“Not much chance of that. I don’t take too kindly to strangers on my land.”
“Well, we don’t need any confrontations, Mister Farragut. If you’ve told no one that we’re here, then we can expect to be left alone during the shoot.”
He placed his cap back on his head, stepped back and left his guests alone to discuss business. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a packet of chewing tobacco and then jammed a big wad of chew into his mouth. Farragut tasted the mix of apple and tobacco on his tongue. A few second later, he spat out a mouthful of brown spit onto the rocky floor. Farragut stood there, watching some of the Korean laborers install a heavy metal chain under the derrick. He wondered what they were up to but decided that like everything else it really was none of his business. He had a bottle of bourbon waiting for him in his living room. With his sudden change of good fortune, Farragut couldn’t wait to get what was coming to him.
32
A thin sliver of light crept up on the horizon as night gave way to the coming dawn. A cool fog hung over the low ground, blanketing it.
On the tarmac outside of the main complex building, a blood-red Augusta Westland AW-139 helicopter sat with its engine running, its rotors nosily cutting through the air.
Gabriel Cypher walked to the waiting helicopter, dressed in a dark gray, one hundred thousand dollar Alexander Amosu suit, hand tailored for him during his last visit to London. As was his style, he wore highly polished Italian-leather shoes on his feet. With his head held high, he moved as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
Lagging a few meters behind was Colonel Hwan with a tired and bitter expression on his face. An hour ago, his blood-soaked suit had been taken from him and burnt. Wearing a set of borrowed dark gray coveralls, Hwan felt out of place and humiliated to be wearing common work clothes. He was a senior officer in the North Korean Army, not some fool who could be pushed around. Hwan hadn’t been told why they were leaving or where they were going, only that he had five minutes to meet Cypher outside the hangar, or he would be left behind.
Cypher calmly walked under the racing propeller blades and then made his way into the co-pilot’s seat.
The side door slid open. Hwan, mumbling to himself, climbed inside the back of the helicopter. He was stunned. Instead of the bland, utilitarian interior of a military helicopter, the back of the AW-139 was as luxurious as the first-class seating on board a commercial airline. There were four plush, tan-leather seats inside, all facing into the middle of the chopper. The floor was carpeted, and light-brown wood paneling lined the walls.
Atsuko Satomi was already seated; in her lap was an open laptop. She was wearing a black suit with a white, open-necked shirt. Without looking up from her computer, Atsuko motioned for Hwan to take the seat beside her.
Hwan buckled himself in. A technician hopped aboard, checked that they were secure, and then handed them both a headset before climbing out of the chopper, slamming the door closed. The loud noise from outside diminished.
“Good to go back there?” said Cypher.
“Yes,” replied Atsuko.
A second later, the pilot revved the engine. Smoothly, the helicopter climbed up into the morning sky.
Hwan watched out the window as the helicopter circled the complex a couple of times before stopping to look down at the factory from a height of two thousand meters in the sky. Hwan was mystified. He had no idea what was going on. Continually kept out of the loop by the people he was working with was not how he liked to be treated.
With a slight nudge from her elbow, Atsuko got Hwan’s attention. He turned his head and looked over at the screen on Atsuko’s laptop. He could see the factory complex.
“Colonel Hwan, can you see the factory on Atsuko’s screen?” asked Cypher in Hwan’s headset.
“Yes, I can,” replied Hwan.
“Good, the image you see is coming from a camera mounted on the underside of the helicopter. Please pay close attention to the complex.”
Hwan leaned forward, intently examining the image on the screen, when the ground around the complex seemed to heave upward and then, like a pebble thrown into a calm lake, the ground began to ripple outward. The buildings collapsed or were torn to pieces as the deadly wave raced away from the center of the complex. Nothing in its way could withstand the onrushing wall of rock and debris as it surged ever outward. Within seconds, the entire factory had disappeared from view, lost in a monstrous swirling cloud of dust and smoke.
Hwan felt the helicopter rise farther into the sky as it distanced itself from the destruction now racing across the desert floor. After about a kilometer, the wave began to slow and then dissipate as if it had never been there at all. Horrified, he was unable to take his eyes off the scene of devastation below him. Hwan thought it looked like an underground nuclear test blast, but Cypher had been building a different kind of bomb for him.
The helicopter flew over the ground where the complex had stood barely a minute ago. As the wind began to push the dust cloud south, Hwan couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw that the factory had completely disappeared. There was nothing there but a crater in the ground. In the blink of an eye, the factory and everyone who worked in it had been destroyed.
“What did you do?” mumbled Hwan.
“That, Colonel Hwan, was the field test of your new weapon. Instead of aiming its tectonic energy at a target in the distance, I simply had the device focus its destructive power underneath my factory. I needed to eliminate any trace of what had been going on,” explained Cypher as if he were talking about the weather.
“Your people… you killed all of your people. Why?”
“There can be no witnesses. The Mongolian Army failed to trap the saboteurs, so I decided to adjust the timetable for testing the device to today. If the police had managed to get their hands on just one of my scientists, they could have learned what we were up to, and I’m sure General Pak never wanted that. Now did he?”
“No,” replied Hwan, mournfully shaking his head.
“Now, Colonel, sit back and enjoy the ride to the capital, where we will board a plane for the States.”
“You have the other devices with you?”
“No, of course not. I had them flown to the States days ago.”
Hwan sat back. His jaw was clenched so tight that it hurt. Inside, he was seething in anger. Cypher was making decisions by himself that could jeopardize their entire operation. It had taken years to painstakingly plan and execute Long Sword. Hwan would be damned if it failed all because some fool was playing God with the lives of everyone around him.
33
To Mitchell, the past twelve hours had been a frantic blur of activity. After linking up with Yuri’s Chinese contact, they had all flown to Sapporo, Japan, where a representative from the Satomi Corporation met the plane. After taking personal responsibility to look after Sam and Cardinal, the man quickly arranged for Cardinal to be seen at the nearest hospital, while he worked with the Canadian and U.S. Embassies to arrange for new passports for both Sam and Cardinal, so they could travel home as soon as Cardinal was fit enough to leave the hospital.
In a secluded office of a business tower in downtown Sapporo, in a room belonging to the Satomi Corporation, Mitchell, Jackson, and Yuri sat drinking copious amounts of coffee and wolfing down a plate of sandwiches while they teleconferenced with General O’Reilly, Mike Donaldson, and — to Mitchell’s pleasant surprise — Jen March. Mitchell went first and briefed O’Reilly on everything that had happened at Cypher’s factory in Mongolia. No one back home seemed surprised when he told them that Atsuko Satomi had been at the factory and was definitely part of whatever Cypher was planning.