Myn was surprised to hear from Park, and, once he’d confirmed that he was still with MII, he was equally taken aback when Park told him why he’d called.
“Slow down, Yo-Wi,” the agent told Park. “Did I hear you correctly? Oh Chol is your uncle?”
“Yes!” Park exclaimed. “And I think he’s been murdered by some of the people I work for.”
There was a moment of silence on the other line, then Myn told Park, “Tell me exactly what happened.”
Park trusted Myn and told him everything, not just about the aborted phone call, but also about his earlier conversation with Oh in which they’d discussed Major Jin. Once he’d spelled it all out, Myn was briefly silent again. When he finally replied, the tone in his voice was every bit as urgent as Park’s.
“Listen to me, very carefully,” Myn said. Without mentioning Operation Guillotine or divulging any more details than necessary, the agent told Park that MII was already investigating Major Jin as well as other officials at the Changchon facilities. He said that just today an undercover agent had been sent to Changchon to gather more information.
“We’ve received a preliminary report from him that has raised more questions than it answers,” he concluded. “There’s something very wrong going on there and, from the sounds of it, your uncle got caught up in the middle of it.”
“I knew it!” Park said, pounding his fist on the desk. “I should have—”
“Wait!” Myn interrupted. “I haven’t finished. Yo-Wi, you need to understand something. From what you’ve told me, I have reason to believe that you could be in danger. I’ll do what I can to help get to the bottom of all this, but it will take time, I’m afraid. Until then, you need to watch your back. Is that clear?”
Park sagged into his drafting chair. “What am I supposed to do?” he said.
“Are you in a safe place?”
“I’m in my office inside the launch facility,” Park replied. “I don’t know where else I could go.”
“Do you have a gun with you?”
Park felt ill. “No.”
Park could hear the other man sigh before he went on. “Just stay put, then. Turn your lights off and pretend you’re asleep. I’ll do what I can.”
Myn gave Park other instructions—to lock his door, leave his cell phone on, to find something to arm himself with—but the contractor barely heard what the other man was saying. By the time he finished the call and hung up, his head was spinning and he felt a wave of nausea pass over him. He doubled over and waited for the sensation to pass, then slowly sat back up. There on the drafting table in front of him were preliminary sketches he’d been working on for a home he’d hoped to build for himself one day. It was a modest structure, with studio space as well as extra bedrooms. A family home, one he’d envisioned settling into a few years from now, after he’d found the right woman and gotten married. When he’d worked on the sketches late the previous night, he’d been humming to himself, filled with optimism about his future. Now, less than twenty-four hours later, he found himself plunged into a nightmare.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
“Well, it’s a good news-bad news thing,” Aaron Kurtzman told Hal Brognola and Barbara Price once he started pulling in feeds from the NSA sam-cams that had been redeployed over the Changchon Mountain Range. “These clouds that have rolled in will help with the insertions, but they’re putting a crimp on the eyes in the sky.”
“I can see that,” Price said, glancing over Kurtzman’s shoulder at the image on his computer screen. All she could see through the clouds were a few snippets of mountainside.
“I should have some infrared readings in a while at least,” Kurtzman explained. “Hopefully that’ll give us some idea of how the place checks out in terms of nukes.”
“Are you sure?” Brognola interjected. “If they’re just storing the missiles there, their payloads will be sealed up enough to avoid detection, right?”
“Good point,” Kurtzman conceded. “If we’re lucky, though, they might have some sort of testing facility that would give off a reading.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Price said. “Outside of Mack finally neutralizing that REDI crew, our luck on this front has been running a bit on the cold side.”
“Still, keep working on it,” Brognola said. “Maybe our luck will start turning.”
Brognola and Price left Kurtzman and moved on to Akira Tokaido’s station, where Kissinger was still hard at work helping the cyber crew monitor the North Korean crisis. The redeployment of satellites was only part of the strategy the U.S. had resorted to over the past few hours. Along with the plan to insert special ops teams across the DMZ, the U.S. Navy had rerouted two aircraft carriers toward the Korean Peninsula, and, Kissinger reported that the Air Force was readying a minisquadron of F-111F fighter jets for use if matters escalated to the point where it might be deemed necessary to attack the suspected mountain base with GBU-28 bunker busters.