Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

As he jogged he saw several bored and tired North Korean guards who just glanced at him and then went back to their conversations and their cigarettes. As he passed the hotel adjacent to the temporary housing compound, he saw several black cars and vans. These he knew belonged to Hwang Min-ho, who had arrived the previous evening from Pyongyang.

Adam knew something important was going on. The day before at work he’d been ordered to reduce his daily quota of powder. On the three previous days he’d been directed to work until he had produced eight hundred kilograms of crushed ore, which took him twelve hours. But yesterday this was changed to just one hundred kilos.

He had not asked any questions, he simply complied, but in the break room other Chinese technicians had been talking about the changes in their own work spaces, and one man relayed how the North Korean shift supervisor had told him the separation equipment that was due to arrive any day had been delayed. Adam knew this intel was secondhand at best, and he had no way of judging its accuracy, but the fact Hwang himself came in that evening made him wonder if the North Koreans had some sort of a crisis on their hands.

On his second lap around the inside of the fence he was surprised to notice another runner slowly jogging in the distance around the unfenced portion of the parking lot. He was too far away and it was too dark to see him clearly, but Adam assumed the man must have been a guest at the hotel.

Adam slowed his jog. For a moment he thought the runner might have been Hwang himself, because the man was small and slight, but soon he discounted this possibility because Hwang was bald, and the runner definitely had hair.

On his next lap he tried to time his run so he would be on the fence line at the same moment the runner approached on the other side of the fence. Adam was more curious than anything, because now he had put together the likelihood that the runner might be one of the foreign guest workers from Australia. Adam had seen them at the refinery, although none of them had business in his part of the plant, and he knew they were staying in the hotel.

He timed his lap perfectly. As he neared the approaching runner on the other side of the fence he realized he had been mistaken. This was not a man, this was the redheaded Australian woman he’d seen a few times before.

She smiled and waved as she approached. Adam waved back and kept running.

When she was still in front of him and closing, she called out to him. “Ni hao.” Hello.

Surprised to hear the white woman speak Mandarin, Adam slowed. He nodded to her. “Ni hao.”

She stopped fully now. “Ni hao ma?” How are you?

Adam stopped as well. “ Wo hen hao. Ni ne?” I am fine, and you?

She continued in stilted Mandarin. “I am good. I am Dr. Powers, from Australia.”

“Shan Xin. From China. You speak very good Mandarin.”

“Thank you. I went to university in Shenzhen. My husband is from there.”

In truth her Chinese was fair at best, it was heavily accented with an Australian twang, but Adam felt his heart pounding. Perhaps he could get some information from this woman, and do it without revealing anything about his true identity.

But he knew he needed to go slowly and carefully so as not to arouse suspicion. He started with some idle conversation. “You run every day?”

“There is nothing else to do,” she said. “What is your job at Chongju?”

“I am the computer operator of the cone crushing machine in the powder-processing department. I arrived just last week. And you?”

“I am a geologist. I have been here for over a month.”

Adam smiled and nodded. “Very good.”

She shook her head. Even in the darkness, Adam thought she looked sad.

He said, “You are far from home.”

She didn’t hesitate to open up. “I have two children. A boy and a girl. I miss them.”

“I understand. I have a boy and a girl, too.”

She brightened a little. “Really? How lovely. What are their names?”

The woman was obviously bored and lonely. Adam made up names, ages, and even personalities of two children. It was called mirroring, and it was probably the oldest social engineering trick in the book, but it was also supremely effective.

“You have pictures?”

Adam let his shoulders droop. “They took all our personal belongings in Shanghai. They were just pictures. What does it matter? Now I cannot look into the eyes of little Lanfen, my daughter, before I go to sleep at night.”

Adam was a good actor. Powers bought it hook, line, and sinker. He felt bad for the deception—she was probably a nice woman who’d made a bad decision in coming here—but he had a job to do, and bad acting in his job would compromise his mission and could get him killed.

Powers said, “I regret coming. I would go home in a minute, but they won’t let us leave until the facility is producing.”

Adam saw an opportunity. He was rushing things, he knew, but this was too good to pass up. “I worry about when that will happen. Yesterday they told us the refinery will not start on time. Some equipment was supposed to arrive, but it has been delayed. You want to leave, but I do not. There are no jobs in mining where I come from. I am afraid they will send us home if it doesn’t come soon.”

Powers waved away Adam’s concern. “The arrival of the flotation cells was held up. Don’t worry. Hwang will get more here soon. He has to.”

“ Has to?”

“It’s all about money. The North Koreans don’t get paid until the refinery starts producing. On the day the refinery goes on line, North Korea stands to get five hundred million U.S. dollars from their foreign partner.”

“I see,” he said. “How do you know all this?”

Instantly he saw he’d gone too far with his questioning. She hesitated in answering, and she looked around to make sure they were not being watched. Dr. Powers was concerned about what she had just said because, Adam assumed, it was something she was not supposed to know.

As a NOC, Adam knew how to put sources at ease. He laughed. “Maybe you shouldn’t say anything else to me.” He smiled. “I am just a computer technician. I am happy you think the facility will go on line soon. That is all I care about.”

She relaxed, and a minute later the two of them had jogged off in separate directions along opposite sides of the fence line.

—

Three hours later Adam sat at his terminal, typing out his report for the operations center of Acrid Herald. He did not use Dr. Powers’s name or even make any reference to her, because if his mission was discovered he did not want her implicated, but he reported her claim that North Korea would receive a $500 million payment on the day the refinery went live.

From what Adam knew about where that money was going and what it was being used for, he hoped like hell that day never came.

64

Óscar Roblas de Mota had been asleep in his suite at the Pan Pacific hotel in Singapore when the attack on Jack Ryan occurred in his hometown ten thousand miles away. He slept in the next morning, and it wasn’t until one of his personal assistants roused him at nine that he heard the news.

From nine a.m. till ten a.m. he sat in his white bathrobe on the sofa and watched television, both U.S. and Mexican satellite stations. By now there was video of the ambush from cell phones, helicopter news crews, and security cameras. A virtual glut of moving pictures of the entire attack from multiple angles.

He called a half-dozen friends in government in the district; he was as dialed-in as anyone could be there, after all. Everyone was saying the attack was the work of Santiago Maldonado, but Roblas didn’t buy that for a minute. The Maldonados had claimed responsibility, but they weren’t an active group inside Mexico City. Sure, they could have driven into town for the attack, but Roblas didn’t see them as competent enough to pull off anything of this magnitude. He knew they had recently failed in an attempt to kill the mayor of a small city in Guerrero, and here they were, supposedly taking out dozens of trained security and wounding the President of the United States?