Suddenly Jiyeon walked out of a building to his right. She saw him, smiled and came over. She moved carefully like a cat. It emphasized her slim figure.
“You really like being at this base, huh?” Tom said.
“Yeah, Mr. Lee went back to the office but I met with some of the helicopter pilots here. I briefed them on North Korean naval activity. For when they fly you to the Virginia.”
The importance of that did not escape Tom. Despite the fact that North Korea was technologically backwards, they employed their navy often. In recent years, they launched a torpedo at a South Korean naval boat which killed a significant number of sailors. The year before a North Korean ship entered the South’s waters and started firing at a South Korean naval vessel. The South Korean ship returned fire and the North Korean boat was significantly damaged. A similar incident took place several years earlier. Rarely reported by American media, these incidents showed that the North Korean navy was looking to pick a fight, and if they saw an American helicopter flying low, it would be within their logical process to think to shoot it down. Whoever was flying Tom would have to be aware of potential ships.
“Let’s get dinner,” Tom said to Jiyeon.
She smiled. “OK. But I have to drop off my files at the office. What should we do?”
“I need to put my gear away and change anyway. Let’s meet in an hour.” Tom said, pointing to his rifle.
“OK. See you soon then.” It pleased Tom to look at her smile.
In the locker room Tom quickly put on BBC World News. They were reporting on the only story everyone was thinking about.
“North Korea released a video today of its troops preparing for war. North Korean soldiers were seen demonstrating their hand-to-hand combat skills and shouting war slogans in unison. A video was also shown of missile batteries being raised into a firing position. The regime released a statement saying ‘If the American puppet state dares to strike us, we will unleash a fiery response they cannot imagine. Our nuclear forces are on the highest alert and are prepared to smite all of America’s major cities with terrible destruction.’ South Korea meanwhile has called up its reservists and has moved several Marine units closer to the border. The United States is reported to have sent its B-2 bombers to the region. These are the planes that can carry nuclear bombs.”
Tom stared at the screen.
Why do they talk that way?
The martial arts demonstrations coming out of North Korean or Chinese militaries always amused him. Kicking and punching was useful in a small percent of hand-to-hand combat situations. The vast majority of fights end up with both fighters on the ground immediately. On the ground someone who knew Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu had a complete advantage. A Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner knew multiple chokes and submission locks to which a kicker or puncher had no idea how to respond. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu was a form of grappling or wrestling developed in Brazil originally from a form of Judo brought in by a Japanese immigrant. In the SEAL teams, Tom had learned Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to a level that gave him a distinct advantage in any potential hand-to-hand combat situation. He had practiced the Triangle choke so many times he thought he could perform it blindfolded. The Triangle was the classic move — if one was on his back and the opponent was on top, trying to punch or attack in some way, one could wrap a thigh around the neck and lock that leg’s foot with the other leg’s knee. At the same time one pulls in on attacker’s arm and locks it with the attackers head in the legs. The attacker ends up looking like he is raising his hand in school, with someone’s legs wrapped around his raised arm and neck. The triangle, named from the shape one’s legs made, constricts the carotid artery carrying blood to the brain. It makes the attacker pass out in less than a minute.
As Tom was stepping into the warm shower, he thought about what that video out of North Korea really showed. It showed a pure fanaticism. What drove people to that point? History had examples of fanaticism at this leveclass="underline" during World War II, both the SS and the Japanese soldiers demonstrated a similar fanatical indoctrination. Each ended up fighting to the death at a heavy cost to the allies. Could these North Koreans really believe in their regime in the same way? Tom knew he could not question their sincerity. He had to assume that once he entered that land of darkness, he would be in the midst of true believers.
Tom wondered if that copy of Heart of Darkness had arrived yet. He had memorized passages from it while in college. One piece stuck out in his mind at this moment:
“They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity — like yours — the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.”
There is only one thing worse than nobody believing in a cause, and that is everyone believing in it.
CHAPTER 10
Sara did not sleep well the night before. In her office, the pervading smell of coffee seemed to attach itself to everything in the room. She had turned into a state where her mind could not get over the message that she sent the previous day with Matt. She thought about it over and over, almost like a computer that catches a virus and starts performing the same task in a loop. She worried that Matt’s computer did have a virus and that someone could have figured out what they were doing with Tom. Matt had combed through his computer afterwards and said he could not find any malware installed, but that did not satisfy her. Something felt wrong.
In the world of traditional espionage, Sara knew you could never be completely sure whether you were the one carrying out the mission, or whether a mission was being carried out on you. It was confusing, but examples sometimes helped to make the concept clear. Double agents typically created these situations. In one of the most famous cases, the allies in World War II made the Germans believe that German agents had conducted a successful operation to determine where the allies were planning to land in Normandy. During Operation Fortitude, the allies placed inflatable objects that looked like tanks, trucks, and artillery guns onto English fields on the coast close to Calais. German agents in London confirmed that the allies planned to invade Calais. The Germans had believed that they conducted a successful intelligence mission and prepared themselves for an invasion in Calais. However, the real mission was performed on them, as the German agents in London were double agents. They were really working for the British, and their mission was to make the Germans believe that they had discovered where the landings would be. This fear of “being on the wrong side” of the mission pervaded many intelligence agencies. The description of spy operations during the Cold War as chess emanated from the endless quest to outmaneuver an unsuspecting enemy. During the Cold War, analysts were constantly asking themselves whether assets recruited were genuine, or whether they were double agents who were feeding you information to make you conduct an operation right into the hands of the opposing side. This Cold War game created a paranoia that could be felt in CIA headquarters. It was a place where one’s job was to be paranoid all day.
Sara knew that double agents were not the only source of this paranoia. Anytime the enemy found a way to get information from you, they could turn your mission around so that you were on that wrong side. And that paranoia was boiling inside Sara today. She had heard about Chinese military hacking groups. They were government-sponsored groups whose purpose was to hack the western world and get anything — classified information, asset names, technology blueprints, and commercial information. She had been to sessions where she along with the other analysts had learned the basics about them. But she was not responsible for rooting them out. There were other analysts in the CIA who did that — people who understood computer science, unlike her. Even within SAD, Matt understood computer science at a level where he should have been able to check whether they were being hacked, and he had said he could not find anything on their systems. But why did a Mandarin symbol appear when they sent that message to PACOM? Sara could not stop thinking that if the North Koreans found out what was about to happen, the mission would quickly turn around and be on Tom.