Jim DeFelice - Threat Level Black

“All right, all right,” he heard someone say. The gun-fight was over. “All right, all right.”

He turned around, not realizing at first that he had been the one who’d spoken.

There was no way to hide this, and Tyler didn’t bother. His immediate concern was two casualties. One of the men had been shot in the shoulder; the wound was relatively light and the sergeant joked about having had bee stings that hurt more. Tyler appreciated the lie.

The other man had been shot through the face and was dead. The A team captain took his shirt off and wrapped it around the dead man’s face; Tyler thought he should have been the one to do this.

“We’ll take him out with us,” he said softly. One of the others had already begun to set up a litter.

Warrant Officer Litchfield looked at him but said nothing. He didn’t have to.

Tyler ’s orders dictated that he call in about the firefight. The reply was brief: Proceed to Pickup Zone 1 as planned.

They did.

“Where are we landing?” asked his passenger about twenty minutes out of Japan.

“Misawa,” said Howe. The Korean had been so quiet, he’d almost forgotten about him.

Almost.

“Misawa. I thought it might be there. Or Okinawa.”

“ Okinawa ’s a bit far for us,” said Howe.

“Misawa will do very well.”

Howe laughed. The Korean didn’t know what he was in for. A team of debriefers was undoubtedly waiting on the tarmac, anxious to get at Dr. Park. He was going to be a very popular man for the next few days, and probably a good many months after that.

With the island in sight, Howe fought off his fatigue by concentrating on the plane. It had performed extremely well, one more example of the value of NADT and its diverse expertise. The organization was important.

So, did that mean he should take the job after all?

The strip came up wide and fat, his approach a gentle, easy glide that contrasted starkly with his landing in Korea. Howe felt his tires hit the concrete, the plane settling around him like a tired horse falling from its gallop after a hard run around the track.

It wasn’t quite home, but it would do for now.

He trundled off the runway and was met by an SUV with a blue flashing light. He popped open the canopy and breathed the fresh air, following the truck as it led him away from the main area of the airport, past a pair of hangars isolated from the others to a wide expanse of concrete near a perimeter fence. It was obviously meant as a security precaution, but there were no support vehicles in sight, not even a tractor to haul him into one of the hangars. Howe wasn’t exactly in a position to argue, though, and hell, he just wanted to get to bed.

Howe powered down. Two men, both in Japanese Self-Defense Force uniforms, got out of the SUV and trotted toward the plane. Until now, this had been a U.S.-only project, but they were in Japan and the Japanese tended to be slightly touchy over protocol. Lights approached in the distance: Obviously the U.S. Air Force team was uncharacteristically running a little behind the timetable.

Something popped behind him, an engine or something. He couldn’t hear well with his gear on.

“All right, my friend, taxi ride is over,” Howe said, removing his helmet and starting to push up from the ejection seat.

As he did, something smacked him hard on the side of the head. He caught a glimpse of a shadowy reflection in the right display. then blacked out.

Blitz couldn’t stop himself.

“How? How?” he demanded, pacing back and forth in the secure communications center below the Pentagon. “How?”

“I sure as shit would like to know that myself,” said Pierce.

Actually, they had just been told how it had happened-or rather, the sequence of events that had followed Howe’s landing at Misawa in northern Japan. According to the colonel who had made the report, a dozen men-obviously North Koreans-had infiltrated the base sometime after the Berkut had taken off. Wearing Japanese uniforms, they had killed the two American crewmen assigned to ride out to the Berkut when it landed and had taken over their truck. They had then diverted Howe to the abandoned area, where they knocked him out and spirited his passenger away. The Japanese unit tasked as escorts had been delayed, apparently with false orders. As it was, an American backup team had narrowly missed grabbing the scientist-or whoever he was-and may have saved Howe’s life.

Had the Koreans somehow learned of the operation and then managed to thwart it? Japan was said to be filled with North Korean spies, but it didn’t seem possible.

Blitz thought there was a more logical if equally outrageous explanation: The operation had been planned to get the passenger out of Korea. There were sketchy reports of intrusions at other bases and airfields as well, and while the information was vague, he thought this meant that the North Korean had tried to cover as many contingencies as he could without knowing all of the details of the operation. He must be fairly important, obviously, and thought that he would be recognized once in American custody. But who the S-37/B had transported remained a mystery.

In the meantime, the situation in Korea had dramatically changed. There had been a coup, and apparently in mistaken and unordered retaliation-or at least there was no intelligence indicating that orders had been given-two artillery units had fired on Seoul.

The American reaction had been swift and fierce. Within a few minutes ninety percent of the artillery tubes in the DMZ area had been bombed, shelled, or hit by missiles. The North Korean warheads had been destroyed by B-2s, and a phalanx of Tomahawk cruise missiles had destroyed command centers, barracks, and weapons depots deep inside the country.

And last but certainly not least, a Cyclops airborne laser had wiped out a medium-range intercontinental missile that had managed to get off the ground from a heretofore unknown base, blasting it out of the sky as it headed toward Japan.

It had not yet been determined whether the missile was armed with a nuclear weapon or not. It was irrelevant, in Blitz’s mind: just so much more piling on in the geopolitical calculus.

American troops had taken over two military airports in the southern portion of the country. The President had ordered the Joint Chiefs to proceed with a plan dubbed Righteous Force, cooperating with the South Koreans to secure the area near the DMZ and protect South Korea from further attack. In the meantime two different North Korean army commanders had proclaimed that they were in control of their capital. Depending on the report, North Korea ’s dear leader Kim Jong Il had either been killed, fled the country, or was fighting back from one of three strongholds.

Blitz stared at a computer screen, where a fresh casualty report had just been flashed up. Three thousand South Koreans had died and about twice that number had been injured.

Could that number be true? It was a ridiculously small price to pay-absurdly small.

The first reports were always wrong, he told himself. The first rumors from the field at Manassas proclaimed a great Union victory. But with a relatively low number of casualties-horrible as any deaths were-the U.S. might yet achieve the goals Blitz and the President envisioned without the catastrophe that everyone, Blitz included, had feared.

Should he be happy? Their hands were tied; they’d had no choice but to respond. The fact that the plan had gone off so well-assuming the reports were true, assuming there weren’t other surprises-that was cause for celebration. Serious cause.

And yet, it felt sacrilegious. He wasn’t a warmonger-the opposite in fact. He hated it. But ironically that made it necessary, at least in some circumstances.