It wasn’t as sure a method for getting her daughter up for school as being there in person to annoy her, but Annette needed to get to the office early to look at a new set of sat images, so it was the best method available to her.
By seven a.m. Annette had been at it for an hour already. She had made it her personal mission to somehow identify the visiting workers at the new Chongju rare earth — processing plant just north of the mine. This was hard work — the resolution provided by the KH-12 satellite in orbit over North Korea was impressive; in just the right conditions she could make out a license plate, although it was extraordinarily rare that she’d been lucky enough to have the conditions in place when she needed a tag number. But determining the identity of a group of one hundred fifty or so men from outer space was no easy task.
She had a couple working assumptions going. For one, she decided these workers were not North Korean. There were definite security measures around the temporary housing compound near the hotel in Chongju. North Korea, of course, subjected its own citizens to positively Orwellian levels of scrutiny and security protocols, but this looked more like an armed camp inside a North Korean city. Annette decided if these were local workers they wouldn’t have that number of guards, guns, and gates around them.
No, these were foreign workers, but foreign workers from where?
She wasn’t able to identify any obvious Caucasians or blacks among the few people standing around the trailers. Everyone she saw looked Asian, but it was impossible to tell if these were North Korean minders or workers from another Asian country. Of course, if they were workers from another country, China would be the first assumption, if not for the fact North Korea had kicked out their Chinese partners more than a year earlier.
She kept hunting, using her three monitors to look at each trash bin, each vehicle, each piece of clothing as closely as possible.
At eight a.m. she thought she had something, and by eight-fifteen the excitement of tangible results coursed through her like electric shocks.
Colonel Peters, Annette’s boss, arrived at work at eight-thirty a.m. to find Annette Brawley standing by his locked door with a smile on her face and two fresh cups of coffee in her hands.
His smile in return was more perfunctory. “Morning, Brawley. Any chance I can have a couple of minutes to myself before you waylay me with a PowerPoint?”
She replied like a schoolgirl. “Pu-lease, I just need a few minutes.”
He sighed. “Will I be impressed?”
“Positively floored.”
“Come on, then,” he said, and he opened the door to let Brawley in.
Peters had just set his briefcase down on his desk when Annette Brawley placed his coffee down, spun his computer to her, and began opening a PowerPoint loaded on the department server to put up on his wall screen. While doing so she said, “I know who is working at the rare earth metal refinery.”
She put up a picture of the temporary housing in Chongju. She’d highlighted several guard posts on the outside with red circles. “So first we see there are guards facing out and facing in, looks like two-way security. They don’t want the locals meeting with these folks, which means they aren’t locals.”
“I’ll buy that,” Peters said.
She changed the slide; now it showed some sort of kitchen facility. Wood-burning stoves. Women walking with pots. “Here is the mess area for the guest workers. It’s open-pit fires with grills on them, outdoor lean-to structures. Water tanks.”
“Right,” said Peters. “No refrigeration. Nasty.”
“Yeah. For us, anyhow. But not for them. Much of the Third World doesn’t refrigerate their meat. My daughter would gag if I told her that, but some of the things she eats make me want to puke.”
Another red circle was around a stack of square objects near the fire. “What’s that?” he asked. “Are those chicken coops?”
“Nope,” she said, and she clicked again, enlarging the area.
Peters leaned forward. They were definitely cages, each one approximately two feet square, based on a woman standing next to them. The Marine colonel tried to look inside. After a few seconds he said, “Wait. Are those… dogs?”
“Yes, they are,” she said. “Twenty crates here, twenty dogs. This image is from twenty-four hours ago.” She clicked the mouse and the next picture came up. It was of the same area. “And here is that mess facility just six and a half hours ago.”
Peters counted. “Eight of the crates are gone.”
“The guest workers ate Fido and his friends for dinner.”
“So… the guest workers are Korean? Koreans eat dog sometimes, don’t they?”
“They do. But so do some other Asian cultures. Vietnam, Indonesia, Taiwan, and China.”
“Well, we know they aren’t Chinese.”
“No, sir. We know they aren’t anyone else but Chinese. Only the Chinese have experience with rare earth processing. None of the other countries deal in this industry at all.”
Now Peters cocked his head. “But… China was kicked out.”
Brawley smiled broadly. “The Chinese state-owned metal mining corporations, Chinalco and Minmetals, were kicked out, but what I have determined is that these guest workers are Chinese gangster miners.”
“Gangster miners?”
“Yes. There are illegal mining companies working all over the country.”
“How do you know?”
She clicked to the next slide. “This is a rare earth mine in Mongolia. It’s a gangster mine, run by an illegal outfit out of Shanghai. This image is from last August.” The mine was full of people. Cars, trucks, earth-moving equipment. “This mine has been underproducing for a few years, but they kept it open, digging out what they could. Three hundred fifty or so workers, based on the housing.”
She switched to the next slide, and the next, and the next. They all showed the same mine and surrounding buildings; the only difference was the date in the upper left corner changed. October, December, February.
She clicked to bring up the next image, from April. Peters looked at it for a moment and said, “I’ll be damned.”
Annette grinned. “Where did everyone go, boss?”
“To North Korea? To Chongju?”
“Damn right,” she said. “The gangster miners must have been hired in secret by the North Korean state-run mining industry because they didn’t have the expertise to operate the mine themselves. Same with the processing facility. The only difference there is the Chinese will need to somehow get some workers with experience in that. The existing gangster mines don’t process their own ore.”
Peters stood up from his desk. He had not even taken a sip of his coffee. “We need to run this up to the fifth floor. Even though it’s a little early to present the director with stories about dog meat, they’ll need to see this right away.”
“We?” she said. “I look like crap.”
“You look tired, Brawley. Like you’ve been working your ass off. That’s a good thing. I might have to rumple myself up a little before we go so you don’t make me look bad.” He said it with a smile.
“You couldn’t if you tried, boss.”
24
The breach of Karel Skála’s apartment building on Krišt’anova Street in Prague took place at two p.m. It went smoothly; an old man exited the building just as Ryan and Caruso walked up the steps and they caught the door before it closed. Once inside, they moved to the right, sticking close to the wall, and then they stepped into the stairwell without anyone noticing them.