Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

Without thinking she moved the image around to the left and the right, tracing around the banks of the reservoir created by the hydroelectric dam. There was a tiny village of square buildings on the north bank of the reservoir, and then she panned left to the west bank, on the far side of the water from the dam.

She stopped panning and leaned her face halfway to her monitor.

“What the hell is that?”

A series of long metal roofs ran on either side of some sort of raised track. On the eastern side of the roofs were a series of circular structures. Annette thought they looked like some sort of tanks. She counted twenty-six individual structures in the entire complex, and several vehicles were parked nearby.

“No . . . freakin’ . . . way.”

She thought she knew what she was looking at, but to be certain she spun in her chair to the monitor on her right, typed something in a Google search, and then pulled up an image. This was the LAMP site in Malaysia. LAMP stood for Lynas Advanced Materials Plant; it was a rare earth mineral refinery owned by the Australian mining company Lynas.

She looked back to the location near the reservoir in the mountains of North Korea.

And then back to LAMP.

The two sites were virtually identical.

“What are you doing out there in the middle of nowhere?” she asked aloud.

She typed something on her keyboard and her third monitor displayed schematics of a typical rare earth refinery. Within a minute she had identified the round tanks as part of a rare earth oxide separation unit.

That confirmed it for her. North Korea was back in the rare earth mining game, and in a big way. They were cutting the Chinese out, even from the processing stage of the equation.

That would require high-tech equipment and massive amounts of expertise and skilled labor.

And Annette didn’t think for one second that the North Koreans were doing this on their own.

—

Annette Brawley had worked through lunch, running down to one of the two cafeterias in the atrium only to grab a banana and a bag of animal crackers. She ate while she worked, compiling her astonishing findings and creating a quick but impactful PowerPoint presentation.

In Army intelligence her main weapon had been the PowerPoint slide show. It garnered a lot of insults from the soldiers devoted to combat operations, and rightly so, she admitted. She wasn’t a shooter or a door kicker, she was an intel geek. But even though the door kickers she presented her slide shows to sometimes rolled their eyes, she took solace in the fact she’d done her best, and her best had helped the troops in harm’s way.

Annette’s superior at NGA was a Marine colonel named Mike Peters. He was younger than Annette by a few years and she found him roguishly handsome, and even though sometimes she felt he deferred unfairly to her colleagues in the armed services at the expense of his civilian employees, he did seem to appreciate Annette for her hard work and the lack of drama she brought to the workplace as compared with some of her younger colleagues, both in uniform and out.

She rapped on the door to his office at three-thirty in the afternoon. She’d checked his online agenda and saw he had a half-hour till his next appointment.

Peters looked up from his paperwork. “Hey, Brawley. What’s up?”

“I’ve got something good. You have ten minutes?”

“Got more than that. There’s a meeting on five at sixteen hundred, but I’m yours till then.”

If only, she thought.

She pulled up her PowerPoint on his computer and sent it to a monitor on the far wall of his office. They went through it together over the next ten minutes; she showed her boss the temporary housing in Chongju near the hotel, new cars parked throughout the town, and then finally the processing plant near the dam north of Chongju.

When it was finished Colonel Peters turned away from the monitor and back to her. “So the Chinese companies, Chinalco and Minmetals, are back at Chongju, and they are going to process their ore? Why would they need to do that?”

“They wouldn’t. The Chinese have their own refineries over the border and the roads, rail, and bridges to get it there.”

“What’s your conclusion?” he asked.

“The only conclusion I can come up with is that the Chinese are not involved.”

“Are you saying the DPRK domestic mining operation has developed to the extent they can extract rare earths?”

Brawley shook her head. She considered herself a pretty “meat and potatoes” analyst. She didn’t speculate wildly about anything, because that was a surefire way to make errors. Still, when she was sure of herself, she expressed herself with vehemence. “Mike, I’ve been examining operations at this mine long enough to know this isn’t DPRK doing this work alone. They are getting help.”

“Who is doing the work?”

“That’s going to be impossible to tell from a satellite. CIA needs to get a man in there.”

Peters laughed. “Have they been showing Mission: Impossible in the break room or something?”

Brawley laughed as well. “Sorry, is that far-fetched? I don’t know HUMINT. I just look at roofs and heads. It’s up to somebody else to get all the answers on the ground.”

Peters liked Brawley’s work. She was careful, more careful than many of the twenty-somethings that worked at her level.

“This is good.”

“Thanks.”

“This might go all the way up to DNI. Who knows, it could make its way into the Presidential Daily Brief.”

Brawley’s eyes widened. She had a smiling picture of President Jack Ryan on her desk. Even the fans of the President in her office teased her about it. “Maybe I should work up another PowerPoint. More levels of distinction. More color.”

Peters shook his head. “Everyone in the IC knows Jack Ryan likes to look at raw data for himself, but DNI Foley won’t sit in the Oval with him and click through a PowerPoint. Don’t worry about your presentation. You’ve done great work, now get back to your office and produce something more.”

“Something more?”

“You aren’t done, Annette.” He tapped the open-pit mine with the tip of his pen. “As long as they keep digging, you keep digging.” Colonel Peters gave her a satisfied wink.

“Just thought that one up, Colonel Peters, or have you been saving that one for a while?”

“Just thought it up,” he said proudly. “Though you can expect me to reuse it hundreds of times. It’s pretty good, right?”

14

One year earlier

Mining director Hwang had met intelligence chief Ri just once, a week earlier when he showed up unannounced to his office, and at that time Ri had been wearing his military uniform. Hwang supposed the lieutenant general was always dressed as an officer in the Chosun Inmingun when he left his house, so Hwang found it surprising to see the fifty-two-year-old this morning wearing a light gray Western suit and a blue tie. Hwang had to admit that Ri was, if anything, even more impressive out of uniform. He obviously exercised regularly, unlike Hwang, who rarely seemed to find the time for evening walks with his family, and often got winded taking the stairs to his office of the Korea Natural Resources Trading Corporation.

The two men stood in front of each other in the business-class lounge at Pyongyang Sunan International Airport. Each man had his own small entourage with him; in Ri’s case it was colonels as well as bodyguards, and in Hwang’s case a single personal attendant as well as several assistant directors and high-level technical advisers. It was just five a.m., and the first commercial flight of the day wasn’t leaving until eight-thirty, so the military and government men had the place all to themselves, although General Ri could have shut down the entire airport if he had any concern about eyes on him that might threaten today’s operation.