While Bolan and his colleague stayed put and continued to blast away at the enemy, the others in the lead jeep bounded out of the vehicle and sprinted toward the main gate, pausing long enough to drop the guards stationed there. Behind them, the missile transporter lumbered into view, followed by the second jeep. The latter vehicle swerved around the transporter and sought out the side entrance to the prison yard.
Major Cook was behind the wheel of the transporter, and he crouched low in his seat as he directed his rolling behemoth toward the largest of the gaping maws in the side of the mountain, figuring it had to be the entrance to the bunker facility where the missiles were being held. When guards appeared in front of the opening, the Ranger riding alongside Cook took aim through the shattered windshield and fired his M-16, dropping the guards before they could so much as get off a shot.
“Hang on,” Cook told his colleague as he bore down on the entrance. “Looks like a tight fit.”
Cook was right. There was barely enough clearance for the transporter. But, then, the cramped space played perfectly into the major’s strategy, and once the transporter was halfway through the opening, he put on the brakes and killed the engine, effectively closing off the opening to anyone who hoping to rush out of the storage facility. By the time he’d thrown open his door and jumped down from the cab, the trapdoor beneath the transporter’s chassis had been opened and the troops hidden within the belly of the hollow missile were dropping to the ground and charging their way into the cavernous enclosure.
There were a couple dozen Koreans inside the installation, but three-quarters of them were unarmed technicians, and once the Rangers had traded gunfire with those few Koreans in a position to put up a fight, the facility was effectively secured.
“I don’t know where that tunnel leads to,” Cook said once the brief skirmish had ended, “but let’s seal it off! I don’t want any reinforcements showing up to throw us off our game plan.”
As several of the Rangers checked out the other transporters for one they could use to barricade the tunnel, Cook led a few other soldiers in a quick room-by-room search. They encountered brief resistance when one of the cooks came out firing from the rear kitchen area, but otherwise they managed to flush out another five Koreans without incident. The search ended when Cook and the others found themselves standing in front of the locked vault containing the concealed warheads. “I might be wrong,” Cook said, “but I think we just stumbled on the motherlode.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
For the first time since the cybernetic team had put on its blinders and devoted its full attention on the North Korean crisis, it was quiet in the Farm’s Computer Room. It wasn’t that the room was deserted. In fact, Hal Brognola and Barbara Price were present in the Annex along with Aaron Kurtzman, Carmen Delahunt, Huntington Wethers and John Kissinger. But no one was speaking and there was none of the usual staccato clatter of fingers across keyboards. All five members of the Stony Man home crew stood silently in a small huddle directly in front of the computer stations, their eyes focused on the large central monitor mounted on the far wall. There on the screen was a live satellite feed being transmitted by an NSA sat-cam positioned high in orbit above the 38th Parallel. The dense cloud cover prevented a second satellite from being able to provide a view of the deadly skirmish taking place on the northern flank of the Changchon Mountain Range, but on the south side of the mountains the sky was relatively clear and though the satellite image was grainy and void of color, those in the chamber had little trouble making out the sprawl of empty buildings that comprised Kijongdong. All eyes were on the largest of the structures, which, according to the testimony of unwitting defector Park Yo-Wi, served as a facade behind which the Korean People’s Army had built a concealed launch pad intended for the deployment of the rogue nation’s clandestine arsenal of nuclear warheads.
Undersecretary of State Brooke Hilldecker had already spoken to her liaison contacts in Russia, China, Japan and Taiwan, informing them of Park’s disclosure. The hope had been that all four countries would seize on the latest news and present a unified front demanding that North Korea immediately pull the plug on its nuclear agenda and allow unchecked access to investigative teams looking to verify the shutdown. Taiwan and Japan had been quick to throw in with the U.S., but China and Russia had balked, saying they needed more proof than the word of a lone defector. By then the President had convened a special meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and once they’d been apprised of China and Russia’s recalcitrance, the President and his advisers had decided on a dangerous and unprecedented course of action.