Adam decided to take a chance today. He told his shift supervisor he needed to run some diagnostics on his machine’s computer and, no, it could not wait another day, because if the machine needed physical repair he had to do it now in the downtime. His shift supervisor talked with the floor manager, and it was agreed that Adam’s entire section would get twenty minutes of generator power so he could use his computer.
The truth was, Adam just wanted the opportunity to check for any messages from the Acrid Herald ops center.
When the lights came up on his floor he was already waiting at his terminal. He fired up his computer, made certain he was alone, and then opened his communications device in his system’s BIOS. He followed his memorized sequence of actions, and soon enough he saw there was, in fact, a message waiting for him. He was certain it would be a worried request for an update because he had not reported in, but instead, when he clicked to open it, he found it to be something altogether different. He read it once all the way through, and then again, more slowly the second time because he just couldn’t believe it.
As he read he felt his heart pounding inside his coveralls.
Under his breath and all but inaudible, but nevertheless in English, he spoke. “Oh… my… God.”
SECRET
TO: FLASH FOR AVALANCHE
FROM: TIDALWAVE
SUBJECT: POSSIBLE DEFECTION OF HWANG MIN-HO/PERSONNEL
RECOVERY/EXTRACTION
SOURCE: SIGINT SINGAPORE STATION
1: ACCORDING TO SIGINT INTERCEPTS THROUGH STATION SINGAPORE, MINING DIRECTOR HWANG MIN-HO HAS EXPRESSED WISHES TO INTERMEDIARY TO DEFECT TO CHINA. INTERMEDIARY NAME IS CHANG LAN — A CHINESE BANKER AND ACQUAINTANCE OF HWANG. UNKOWN MOTIVATION, BUT ANALYTICAL SOURCES SUSPECT HE IS CONCERNED RE PERSONAL SAFETY AFTER PROBLEMS WITH REFINERY PRODUCTION TIMETABLES. CHINESE GOVT HAS NOT YET RECEIVED REQUEST FROM INTERMEDIARY, BUT WILL WITHIN 48 HRS.
2: REQUEST AVALANCHE MAKE CONTACT WITH DIR. HWANG IN NEXT 24 HOURS UNDER COVER OF CHINESE INTELLIGENCE OFFICER. CONFIRM HIS WISH TO DEFECT. BOLSTER BY INFORMING HIM OF DANGERS OF REMAINING IN PLACE. BRING HIM TO GRID 39 45'58.04"—124 50'50.21" NOTE — HE INFORMS INTERMEDIARY THAT HE HAS HIS FAMILY WITH HIM IN CHONGJU. YOU ARE AUTHORIZED TO BRING OUT HIS FAMILY IF ABLE.
3: YOUR ARRIVAL WILL BE MONITORED BY SATELLITE, AND YOUR RECOVERY WILL BE EFFECTED BY AIR.
TIDALWAVE
Yao looked at the date of the message. It was sent yesterday. The forty-eight-hour timetable was just cut in half.
A file had been sent along as well, and he opened it. It was a satellite map of northwestern North Korea to the Chinese border, with his extraction location marked. It was at the end of a long straight dirt road west of the city of Sonchon, just west of where he now sat and near the coast.
Expanding the satellite map as large as possible, he saw at the end of the road something that looked like a poultry farm.
So, Adam said to himself, I’m supposed to go knock on Hwang’s door and say, “I hear you want to defect. Let’s go. Can we take your car?”
Sure, that’s going to happen.
And then what? Extraction via air? Really? What, a helo is just going to come flying straight up the middle of North Fucking Korea and land at a chicken farm?
Yao closed the message and it automatically erased. He was just about to type out a new message when he heard footsteps on the other side of the cone crusher.
A Korean spoke in Mandarin: “Your time is up, Shan. Generator power goes out in one minute.”
Shit. He shut down his machine and walked away as the lights went out. Acrid Herald would see that he received the message, but they wouldn’t hear what he wanted to tell them, that there was no fucking way he was getting Hwang out of North Korea.
Adam slept little, but the morning came anyway. He rose from his cot at five-thirty and went outside, and after a short stretch he started his daily jog.
Dr. Powers was there, and they stopped to chat. She seemed sadder and more sullen than ever, but nothing new had happened. She was just becoming more and more depressed that she had no idea when she would be allowed to go home.
Adam had spent the evening thinking over his next move, and he knew now was his one chance to get it right. “I need a small favor from you.”
She nodded. “What is it?”
He looked around to make sure they were alone, and then he placed a folded sheet of paper through the fence wire. She took it.
“Don’t open it,” he said. “Can you give it to Director Hwang? I don’t know if I will see him at the factory today.”
Despite his instructions, she opened it. It was written in Chinese. “I speak Mandarin, but I can’t read it. What does it say?”
Adam was pissed, but this was part of NOC work. Misjudging how someone would react. Last night in bed he’d put it at seventy-five percent that she would do what he asked without question. Clearly now, he’d made the wrong call. He said, “I can’t tell you. It’s about the factory. Concerns we have about the conditions. He will not be mad at you. You can’t even read it.”
She was on guard. “Who are you?”
“You know who I am. Shan Xin.”
She seemed very suspicious now, and Adam worried he’d overplayed his relationship with the Australian woman. He reached a hand through the fence. “You know what? Never mind. I’ll give it to him myself.”
But Powers put the sheet in her pocket. “I’ll see him in the lobby before he leaves for work. He has breakfast with his family in the restaurant there. It’s a luxury we foreign contractors do not enjoy. Spending time with our families, I mean.” She paused. “Let me guess. You would like it if I didn’t let anyone see me hand it to him, wouldn’t you?”
Adam just nodded.
“And it’s about conditions at the factory?”
He nodded again.
“You think he gives a damn?”
“Probably not.”
She shrugged. “Okay. I’ll do it. If you are lucky, they will send you home for complaining. Hell, maybe I should try it.”
Adam said, “Let’s see how it goes for me first.”
“Good idea.”
71
Duke Sharps lunched alone at a back table at Nice Matin restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side, but he wasn’t very hungry. He picked at the turkey-and-avocado sandwich in front of him and he sipped a gin martini, very dirty, while he read The New York Times.
The above-the-fold article was about the assassination attempt on President Jack Ryan three days earlier, and this article had positively ruined his appetite.
The U.S. government claimed to have evidence tying the attack to North Korea. They weren’t revealing the source of their intel, and at this point it looked like some unsourced and unsubstantiated leak out of the White House, but the Times was running with it.
Sharps thought it was probably a lie, but even so, this lie could end up costing him a great deal of money. The Ryan administration was doing everything it could to beef up sanctions on North Korea, apparently even taking the extraordinary step of fingering them in the Mexico City massacre. It was incredible to Sharps that Ryan would blame Pyongyang for the killing of one U.S. ambassador, nine American Secret Service agents, and thirty-seven Mexican nationals, and the injuring of more than a hundred fifty, dozens critically.