Warriors (44 page)

He thought he had one more chance left in him.

He reached out with his right hand and began to claw at the dirt. Pulling himself closer one half inch at a time . . . finally . . . he almost touched it (Mary Poppins!) with his fingertips . . . close . . . closer . . . he had her in his grasp!

He clutched the high-tech lifesaver to him, elated. Despite the pain, he managed to roll over onto his bum and sit up. Flailing away at the hellish birds with his free hand, he depressed a glowing red button in the crook of the carbon-fiber handle. That button caused the microthin titanium-mesh umbrella to deploy instantaneously.

Now he had a shield capable, so Hawke said, of stopping at least a knife and perhaps even a small-caliber bullet.

He held the handle close to his chest and lowered the crown down near his head for maximum protection. His head and all his torso, as well as most of his legs, were now unreachable.

Still the shrieking ravens dove down undeterred. It felt like his umbrella was being bombarded with golf balls. Countless numbers of birds slammed into his protective shield at full speed and careened off the thin titanium skin. Many if not most of them were dropping dead to the ground all around him. And yet still they came.

His fingers found another tiny illuminated button, blue. There were advanced lithium-sulfur batteries inside the umbrella’s tube, Hawke had explained with delight, capable of jump-starting a dead car battery. And thus the pointed ferrule at the umbrella’s very top was electrified to serious voltage.

He pressed the blue button repeatedly and saw jagged flashes, a veritable geyser of blue-white electricity, arc upward from the finial in all directions, instantly killing anything within range. And showering the ground below with showers of white-hot sparks when he zapped the filigreed iron struts near the top of the aviary.

To a casual observer, it looked as if the world-famous criminalist had sought refuge beneath a small black teepee, one capable of firing jagged bolts of blue-white lightning skyward from its apex like some high-tech electrified Roman candle.

Inside the protective cover of his cozy titanium tent, Congreve inhaled the acrid scent of burning bird flesh and feathers with enormous satisfaction. Zapped ravens were dropping like flies all around him now and—what was that? Someone calling his name?

“Inspector Congreve? Inspector Congreve? Is that you inside there, sir? Under that umbrella?”

He raised Mary Poppins a foot or two, in order that he might be seen and heard.

“Of course it’s me, Cummings, you bloody fool! Where the hell have you been, Inspector?” he shouted. “You were supposed to meet me here an hour ago!”

“Sorry, Chief Inspector, we had to—you see—we were held up by a lorry that jackknifed at a roundabout and—”

“Never mind all that. Just get me out of here! How many men have you got?”

“Six, including myself.”

“Send four of your best armed men into that house. There are only two people in there that I know of, but both are extremely dangerous. One of them has just confessed to the murder of Professor Watanabe. Her name is Dr. Chyna Moon. The other is male, a psychotic wrestler by the unlikely name of Optimus Prime. Tell your men to take no chances with either. They’re both mean as snakes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sabrina’s killer herself lives inside that morbid house. She may still be inside it, but I rather doubt it. Her name is Lorelei Li, a stringer for the
Times
and a Cambridge grad student. I think she very well may have escaped via motorbike a short while ago. A Vincent Black Shadow.”

“Any idea as to what direction she took, sir?”

“Yes. I seem to recall Pelham saying something about Sabrina visiting Lorelei at a cottage down in Cornwall. Nevermore, I think he called it. She’s probably en route there. Pretty girl. Voluptuous, as they say. Late twenties, Asian, short black hair. Call it in.”

“Very good, Chief Inspector. You appear to be bleeding.”

“Of course I’m bleeding, you idiot. I say, Cummings. Are we going to sit around and talk all night? Or is someone perhaps thinking of removing me from this cauldron of death? No hurry, of course; I’m quite comfortable in here with these bloodthirsty beasts.”

“Right away, sir! Constable Jenkins, cut away that padlock and let’s get the chief inspector out of there, shall we?”

Jenkins hefted a pair of bolt cutters and went to work on the hefty padlock.

“I say, Chief Inspector,” Cummings called out, “if you don’t mind my asking. What is that strange contraption you’re sitting under?”

“It’s a bloody umbrella! What does it look like?”

“It does have a certain ‘James Bond’ air about it, sir, to be perfectly honest. All those special effects, I mean, the sparks, the lightning bolts . . .”

There came then another eruption from the umbrella, only this time it was not sparks but the raucous laughter of one Ambrose Congreve, glad he would live to fight another day.

C
H A P T E R
  6 0

A
solitary and unblinking eye, black and hooded, emerged from the cold sea. The night sky was black, the sea was leaden, and that is all there was, save the eye moving slowly a few feet above the surface, leaving a rippled wave in its wake.

The eye slowed, then stopped.

It began to swivel counterclockwise, very slowly, making two complete revolutions. Then it paused and disappeared again, slipping unseen beneath the waves. The hooded eye had seen nothing interesting or threatening on the desolate North Korean beaches, nor any surface vessels on the sea. Nothing, and that was just enough.

It had been just ten days since the secret meeting at Fort Whupass.

Lurking below the surface, stationary at periscope depth, the USS
Florida
(SSGN728) was ready to commence operations. She was an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) recently converted to a guided missile sub (SSGN) in order to insert SEAL platoons into hostile environments to conduct clandestine missions for extended periods of time ashore.

A stealth platform, she was designed, to use the SEAL motto: “To equip the man, not man the equipment.”

“Prepare to launch two SDVs, Bash,” the sub’s skipper, Captain Ben Malpass, said to his young XO, Lieutenant Bashon Mann.

“Aye, sir. Launch SDVs.”

Bash radioed the men working on the submerged deck. He then sent the periscope sliding back down into its well, a slight hydraulic hiss in the quiet of the control room.

“Prepare to launch, aye!” a crewman operating on deck replied over the intercom.

A minute later, Lieutenant Mann said, “Coming up on five minutes to launch, Skipper.”

Five minutes later, a small, dark shadow slipped away from the submerged sub and headed for shore. It remained submerged, en route to a place code-named Half Moon Bay. A few minutes later, a second shadow slipped into its underwater wake. Two twenty-one-foot-long submersibles, known as SDVs, or SEAL delivery vehicles, would rendezvous on the deserted and frozen coast of North Korea.

Launched from a tubular dry-deck shelter on the submerged sub’s deck, the SDV carried its crew and passengers exposed to the icy water, breathing either from their scuba gear or the vehicle’s compressed air supply. Aboard the two submersibles were a team of twenty-one men tasked with a mission that had been the subject of cabinet-level debate in Washington and at the highest levels of government in London.

THE MISSION HAD VERY NEARLY
been canceled until a courageous President David Rosow gave the last-minute go-ahead. The British prime minister, along with the director of MI6, had finally convinced everyone that this particular team of counterterrorist operatives actually had a fighting chance of pulling this thing off. All despite terrible odds and in the face of scathing resistance within the Pentagon and Naval Intelligence headquarters in Britain.

Rosow had made his decision based only on the heroic quality of the men he was sending into harm’s way. The price of failure was incalculable. But these men, all of them, were a different breed. Hawke and his teams had long demonstrated a way of overcoming impossible odds; they had a track record of snatching victory from the jaws of certain defeat, and they’d done it time and again, year after year.

And now he was sending them into a country with which the United States was not technically at war, at a time when the slightest miscalculation could send the world hurtling toward catastrophe. “Godspeed, Hawke,” Rosow had said the night before, speaking with the team leader on the eve of their mission.

“We can do this, Mr. President,” Hawke assured him. “You made the right decision. Sleep well, sir. I’ll keep you informed of our progress.”

HAWKE, STOKELY JONES, FITZ MCCOY,
and Colonel Cho were the first four men ashore. They split up and made an immediate recon of the landing zone, making sure the designated LZ area was as deserted as their photo recon had indicated. Fitz went right, Stoke left, while Hawke and Cho went straight ahead up and over the sand dunes.

Hawke had wanted a dark night to go ashore and he’d gotten his wish. Stumbling once going up the sand hill, he flipped down his NVG optics. The world turned fuzzy green, but at least he could see where to put his boots. At the top of the dune he paused, turned, and looked back to sea with his binoculars.

USS
Florida
was way out there, her conning tower a thin black blip of a silhouette on the grey horizon line. Hawke could just make out two of the sub’s five primary navigation lights: the rudder (white) and the port (red), winking at him in the distance. He swung back round to check out his objective.

His objective, the camp, was just on the other side of that mountain range.

Looking at the dense, endless blackness, he recalled a press unveiling of a U.S. Defense Department satellite image of the Korean Peninsula at night. The photograph showed the northern half of the peninsula completely in the dark except for a speck of light indicating the location of the capital, Pyongyang. South Korea’s portion, in contrast, was aglow, its myriad cities alive with light. It was a dramatic depiction of the economic miracle that is Communism.

He smiled at Cho, and the two men turned to return to the beach.

When he stormed down the dune, he saw all the heavily armed men from both SDVs assembled on the beach. Hawke asked the men to count off and then radioed the minisubs. The two minisub drivers were standing by one-half mile offshore just in case it got spicy and he required an immediate exfil. He told them the mission team onshore was good to go, and that they could safely return to the mother ship. He reconfirmed the time and place set for the team’s extraction and signed off.

He turned to the men under his command.

“You all know what to do. So let’s go goddamn do it.”

The little twenty-one-man army began the silent march inland. Their route would take them up through the mountainous region and across a narrow barren plain before they came to the dreaded
kwan-li-so
.

Number 25. The death camp.

HAWKE RAISED THE FLAT OF
his hand and brought the entire squad to a halt. They were halfway down a mountain, picking their way through ice-encrusted rock, loose boulders, and scrub. The temperature hovered around freezing. Fifty yards below was a small copse of trees, big enough to shield them from prying eyes; it was the last bit of cover they’d have for a while.

“Recon,” he said. “Ten minutes R&R.”

The men moved down into the woods, grateful for a few minutes’ rest after the night’s march. Hawke got behind a large boulder, rested his elbows on it, and looked through his binocs. The sky was turning pink. He could see the gulag-style work camp with some clarity now.

At the main gate, a giant portrait of the late, unlamented Kim Jong-il looked out over acres of wooden barracks. This perimeter fence was studded with six tall wooden guard towers. Three men in each one with binoculars and automatic weapons, according to Cho. Hawke swung the glasses, searching for the sign the CIA had told him would confirm his arrival at the camp where the Americans were believed to be held. He saw it. A giant banner with huge red Korean letters that exhorted the workers: “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, to Victory!”

He calculated the distance from the tree line across the narrow plain to the camp perimeter.

They’d have to fan out and crawl on their bellies across a half mile of open ground.

He smiled to himself.

Nobody’d ever said this stuff was easy.

C
H A P T E R
  6 1

F
itzHugh “Lightning” McCoy was a sniper.

He was one of the most highly decorated snipers in recent military history and had even written a bestselling book about his experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, along with two of his best men, he was getting ready to take out the NK guards in the machine-gun towers.

They were in the woods, just above no-man’s-land. With NVG telescopic optics, they could see the guards, not a few of them dozing atop the towers. Occasionally, the guards would fire up a searchlight and play it lazily around the perimeter. One could sense these were not men on a high state of alert. This was Norkland, for God’s sake! The home of the Norks! Norkland was what T&L called North Korea and its vast numbers of military rulers. Who in the world would ever attack a bunch of Norks out in the middle of bloody nowhere?

Fitz spoke in a low, deadly serious whisper.

“Take out the towers to either side of the main gate first. That’ll be their wake-up call this morning. Then work outward along the perimeter. Remember, the colonel says there are three guards to a tower. But there’s always one on a cot below the ledge where they catnap until relieving one or the other. I want three down before you move on to the next.”

“Roger that, sir.”

“Take out all those bloody searchlights, too. Just for good measure. Might encourage other internees to escape after we’ve gone. One can only hope.”