Before Bolan could respond, Jayne Bahn joined them, waving her release papers.
“Okay, I got my Get Out of Jail Free card,” she said. “What’s our next move?”
“We’re just trying to figure that out.” Bolan quickly filled her in on the latest developments.
“I still think Vegas might be worth a shot,” Bahn suggested. “Yeah, maybe they know their guys went bust in Chicago and D.C., but since they’ve already got Li-Roo, they might decide to push their luck and go after Kang, as well. I mean, if the other teams struck out and they come back with at least two of the defectors, they’ll come off smelling like a rose.”
“Good point,” Scanlon said. “Of course, there’s a chance, too, that they have their orders to go after Kang regardless of what happened.”
“Well, guys, it sounds like a crap shoot,” Bahn said. “Me, I’ll put my money on Vegas.”
“Me, too, I guess,” Scanlon said. “We’ve got enough men to handle things here, so I think I’ll grab that plane flight after all.”
“I’ll come with,” Bahn said.
“What about you?” Scanlon asked Bolan.
The soldier thought it over, then decided, “What the hell. Let’s roll the dice.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Camp Bonifas, South Korea
First thing Akira Tokaido had done after learning that his cousin’s yacht may have been hijacked was place a call to Stony Man Farm. He’d asked Aaron Kurtzman to track down any available sat intel footage of the area where the abduction had reportedly taken place and see if, by some miracle, the eye in the sky had managed to capture the incident. As he waited for a response, Tokaido had resumed his post at the Army base’s CRCC facilities. There, he’d convinced Colonel Thomas Michaels to, at least for the moment, shift focus away from the ongoing ghosting operations and assign all available manpower to tracking KPA mil-com frequencies in hopes of intercepting more information regarding the yacht and those who’d been aboard when it had been seized by the North Koreans. Reciprocating Kurtzman’s earlier request, Tokaido had asked the radio control operators to also keep an ear open for any communiqués dealing with the attempts by REDI agents to drag the members of the Kanggye nuclear team back home so that they could verify the launch ability of Kim Jong-il’s hidden ICBMs. An hour’s worth of eavesdropping, however, had yet to turn up any worthwhile information. In fact, the radio team had discovered that the KPA had apparently changed frequencies during the night and were somehow scrambling their signals so as to avoid interception.
“Bastards,” Michaels cursed once he’d returned from a briefing across the courtyard and been apprised of the situation.
“They’re on to us.”
“It sure looks that way,” Tokaido said bleakly. “I didn’t think they had the technology to pull it off, but obviously they do.”
“They’re doing a great job of having us underestimate them,” Michaels agreed. “And they’ve stepped up their smoke screens, too.”
“What do you mean?”
Summing up the findings of the intelligence briefing he’d just attended, the colonel explained, “They’ve increased activity at their missile facilities in the north, but every time we think we might’ve spotted a nuke site, they throw us for a loop. We’ve got one incident in Yongjo where they put a three-stager on the launch pad, but the payload turned out to be a weather satellite. And in Musudan they pulled the same trick with a sky cam. I think you already know about the shell games they’re playing with truck movements.”
Tokaido nodded, then asked, “Are we positive those payxsloads in Yongjo and Musudan aren’t just dummied up to look like something other than warheads?”
“Afraid so,” Michaels said. “We put them both under infrareds and neither site registered hot.”
“I guess on the bright side, if they keep this up we’ll be able to narrow the possibilities by process of elimination,” Tokaido suggested. “We can just cross off the areas where they’re playing games with us and step up our intel elsewhere.”
“Maybe,” Michaels said. “On the other hand, they might figure that’s what we’d do and then turn around and slip the nukes to one of these sites where they’ve been jerking us off.”
“Chess game,” Tokaido muttered.
“That’s pretty much what it’s come down to,” Michaels said. “One thing I can’t figure out, though. With things going their way, why would they go ahead and do something bonehead like hijacking that yacht? The last thing they need is to stir up some kind of international incident. I mean, your cousin is a big shot around these parts. Once word gets out that he’s been kidnapped, there’s going to be an uproar.”