Ballistic Force(22)
“I think we might have something on your cousin,” the colonel told the Stony Man cyber warrior. “If we’re right, I’m afraid the news isn’t good…”
LESS THAN TEN MINUTES later, Tokaido was sitting at his station at CRCC. The room, half the size of the Annex Computer Room back at Stony Man Farm, was located on the second floor of the UNCSB Administration Building. A bank of windows along the north wall overlooked the exercise yard, where a handful of new Hummers delivered from Seoul were being unloaded from a semi-rig. Beyond that, uniformed troops were out training in the surrounding hills and, far in the distance, a South Korean flag flapped in the breeze from the center of Daeseong-dong, the only inhabited village located inside the DMZ. Tokaido was oblivious to the activity, however. He was still reeling from Colonel Michaels’ news.
Less than an hour ago, the Army Intelligence radio crew had intercepted a KPA military communiqué in which a senior officer boasted that the day before a naval unit of the Bureau of Reconnaissance had managed to get their hands on a South Korean fishing yacht moored just off the coast of Gyondongdo, a small island in the Yellow Sea forty miles north of Incheon. They’d incarcerated those aboard the boat, which was presently en route to the North Korean military port in Sinsaeng. For now, according to the pirated dispatch, the plan was to dole out use of the yacht as a perk for naval officers with high-performance ratings.
“I know there aren’t many specifics,” Michaels said, pointing to the transcript Tokaido had just read over for a second time, “but there are just too many coincidences. It sounds like the same-size boat you said your cousin had taken out fishing in that area.”
“Yes, I know,” Tokaido conceded wearily. “But I don’t understand. Gyondongdo is located on our side of the maritime line. Seung-Whan wouldn’t have strayed into North Korean waters. He knows better.”
“Even if he stayed on our side,” Michaels said, “North Korea has been disputing that line ever since it was drawn up, and they have no qualms about crossing it, believe me. This isn’t the first ship they’ve snatched. Hell, they’ve even come ashore on a couple of these islands looking to abduct people. It’s happened twice this month that I know of.”
“Still,” Tokaido murmured. “It’s so hard to believe.”
“I hear you,” Michaels said, “and I’m sure it’s the last thing your cousin expected. No offense, but he’s well-off and it’s easy for people of his station around these parts tend to get a little complacent. They don’t realize how much can go wrong if they stray out of their element. We’re in a war zone.”
Much as he wanted to defend his cousin, Tokaido knew the colonel had a point. A number of times when he’d conversed with Seung-Whan, Akira’s cousin had dismissed Seoul’s close proximity to the DMZ and said he’d decided years ago that there was no point to living in fear of things he had no control over. Tokaido understood the rationale, but there was a difference between being fearless and foolhardy. Now it was looking as if Seung-Whan was paying a price for the latter.
Tokaido glanced back down at the transcript and read it over yet again, hoping somehow to glean more information. There was so little to go on, however. It wasn’t even clear how many people had been aboard the yacht when it was seized. For that matter, Tokaido didn’t know for sure how many people Lim had taken on the trip besides his wife and daughter. “Some friends” had been all he’d said.
On his third read-through, one word in the transcript jumped out at him. He looked it over, then glanced up at Michaels.
“It says here that those aboard the ship were ‘incarcerated,’” he said. “Are you sure that’s the right translation?”
Michaels nodded. “I heard the message myself. Yeah, whoever was on board that ship was taken into custody. They weren’t executed, if that’s what you mean.”
Tokaido nodded bleakly, already beginning to fear the worst. “At least, not yet,” he said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Changchon Rehabilitation Center, North Korea
Lim U-Pol and her life-long friend Ji Lhe-Kan had been laboring in the poppy fields for nearly five backbreaking hours when one of the guards blew a whistle announcing the end of their workday. The two women were every bit as filled with fear and apprehension as when they’d first stepped off the truck that had brought their families here to the camp, but the work had numbed them, and exhaustion had turned them into automatons. Just as they’d lost themselves in the redundant task of extracting resin from the poppies, the two women now mindlessly followed the example of the other workers and turned over their scraping tools and the small plastic containers they’d filled with resin, then fell into line for the long march back to the prison camp.