Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

Jack understood. “You want to go take a peek at his place?”

Dom nodded. “We go right now, before people get home from work.”

Gavin had been silent—he was out of his element here—but he was curious, so he asked, “Why don’t you do it late at night?”

Caruso replied, “Why? Everybody is home then, sounds are amplified because there is less ambient noise, anyone sees us and they wonder what we’re doing, whereas if we go now and act like we’re supposed to be there, nobody will give us a second glance.”

Gavin understood, then said, “If you want I can disable the security cameras.”

Ryan cocked his head. “Really? How can you do that?”

“This apartment building is using one of the biggest alarm companies in Europe. We established a back door into their servers a couple years ago when we were doing an op in Paris. I can get in, turn the cams off, or just pan them out of the way so they don’t see you when you come in.”

“That’s awesome,” Ryan said. “Let’s shut them down while we are inside.”

Gavin slid to his laptop and let his fingers hover over the keys. He looked up. “What about me? You’re not just going to leave me here by myself, are you?”

Dom rolled his eyes, but Jack said, “You’ll be fine, Gav. We need you to monitor the entrance to the building and listen to your headset. We’ll remain in comms so you can let us know if Skála shows up while we’re in his place.”

“What will you do if he does show up?”

Ryan answered, “We’ll improvise.”

Gavin didn’t like this one bit, that was plain from the look on his face, but he grabbed his laptop off the table and took his seat at the tripod-mounted binoculars. Here with the computer in his lap he could see the view from the camera on the roof as well as through the binos, plus he could hear any noise on the laser mike and the directional boom mike, as well as listen in to all comms from Jack and Dominic.

The two men put hats on their heads and sunglasses over their eyes, and they headed for the door.

Before they left, Jack turned back to Gavin. “If you see anything out of the ordinary, you let us know.”

“Got it,” Biery replied, with an intensity in his voice that sounded to the two operators as if Gavin himself was going to be the one to break into the target location.

23

Annette Brawley arrived at work early this morning. She’d left a sweet and apologetic note for her daughter on the kitchen table next to a box of Cheerios and a cereal bowl and a spoon. She even picked a Gerber daisy out of the flowerpot on the back patio and put it in a tiny vase to go with the table setting.

She knew, without a doubt, that Stephanie would ignore the flower and crumple up the sweet note and throw it in the trash. She probably would have done this anyway, but Annette suspected the focus for Stephanie’s anger this morning would be the fact that her mother had left an alarm clock at the bottom of the stairs to her room, meaning when it went off she would have to get up and storm downstairs to turn it off.

It wasn’t as sure a method for getting her daughter up for school as being there in person to annoy her, but Annette needed to get to the office early to look at a new set of sat images, so it was the best method available to her.

By seven a.m. Annette had been at it for an hour already. She had made it her personal mission to somehow identify the visiting workers at the new Chongju rare earth–processing plant just north of the mine. This was hard work—the resolution provided by the KH-12 satellite in orbit over North Korea was impressive; in just the right conditions she could make out a license plate, although it was extraordinarily rare that she’d been lucky enough to have the conditions in place when she needed a tag number. But determining the identity of a group of one hundred fifty or so men from outer space was no easy task.

She had a couple working assumptions going. For one, she decided these workers were not North Korean. There were definite security measures around the temporary housing compound near the hotel in Chongju. North Korea, of course, subjected its own citizens to positively Orwellian levels of scrutiny and security protocols, but this looked more like an armed camp inside a North Korean city. Annette decided if these were local workers they wouldn’t have that number of guards, guns, and gates around them.

No, these were foreign workers, but foreign workers from where ?

She wasn’t able to identify any obvious Caucasians or blacks among the few people standing around the trailers. Everyone she saw looked Asian, but it was impossible to tell if these were North Korean minders or workers from another Asian country. Of course, if they were workers from another country, China would be the first assumption, if not for the fact North Korea had kicked out their Chinese partners more than a year earlier.

She kept hunting, using her three monitors to look at each trash bin, each vehicle, each piece of clothing as closely as possible.

At eight a.m. she thought she had something, and by eight-fifteen the excitement of tangible results coursed through her like electric shocks.

Colonel Peters, Annette’s boss, arrived at work at eight-thirty a.m. to find Annette Brawley standing by his locked door with a smile on her face and two fresh cups of coffee in her hands.

His smile in return was more perfunctory. “Morning, Brawley. Any chance I can have a couple of minutes to myself before you waylay me with a PowerPoint?”

She replied like a schoolgirl. “Pu-lease, I just need a few minutes.”

He sighed. “Will I be impressed?”

“Positively floored.”

“Come on, then,” he said, and he opened the door to let Brawley in.

—

Peters had just set his briefcase down on his desk when Annette Brawley placed his coffee down, spun his computer to her, and began opening a PowerPoint loaded on the department server to put up on his wall screen. While doing so she said, “I know who is working at the rare earth metal refinery.”

She put up a picture of the temporary housing in Chongju. She’d highlighted several guard posts on the outside with red circles. “So first we see there are guards facing out and facing in, looks like two-way security. They don’t want the locals meeting with these folks, which means they aren’t locals.”

“I’ll buy that,” Peters said.

She changed the slide; now it showed some sort of kitchen facility. Wood-burning stoves. Women walking with pots. “Here is the mess area for the guest workers. It’s open-pit fires with grills on them, outdoor lean-to structures. Water tanks.”

“Right,” said Peters. “No refrigeration. Nasty.”

“Yeah. For us, anyhow. But not for them. Much of the Third World doesn’t refrigerate their meat. My daughter would gag if I told her that, but some of the things she eats make me want to puke.”

Another red circle was around a stack of square objects near the fire. “What’s that?” he asked. “Are those chicken coops?”

“Nope,” she said, and she clicked again, enlarging the area.

Peters leaned forward. They were definitely cages, each one approximately two feet square, based on a woman standing next to them. The Marine colonel tried to look inside. After a few seconds he said, “Wait. Are those . . . dogs?”

“Yes, they are,” she said. “Twenty crates here, twenty dogs. This image is from twenty-four hours ago.” She clicked the mouse and the next picture came up. It was of the same area. “And here is that mess facility just six and a half hours ago.”

Peters counted. “Eight of the crates are gone.”

“The guest workers ate Fido and his friends for dinner.”