The CIA agents yanked the other border guard to the ground, wresting the AK-47 and pistol from him. The female agent turned around and fired the pistol, shooting General Adad’s bodyguards. The bearded agent stabbed the border guard in the ribs, driving the blade into his ribs until his eyes flared open in shock, while his will to fight slackened.
Taking a page out of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda playbook — when he dispatched a pair of assassins dressed as journalists to blow up the Afghan Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud two days before the 9/11 attacks — Alan Cuthbert and his fellow CIA operator moved in to secure the site.
A jeep rumbled up the road in a cloud of dust, cut across the flats toward them where the connector road had been designed. The female agent picked up the plans, while Agent Cuthbert pulled a quivering Ferdows off of Dong-Sun. With the cap blown off her head and her long hair disheveled, draping her stunned face, Cuthbert lifted the engineer to her feet as the jeep skidded to a halt. Waiting to see who was in the vehicle, the female agent frisked Dong-Sun’s backside. The agent felt the outline of a pistol tucked down the belt of her narrow waist, and pulled out a Browning automatic.
She clicked the safety off, gripped the pistol behind the swaying Dong-Sun, ready to fire. The engineer stood still, raising her hands. She looked back at Ferdows rolling over on his side feeling his clothes for the tablet. He found it under his shirt.
A burly Baathist colonel stepped out of the jeep in a Syrian army uniform. He bore a thick mustache and scanned the stunned and wounded in a dark gaze. He reached inside the cab and pulled out a shotgun, leaned his elbows on the hood, aiming the barrel at the agents. Alan Cuthbert glanced over to his colleague. Coming to an accord with just a look, he thrust his hands above his head as he approached the jeep. He and the colonel exchanged a few words in Arabic, when the agent stopped. The Baathist colonel lifted the rifle off the hood and aimed at Cuthbert’s chest. The colonel checked a birthmark on the agent’s left forearm, saying, “Cuthbert, yes. Confirmed,” and waved the female agent to bring Dong-Sun over.
With the wounded generals sprawled on the ground, writhing, moaning, immobilized, the colonel pushed the female agent aside, lifted the chin of Dong-Sun, and stared at her blank gaze.
He twisted her around, as Alan Cuthbert bound her wrists behind her back with snap-ties. The female CIA agent pulled the North Korean engineer around the other side of the jeep, and dumped her in the backseat.
Chapter Twenty-Six
At the border, the CIA agents abandoned the jeep, stuck in a berm.
They whisked Kim Dong-Sun with the ex-Saddam loyalist over the border. The Baathist colonel, a mole buried deep in Syria’s civil war, was the reason why the CIA was able to pull off the brazen daylight kidnapping. A battery of Iraqi Army soldiers and policemen applauded the capture. Behind the cordon, a quad of American military officials waited to bring the North Korean engineer inside for low-intensity interrogation.
Dong-Sun scanned the dark-skinned faces of the Iraqis, then saw the pale American officers pulling back, opening a side door of Fort 24, a tan brick and bitumen building perched on an arid hill. An array of radio antennas pointed to the sky. Fort 24 had survived the Syrian civil war and the area of what ISIS once claimed in erasing the border between Iraq and Syria.
Inside a small room with no mirrors or windows, the CIA agents dumped the North Korean in a chair, cut the plastic ties off her wrists, and pushed her seat up to a wood table with a glass of water on top. Dong-Sun finger-combed her hair out of her dusty face, took a sip of water, and studied the faces of Alan Cuthbert, the blonde female agent, then eyed a scruffy US Marine sergeant sitting between them. A fourth person entered the room. He was a short nerd dressed in civvis. He, she knew, was an interpreter on the surface, a CIA agent under the guise of a contractor specialist.
Kim Dong-Sun shook her head. She reached across the table and took a pen and pad from the female agent, then began to scrawl in English a request and then drew a man with a beard.
The note read: Let me speak to the man alone. Turn off the cameras to the room.
Dong-Sun slid the note across the table to Alan Cuthbert, who read it. He smirked and slid the note over to the female agent, who motioned everyone to step outside.
Cuthbert closed the door behind her, signaled to the camera in the corner of the ceiling to shut off, then sat down with the laptop and his smartphone, making sure they were recording their conversation. He then rolled out the blueprint of the missile launch site and stared at Dong-Sun, as if the engineer, based on a hard look, would divulge state secrets and plans in a second.
“Kimchi, you don’t need an interpreter to talk to me. So tell me what these plans mean,” he said, flicking grains of sand out of his beard. “You’re a pretty good marksman for a woman.”
Dong-Sun picked up on the racial slur and gender slight and frowned at the burly CIA agent. Sitting still like Buddha, Dong-Sun stared at Cuthbert, who lasered a death stare back.
“What the hell? Why won’t you talk?”
“Are we live with your bosses?” she said in a thick Korean accent, tapping the laptop.
Alan Cuthbert nodded, saying, “Sure. We have an open live feed to CIA’s Sixth Floor Operations Center, with the CIA director and his team. They watched the kidnapping unfold live.” He then spoke to the laptop, announcing, “Director, this is Baghdad station chief at Fort 24 border crossing. We’re in possession of North Korean ballistic missile engineer, Kim Dong-Sun.” He wouldn’t state his real or any other name in front of her.
Dong-Sun managed a razor-thin grin. She took a sip of water, and — slammed the glass down on Cuthbert’s fingers. He yelled, grabbing his hand in pain. She lunged across the table, chopped the off-balance agent across the forehead and pushed him to the floor, rolled over the table and locked the steel door, putting a chair against the doorknob. She smashed the glass, took a jagged shard and hovered it over Cuthbert, motioning him to stay on the floor. The engineer then spun the laptop toward her as guards banged on the door, trying to break into the room.
She showed her face and spoke into the laptop mic in American English: “This is CIA Agent Jenny Myung King of SOG Clandestine Services. Hi, Director, I can see you…” Jenny King eyed the shocked and speechless Alan Cuthbert still on the floor. She repeated her name, her senior CIA officer rank and pay level of GS-15, and then revealed the top-secret code name of the missile site Special Ops mission she was involved in: “Operation Sandblast Scree.”
She ripped off her North Korean army tunic, tossed it on the floor, shouting, “Your field morons have blown my cover.” She banged her fist on the door, yelling, “Wait. Stop the noise. Wait a minute.” As Cuthbert climbed off the ground, signaling to the camera that he was “okay,” Jenny spoke to the laptop: “They have ruined nine months of deep surveillance. They have blown my clandestine op. They have wasted thousands of man-hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars paying off local assets. Now let me bring the Langley ass-clowns of Red Cell up to speed… I already kidnapped the real Dong-Sun thirty-six hours ago. The person you need to interrogate is Syrian General Adad and the Iranian nuclear scientist Ferdows. But your pack mules left them in the desert. Isn’t that right, Alan Cuthbert?”
Agent Jenny King turned away and sat on the edge of the table, burying her face in her hands to absorb her frustration. She looked up at the ceiling, shouting, “God, you guys suck.”