Yulim looked down at Dahn’s limp form, then glanced up at Major Jin. “Was that really necessary?”
“I owed a little something for trying to bug my office,” Jin countered. “Besides, with a black eye and a broken nose, he’ll have more credibility when we put him to use helping to clear up this mess we’ve gotten caught up in.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Camp Bonifas, South Korea
Since his return from the Joint Security Area, Akira Tokaido had resumed his original assignment of helping the Army’s CRCC radio crew try to descramble the military frequency used by the KPA. He welcomed the challenge, not only because it called upon his expertise, but also because it demanded his full attention and kept him from watching the clock and chafing his nerves counting down the time left before his kidnapped cousin’s family would be released.
And now, after several painstaking hours the intensified efforts had finally paid off.
Thanks largely to Tokaido’s incessant tweaking of the directional controls operating the bases satellite dish receptors, a communiqué being sent out from the North Korean capital of Pyongyang had just been intercepted, and Tokaido was as stunned as everyone else by the contents of the message.
“A coup?” he said. “All this time we thought they had their hands full playing shell games with their nuke arsenal and it turns out they’re in the middle of trying to put down a coup?”
“Sure looks that way,” responded the officer working next to him. “From the sound of it, though, I think the whole coup thing more preemptive than prescriptive. They’re trying to nip it in the bud.”
“Yeah, I got that,” Tokaido said, scanning the translation of the intercept. “And you had to figure there’s been some amount of rumbling in the ranks. But still, the idea that somebody on the inside is gunning for Kim Jong-il puts a whole new light on things.”
“Amen,” the other man replied. “And if they start fighting over who gets to put their finger on the button for those nukes, look out.”
The remark gave Tokaido an idea. “Maybe we ought to run with that.”
“What do you mean?” the other man asked.
“We could try ghosting a response on this same frequency,” Tokaido explained. “Word it the right way and maybe we can get them to confirm whether they’ve got their nukes stashed in Changchon. It’d beat waiting for NSA to redirect their sat-cams back over the mountains.”
“Not a bad idea,” the other man said. “Let’s give it a shot.”
Tokaido rose from his chair and stretched, then started across the room. Before he could collar the radio team’s North Korean translator, however, he was distracted by a loud curse coming from Colonel Thomas Michaels, who’d been on the phone much of the time since returning with Tokaido from Panmunjom.
“Those freaking bastards!” Michaels yanked off his headset phone and pounded his fist on the table he was working at.
“What happened?” Tokaido asked, veering over to Michaels’ station.
“You don’t want to know.”
Tokaido instantly felt a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. “My cousin?”
Michaels nodded gravely. “They just called off the exchange.”
“What?” Tokaido said.
“They’re saying now they think he might be a spy.”
“What a crock! What makes them say that?”
“Beats me,” the colonel said. “And they cut off without setting up another time for doing the switch.”
“Were we able to trace the call?” Tokaido asked.
“It was scrambled, but we know it was a cell phone,” Michaels responded. “Same relay tower as the first call, but that’s all we’ve got to go on, and they’ve got at least a dozen different military installations within range of it.”
“Wait a minute,” Tokaido said. “That tower’s atop Changchon Peak, right?”
“Yeah. So what?”
“Then it should be able to act as a server connect for callers on both sides of the mountain range,” Tokaido theorized. “The ones we were looking at before were all on the south flank, facing the DMZ. At the time we didn’t know about this mining camp my people stumbled on.”
As he sorted through the haphazard heap of papers on his desk, Michaels said, “What, you think they’re holding your cousin in the same place where they’re hiding their nukes?”
“It’d make sense, don’t you think?” Tokaido said. “I mean, it’s secure, it’s out of the way—”
“And it’s within range of that relay tower,” Michaels interjected, glancing at the topo map he’d managed to track down amid his papers. “Maybe you’re on to something here, after all. The question is, what do we do about it?”