Ballistic Force
“We should’ve done this in the first place,” she told Howland after he’d parked and joined her.
“Hindsight,” he murmured, leading the way up the front walk. When they reached the door, Howland knocked, then rang the bell. Pearle glanced around as she nonchalantly pulled a G-issue Colt pistol from her shoulder holster. She kept the gun concealed from view of the neighbors and waited for Howland to trip the lock. Her partner drew his gun, as well, then swung the door open.
“FBI,” he announced.
The only response was the chirping of a canary somewhere inside the house. The two agents did a quick room-by-room search. There was no sign of Li-Roo Kohb and the house seemed undisturbed. The canary was caged in an alcove just off the kitchen.
“I’ll check the garage,” Pearle told Howland.
Howland nodded, then began to retrace his steps through the house, inspecting each room more thoroughly for some clue as to Li-Roo’s whereabouts. He was in the den when Pearle rejoined him.
“He’s got a canoe and some fishing gear in the garage,” the woman reported, “and there are a couple pairs of hiking boots by the door, so obviously he’s the outdoors type.”
“Not much to go on there,” Howland muttered. They were interrupted by a knock at the front door. Howland whirled with his gun but held fire. It was the third agent, Bryce Thompson.
“Easy,” Thompson said. “It’s just me.”
Howland filled Thompson in on what little they’d found, then asked, “You come up with anything?”
“Couple things,” Thompson reported. “The gal next door says Li-Roo likes to keeps to himself, so she doesn’t know much about him. She says most days he’s out of the house by eight and doesn’t get back until after sundown.”
“We just missed him,” Howland said, recalling that their stakeout had begun shortly before nine. “What else?”
“She says there were a couple cable guys here yesterday afternoon,” Thompson said. “They were here nearly an hour.”
“Korean?” Pearle asked.
“She’s not sure. Definitely Asian, though.”
“Sounds like the same MO REDI used with that guy in L.A.,” Howland said. “Which means they’ve probably already tossed the place.”
“Maybe we should check for prints,” Pearle suggested.
“Yeah, maybe so.” Howland considered another possibility. “Could be they’ve been watching us during our whole stakeout, too.”
“If that’s so, we’ve pretty much blown our cover.”
“Not much we can do about that now. Let’s keep looking around here,” Howland suggested. “We still need to figure out where the hell Kohb spends his days.”
“If REDI’s been here, they probably already know,” Thompson remarked. “Which puts us a step behind them.”
“Thanks for sharing that,” Howland groused. He turned his attention back to the den. Li-Roo had a state-of-the-art sound system with a karaoke counsel and a carousel filled with more than a hundred CDs, mostly by jazz artists and Korean pop singers. There was a bookcase built into the wall, but it was empty except for a few library books, two devoted to local hiking trails and a third entitled How to Win at Texas Hold ’Em. On the bottom shelf, though, there was a ceramic bowl filled with candies, stray keys and a few packs of matches. On a hunch, Howland zeroed in on the matchbooks. The hunch paid off.
“I think I’ve got something,” he called, grabbing the phone next to the stereo. He dialed the number on the one of the match packs. After a few rings he found himself talking to the operator at the Laughlin Shores Casino.
“Do you guys have a poker room?” Howland asked.
CHAPTER TEN
Camp Bonifas, South Korea
Akira Tokaido awoke with a start to the persistent bleeping of his travel alarm. He muttered to himself as he untangled one hand from under the covers and reached over to shut off the alarm. It was a little after four p.m., South Korean time. Tokaido had hoped a quick catnap would take the edge off the fatigue he’d been battling since arriving at Camp Bonifas, but he felt every bit as tired as when he’d nodded off. And the situation he’d gone to sleep worrying over promptly began to hound him all over again.
After several years of corresponding and talking by phone with his cousin, this was to be the first face-to-face meeting between Akira and Lim Seung-Whan, and Tokaido had been under the impression that Lim was looking forward to the occasion as much as he was. But since arriving at Camp Bonifas, Tokaido had tried several times to reach his cousin without success. No one was answering the phone, either at his home or at Lim’s cell number. He’d left messages, as well, but his calls had yet to be returned and the young man was troubled by the silence. He knew that Lim had planned to take his family on a weeklong fishing trip on the Yellow Sea, but they were supposed to have returned two days earlier, not only because of Akira’s visit, but because the Seoul Sky-Eagles—the professional baseball team partly owned by Lim—were in the thick of a pennant race and Seung-Whan had made it clear how much he was looking forward to taking in this weekend’s crucial home series with the first-place Lotte Giants. Given all this, Tokaido knew that Lim wouldn’t have deliberately prolonged his fishing trip, and yesterday he’d double checked maritime conditions on the coast near Incheon, thinking inclement weather might have waylaid his cousin. But the sea had been as calm as the skies had been clear, so there had to be some other explanation for Lim’s being incommunicado.
Tokaido’s cell phone was on the dresser of the officers’ quarters where he was staying for the week. He’d left the phone on in hopes Lim might call, and his spirits rallied when he saw that someone had indeed left a message. It turned out, however, that the call had been from Barbara Price back at Stony Man Farm. Tokaido showered first, then dressed and pulled his long black hair into a ponytail before returning the call. The mission controller wasn’t available, so Tokaido asked to be patched through to Aaron Kurtzman at the Annex.
After they exchanged a quick greeting, Kurtzman told Tokaido the reason Price had called.
“Look, I know your plate’s full out there,” Kurtzman said, “but there’s a new wrinkle to this whole mess that you might want to keep an ear open for.”
Tokaido quickly tracked down a pen and paper, then scribbled notes as Kurtzman apprised him of the latest developments involving attempts by North Korean REDI agents to abduct members of the Kanggye nuclear team.
“If you come across any intel mentioning the defectors,” Kurtzman concluded, “you might want to give it top priority, because if the KPA spells out where they plan on bringing these guys, odds are we’ll find the missiles there, too.”
“It’s definitely worth a shot,” Tokaido admitted. “I’ll get on it first thing.”
“Listen, Akira,” Kurtzman went on, “I don’t know if it’s just the connection, but you sound exhausted. Were you out partying with the relatives last night?”
“I wish.”
Tokaido told Kurtzman about the problems he’d had getting in touch with his cousin.
“That’s strange,” Kurtzman said. “If you’re really concerned, maybe you ought to head down there and check things out. It’s only an hour drive to Seoul from where you are, right?”
“Something like that,” Tokaido said. “I can probably wrangle a chopper ride and get there even quicker. I want to wait until a little later, though. I keep thinking there’s been some kind of mixup and I’ll still hear from him.”
“You don’t sound very convinced of that,” Kurtzman said.
“Maybe not,” Tokaido confessed, “but it beats thinking about the alternatives.”
“I can understand that,” Kurtzman said. “Well, keep us posted. And if you come up with anything on that defector angle…”
“Don’t worry, I’ll get right on it and give you a holler if we get lucky.”
Tokaido wrapped up the call, then tried Lim again. There was still no answer. Anxious for some kind of news, he tried Lim’s office. Seung-Whan was CEO of a computer-electronics firm in Seoul bearing the family name: in fact, it had been the profits from Lim Systems International that had allowed him to buy his share of the Sky-Eagles baseball team. Tokaido managed to speak with Lim’s executive secretary, but she hadn’t heard from Lim and wasn’t expecting him back in the office until the beginning of the following week. She offered him some fleeting hope, however, explaining that Lim owned a beach house near Incheon and might have stopped over there after the fishing trip. The house didn’t have a phone, but Tokaido assumed Lim had his cell phone with him and should have received his earlier messages. Things still didn’t add up, at least in any way that was reassuring.
“Where are you, Seung-Whan?” he muttered as he hung up.
Tokaido slipped his cell phone into the same carrying case that held his laptop and the notes he’d compiled during his long hours at the base’s Communications and Radio Control Center. Though he wasn’t hungry, he stopped by the cafeteria for an early dinner. The food was standard Army fare: bland but filling. He stared into space as he ate, trying to suppress his growing concern over Lim’s whereabouts. He was so lost in thought that he didn’t notice an officer approach his table. The man had to wave a hand in front of Tokaido’s face to get his attention.
“Sorry,” Tokaido said in apology, staring up at U.S. Army Colonel Thomas Michaels.
“You weren’t in your room, so I figured I might find you here,” the officer told him.
Although Camp Bonifas was technically home of the United Nations Command Security Battalion, the U.S. Army’s 2nd Armored Division comprised the majority of the base’s actual manpower, and Michaels, who headed up intelligence operations along the DMZ, was third in command at the facility. A tall, hawk-nosed Seattle native, Michaels had been Tokaido’s primary contact the past week. Normally the man had a surprisingly easygoing demeanor, but as he took a seat, Tokaido noticed that the colonel’s expression was grim.
“I think we might have something on your cousin,” the colonel told the Stony Man cyber warrior. “If we’re right, I’m afraid the news isn’t good…”
LESS THAN TEN MINUTES later, Tokaido was sitting at his station at CRCC. The room, half the size of the Annex Computer Room back at Stony Man Farm, was located on the second floor of the UNCSB Administration Building. A bank of windows along the north wall overlooked the exercise yard, where a handful of new Hummers delivered from Seoul were being unloaded from a semi-rig. Beyond that, uniformed troops were out training in the surrounding hills and, far in the distance, a South Korean flag flapped in the breeze from the center of Daeseong-dong, the only inhabited village located inside the DMZ. Tokaido was oblivious to the activity, however. He was still reeling from Colonel Michaels’ news.
Less than an hour ago, the Army Intelligence radio crew had intercepted a KPA military communiqué in which a senior officer boasted that the day before a naval unit of the Bureau of Reconnaissance had managed to get their hands on a South Korean fishing yacht moored just off the coast of Gyondongdo, a small island in the Yellow Sea forty miles north of Incheon. They’d incarcerated those aboard the boat, which was presently en route to the North Korean military port in Sinsaeng. For now, according to the pirated dispatch, the plan was to dole out use of the yacht as a perk for naval officers with high-performance ratings.
“I know there aren’t many specifics,” Michaels said, pointing to the transcript Tokaido had just read over for a second time, “but there are just too many coincidences. It sounds like the same-size boat you said your cousin had taken out fishing in that area.”
“Yes, I know,” Tokaido conceded wearily. “But I don’t understand. Gyondongdo is located on our side of the maritime line. Seung-Whan wouldn’t have strayed into North Korean waters. He knows better.”
“Even if he stayed on our side,” Michaels said, “North Korea has been disputing that line ever since it was drawn up, and they have no qualms about crossing it, believe me. This isn’t the first ship they’ve snatched. Hell, they’ve even come ashore on a couple of these islands looking to abduct people. It’s happened twice this month that I know of.”
“Still,” Tokaido murmured. “It’s so hard to believe.”
“I hear you,” Michaels said, “and I’m sure it’s the last thing your cousin expected. No offense, but he’s well-off and it’s easy for people of his station around these parts tend to get a little complacent. They don’t realize how much can go wrong if they stray out of their element. We’re in a war zone.”
Much as he wanted to defend his cousin, Tokaido knew the colonel had a point. A number of times when he’d conversed with Seung-Whan, Akira’s cousin had dismissed Seoul’s close proximity to the DMZ and said he’d decided years ago that there was no point to living in fear of things he had no control over. Tokaido understood the rationale, but there was a difference between being fearless and foolhardy. Now it was looking as if Seung-Whan was paying a price for the latter.
Tokaido glanced back down at the transcript and read it over yet again, hoping somehow to glean more information. There was so little to go on, however. It wasn’t even clear how many people had been aboard the yacht when it was seized. For that matter, Tokaido didn’t know for sure how many people Lim had taken on the trip besides his wife and daughter. “Some friends” had been all he’d said.
On his third read-through, one word in the transcript jumped out at him. He looked it over, then glanced up at Michaels.
“It says here that those aboard the ship were ‘incarcerated,’” he said. “Are you sure that’s the right translation?”
Michaels nodded. “I heard the message myself. Yeah, whoever was on board that ship was taken into custody. They weren’t executed, if that’s what you mean.”
Tokaido nodded bleakly, already beginning to fear the worst. “At least, not yet,” he said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Changchon Rehabilitation Center, North Korea
Lim U-Pol and her life-long friend Ji Lhe-Kan had been laboring in the poppy fields for nearly five backbreaking hours when one of the guards blew a whistle announcing the end of their workday. The two women were every bit as filled with fear and apprehension as when they’d first stepped off the truck that had brought their families here to the camp, but the work had numbed them, and exhaustion had turned them into automatons. Just as they’d lost themselves in the redundant task of extracting resin from the poppies, the two women now mindlessly followed the example of the other workers and turned over their scraping tools and the small plastic containers they’d filled with resin, then fell into line for the long march back to the prison camp.
U-Pol was so drained that it took all her concentration merely to stay awake and put one foot in front of the other. There was one saving grace to her fatigue: as with work ordeal in the fields, it proved a potent distraction, leaving her with little time to dwell on the fate of her husband and daughter, who’d been led away, along with Ji Lhe-Kan’s husband and son, shortly before the women had been first put to work. No indication had been given as to what lay in store for the men, but U-Pol assumed they had been diverted to some more strenuous labor. As for Na-Li, U-Pol had seen the way the commandant had looked at her daughter, and the thought of what he might have had in mind for young woman was unbearable to contemplate, so she’d struggled to block the matter from her mind.
Soon, the prisoners found themselves heading past a clearing where a handful of soldiers had begun to fling several corpses, one after the other, into a shallow pit barely deep enough to hold them all. The sheer horror of sight alone was enough to unnerve U-Pol, but when it dawned on her that her loved ones might be among the dead, her pent-up emotions suddenly erupted in a sob so loud and wrenching that it doubled her over. Fortunately she wasn’t alone. An equally profound wailing broke out among some of the other prisoners, men and women alike, and several of them strayed from the column, rushing toward the makeshift burial site. They were intercepted by the guards, who brusquely herded them back while shouting for silence.
During the commotion, Ji Lhe-Kan hurriedly spoke with the prisoner ahead of her, then turned to U-Pol and whispered that those being buried were prisoners that had been killed during an incident that had occurred before their arrival at the camp.
“Our men are still all right,” she added quickly. “Na-Li and Rha-Tyr, too. You’ll see.”
U-Pol nodded faintly, but she was consumed by doubt and she saw that her friend, too, was nowhere near as confident of their loved ones’ fate as she was pretending to be. The two women clutched hands briefly, as if attempting to lend strength to one another.
“Move on!” one of the guards shouted, further startling the women by firing a warning shot into the air with his carbine. “Unless you want to join them!”
When another soldier aimed his rifle at U-Pol and Lhe-Kan, the two women pulled their hands apart. U-Pol struggled to regain her composure, but as the prisoners resumed their march back to camp, the image of the mass grave continued to haunt her. She wept quietly, biting her knuckle each time another anguished sob swelled in her throat.
As the procession reached the camp and wound its way around the periphery fence, U-Pol and Lhe-Kan found themselves horrified anew as they were led past a spot where a young male prisoner had just made an unsuccessful escape attempt. He’d apparently made it as far as the top of the innermost fence before sentries in one of the nearby lookout towers had gunned him down, and though he’d been killed, his shirt and one of his pant legs had snagged on the thick coils of barbed wire topping the fence and he hung suspended, arms and legs pinned at an angle that made it look as if he were still alive and dancing in midair. A pair of guards had just reached the body, one carrying a ladder and bolt cutters, the other tugging at a leash to keep a full-size Rottweiler from sniffing at the pool of blood collecting on the ground directly beneath the bullet-riddled corpse.
“The third one this week!” a guard walking alongside U-Pol and Lhe-Kan said with a snicker. “You’d think they would know better by now!”
U-Pol tore her gaze from the grisly sight, blinking away a fresh flow of tears. She could hear Lhe-Kan weeping directly ahead of her, as well, but moments later the other woman’s sobbing stopped as abruptly as it had begun, and soon U-Pol saw the reason why. As they were herded through a side gate into the prison yard, she saw Lhe-Kan’s son, Rha-Tyr, standing bare-chested amid a handful of other young men who’d been given sledgehammers with which to pound away at some of the larger rocks that had just been brought down from the mines.
Rha-Tyr spotted the women in midswing and offered them a faint smile before he brought the hammer crashing down. He glanced around him, making sure that none of the guards was watching him, then gestured faintly over his shoulder. U-Pol looked past him to the side of the mountain overlooking the camp and saw the openings to several mine shafts.
“Seung-Whan and Pho-Hwa must be in the mines,” U-Pol whispered to her friend. Now that they were within the confines of the camp, the guards had moved away, leaving them free to talk.
Lhe-Kan nodded hopefully. “I told you they’d be all right,” she said.
“I don’t see my daughter anywhere,” U-Pol murmured, scanning the grounds for her daughter. Na-Li , however, was nowhere to be seen.
“Maybe she’s already in the barracks,” Lhe-Kan suggested, indicating the flimsy structures they were heading toward.
But U-Pol had her doubts, and a quick glance inside the barracks confirmed her fears. While the others began to collapse onto the wood-planked floor, eager to escape into the clutches of sleep, she and Lhe-Kan left the barracks and continued to search the grounds. Finally, U-Pol looked past the far perimeter of the camp and saw a small bungalow resting on a knoll surrounded by trees. Judging from the condition of the structure and the surrounding landscape, U-Pol guessed it had to be the headquarters for those who ran the camp. Again she recalled the way the commandant had looked at her daughter and she began to shudder. Lhe-Kan put an arm around her and the two women dropped slowly to their knees without taking their eyes off the bungalow.
“No,” U-Pol sniffed. “Please, not my daughter…”
WHEN NA-LI awoke, hours later, the clothes she had worn to the concentration camp were missing. In their place, a pair of crude sandals lay atop a coarse muslin frock that had been placed haphazardly at the foot of the bed. As she fingered the material, she felt the urge to cry yet again, but this time the tears wouldn’t come. She dressed slowly, her body still aching.
She was slipping her feet into the sandals when the door opened. Na-Li let out an involuntary gasp and recoiled as Yulim entered the bedroom, followed by one of the guards, who was carrying two overnight bags. Na-Li recognized the bags. One belonged to her, the other to her father. The bags, along with those belonging to her mother and the Ji family, had been confiscated from the family yacht and tossed into the front cab of the truck that had brought her and the others to Changchon. She’d doubted she would ever again see her tote or the belongings it contained, and yet here they were.
“Did you sleep well?” Yulim casually asked Na-Li as he took her bag from the guard and set it on the bed.
Na-Li stared at the man, incredulous. After what he’d done to her, how could he stand there and speak to her as if he were some loving uncle checking up on a favorite niece who’d come visiting the for weekend? She tried to muster some righteous indignation, but, as with her stifled tears, she found herself unable to act on her emotions.
Yulim nudged Na-Li’s bag closer to her and zipped it open.
“Go ahead,” he encouraged her. “Everything’s there, more or less. See for yourself.”
Na-Li stared at the bag, then glanced up at Yulim.
“Why?”
Yulim smiled benevolently. “I thought there might be something you’d like to take back with you to the barracks,” he said. “You can take one item. Anything you want.”
Na-Li remained on her guard as she tentatively opened the bag and inspected its contents. Her wallet had been confiscated along with her CD player, her music and a sharp-handled comb, but otherwise, as Yulim had assured her, everything else she’d packed for the fishing trip was still there. A few days ago, if told to pick one item from the bag, she, without question, would have taken her makeup kit. In light of everything that had happened, however, the last thing she wanted was to make herself look more attractive. So, instead, she selected her charm bracelet, a cheap piece of jewelry to which, over the years, she’d attached a handful of small knick-knacks, each one reminding her of a special time in her life.
“That would have been my guess,” Yulim told her. “It has sentimental value, yes?”
Na-Li’s first instinct was to scream at the man and tell him to quit trying to be so nice to her. She wanted to damn him for the way he’d abused her and let him know that she’d overheard him conspiring with the other officer. She wanted to tell him that if was the last thing she did, she’d find a way to use that information to make him pay for what he’d done to her. Instead, however, she merely nodded demurely and closed her fingers around the bracelet.
“I can go, then?” she asked.
“Of course,” Yulim told her. He indicated the guard and said, “He’ll take you back to your family. In a moment. First we need to reach a little understanding.”
Abruptly the smile left the lieutenant corporal’s face. He reached forward and grasped Na-Li by the jaw, tilting her head upward so that she had no choice but to stare into his eyes.
“You’ll be back,” he advised her, his voice cold with menace, “and no one is to know about what goes on in this room. Is that clear?”