One Killer Force: A Delta Force Novel (31 page)

Seamstress!

Hawk held her purse close to her hip, lifted her heels, and jogged the last few steps toward the door. Seeing her approaching, Seamstress froze in the doorway, still holding the open door with his left hand. Hawk lifted her right hand, palm facing Seamstress, and laid a forward-moving Heisman on him that knocked him back into the restroom and onto his ass.

She quickly closed the door, turning the lock to secure it behind her. She knelt down next to Seamstress, who had already gone from shocked to pissed off. He was spouting off something unintelligible to Hawk but she knew it would make a hungover sailor proud.

“Mr. Pang,” Hawk said, “do you speak English?” She wanted to dig into her purse and secure the tags, but knew she needed to confirm his identity and pass bona fides first.

“Yes, yes,” Seamstress said. “Where is American CIA?”

So much for bona fides.

Hawk reached down, grabbed both of Kang Pang Su’s hands, and held them palm up, waist high.

Large mitts, like an infielder’s glove, but not really fat.

Not the correct protocol, or what Hawk was told by Myron Curtis to expect, but good enough for her, given the circumstances. He spoke English, obviously pretty good English, and at the moment Hawk knew that was a surprise party gift even Curtis couldn’t predict.

“Great!” Hawk said. “Stay calm and give me a second.”

Hawk pulled her designer purse sling over her head and placed it on the marble bathroom floor. She opened it and pulled out the two RRD tags and set them on the floor. She reached back into the purse, fished around in the small side pocket, and found the three light green egg-shaped Q dots. These she placed into the two pockets of her blazer. As soon as she placed the RRD tags she would be applying the Q dots next.

“Please take off your jacket,” Hawk said. “We have to hurry.”

“I defect, yes?” Seamstress said. “For political and ideological reasons me relinquish my status as a North Korean citizen.”

Hawk heard every word, but it didn’t register. “Your jacket, hurry!” Hawk said. “I need to mark you before you get back on the train.”

“No, no, me no going back to Kaesong Station,” Seamstress said. “You take across border now.”

What? This guy’s delusional.

Hanging her ass out on a singleton mission to place a tag on some old dude was one thing, humping his ass across a two-klick-wide demilitarized zone crammed full of land mines, razor wire, and interlocking machine-gun fire was another.

“Please, I beg you!”

“The jacket!”

“They will feed me to dogs,” Seamstress said. “I know they on to me.”

“That’s not my mission, Mr. Pang,” Hawk said. “I can’t do that.”

“I survive no another day.”

“You have to get back on that train,” Hawk said firmly. “It will be okay.”

“No, I no can, no can,” Seamstress said, showing obvious stress for the first time, “better shoot me here than let savages tear limbs off.”

You can do this!
she told herself, not really sure how.

Seamstress was scared shitless, but sneaking out of the building and running for the safety of South Korea was not part of the plan. As Hawk stared at the trembling Kang Pang Su, she allowed herself a moment to consider, what if? What if she audibled the mission and bolted with Seamstress? That course of action certainly had its advantages. For one, the SEALs would be off the hook. Beaver and Bear wouldn’t need to be destroyed; they could melt back out of the country, nobody the wiser. Second, if Seamstress’s angst was legit, if they really were onto him, then his personal scrutiny had likely changed. More North Korean soldiers surrounding the country’s latest traitor inside the armored car would create definite trouble for SEAL Team Six, especially with the sketchy plan to use the less-than-lethal MAUL ammunition.

Conversely, Hawk knew the probability they would successfully make it out safely was ant-shit low, not even promising enough to register on the scale.

“Please, madam, you help me,” Seamstress said as he cupped Hawk’s right hand with both of his.

He shook so hard, Hawk began to worry he was going into shock.

“I can’t help you,” Hawk said. “You must get back on the train.”

“I will not!” Seamstress said. “I defect today, I die trying.”

Then it hit Hawk. This was fucking Delta Force, the premiere counterterrorist unit in the entire world. Paid, trained, and expected to solve the nation’s most pressing national security problems. She remembered what Colonel Webber had said when she started her operator training course, almost two months ago now.
Operators are trained how to think, not what to think.
Yes, Gangster’s comprehensive color-coded matrices, animated PowerPoint slides that Bill Gates would marvel at, and the SEALs’ concept of operation were all good, while they lasted. But now, on the X, when the enemy gets a vote, all that plan A stuff had been overcome by events.

Fully knighted as the first female operator or not, on that morning, at that moment, as Carrie Tomlinson kneeled on the hard marble floor, she knew she was the most important member of Delta.

“Okay,” Hawk said, nodding and smiling at Seamstress, “I’ll help you defect.”

Seamstress scrambled to his feet like anything but a man a few years shy of seventy. “Thank so much! Thank you! Thank you!”

He pulled out a folded piece of paper, about the size of a credit card, and handed it to Hawk. Surprised, she quickly unfolded enough of it to see a handwritten message in Hangul.

“What is this?” Hawk asked as she quickly refolded it.

“For my family.”

Hawk yanked her left pant leg up to her knee, exposing the top of her knee-high hose. She peeled the edge back just enough to secure the note, pushing it an inch or so past the edge to be sure. She fixed her pants, grabbed the two RRD tags off the floor, and pushed to her feet, careful not to turn an ankle or bust a heel. Now standing face-to-face with Seamstress, she was stunned by how short he was, even accounting for her heels. She figured he was only about five foot three; five four, max.

Hawk reached into Seamstress’s coat pockets, dropping a tag inside each as smoothly as a Times Square pickpocket when the ball drops. The SEALs wouldn’t have to worry about him, but if they ran into trouble, somehow got separated, they might have a chance at recovering him.

“There back door,” Seamstress said, squeezing Hawk’s left arm, “I know way.”

“Okay, but you have to stay calm,” Hawk said. She pulled her cell from her pocket and powered it on.

Hawk cursed the slow startup sequence, watching it run its security protocols, tapping the Call Log button several times before it activated.

C’mon, c’mon.

“What doing?” Seamstress said, almost in panic mode. “We must now go!”

“Getting us some backup,” Hawk said, “and maybe a safe lift over the land mines.”

TWENTY-ONE

Objectives Beaver and Bear, North Korea

Ghillie-suited Master Chief Kleinsmith dropped both knees into the hardscrabble hillside that marked the SEALs’ last covered and concealed position just as the sun was already shining high over the treeless hills to the east. The happy mounds, Korean graveyards crafted out of giant grass-covered dirt piles that resembled upside-down half grapefruits, where the dead were entombed in a seated position, provided their only cover for several hundred meters.

“That took longer than I wanted it to,” he whispered to his mates only a few feet away.

Kleinsmith took a few deep breaths of the morning air. Strangely thick, it seemed to hang in his lungs, without a hint of wind moving across the hills. They’d had some trouble at OBJ Beaver, trying to get the C4 placed without making any noise that would certainly carry for miles, but happy to have finally placed the bulk explosives on the four vertical railroad track support beams with nobody the wiser.

But now, as the Six Team leader looked around the immediate desolate area, void of bushes or branches to build even a simple hide, not a rodent or bird or even an insect in sight, he wondered if they might have been safer back at the bridge. In fact, if not for the one water buffalo they’d bumped into last night moving to the shanty, North Korea was almost as lifeless as the moon, the result of a nationwide famine in the 1990s.

Kleinsmith didn’t like it. He didn’t like their current location, devoid of the basic requirements of any tactically sound operation—cover and concealment. He knew that, ghillie suits or not, anyone with a pair of binoculars would pick their torsos out from a klick away. This wasn’t Afghanistan, where the sharp craggy rocks and rich foliage in the mountains offered protection to get the job done.

He cranked his head toward South Korea, running his eyes slightly downhill, searching for the ghillie-suited silhouettes of the other half of his Red Squadron troop.

Where the hell are the others?

“I don’t see ’em,” Kleinsmith said, not really expecting any comment from the others. “They should have beaten us back here.”

“Me neither.”

“We’re an hour-plus behind schedule, I’m breaking radio silence,” Kleinsmith said as he rotated onto his right side and reached for his push-to-talk near his left shoulder.

“Satan Seven-Two, Seven-One, check?”

Nothing. He waited a few long seconds, trying not to let worry enter his thoughts, or worse, let his fellow SEALs feel his angst. They had been through much tougher times, had come through much more complicated targets than this, and at the moment nobody was shooting at them. But, Kleinsmith also knew that the other team had half the distance to travel to reach OBJ Bear, and unless they had the same issues, dicking around with the explosive placement, his natural sixth sense couldn’t help but peg hard right.

Sure, Satan Seven-Two could have engaged someone and he wouldn’t have heard. Like him that morning, all his frogmen were running with cans. But, had they drilled someone, or been hard compromised, they certainly would have broken radio silence to fill him in.

“Satan Seven-Two, this is Satan Seven-One in the blind, over.”

Kleinsmith heard one of his men whisper heavily, “Hold up, I see them.”

Relieved, Kleinsmith released his hand mike and eased back to his belly to lower his silhouette. He looked around to his men, making sure they all were aware of the approaching patrol.

“Hey, heads up, friendlies,” Kleinsmith said, “nine o’clock.”

Eyeballing the SEALs slowly weaving through the shallow draw, the heads of the crouching SEALs just a foot or two below the far crest, his eyebrows popped.

“Who the hell are they carrying?” Kleinsmith asked.

Eight ghillie-suited SEALs in dark earth-tone patterns stopped about sixty feet short of Kleinsmith. He watched the leader, Machinist’s Mate Danno, slowly move his left hand, palm facing toward the ground, up and down a few times, signaling the others to take a knee.

Kleinsmith’s radio cracked. “Seven-One, Seven-Two, check?”

Kleinsmith reached for his mike again to answer Danno. “Seven-One, check.”

He watched as two SEALs slowly lowered two bodies to the ground and rolled them on their backs.

“Whatya got?”

“Soft compromise,” Danno whispered.

“Dead?”

“Negative,” Danno replied coolly, “heavily sedated.”

Kleinsmith slowly moved to his feet, tapped his prone partner on the back of the thigh, and whispered, “Back in a second.”

He crossed the sixty feet of slightly sloped terrain at a crouch, careful with each step, carefully zigging and zagging between the five-foot-high happy mounds, before taking a knee next to his medic. Doc was already bent over one of the two supine men digging in his aid bag.

“Midz?” Kleinsmith asked, assuming the North Koreans had been drugged with midazolam.

“Yeah, time for another, too.”

“What the fuck happened?” Kleinsmith asked as he watched Doc delicately hold a twenty-three-gauge medical needle and squirt a single drop of clear liquid from the business end.

“Sons of bitches spooked us near the bridge,” Danno said, taking a knee next to Kleinsmith, “walked the fuck up on us like they owned the damn place until Roscoe hit on their scent.”

“Damn, these guys are Red Guards,” Kleinsmith said. “Roscoe get a bite?” Kleinsmith noticed the copper-colored Belgian Malinois sprawled on his belly, tongue threatening to snake out of the Hannibal Lecter–looking muzzle, breathing heavily a few yards away. His unblinking dark glassy eyes were steady state on the two Red Guards, waiting for a command, any command, to make his master happy and receive a treat.

“Nope, Streaker busted both of them with the less-than-lethal,” Danno said, “both center mass to the chest.”

“They armed?” Kleinsmith asked as he studied both bodies, looking for a rise in the chests, as if he didn’t really know if they were dead or alive.

“Negative,” Danno said.

Kleinsmith watched as Doc unbuckled the oversize and cheap brown utility belt that wrapped the Korean’s narrow waist. Letting it flop to the dirt, Doc pulled the brown uniform shirt collar down on the middle-aged Korean to expose half of a large, swollen black-and-blue bruise, the definite point of impact of the rubber bullet. Doc released the collar and placed his gloved left hand gently but firmly on the man’s forehead. He pushed down, naturally opening the mouth, to allow him to insert the needle between the inside of the cheek and the teeth and gums.

“Second dose to the buccal pouch?” Kleinsmith asked, pointing toward the inside of the Korean’s cheek.

“Third,” Danno answered.

“These guys are light sleepers,” Doc said. “I’m about out though; maybe enough for one more dose.”

Kleinsmith looked hard at the sedated paramilitary, then watched Doc slide on his knees, dragging his aid bag with him to the other numb Red Guard a few feet away. They could have been twins. Both wore identical brown, collared shirts made of Vinalon, the standard uniform of the Worker-Peasant Red Guards that make up the nation’s civilian defense force. Top two buttons unsecured, possibly buttons missing. Sleeves rolled up to just under the elbows. Pants, the same swamp-brown color, at least a size or two too big, but blending in with the hillside better than their ghillies. Both in hand-me-down worn leather sandals over calloused feet that provided no hope to make a run for it should they wake up, as black flex ties secured their feet and ankles tight together. Kleinsmith knew their hands, hidden behind their backs, were flex-tied as well.