Don Pendleton - Ballistic Force

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.”

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.