’d stick out like a sore thumb, just like the readings we’re getting at the reactor plant. But there’s nothing. Nada.
“I don’t know if they just stopped for lunch or whatever,” he concluded, “but once they rolled out, they looped around and by the end of the day they were back at the warehouse. And the thing is, there are stretches leading to and from this covered area where the roads are dirt, so I zoomed in and measured the tread depth on the tires. No difference the whole way.”
“Meaning they didn’t unload anything,” Price guessed.
“Exactly.” Kurtzman yawned and rubbed his eyes, then shrugged. “You want my guess, it was a diversion. Nothing else.”
“Not the first time they’ve pulled that,” Brognola said.
Kurtzman nodded. “And I’ve got footage from Yongbyon and Kumho where they did the same thing, more or less.”
“In other words,” Price said, “they know we’re watching so they’re playing shell games with us.”
“Yep,” Kurtzman concluded. “I keep waiting to come up with a zoom shot where one of the drivers looks up and tweaks his nose at us and starts shouting ‘Nyah nyah…’”
“Meanwhile,” Brognola said, “somewhere down there, they’ve got those missiles tucked away someplace where we can’t see ’em.”
“I hear you,” Kurtzman said. “And I’ll keep sifting through everything from the sat-links, but somehow we gotta beef up our ground intel or we’re going nowhere.”
“CIA’s working on that,” Brognola assured him, “and the Army and Navy are both getting ready to insert covert op teams. If Phoenix Force wraps up its current assignment, we’ll probably want to throw them into this, too.”
“Probably a good idea,” Kurtzman said.
Before they could go on, Carmen Delahunt brought over a computer printout and cleared her throat to get everyone’s attention.
“Ready for my two cents’ worth?” she asked.
“By all means,” Brognola said.
“Okay. As far as these defectors go, we’ve got a bit of a mess on our hands,” Delahunt began. “For starters, one of the guys on that list just turned up dead in L.A. He was killed around the same time as the raid on that gang headquarters in Koreatown, so there was no way Mack could have gotten to him in time.”
“Killed?” Brognola murmured. “So much for my theory about them taking them alive.”
Price quickly scanned her notes, then asked, “Are we talking about Yong-Im Hyunsook?”
Delahunt nodded. “They got to him at his house in the suburbs. The place was ransacked to make it look like a botched home-invasion robbery, but we obviously know better. And from the looks of it, Yong-Im was tortured before they killed him.”
“Maybe he didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear,” Brognola suggested.
“That would be my guess,” Delahunt said. “Now, as for the others, the FBI moved in and took as many of them as they could find into protective custody. Unfortunately, they could only get to three out of the other five. One in Las Vegas, another in Chicago and a third here in D.C.”
“What about the other two?”
“One of them lives in Laughlin, Nevada,” Delahunt explained. “It’s a small casino town about two hours south of Vegas on the Colorado River. The guy wasn’t home when the Bureau showed up, so they’ve got the place staked out and are keeping an eye open for him.”
“How far is Laughlin from L.A.?” Brognola asked.
“About five hours,” Delahunt said.
Brognola checked his watch and calculated the time on the West Coast. “So there’s a chance the Koreans got to him after they whacked Yong-Im.”
Delahunt nodded. “That’s cutting it close, but, yeah, they might have beat us to him.”
“There’s also a chance REDI has more than one team out looking for these guys,” Price interjected. “Especially when you consider how spread out they are.”
“True,” Brognola conceded. He turned back to Delahunt. “What about the last guy?”
“His name’s Shinn Kam-Song,” Delahunt said. “And of the whole batch, he’s probably the most valuable. He was the point man on missile development and guidance systems, and he’s also the one who did the most tampering with the R&D data before he defected.”
“Meaning he’s the one they’d want to make sure they got all the bugs out when they moved ahead without him,” Brognola surmised.
Delahunt nodded. “Yeah, he’s the one they want alive more than the others combined.”
“Where is he?” Price queried.
“Well, that’s the problem,” Delahunt said. “Up until three months ago he was living with his wife in Phoenix. Then they both just up and disappeared.”
“How is that possible?” Brognola said. “Weren’t we keeping tabs on them?”
“Not close enough, obviously.”
“Maybe REDI already has their hands on him,” Price suggested.
“I don’t think so,” Delahunt said, “otherwise Shinn’s address would have been on that list Mack found in Koreatown.” Referring to her notes, she added, “And the thing is, Shinn and his wife didn’t leave everything behind. They took most of their belongings with them. According to the FBI, Shinn was getting tired of all the debriefings they kept putting him through. The feeling is he wanted to slip through the cracks and not be bothered anymore. Not that I’d blame him. I mean, if you risk your life fleeing a police state, the last thing you want is another Big Brother looking over your shoulder all the time.”
“I’m sure it was for their own good,” Kurtzman said.
“Doesn’t mean they had to like it,” Delahunt countered. “In any event, I think Shinn and his wife are still out there somewhere.”
“If that’s the case, then we damn well better get to them before the Koreans do,” Brognola said. “Any idea at all where they might’ve relocated to?”
“Nothing definite,” Delahunt said. “But we do know that Shinn was close friends with Li-Roo Kohb, the guy from Laughlin. After they defected, their orders were not to contact one another, but maybe they made an exception.”
“It’s worth looking into,” Brognola said. He turned to Price. “Put Mack on it. If this Shinn fellow is the key to North Korea reaching first-strike capacity, we need to get to him before they do.”
“I’ll make the call now,” Price said.
As she moved over to the phone at Akira Tokaido’s workstation, Brognola turned back to Kurtzman.
“And let’s keep looking for that hidey-hole where Kim Jong-il’s hiding his arsenal.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Changchon Rehabilitation Center, North Korea
Lieutenant Corporal Yulim Zhi-Weon finished his lunch of fried oysters, bacon and scrambled eggs, then pushed the plate away and pulled a silver cigarette case from his uniform shirt pocket. By the time he’d lit a cigarette, a prison trustee had taken away the plate and replaced it with a fresh cup of coffee, a crystal ashtray and a small basket filled with fresh pastries delivered earlier in the day from Kaesong. Yulim’s quarters was an air-conditioned, three-room bungalow set on a tree-lined bluff overlooking the prison yard. There was a satellite dish on the roof, giving Yulim more than eighty different channels to choose from on the high-definition television in the spacious den set off from the dining room. Back in his bedroom, the sixteen-year-old girl he’d taken a fancy to back at the poppy fields was sleeping off the sexual workout he’d just put her through.
As he slowly smoked his cigarette, Yulim stared down at the prison yard. He could see a row of inmates filing past the mess tent for their daily rations, a cup of rice soaked in chicken broth. In light of today’s suicide and the subsequent killing of three more workers, Yulim wondered if it might be a good move to increase the rations slightly. Nothing major; maybe a cube of tofu or a few string beans. It would be a small price to pay if it would pick up morale at the camp. Yes, he’d told General Oh that he was sure he’d make his quota in terms of opium production, but that had been spin control. In truth, the Changchon fields had fallen drastically short of their projected output, and Yulim knew he could only bribe officials in Chongjin for so long before they refused to falsify the delivery tallies any further.
He needed better work from the inmates, and cracking the whip obviously wasn’t the solution. Of course, if the other plan Yulim was pursuing bore fruit, the shortcomings here at Changchon would become a moot point. If the other plan were to succeed, Yulim would no longer have to concern himself with incurring the wrath of Kim Jong-il and his military hierarchy. Everything would change; everything would be different.
Yulim took a last puff from his cigarette, then stubbed it out in the ashtray and sorted through the pastries, settling on a chocolate éclair. He dunked it in his coffee and was taking his first bite when there was a knock at the front door. Yulim nodded to one of the two security guards posted inside the doorway. The guard opened the door to yet another sentry.
“Major Jin Choon-Yei to see the Lieutenant Corporal,” the sentry announced.
“Send him in,” he called out, adding, “and wait outside. Everyone.”
The guards ushered the prison trustee out of the bungalow, then the major entered and joined Yulim at the dining-room table. Yulim held out his cigarette case, but Jin waved it away and helped himself instead to one of the pastries.
“So,” Yulim said, “how did the grand tour with General Oh go?”
Jin shrugged as he bit into his pastry. “It was the usual. I told him what he wanted to hear and he was suitably impressed.”
“So he still suspects nothing?”
The major shook his head. “In his mind, it’s all systems go.’ He’s sleeping now, but come morning he’ll see his nephew at the launch site and he’ll hear more of the same.”
“Good,” Yulim responded. “If all the other generals are so easily duped, it will make things that much easier for us.”
Jin chuckled. “I still can’t believe he would think you’d have no idea what was going on inside the mountain. All those night shipments moving directly past the camp here. Does he think no one notices anything?”
“He takes me for a good soldier who doesn’t ask too many questions. He figures that for all I care you could be building an apartment building instead of a missile compound.”
Jin finished his pastry, then confided, “I guess I’m a bad soldier, then, because I asked him about the defectors.”
A scowl crossed Yulim’s face. “Was that wise?”
“Don’t worry,” Jin assured his colleague. “The general and I go way back together. He trusts me like a brother.”
“I hope so,” Yulim said. “What did he say?”
“He confirmed what we already suspected. REDI is trying to apprehend the defectors and bring them back to look over the missile data.”
Yulim continued to frown. He lit another cigarette and took a nervous puff.
“That could pose a problem,” he said. “Especially if they manage to bring the team back before we’ve made our move.”
“What are the chances of that?” Jin countered. “Slim to none, I would say.”
“Don’t be so certain,” Yulim cautioned. “Kim Jong-il is determined to make sure the missiles are operational. I’m sure he’s sent his best men to the States.”
Jin shook his head. “Our Great Leader waited too long to play this hand. Even if they do get their hands on Shinn and the others, it will be too late for them to make a difference. Trust me, by the time the REDI agents return, with or without the defectors, we will already be in control. If anything, REDI is doing us a favor. If they bring back the Kanggye Team, we’ll take them into custody and have them do the verification for us. If we can prove that the missiles are functional, their price will only go up.”
