“Stand fast,” shouted the chief. “Wait for him to—”
The knife fell from the captain’s hands and he crumpled back onto the deck between the helm and the pilot chair.
“Secure that blade!” Chief Ricks ordered now, and Greaser leapt forward, kicked the knife out of reach, and then he pinned the wounded captain down to the deck. He rolled him over and pulled out a zip tie from his load-bearing vest to tie the captain’s wrists.
Ricks turned to the medic of the squad, SO3 Joseph Jones. “Joe-Joe, do what you can for him.” Ricks said this even though he knew without a blood transfusion and surgery the captain didn’t have a prayer, and the chances of those happening here were zero.
The captain died quickly — even though the medic slid a tube into the wound to keep an airway going, there was no way to stop the blood loss in time to save the small man. Ricks stood over him the entire time, but his attention was split between the activity at his feet on the deck and the constant updates on his radio.
Bravo and fire team two of Alpha had rounded up the twelve surviving crew members on board. All of them had been searched and zipped, and put on the main deck just forward of the superstructure. They were all guarded by SEALs.
Jones covered the dead captain’s body with a body bag out of his pack.
Greaser stood next to Ricks and looked down at the dead man. “Chief, I’m going to go way out on a limb and say we’ve got ourselves some contraband on this ship.”
“Ya think?” Ricks replied. He called Takenaka, the radio man of the squad, and told him to get on the horn with the Freedom and tell them the ship was secure.
Hendriks, Elizondo, Parnell, and Stovall joined the others on the bridge, and they looked down at the body under the green plastic bag.
“You had to smoke him?” Hendriks asked.
Greaser answered for his chief. “He smoked himself. Slit his own fuckin’ throat.”
“Holy shit. Why’d he do that?”
Ricks answered matter-of-factly, “Because he didn’t want to defect to the evil West, and slitting his own throat was better than going back home. For his failure he would have fared even worse there.”
Parnell said, “There ain’t a lot worse than gagging on your own blood.”
Ricks looked up at Parnell, then at the rest of his men. “I read a thing a few months back. A DPRK major was suspected of giving intel to the South Koreans. He probably didn’t do it, but he was suspected. The government took him out and executed him.”
The men waited for the punch line. They were all pretty sure it wasn’t going to be funny.
Ricks said, “With a goddamned flamethrower. They tossed that poor son of a bitch into a dirt pit and barbecued his ass. Took their time with it, too.”
“Jesus Christ,” mumbled Stovall.
Ricks said, “On interdictions in these waters, we are engaging a uniquely motivated enemy. They are desperate men with their backs to the wall.”
Ricks fingered his skull-face balaclava and raised his Colt rifle. “We think we’re a bunch of terrifying motherfuckers, but don’t forget. We don’t scare anybody out here. They’ve seen worse.”
Two dozen Marines stationed on the USS Freedom arrived on the Emerald Endeavor within twenty minutes. Ricks figured these kids — their average age was about twenty — wished they’d had the chance to be involved in the raid, the shooting and scooting. In comparison, going through the cargo holds and containers of the big ship would be dull work, but at least it got them off the other boat for a few hours.
They found what they were looking for after ninety minutes. Cargo holds one through four all contained eighty-pound sacks of unrefined sugar with the markings of a Cuban agricultural entity. Hold seven contained the same thing. But holds five and six, just fore of the center of the ship, contained stacks of forty-foot containers. When the Marines broke open the doors of the locked containers, they saw they were piled high with various machine parts. The equipment looked like plumbing and air-conditioning equipment, and parts of an old boiler. It was all used and rusted and broken, certainly not equipment one would ship around the world. But after a half-hour of pulling out big hunks of metal equipment, the Marines came upon large aluminum tubes in fiberglass casing. There were no markings on the cases, but the tubes were some six and a half feet in diameter, and eighteen feet in length. The Marines found only two before the ship was brought into port in Inchon, but when inspected fully, a half-dozen precision aluminum tubes were found, along with sophisticated plastic crating containing precision-crafted O-rings and coupling bolts.
The young Marines had suspected it from the beginning, but the experts in South Korea confirmed the find. These were the hollow stages of an intercontinental ballistic missile, and they corresponded in diameter to the Taepodong-2, North Korea’s still-unsuccessful longest-range nuclear-delivery vehicle.
Determining where all this equipment came from was the next order of business for the intelligence organizations of the West.
17
French intelligence operative Veronika Martel climbed out of a taxi on the corner of 88th and Columbus and began walking east in the rain. Her black umbrella protected her from the downpour, but it also helped her blend in with the other pedestrians, many of whom were under black umbrellas themselves.
Martel had no real reason to run a surveillance detection route here on the Upper West Side of New York City. It wasn’t like she was in Tripoli or Bucharest or Dubrovnik; she wasn’t even on the job at the moment. But SDRs were part of Martel’s life. She’d learned to leave nothing to chance, to expect every opportunity to turn into a potential for danger, to concern herself with the minutiae of her tradecraft to keep herself safe.
The reasons for her concerns about everyone and everything all boiled down to a simple explanation: Veronika Martel did not trust the world.
Even though her SDR took her north, south, east, and west through the rainy mid-morning streets of one of the most congested metropolises on earth, she arrived at the offices of Sharps Global Intelligence Partners at ten a.m. Exactly on time. After a quick security check by a guard who met her in the ground-floor lobby of the building, the two of them took the elevator up five stories and the door opened on the marble foyer of the executive office of the nation’s most successful corporate intelligence concern.
A guard force of six men manned the lobby; they all wore business suits and earpieces and salt-and-pepper hair over physiques that were still hardened from physical activity, making the men appear at once both distinguished and dangerous. Martel knew these guards were all ex-military, just like the force at her satellite office in Belgium, and just like the guard forces at all twenty-six sat offices around the globe. The men were polite and professional, but they all leered at her. Martel had come to expect this from men, and as always, it only stood to make her both uncomfortable and annoyed.
She didn’t come to New York often and she had not seen Wayne Sharps since the day he hired her three years earlier; she was virtually always in the field and she liked it that way, but she’d been summoned by the director of her company and she knew the value of showing her face around the home office once in a while to remind the execs who she was.
She felt like she knew the reason behind her summons. The operation in Ho Chi Minh City two weeks earlier had been an odd one. The North Koreans’ presence at the safe house, the Australians and their trepidation about what they had gotten themselves into, the American asset refusing to hand over the package. And the blood on the document, indicating it had been taken by force.