Ballistic Force Read online

  “You have the wrong house,” the scientist pleaded. “My name is not Yong-Im. My name is Evan Rohri. You can check my wallet. You’ll see!”

  Hong and Ok-Hwa exchanged a glance, then Hong suddenly whipped the weighted sock around, striking Yong-Im in the jaw.

  The man’s cry was drowned out by the blaring of the television set. A welt began to form on his jaw where he’d been struck.

  “I’m sure they gave you a new name when you defected,” Hong taunted the scientist, “but you are Dr. Yong-Im Hyunsook from the Project Kanggye Nuclear Team. There’s no sense trying to deny it.”

  “My name is Evan Rohri!” Yong-Im persisted.

  Hong lashed out again with the weighted sock. Yong-Im threw a hand up and deflected the blow. His fingers went numb where the ashtray struck them.

  Hong signaled Ok-Hwa. The younger man moved forward, grabbing Yong-Im and pinning his arms behind his back. Hong laid into the scientist a third time with the sock, splitting his lower lip and breaking two of his front teeth. Blood began to seep from the corner of his mouth.

  “We’ve found you and we know the addresses of the others, except for Shinn Kam-Song,” Hong told the older man. “Tell us where we can find him and maybe we’ll let you live.”

  Yong-Im stared at his captors, trembling. He couldn’t help them, even if he wanted to. After they’d defected, the Kanggye Team had been split up and, for their own protection, none of them had been told where the others had been relocated to, much less what their names had been changed to. He spit out the blood pooling inside his mouth and clung to his first defense.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he insisted. “I don’t know about any nuclear team! I’m a retired accountant! I’ve lived here in America since I was a child!”

  “Liar!” Ok-Hwa screamed at the prisoner. In a burst of fury, the young Killboy initiate tossed his gun aside and jerked Yong-Im across the carpet, slamming his head against the corner of the coffee table. “Do you think we’re fools?”

  Hong reached into his tool kit for a syringe filled with an amber fluid. He had a feeling they were going to need truth serum to get Yong-Im to talk. As he readied the needle, his partner continued to throttle the doctor.

  Hong became alarmed by Ok-Hwa’s ferocity and finally set aside the syringe and rushed over to intervene.

  “Ease up, you idiot!” he shouted. “We want him alive!”

  But Ok-Hwa was caught up in his bloodlust and he continued to hammer Yong-Im’s skull against the tabletop until Hong forcibly pried him away. Even then, Ok-Hwa continued to rage at their prisoner.

  “That will teach you!” he seethed.

  Hong dragged his protégé aside, pinned him against the wall, then went nose-to-nose with him.

  “Who’s running things here?” he demanded.

  “He wasn’t cooperating!” Ok-Hwa countered.

  “Who’s running things here?” Hong repeated, shaking the younger man.

  “You are!” Ok-Hwa relented. “You’re in charge!”

  “Don’t forget it!”

  Hong released Ok-Hwa and turned back to Yong-Im. The defector lay sprawled facedown on the floor, blood from his mouth discoloring the carpet. He wasn’t moving. Hong crouched over the man and turned him over. Yong-Im’s face was bruised and swollen. His eyes were open, but his stare was vacant. Hong let the man go and slowly stood. Ok-Hwa met Hong’s livid gaze with one of his own.

  “I didn’t mean to kill him!” he said. “I was just trying to get him to cooperate.”

  “There’s not much chance of that happening now, is there?” Hong said coldly. He turned the television up even louder, then went to a nearby desk and yanked out one of the drawers, spilling its contents onto the carpet. He’d already looked through everything in the desk and taken pains to make it appear that nothing had been disturbed. But now everything had changed. They needed to cover up the real reason for their visit. They couldn’t afford to make it known that the Kanggye Team was being targeted by REDI. Until they got their hands on the other defectors, they needed to maintain the element of surprise.

  “Give me a hand!” he shouted at Ok-Hwa. “We need to make it look like he stumbled onto a burglary!”

  Ok-Hwa quickly joined in, helping himself to Yong-Im’s wallet as well as his watch and jewelry.

  “What do we do then?”

  “We stick to the plan,” Hong told him. “We’ll go to Nevada and track down the next member of the team.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Stony Man Farm, Virginia

  Hal Brognola rarely returned from his White House briefings in a state of good cheer, and this day was no exception. As he disembarked from the helicopter that had brought him from the capital to Stony Man Farm, a clandestine base of operations in the heart of Shenandoah Valley, he trudged wearily past the sun-drenched fruit orchards to the inconspicuous-looking farm house.

  As he headed toward the tunnel to the Annex, Brognola ran into Barbara Price, the Farm’s blond-haired mission controller. Price was carrying a file folder filled with intelligence briefs on the North Korea situation.

  “I just spoke to Mack and Cowboy,” she told Brognola as she took a seat alongside him in the small electric rail car waiting for them at the mouth of a thousand-foot-long underground tunnel connecting the main house with the Annex. “They knocked out that street gang in L.A., but it turns out drug-running was just the tip of the iceberg as far as what they were up to.”

  The rail car purred to life and slowly carried them along the subterranean passage that ran beneath the orchards as well as a stretch of land that had been converted into a poplar grove, the better to sell the Annex’s supposed function as a timber mill. Along the way, Price briefed Brognola on Bolan’s discovery of an apparent hit list involving North Korea’s former Project Kanggye nuclear team.

  As he listened, Brognola fumbled through his suitcoat for a cigar. He wasn’t about to light up; he’d cut back on his smoking in recent years and for the most part contented himself to fidgeting with cigars the same way some people used worry beads.

  “I’ve got Carmen checking the status of the defectors,” Price concluded, referring to Carmen Delahunt, one of Aaron Kurtzman’s cyber experts. “She should have an update ready for us.”

  “Good,” Brognola replied. “If you ask me, though, I’m not sure we’re talking about a hit list, per se.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think these defectors are more valuable to North Korea alive than dead,” Brognola said. “Especially with this whole missile situation going on over there.”

  “You have a point,” Price conceded. “What’s the latest on that?”

  As succinctly as possible, Brognola rehashed the key points brought up during the White House briefing. For the past three years, the so-called People’s Democratic Republic of North Korea had been using its unchecked nuclear weapons development as a bargaining chip in its demands for economic aid and other concessions from the U.S. and her allies. The ploy had had intermittent success, but each time America had given an inch, DRNK had turned around and asked for a mile, then used balking by the West as an excuse to resume its nuclear agenda. When matters had escalated in recent months, Russia, China and Japan—prompted by concerns about their close geographic proximity to North Korea—had been forced off the sidelines and into the fray. There had been hope that pressure from their closer neighbors would make Kim Jong-il’s regime more willing to make compromises, but the opposite had been the case.

  In recent weeks DRNK’s demands had escalated to the point of absurdity. The President was concerned by the sudden change in tact, as it seemed to indicate that the rogue nation now less concerned with negotiation than pursuing its agenda by more aggressive means. The implication seemed clear: North Korea had stalled long enough on the diplomatic front to beef up its nuclear arsenal and was now looking for a pretext to use it. And if all available intel was correct, the range of the DRNK’s missiles was no longer restric
ted to countries that lay adjacent to North Korea. Word was that the Korean People’s Army now had four-stage ICBMs capable of reaching American targets in a two-thousand-mile-wide swath extending from San Diego to the Great Lakes. And, much as the U.S. had always been concerned about the vulnerability of its troops stationed below the 38th parallel, now a goodly share of the homeland citizenry was lined up in Kim Jong-il’s crosshairs, as well.

  Whether North Korea would be foolhardy enough to launch a first-strike attack on the U.S.—thereby ensuring their doom via retaliatory bombing—was still a matter of debate, but the President, for one, wasn’t about to play wait-and-see. At the end of the briefing, his orders had been concise and to the point: find the ICBMs and put them out of commission.

  “Obviously we’re working every diplomatic angle possible to diffuse the situation,” Brognola concluded, “but the feeling is that Kim Jong-il is through talking. Which means we’re running out of time. We need to track down those missiles, pronto.”

  “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.”