“I know this is a sidebar, Chief,” Cowboy said, “but a DEA team just shut down that harbor warehouse the Koreans were using in San Pedro. Between that and knocking off the Killboys in Koreatown, I think we’ve pretty much slammed the door on their West Coast smuggling operations.”
“At least for now,” Brognola said. “You can bet they’ll work some other angle first chance they get.”
“You’re probably right,” Kissinger said.
The two men were interrupted when Kurtzman let out a sudden whoop.
“Whoa, Daddy!”
Kissinger eyed Brognola and smirked. “He either finally drank one too many cups of coffee or he’s found something.”
“Well, with Bear there’s no such thing as too much coffee.”
The two men made their way over to Kurtzman’s station.
“You found something?” Brognola asked.
“More like a hat trick,” Kurtzman said. “Check this out.”
Brognola and Kissinger glanced over the man’s shoulder at the computer screen, which was filled with a sat-cam image of a heavily forested mountain area.
“This is the north flank of the Changchon Mountain Range,” Kurtzman said. “It’s about ten miles north of the DMZ.”
“Okay, I know the area,” Brognola said. “Looks pretty benign to me.”
“From a distance, yeah,” Kurtzman conceded. “According to all our intel, the only thing going there is an old mining site, and word was they’d pretty much played out all the veins inside the mountain. But let’s move in for a closer look.”
Kurtzman cursored the zoom command and once the screen had adjusted, Brognola and Kissinger found themselves staring at the one-time mining center. It was clear at once to both men that the site had been converted to another purpose.
“Barracks,” Brognola noted. “Barbed-wire perimeter fences.”
“Concentration camp?” Kissinger said.
“I think they call them something else, but yeah, that’d be my guess,” Kurtzman said. “There’s another angle shot that shows a few dozen people working a field about a quarter mile north of here. Poppies, from the look of it.”
“Lets have a look,” Brognola said.
“Nah, just take my word for it,” Kurtzman said. “I want to get to the good stuff.”
“There’s more?” Kissinger said.
Kurtzman nodded. “See that service road that leads right up to the mountain? It’s dirt, so I was able to get a good read on the tire tracks leading there.”
He entered a few commands, splitting his computer screen so that it depicted two similar side-by-side images. “The left set of tracks are from the sat-cam,” he explained. “They’re deep enough that you can see they’re made by a multiaxle vehicle with four tires to an axle. I ran with a hunch and did a cross-check on the missile transporters they’d most likely be using. Bingo!”
Kissinger whistled low. “And by missile launchers, I presume we’re talking nukes.”
“You’re darn tootin’!” Kurtzman said. “We might want to get NSA to redirect a couple satellites over the area for some infrareds, but even now I’d bet my paycheck we’ve just found the needle in the haystack.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Changchon Rehabilitation Center, North Korea
“This can’t be happening!” Lieutenant Corporal Yulim stormed out in frustration.
It was bad enough the commandant had just learned that the Ministry of Internal Intelligence was apparently looking into his and Major Jin’s involvement with Operation Guillotine. Now this?
“A prison revolt!” he exclaimed.
He glared at Ahn Chung-Hee, the camp cook, who’d just come to him with the revelation. In his frustration, Yulim grabbed for the first thing in reach, a crystal ashtray lying on top of his desk in the den of his bungalow quarters at the concentration camp. When Yulim cocked his arm, the cook flinched, fearing that he was about to pay the price for being the bringer of bad news. But when Yulim let fly with the ashtray, it was his high-tech television set that took the hit. The soft plasma screen didn’t shatter when struck; instead, there was dull splat, followed by a brief sputtering inside the set, after which it gave off a small wisp of smoke.
His fury spent, at least for the moment, Yulim turned away from the ruined set and went to the wet bar. As he poured himself a drink, he stared back at the cook.
“Give me the details,” he said. “All of them!”
“I don’t have any specifics,” Ahn explained. “At least not in terms of how they plan to carry it out. I only know that it’s supposed to happen tomorrow morning. I was supposed to put something in the food given to the security detail. Enough to knock them out, or at least make them drowsy.”