“She’s sleeping now. Come back tomorrow afternoon and then perhaps you can see her.”
“Thanks for everything, doc,” said Jackson, energetically pumping the man’s hand. “I’ll tell her parents the good news the instant they arrive.”
“I’m on call, so just have me paged, and I’ll come and give them a more detailed report on their daughter,” said the doctor as he stepped out of the room.
Jackson turned and saw Mitchell sitting in his chair with a solemn look on his face. He dug out his phone and handed it to him. “Give Jen a call, I’m sure she’ll want to hear from you,” said Nate with a wink.
He smiled, took the phone and dialed his home number. Almost right away, Jen answered. Hearing her voice was more than enough to raise his battered spirits. He turned to look over at Jackson and saw him sitting there with a grin from ear to ear. Waving a thanks to his friend, he sat down in a quiet corner of the waiting room, let out a deep sigh, and then spoke to the woman he wanted to see more than anything in the world.
11
The dark green train raced north along the darkened track, heading from Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, toward the Chinese border. It was one of three trains using the line that night. The first raced ahead to ensure that the track was safe to use. The second train was Kim Rak-Hui’s, the Supreme Leader of North Korea, while a third train followed behind, filled with additional administrative and communications staff. To prevent sabotage, the trains were evenly spaced out thirty minutes apart. The center train containing the Supreme Leader was heavily armored and could withstand the blast of any known hand-held anti-tank weapon. Inside, it had a platoon of North Korean Special Forces soldiers to protect the Supreme Leader. Each train car was luxuriously designed, with wall-mounted televisions, well-stocked bars and only the freshest food. The communications car in the middle of the train had all the latest in satellite telephone and computer equipment, allowing Kim to give orders to his armed forces no matter where he was. North Korea’s people might live in abject poverty, but the Supreme Leader, like his father and his father before him, lived in opulent decadence that few ordinary North Koreans could barely imagine even existed.
Kim sat alone in his darkened private car, watching a recently acquired, black-market Japanese pornographic film. In his hand was a brandy snifter filled with Hennessey cognac. His taste for the finer things in life came from his father, but at the same time, he’d realized that his circumstances could change in a heartbeat. As such, Kim had long ago quietly begun stashing money away in several Swiss bank accounts. To date, he had moved over five billion dollars of hard currency out of North Korea… just in case he needed it.
A knock at the door made Kim glance away from the screen with an annoyed look on his round face. He had told his personal secretary that he did not want to be bothered. Someone was going to regret this interruption. Setting his snifter down, Kim stopped the movie and then stood.
“Yes. What do you want?” he called out, not bothering to mask his irritation.
The door opened. A young North Korean Army major stood at the entrance to the room. No one stepped inside without the Supreme Leader’s permission, to do so was to risk death. “Sir, there is an urgent message for you in the communications car,” said the major, without making eye contact with Kim, another thing that was punishable by death. Since the recent purge of family members and old-guard generals, the military was naturally nervous. Nobody knew who was going to be next.
“Who is it from?” asked Kim.
“Sir, it is from the Chief of the General Staff, General Kim Kyung-gu,” replied the major.
“Is it important?”
“Sir, I was told the message is top secret, your eyes only,”
He let out a bored sigh and waved at the officer to lead on. He could come back to his movie as soon as he had dealt with the annoying communiqué. Outside of the door stood two tough-looking bodyguards who quietly fell in line, one in front, and one behind, the Supreme Leader. A minute later, the door to the communications car opened. The men and women working inside bolted out of their seats and stood rigidly at attention. Paying them no heed, Kim walked over to the computer console solely dedicated for communication between himself and the Chief of the General Staff. Kim was a self-proclaimed Marshal in the armed forces, but the real leader of the nation’s defense was General Kim Kyung-gu, a wily septuagenarian who had outlived the many purges that had taken away his competitors over the years. Sitting down, Kim typed in his personal password and waited for the message to appear. A second later, the image of a starving child sitting in its own filth appeared on the screen.
“What is the meaning of this?” screamed Kim as he stood and pointed down at the computer screen, his whole body shaking with anger.
The young major dashed over and looked down at the screen just as the image changed to that of a mass grave somewhere in the countryside. Dozens of emaciated bodies were being bulldozed into a large open pit already filled with hundreds of corpses.
“Are you responsible for this abomination?” demanded Kim, staring at the major, his eyes aflame.
“No… no, sir,” blurted out the major. Fear gripped the man as he looked over at the Supreme Leader. No matter what he said, he knew that he was soon going to die a horrible death.
In the dark, waiting behind a small, wood-covered hill, three heavily armed Mi-24 attack helicopters hovered just above the ground, waiting for the order to attack. They looked more like mythical Asian dragons than the sleeker and more modern helicopters in the West, but with numerous machine guns, Gatling guns and anti-tank missiles, these helicopters were robust killing machines. A sharp-eyed lieutenant colonel, whose parents had died of starvation three years ago, piloted the center helicopter. In fact, all of the men involved had lost loved ones to starvation over the past decade.
Looking out of the bulbous canopy, the helicopter pilot saw that the world was bathed in green. The lieutenant colonel adjusted the brightness on his night-vision goggles and then looked over at his wingmen, both hovering beside him in the air. His headset crackled. A moment later the code word was given. Slowly increasing power to the attack helicopter’s powerful engine, the lieutenant colonel’s chopper rose up over the top of the hill. Beneath him, moving along the tracks was the Supreme Leader’s train. Like beasts rising from the pits of hell, the two other choppers joined the first.
“Lock everything you have on the third train car. It’s the communications carriage. That’s where our target will be,” said the lieutenant colonel, his voice as cold as glacial ice to the weapons operator sitting in front of him.
Red lights on the wall of the communications carriage began to flash on and off.
“Sir, someone has a missile lock on us!” yelled out an army captain, looking down at the warning indicator on his computer screen.
As one, every head in the carriage turned to look at the captain as he reached over and pressed a large black button on his desk. Outside of the train, hundreds of phosphorescent flares fixed atop the train streaked up into the night, creating a heat signature large enough to draw off some of the incoming missiles away from the train and onto the brightly burning flares.
“What the hell is going on?” screamed Kim as more warning indicators came to life inside the train.
A second later, two of the three missiles fired from the lieutenant colonel’s helicopter struck the communications carriage, ripping it in two. In a blinding flash, shrapnel and flames from the dual impacts flew inside the carriage, killing everyone. Kim died, torn in half by a piece of jagged shrapnel the size of a car’s hubcap. Pivoting in the air, the attack helicopters unleashed their nose mounted Gatling guns loose on the train. Tracers flew through the dark as the 12.7mm bullets tore into the train. For close to twenty seconds, the helicopters raked the train from end to end with their guns. Empty casings steamed down from the night sky like some kind of macabre metal rain. With a loud, protesting screech, the train’s engine, its engineer dead, slid off the track, pulling the remainder of the train with it. With a sickening crunch, the train’s carriages quickly piled on top of one another as the train compacted in upon itself. No one inside should have been able to survive, but just to make sure that there were no survivors, a company of handpicked Special Forces soldiers emerged, like ghosts, from a nearby train tunnel and got to work. Within minutes, they were swarming all over the wreckage. No mercy was given to the injured trapped inside the shattered wreckage. Their orders were clear… there could be no one left alive to tell what had happened.