This only added to the general’s sense of urgency. He was still glaring at the hapless Russian. “Do you understand—”
More freight-train-like rushes came shuffling through the pristine air, the rounds exploding with a roar which, though muffled by the snow, nevertheless was still deafening, and left the general’s ears ringing.
“Stand up!” Freeman ordered them. “You know why I asked you to stand?”
The smaller of the two whey-faced prisoners looked imploringly at his English-speaking partner. What was going on?
“You want us to stand,” said the English speaker. “We stand.”
“You’re standing,” Freeman told them, “because I do not shoot men when they are sitting. You understand that, you terrorist turd?”
It was clear to Chester that while the Russian didn’t cotton on to every word, he understood readily enough and was terrified.
“Now, you told us you came from the H-block, from the building, but you know nothing about the building. Correct?”
The Russian nodded, his Adam’s apple bobbing nervously. “Correct, Admiral.”
Chester bit his lip to stop himself from smiling. He could see that the Russian was far too terrified to even try making a joke.
“I am a general,” Freeman told them unsmilingly. “And you have murdered thousands of innocent men, women, and children.”
The English-speaking Russian found voice to tell his comrade what had transpired.
“Nyet, nyet!” the Russian speaker was repeating.
“Da!” retorted Freeman, with such resounding authority both men fell silent. He fixed his stare on the English speaker. “Your name?”
“My name?”
“Yes, goddammit. Your name!”
“Ilya. My comrade’s name is Boris.”
“Ilya, you and your comrade know more about ABC’s setup than you’ve told us.”
Ilya was shaking his head as vigorously as Boris had. “We have not been inside much. I swear on mother’s grave.”
It was never good practice to talk too much to prisoners, Freeman knew. Their names and conversation lent humanity to their otherwise sullen or scared faces. But Freeman, as Colonel Tibbet had told his marines, kept in mind the sight of the seemingly endless funeral processions after the terrorist attacks on America since 9/11, and the bravery of the victims, the people on Flight 93 and the scientist at DARPA ALPHA with “RAM” and “SCARUND” written on the note in his hand.
“You steal our plans,” said Freeman, slowly and deliberately, ignoring the cacophony of battle just a mile south and west of him down by the rail line, “then sell them to other terrorists who kill our children. You help them. You are as guilty as they are. You’re not prisoners of war, you’re opportunists, outlawed by your own people in Moscow. You’re co-murderers. Terrorists!”
The Russian prisoners didn’t understand “co,” but “murderers” and “terrorists” they did understand, and now looked grim in addition to being scared. They didn’t whimper. They were, after all, opportunists who had been trained as soldiers. Outlawed by their country as terrorists, regular soldiers turned bad, and they’d been told by Abramov, Beria, and Cherkashin to expect no mercy from Moscow or the “American interventionists” if they were caught. They had crossed the line, becoming fantastically wealthy by Russian standards, their MANPAD bonuses alone catapulting their lifestyle into another world, way above that of the average Russian.
“Koreans,” burst out Ilya. “We are not only people involved. Koreans are helping.”
Freeman was nonplussed. He could hear more incoming. What was this Ilya telling him about Koreans? “Tell me more,” Freeman urged.
The other Russian, Boris, couldn’t conceal his surprise at Ilya having mentioned the Koreans, who Freeman quickly surmised must be either one of ABC’s best customers — or joint manufacturers?
“Tell me more,” Freeman pressed.
“Nyet!” cautioned Boris, and Freeman shot him dead, Ilya jumping sideways in fright.
“Holy shit!” It was the Hummer corporal.
“Be quiet!” ordered Freeman, and turned the gun on Ilya. “Tell me about the Koreans. Quickly!”
Ilya’s hands shot up in mute surrender, the body of his dead comrade spread-eagled in the scant snowfall that had penetrated the thick branches of the fir tree like clumps of icing sugar on the dead man’s chest, his eyes wide open, his expression grotesque, as if his dentist had just asked him to open wide.
Ilya was trembling. “Believe me, Admiral, I have not much been in ABC. It is not a lie.”
“What about the Koreans, dammit?!”
“They are—” He couldn’t think of the word.
“General.” It had taken a lot of guts for the marine corporal to speak after being expressly told by Freeman not to, but the sound of the armor was getting closer.
“What?”
“Tank, sir. Getting closer. Can’t see ’em yet in the fog, but—”
“Then go find them and take them out. Do your job, man.”
“Yessir.” The corporal’s right hand circled in a “rev up” motion and the other two marines, who’d given the white overalls they’d taken from the dead Russians to two of the four fire team marines, jumped back into the Hummer, Chester telling Melissa Thomas to join them. The corporal called back to the fire team. “There’ll probably be infantry behind this fucker when we see it, so you boys be ready to give us an assist when we nose out of these trees to fire.”
“You’ve got it, Corp.”
Ilya was perspiring, babbling something, but neither Freeman nor Johnny Lee could understand him, the Russian in such a state of emotional turmoil that words wouldn’t come to him, and so he made as if he was shoveling.
“That better not be bullshit,” the general snapped without a trace of humor, never more serious in his life. “What do you mean? Trenches?”
Ilya was in a frantic charade, and he, like Freeman, had never been more serious in his life.
“Don’t try to think of the word,” Lee told Ilya. “It’ll only go farther away.” But apparently the thought of what the admiral would do to him if he didn’t make it clear only heightened the prisoner’s anxiety in his search for the English word. In desperation, he ceased his shoveling motion, and instead gave Lee the word in Russian. “Fonar.”
“Flashlight?” said Lee.
“Da!” said Ilya, making as if he was walking through a—
“Tunnel!” said Freeman.
“Da! Tunnels! Yes, Admiral. Tunnels.”
“How many?”
“Three.”
“Incoming!” warned Aussie. A tremendous crash of steel ripping into timber followed. Everyone was down for cover except Freeman, grabbing Ilya by the lapel. “Where are the tunnels? Mother of—” He remembered the vapor coming from the high ground, vapor that had no smell. Heating vents! ABC’s weapons were being made underground!
Freeman pointed his H K 9 mm sidearm down at the ground. “Down there, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Entrances?” Freeman asked next. “Johnny, ask him if there’s one entrance, two, how many? An entrance for each tunnel?”
Ilya, realizing that information was his only salvation, was now speaking at such a rate that Lee had to slow him down.
“He says that for security reasons there’s only one main entrance for all three tunnels, and this is deep under the H-block, under the administration offices.”
“Is it North Koreans who are building the tunnels?” Freeman asked.
“Da, General.” With Boris supine beside him in the snow, Ilya was suddenly a gold mine of information. The gist of what he was saying was that the North Korean Communists who, as Freeman and anyone with even a passing acquaintance with North Korea knew, had watched American air supremacy over Korea in awe during the war of 1950–53, had also realized that in future wars, the only way for industry of any kind to survive American air-power would be to do as their North Vietnamese comrades had done in Cu Chi, that is, to burrow underground, deep underground, so deep that their military garrisons and factories couldn’t be penetrated by the American bunker-busters that had laid waste to Saddam Insane’s regime. What Ilya was also explaining was that in exchange for desperately needed foreign currency, the North Koreans’ tunnelers extraordinaire had been engaged by ABC to do the dirty “hard yakka” labor, as Aussie would have called it, of burrowing deep into one of the rock spars that speared out into the marshes from the base of the nearby Zapadnyy Siniy Mountains, the deep missile assembly and storage plant located ninety feet underground and heated by harnessing the hot spring conduits that vented in and about Lake Khanka’s marshes.