Mark Greaney: Full Force and Effect

As he sat in his first-class seat he thought about going through immigration in Vietnam and he began to sweat. If his carry-on was searched at all he knew they would find his stash. But thinking it over quickly, he realized he couldn’t remember a single visit to Vietnam where his person had been searched. If he removed the documents from the hidden compartment and simply stored them in a money belt around his waist, he’d be fine.

But to do this he knew he’d first need to remove them from the large square laminate package.

Hazelton took the document package into the lavatory, sat on the toilet, and tore it open with his teeth. Inside he found five plastic bags, each one containing a passport, a driver’s license, some credit cards, and a folded letter. Despite a strong presumption he was not supposed to look, he began thumbing through the documents.

A flight attendant knocked on the door to the bathroom, telling him to return to his seat because the pilot expected unstable air ahead.

But Hazelton ignored her; all his attention was concentrated on the travel documents. He was not surprised to find the black diplomatic passports. They were not fakes, these were legit, although he assumed they had been altered somehow. He looked at each of the photos. Four Caucasian men and one Caucasian woman.

He couldn’t be sure if they were Czech just by looking at them, but where they were from was not the issue.

It was where they were going. The letters in each person’s possession were travel authorizations, given by the Czech government, allowing the diplomat holding the corresponding passport to travel to North Korea to work in the Czech consulate there.

North Korea? Hazelton had spent the last year doing corporate intelligence work for Siemens, for Microsoft, for Land Rover, and for Maersk.

Now I’m working on behalf of the most brutal and repressive regime in the world?

As he sat on the toilet, his shoulders slamming from one wall to the other with the turbulence, Hazelton decided these five individuals were nuclear scientists being snuck into North Korea. What the hell else could be going on? DPRK had been caught trying to move nuke experts before, and they had no major industry to speak of other than mining, which was handled almost exclusively by partners in China. He couldn’t be certain these were nuke scientists, of course, but he could damn well tell they weren’t Chinese miners.

And he knew this wasn’t some operation Sharps was running against the North Koreans. Duke Sharps wasn’t in the business of taking on despotic regimes for noble aims. He worked for money, there was money in getting brainpower into North Korea, so that had to be what was going on here.

He closed his eyes and leaned back against the bulkhead of the plane, still sitting on the toilet. “Son of a bitch,” he whispered to himself.

The fact Duke Sharps was shipping nefarious characters into the Hermit Kingdom of North Korea pissed Hazelton off, but the fact Hazelton was helping Sharps do it made him shudder.

Hazelton made it through airport immigration with the docs strapped to his midsection, and then an hour later he arrived at his hotel from the airport, salty remnants of dried sweat covering his body. He spent the afternoon in the lobby drinking, thinking about the money and the job and his need to make his financial problems go away, hoping against hope there was some sweet spot of inebriation he could find right as the time came to pass the docs off to the cutout here in Ho Chi Minh City so he wouldn’t feel like he was doing anything wrong.

Now Hazelton knew . . . a half-dozen Tanquerays at the lobby bar and three more at the restaurant—more than a pint of gin—this wasn’t even close to enough to washing away the stench of working for the North Koreans.

He’d balked tonight in the restaurant, refusing to give the docs to the gorgeous French spook, his cutout who would have taken them to the five travelers, probably lodged somewhere in the city. Then the French bitch had probably run off to tattletale to Duke Sharps, and now sixty-one-year-old Colin Hazelton found himself stinking drunk, staggering through a Third World back alley dodging whoever Sharps would send to find the dirty docs that Hazelton now held in a large money belt around his waist.

While he stumbled along he kept an eye out for any surveillance, but he didn’t really expect anyone on him for a day or two. He planned on walking a couple blocks through these back streets to the Kenh Doi, one of several brackish canals that ran through the city, tying his money belt around a loose brick, and then dropping the five sets of dirty documents into the water. From there he’d head to the airport, he’d be on the first plane back to the United States in the morning, and he’d wait to get fired by phone, no doubt by Duke himself.

He’d go back to flying planes for a living. At his age and with his lack of recent flying time he might be able to scrounge some work flying beat-up cargo props in the Third World. He’d die before he paid off his debt, but at least he wouldn’t be a bag man for the Asian Dr. Evil and his murdering minions.

Hazelton walked on. There had been a flurry of activity in the streets—this was District 8, full of French colonial architecture and active nightlife—but now he passed through the darkness in a commercial area near the canal. A restaurant worker carried garbage by him, and an old woman on a scooter putted through the alley.

As he made a left toward the water a pair of men on whisper-quiet black Ducati Diavel motorcycles rolled into the alleyway he just vacated, but he neither heard nor saw them, nor did he have any idea two more similar bikes were already positioned ahead of his route, and waiting for him to walk into their trap.

2

Jack Ryan, Jr., moved in the darkness, east on Pham The Hien. In front of him he saw Colin Hazelton appear from an alleyway across the street. Jack had expected him to turn to his left and head back to his hotel, but to his surprise the American in the white button-down shirt and loose necktie stepped into the road and began heading over toward Ryan’s side of the street.

Shit, thought Jack. He kept walking, looking away from Hazelton and taking care not to alter his gait. He wondered for a moment if he might have been burned, but Hazelton didn’t seem to pay any attention to him.

To Jack’s surprise Hazelton stepped onto the pavement forty yards in front of him, then entered another narrow, dark alleyway. This would lead him directly to the Kenh Doi, an east-west canal that served as the northern border for District 8, and from Jack’s study of the map of this district, there was nothing there but docks and houseboats and ramshackle apartment buildings.

Confused as to why the man wasn’t going back to his hotel, Jack decided he would walk on a few blocks and then try to move up a parallel alley.

Jack picked up the pace, took a second to orient himself with the map on his phone, and then he spoke over the net. “This is Ryan. I’ve got the subject. He’s moving north. Two blocks south of the water. Unless he’s got himself a dinghy tied up somewhere, then he’s going to run out of road here in a minute. I’m going to try to get ahead and see what he’s up to. I’ll move parallel to his—”

Jack stopped transmitting when, directly in front of him, two black Ducati bikes rolled out of the alley ahead and crossed the street. They were just a couple hundred feet behind Hazelton. Here in the quiet sector near the river they couldn’t hope to remain covert from a trained CIA veteran.

Nothing about this looked like a surveillance exercise by the men on the bikes.

“Ryan?” Ding called over the network. “Did you lose comms?”