Ballistic Force Read online

  “At least for now,” the redhead said. “I’ll keep you posted if there are any changes.”

  “Do that.”

  Brognola was heading across the room when Kissinger called out to him from Tokaido’s workstation.

  “I know this is a sidebar, Chief,” Cowboy said, “but a DEA team just shut down that harbor warehouse the Koreans were using in San Pedro. Between that and knocking off the Killboys in Koreatown, I think we’ve pretty much slammed the door on their West Coast smuggling operations.”

  “At least for now,” Brognola said. “You can bet they’ll work some other angle first chance they get.”

  “You’re probably right,” Kissinger said.

  The two men were interrupted when Kurtzman let out a sudden whoop.

  “Whoa, Daddy!”

  Kissinger eyed Brognola and smirked. “He either finally drank one too many cups of coffee or he’s found something.”

  “Well, with Bear there’s no such thing as too much coffee.”

  The two men made their way over to Kurtzman’s station.

  “You found something?” Brognola asked.

  “More like a hat trick,” Kurtzman said. “Check this out.”

  Brognola and Kissinger glanced over the man’s shoulder at the computer screen, which was filled with a sat-cam image of a heavily forested mountain area.

  “This is the north flank of the Changchon Mountain Range,” Kurtzman said. “It’s about ten miles north of the DMZ.”

  “Okay, I know the area,” Brognola said. “Looks pretty benign to me.”

  “From a distance, yeah,” Kurtzman conceded. “According to all our intel, the only thing going there is an old mining site, and word was they’d pretty much played out all the veins inside the mountain. But let’s move in for a closer look.”

  Kurtzman cursored the zoom command and once the screen had adjusted, Brognola and Kissinger found themselves staring at the one-time mining center. It was clear at once to both men that the site had been converted to another purpose.

  “Barracks,” Brognola noted. “Barbed-wire perimeter fences.”

  “Concentration camp?” Kissinger said.

  “I think they call them something else, but yeah, that’d be my guess,” Kurtzman said. “There’s another angle shot that shows a few dozen people working a field about a quarter mile north of here. Poppies, from the look of it.”

  “Lets have a look,” Brognola said.

  “Nah, just take my word for it,” Kurtzman said. “I want to get to the good stuff.”

  “There’s more?” Kissinger said.

  Kurtzman nodded. “See that service road that leads right up to the mountain? It’s dirt, so I was able to get a good read on the tire tracks leading there.”

  He entered a few commands, splitting his computer screen so that it depicted two similar side-by-side images. “The left set of tracks are from the sat-cam,” he explained. “They’re deep enough that you can see they’re made by a multiaxle vehicle with four tires to an axle. I ran with a hunch and did a cross-check on the missile transporters they’d most likely be using. Bingo!”

  Kissinger whistled low. “And by missile launchers, I presume we’re talking nukes.”

  “You’re darn tootin’!” Kurtzman said. “We might want to get NSA to redirect a couple satellites over the area for some infrareds, but even now I’d bet my paycheck we’ve just found the needle in the haystack.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Changchon Rehabilitation Center, North Korea

  “This can’t be happening!” Lieutenant Corporal Yulim stormed out in frustration.

  It was bad enough the commandant had just learned that the Ministry of Internal Intelligence was apparently looking into his and Major Jin’s involvement with Operation Guillotine. Now this?

  “A prison revolt!” he exclaimed.

  He glared at Ahn Chung-Hee, the camp cook, who’d just come to him with the revelation. In his frustration, Yulim grabbed for the first thing in reach, a crystal ashtray lying on top of his desk in the den of his bungalow quarters at the concentration camp. When Yulim cocked his arm, the cook flinched, fearing that he was about to pay the price for being the bringer of bad news. But when Yulim let fly with the ashtray, it was his high-tech television set that took the hit. The soft plasma screen didn’t shatter when struck; instead, there was dull splat, followed by a brief sputtering inside the set, after which it gave off a small wisp of smoke.

  His fury spent, at least for the moment, Yulim turned away from the ruined set and went to the wet bar. As he poured himself a drink, he stared back at the cook.

  “Give me the details,” he said. “All of them!”

  “I don’t have any specifics,” Ahn explained. “At least not in terms of how they plan to carry it out. I only know that it’s supposed to happen tomorrow morning. I was supposed to put something in the food given to the security detail. Enough to knock them out, or at least make them drowsy.”

  Yulim frowned.

  “You’re in on it?”

  “I only pretended to be,” the cook insisted. “I played along, hoping I could get more details before I came to you.”

  “And how long has this been going on?” Yulim demanded. “How long have they been plotting this?”

  “Again, I don’t have that information,” the cook said. “They came to me earlier in the week. I stalled, pretending that I wanted more money than what they were offering, hoping that somewhere along the line they would trip up and give me more details. But beyond drugging the guards, they’ve kept the plans to themselves.”

  Yulim quickly downed his drink, then said, “Who’s behind it all? No, wait. Let me guess. Prync Gil-Su? Is he the one?”

  Ahn nodded. “I would say he’s the mastermind. At least, he’s the one I’ve been dealing with. I can’t say for sure who else is involved, but I’ve seen him hanging around with Vae Jae-Bong and a few others during rations.”

  “Why tomorrow?” Yulim asked. “Why have they decided to try this tomorrow?”

  “I’m afraid that’s my fault,” the cook said. “Prync came to me this morning and said they’d come up with a way to meet my price, or at least most of it. I was concerned that if I tried to stall any longer, they would take me out of the loop and try another way. So I agreed, and that’s when they said they want to do it tomorrow.”

  “How did they propose to pay you?” Yulim demanded. “None of them has any money on them, and most of them were stripped of all their possession before they were sent here.” Before the intern could respond, a possibility occurred to the commandant and he quickly added, “Have they been siphoning opium from the fields?”

  “Not that I know of,” Ahn said. “They claim to have some kind of currency on them, and said they’d be good for more once they were free.”

  “In their dreams,” Yulim scoffed.

  “I didn’t really believe them, but, as I said, I kept bartering in hopes I’d get more information,” the cook said. “As for them finally meeting my price, it has to do with one of the new prisoners. The businessman from the south.”

  Yulim’s face flushed red with rage.

  “Lim?”

  “I think that’s his name. He promised to put up the money I asked for once he was back across the DMZ.”

  Yulim glanced past the intern at the door to his bedroom. He’d had Lim’s daughter, Na-Li, brought to the bungalow after morning rations, figuring to repeat the ravishing he’d enjoyed with her the day before. He’d been interrupted before he could indulge himself, however, first by the call from Major Jin regarding the undercover agent from MII, then by this unexpected bombshell from Ahn. Now, in light of everything that was happening, the last thing on Yulim’s mind was sexual gratification. If anything, he was of a mind to haul Lim’s daughter to the mines and have her killed in front of her father as a way of punishing his treachery. But even that would have to wait. The MII agent was on his way over and Yulim could deal with only one crisis at a time.


  Still, he couldn’t help but mutter out loud, “If Lim thinks he’ll ever see the other side of the DMZ after this, he’s very much mistaken.”

  LIM NA-LI FELT nauseous as she sat at the foot of Yulim’s bed. Lying on the bed beside her was a set of red silk thong underwear with a matching bra and camisole. Yulim had told her to change into the garments, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. That had been more than an hour ago and she’d yet to touch the lingerie. The thought putting it on and being forced to parade around for the commandant’s amusement repulsed her almost as much as the thought of what he would do to her after he’d finished his ogling. She wept quietly, trying her best to take solace in the fact that the abuse would not go on beyond today. Just keep thinking about tomorrow, she told herself. Then she would be back across the border and this nightmare would be behind her. She would kiss the ground once she was back on South Korean soil, she promised herself, and never again would she take her freedom for granted.

  Na-Li was beginning to wonder what was keeping Yulim when the bedroom door opened. The commandant stood in the doorway and stared at her.

  “You didn’t change as I asked you,” he said.

  Na-Li glanced at the lingerie, then looked back at Yulim, wiping the tears from her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I just—”

  “No matter,” Yulim interjected. “It’s just as well, because there’s been a change in plans. The guards will take you back and you can spend the rest of the day in the fields with your mother.”

  Na-Li was stunned. “I can go?”

  “Yes,” Yulim told her. “Now. Come along, I have business to attend to.”

  Na-Li stood, her knees trembling. She feared that Yulim was toying with her and that as soon as she came within his reach he would grab her. But he stood back and waved to her impatiently.

  “Don’t try my patience!” he snapped.

  The young woman nodded and walked past Yulim into the main room of the bungalow. Ahn had already left. In his place, a guard was waiting for her. Yulim instructed the man to take Na-Li to the poppy fields, then turned back to the woman and told her, “I’ll want to see you again later. I have a special surprise in store for you.”

  Na-Li looked at the commandant but said nothing. She turned and followed the guard out of the bungalow. There was another man standing at the bottom of the steps, clearly waiting for an audience with Yulim. The man leered at the woman and pursed his lips.

  “You’re the one I would have chosen,” Sergeant Dahn Yun-Bok told her.

  Na-Li lowered her eyes, avoiding the undercover agent’s gaze as she walked past him. She didn’t know what business the man had with Yulim, but she was grateful that it didn’t concern her. Of course, there was still the chance that, as Yulim had suggested, she might be brought back, in which case she knew she might still find herself placed at the mercy of the man who was now taunting her.

  Fresh tears welled in Na-Li’s eyes, but she forced them back. As the guard escorted her down the walkway leading back to the prison yard, she tried to clear her mind of everything but the idea that soon she and her family would be free. It was a futile exercise, however, because as soon as she reached the prison yard, she was distracted by the sight of Ji Rha-Tyr. Her boyfriend had stopped his hammering at the rock pile and was watching her. Rha-Tyr was expressionless at first, but when the man working beside him pointed out Na-Li and said something, several prisoners began snickering among themselves and suddenly the teenager snapped. He flung aside his sledgehammer and charged the man who’d prompted the sniggering, fists flying. One of the blows connected and sent the other man reeling to the ground. Rha-Tyr dived on top of him and continued to pummel away.

  “Take it back!” he shouted.

  Na-Li cringed as she watched the other prisoners rush over to pull her boyfriend off the other man. She knew that some obscene remark about her visit to the bungalow had likely caused the outburst, and when several guards strode toward the rock pile with their rifles raised, Na-Li froze with horror, afraid that Rha-Tyr’s attempts to defend her honor was going to cost him his life.

  Thankfully, however, the guards were intent only on restoring order. They told the other prisoners to get back to work, then led Rha-Tyr toward another area of the yard, where he was handled a shovel and ordered to start unloading ore from a cart that had just been hauled down from the mountains. The teenager angrily scooped his first shovelful and pitched it to the ground, then stole a quick glance at Na-Li, offering her a quick wink and grin.

  Na-Li smiled back, tears streaming down her cheeks. The guard beside her prodded her gently and told her to move on. Wearily, she turned away from her boyfriend and strode past the barracks to the work area where mechanics were just finishing the repairs on the jeep that would take General Oh back to Kaesong. The general was standing next to the vehicle, staring across the prison yard at Yulim’s bungalow, where Dahn was still awaiting his audience with the commandant.

  “I need to take this woman to the fields,” the guard told Oh’s driver. “Can you give us a ride?”

  The driver glanced at Oh, who nodded absently. Once the mechanic closed the hood and stepped back from the jeep, the others climbed aboard. Oh sat up front next to the driver while Na-Li and the guard crammed their way into the back. As the driver was starting the engine, Oh took a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to Na-Li. The young woman was startled by the gesture, but before she could respond, Oh had turned from her and was fumbling with his cell phone.

  The jeep began to pull away from the camp. Na-Li dabbed the tears from her eyes, taking consolation that soon at least she would be working alongside her mother. She would tell her that she hadn’t been molested, but there seemed no point in worrying her with Yulim’s remark about having a surprise in store for her. Hopefully, whatever business that had diverted the commandant’s attention would continue to take up his time and she would be left alone for the duration of their captivity.

  One more day, she kept telling herself. One more day and this will be over….

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Zane Island, Pacific Ocean

  The aircraft carrying Shinn Kam-Song and Li-Roo Kohb had been retrofitted with a ten-seat passenger cabin located between the cockpit and the plane’s massive cargo hold. The two scientists were seated in the rear of the cabin along with Shinn’s wife. The woman was sound asleep, her head resting on her husband’s shoulder. Shinn himself had managed to doze off briefly, only to be awakened by a suddenly jostling within the cabin. He stirred slightly, then closed his eyes again, but when the plane suddenly began to lose altitude, he snapped to with a start.

  “Don’t worry,” Li-Roo Kohb whispered to him. Gesturing toward the guards seated two rows ahead of them, he continued, “I heard them say we’re getting ready to land. We probably just ran into some turbulence.”

  One of the guards whirled in his seat.

  “No talking!” he warned.

  “Leave us alone!” Li-Roo retorted angrily, taking the guard by surprise. “You have us where you want us, so quit your bullying!”

  The guard rose from his seat, brandishing his carbine.

  Li-Roo taunted him. “Go ahead, shoot us! Then try to explain to your superiors why you failed to bring us back alive!”

  Shinn, who was every bit as fed up as Li-Roo, joined in the taunting, mimicking the guard’s nasally voice. “‘They were talking, sir! So I shot them!’”

  The guard’s face reddened and he cursed the defectors, but before he could do anything rash, Hong Sung-nam bolted from his seat at the front of the cabin and grabbed the man’s rifle.

  “Enough!”

  The guard sullenly dropped back into his seat as Hong eyed his prisoners.

  Shinn’s wife, who’d been awakened by the altercation, turned to her husband and asked, “What’s happened now?”

  “I was just telling our hosts that if they want our cooperation they’re going to have to start treat
ing us with a little more respect,” Li-Roo explained, his eyes on Hong.

  “We haven’t gagged you,” Hong countered. “We untied you and let you sit together. What more do you want?”

  “Perhaps a little more privacy,” Li-Roo replied calmly. “Perhaps being allowed to have a little conversation without being beaten or having guns rammed in our faces.”

  “Yes, is that asking too much?” Shinn added bitterly. “Or are you really afraid two old men and a woman are going to be able to hatch a plot to get the upper hand on you?”

  Hong stared silently at the defectors for a moment. Much as he liked the idea of rewarding the prisoners’ insolence by having them tossed out of the plane without parachutes, he knew as well as they did that it was in his best interests to bring them back to North Korea alive.

  “Fine,” he finally conceded. “Talk all you want. Any more taunting, however, and we’ll just tranquilize the three of you for the rest of the trip.”

  “Fair enough,” Li-Roo said.

  Hong turned his back on the prisoners and cautioned the guards to exercise more restraint, then returned to the front row of the cabin, just as Bryn Ban-Ho was emerging from the cockpit, where he’d been conferring with crew personnel on the ground at Zane Island.

  “They’ve finally cleared us for landing,” he told Hong. “We’ll refuel, then continue on to Kaesong.”

  “That’s the best news I’ve heard all day,” Hong said. “The sooner we turn these prisoners over, the better.”

  Once he’d told Bryn about the latest confrontation with Shinn and Li-Roo, Bryn smirked cynically.

  “The one thing I don’t understand,” he said, “is why KPA is so eager to have these people returned alive in the first place. Do they really think there’s a way they’ll be able to get them to cooperate? And if they’ve betrayed us once, who’s to say they won’t turn around and do it again?”

  Hong shrugged. “That’s not our concern. If we bring them back alive, there will be promotions and commendations. That’s all I’m interested in. If it turns out afterward that they were returned in vain, the fault will lie with the poor idiots who take them off our hands. Let them worry about it.”