In watching her drain the juices out of the lemon, Ferdows made a sour face. He and his countrymen recoiled at the uncouth Korean.
“Look at them. They are backpack reporters,” she said in Korean. “American debt is so big, TV news can’t pay production crew wages.” She noticed their hawklike stares, spat out the next lemon quarter and, using her hands to hold an imaginary firehose between her legs, she shouted at the Syrian guards in Korean: “You stand like fat elephants, holding your guns like trunks. Are you fat and slow like elephants?”
Not understanding a single word she said, the guards glanced over to the fiery Korean colonel, while trying to keep an eye on the captives. Kim directed the translator to translate what she said. He winced and shook his head pleading not to. “Translate,” she shrieked. He started to translate her words and the generals looked back at her in shock as she crudely dressed down Adad’s guards.
Fed up with all the masculine eyes glaring at her, as if she were the one who held the Kalashnikovs like a limp garden hose, Dong-Sun motioned General Adad that she would demonstrate for his guards how they should stand and aim the rifles. Curious to see what she would do next, Adad motioned the nearest guard. The soldier looked at the general in dismay.
Kim Dong-Sun stepped over, tapped the guard’s elbow, lifted the rifle to his shoulder, sat it on his meaty upper arm, and tilted his head down. She tried to angle his big frame sideways, but he refused to budge. So she stepped behind him, looked at his large butt, and remarked, “Do all Syrian cows have fat tails?”
The translator was appalled. But Dong-Sun didn’t wait for him to speak. She kicked the guard in the back of his leg, forcing him down on one knee. She pulled his shoulder back and yanked his torso sideways. His stance and aim were still poor, out of line. So she snatched the rifle from the other guard, shouting, “Watch. Learn.”
With deliberate, robotic movements, Dong-Sun stood sideways, sucked in her gut as if she had the fat man’s belly, saying, “Make your body thin, like blade of grass.” She dropped to one knee, put the rifle on her shoulder, pressed the stock snug to her cheekbone, eyed the sight at the tip of the rifle, aimed it at an imaginary target in front of the captives, and then fired a shot that blew a spray of sand at the boots of the captive bearded man.
He flinched, wiping grains of sand dust off his beard and out of his eyes. The woman stopped to help him, but the border guard yanked her away, goading her on without her colleague. The other border guard swore in Arabic, wondering what the errant shot was all about.
General Adad, together with his generals, waved their hands, shouting that it was okay, that the crazy Korean engineer was a woman learning how to shoot.
Without knowing what he said, Dong-Sun stood up, ignored the bellowing men, handed the rifle back to the other guard, and then circled around the kneeling one, squeezed his shoulder, and straightened his aim. “Go, now. Fire,” she yelled. But he didn’t shoot. “Fire. All clear,” she repeated. Still, he hesitated. So she tapped his elbow; he recoiled a shot over the heads of the captives, who ducked alongside the now-angry border guards.
The kneeling guard threw the assault rifle on the ground in frustration. She picked it up, stood sideways, reed-thin, and walked the guard through the steps from holding her form to steadying the rifle, and aimed the sight beyond the target.
The brooding General Adad watched the engineer with dark amusement.
The swirl of speculation blew up like desert sand in the tense Sixth Floor Ops Center. The CIA director and his team viewed the covert meeting between Syrian and North Korean scientists. The satellite image showed the minutest of details, from the time on General Adad’s black Movado watch to the chevron stripes on Colonel Kim Dong-Sun’s army uniform.
“There they are—” the CIA director shouted, unable to contain his anxiousness over the operation going south. He pointed to the border guards goading the CIA agents, dressed as journalists, to the Syrian generals. “Looks like world heritage day, minus the UN blue helmets and ISIS desert fighters,” he remarked. He took a breath, adding, “We have Koreans, Syrians, Americans… Hell, we probably have an Iranian nuke engineer planted somewhere in there.”
At 0400 zulu, the thumb-tapping CIA director stood with his team of intel specialists and directors. His fatigued, bleary-eyed minions had worked overtime late into the next day, driven by fear that the hot Syrian dirty material would find a way to be shipped out of the war-ravaged country, despite the CIA and Pentagon retasking more than a dozen drones to scour the Syrian borders and battlefields to pick up the infrared trail of plutonium, uranium, or some type of gas agent.
The team had been driven into the ground, analyzing the swatches of electronic NSA-eavesdropped files, and CIA back channel HUMINT with file after file on suspected militants and Islamic State terrorists devouring the bulk of their time and resources. The Syria-Iran-Yemen AQAP connections dominated the new Red Cell analysis. But the CIA director had a sinking feeling that the hot load was headed to or had already made it across the border. If that were the case, then there would be little hope to intercept it until it reached its target destination.
“What’s she doing?” the deputy director of operations asked.
Dong-Sun took the rifle from the guard, demonstrated how to control breathing to calm the body, release tension, and relax the brain’s alpha waves, while focusing her mind on the singular task at hand. In a standing position, she aimed the rifle and fired a volley that clipped one of the cameras dangling by the Syrian border guard’s side. With a burst of the lens, the agents hit the ground covering their heads; the guard jumped back shaking.
“Jesus Christ, that was close. Is she training Adad’s men how to shoot?” the CIA director yelled, the artery in his neck rippling. Mad as hell, he turned to Red Cell analysts: “Did one of you damn ants find anything on Ms. North Korea being an expert marksman?” The analysts froze. They didn’t utter a word; another pair stared down at the table. “Hell, Ms. North Korea is a rifle specialist first, and a missile engineer second, and we don’t know this? That’s nuts.”
As the SAD director flipped through the pages of Dong-Sun’s dossier, the director of clandestine services stepped over to the CIA director and whispered in his ear. With his index finger, the CIA director motioned to contact the Signal Command at Fort Meade to arm the Hellfire missile on the drone hovering over the Syrian desert. All hell was about to break loose.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Furious by the brazen shot, General Adad leaned into Dong-Sun’s face swearing in Arabic. She handed the AK-47 back to the guard and covered her mouth and nose from the odor of the general’s bad breath. He could have used her lemon to cleanse his palette. He blinked more rapidly as his voice and blood pressure rose. Wary that his temper was about to erupt, she eyed the border guards pulling the Americans to their feet and pushing them onward.
Ferdows took the blueprints from General Adad’s hand, as the border guard with the confiscated cameras signaled the Americans to stay put. He strode quickly, glancing back at the hostages. Dong-Sun watched the bearded American pull a small object, like a pen, out of his shirtsleeve. Sensing danger, she stepped behind Ferdows and General Adad to use them as human shields. She didn’t want to die in war-torn Syria.
With a click of the pen a starburst grenade, hidden inside a camera, exploded in a percussion blast, instantly killing the Syrian soldier. The shock wave radiated out, knocking over the generals, Adad and Ferdows, back on top of diminutive Dong-Sun. The generals, closest to the border guard’s motionless body, writhed in pain, covering their ears as blood seeped out.