The sweat on the Korean’s face made him blink, over and over.
His partner said something in Korean, and the two men started some sort of argument that got heated.
While they shouted at each other, getting more volatile by the second, Caruso spoke softly to Chavez. “They’re losing it.”
Chavez said, “Talking over the consequences of failure.”
Dom took in a slow breath. “Dead-enders.”
Chavez knew what he meant. These guys were coming to the realization they had nothing to lose, and this meant, to both of the Campus operators, they were in the same predicament.
There was going to be a point-blank shootout in a minute, and Chavez and Caruso had nothing to lose at this point, either.
The North Koreans had stopped their arguing, and both Americans took that to mean they had reached a conclusion. The train began to slow at the Union Square station, and all four men softened their knees to absorb the inevitable shift in momentum that came along with pulling into the stop. Although they couldn’t communicate it to each other, the Campus men both felt certain the North Koreans were going to fire right as the train made its final jolt before the doors opened. That was their best opportunity for success, and their best opportunity for escape.
Chavez said, “You trust me, Dom?”
It took Caruso a moment, but soon enough he thought he understood. “I trust you.”
“What are you saying?” shouted the English-speaking North Korean.
“I’m saying I give up,” answered Chavez.
He took his left hand off his gun slowly, and held it up in front of him, like he was telling the man with the gun on him he was going to surrender. Slowly he turned his pistol barrel away, changing his grip on the Glock so the gun rolled forward on his trigger finger. It hung upside down in his hand, the grip facing away from him. He turned away from the man he had been aiming at, and toward the man directly in front of him. “Here. Take it.”
As he said this, the man in front of Chavez, the one with the gun pointed at Caruso, took his eyes off his sights for an instant to look up at the man offering his gun to him. A change in the dynamic caused him a half-second of surprise as he reevaluated the situation.
As soon as his eyes shifted, Dominic Caruso swiveled his body to the right and shot the other North Korean, the man with the gun on Chavez, in the forehead.
The man with the gun pointed at Caruso startled at the movement, and his eyes flicked back toward his gunsight. He recognized he’d been caught off guard, looking at one man and aiming at another, but he was still on target, and he jerked his finger against the taut trigger of his semiautomatic.
But he never got a shot off.
Chavez flicked his pistol around in his hand so the grip was in his palm and his pinkie finger was inside the trigger guard. Though the weapon was upside down, the barrel pointed at the aggressor in front of him. He pulled his pinkie back and fired the pistol upside down. The round hit the North Korean in the upper chest and knocked him backward. He stumbled back, and his gun fired once into the ceiling of the train.
Dom Caruso swiveled his Smith & Wesson to the falling man and shot him twice more before he hit the floor.
The train lurched to a stop. Out the windows on the platform the two Campus operators saw a sea of dark blue uniforms running down the staircase twenty-five yards away. The police weren’t sure which car they were going for, so there was confusion at the bottom of the stairs.
Chavez turned toward the back of the train, away from the police, and started running. “We’re going for the tunnel!”
They leapt down to the tracks in the gap between the last two cars. Careful to avoid going anywhere near the third rail, they took off to the south.
Two cars behind them, the transit police held their weapons on all the cars. It would be thirty seconds before they boarded and another minute and a half before they suspected someone had left the train to run through the tunnel.
By then Caruso and Chavez were halfway back to 8th Street.
By the time they got to the 8th Street station, Caruso and Chavez had moved to the southbound side of the tracks. Since all the witnesses had climbed out of the subway car onto the northbound platform, the two Campus men expected there would be a police presence at the scene there, and they were right. A dozen or more police in light blue and dark blue uniforms, some carrying carbines or submachine guns, stood around with witnesses and other passersby.
But Chavez and Caruso climbed up on the southbound platform, fifty yards away from the gaggle of cops across the station, and they made it up to street level with no one noticing them.
Sam picked them up a few minutes later and they were back in the 79th Street safe house shortly after that.
By the time Domingo and Dominic sat down with a bottle of water and a gun-cleaning kit, Campus IT staffers had already reviewed all the relevant NYPD and Metropolitan Transportation Authority camera footage in the area, and they saw nothing that identified their two operatives. There was always a chance some kid on the train had gotten his phone out, but this wasn’t an event likely to have been recorded, for the simple fact that everyone on that train was in immediate mortal peril and knew reaching for a phone or raising a hand to point a camera might have earned them a bullet to the head.
After spending hours on an after-action hot wash of the event with Clark in the living room of the safe house, they determined they had somehow managed to avoid compromise during the incident. No one had any idea just why the North Koreans were so hell-bent on killing a single member of the Sanctions Committee, but Sam’s assertion that Allende and Riley had not managed to come to terms on whatever it was they were meeting about made them all think it likely Riley had notified the North Koreans that the woman knew about the operation to coerce committee members, and the North Koreans decided to silence her before she could talk.
There was a lot of guessing necessary to come to this conclusion, but the facts all seemed to lead in this direction.
Clark said, “Just like in Vietnam, the North Koreans are playing for absolute keeps on this. In situations where some other bad actor might just pull up stakes and bug out, or else threaten a noncompliant party, the North Koreans are using lethal means. This is an ugly game they are playing, and we cannot make assumptions about how they will act without taking that into consideration.”
35
Adam Yao sat in a glass-walled conference room on the third floor of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. A window faced southwest and he looked out over a green forested hillside that obstructed the view of anyone driving by on the Capital Beltway. Adam was sure the hill had been built with security in mind, but it was nice to veg out for a minute and gaze at the greenery. But not for long. After a moment he looked down to the reams of books, notes, and briefing papers laid out on the table in front of him.
Time to get back to work.
He had spent a full week of sixteen-hour days prepping for Operation Acrid Herald, the attempt to place a CIA asset into a rare earth mineral mining operation in northwestern North Korea. He would be leaving for the West Coast in the morning, heading to the Valley Floor rare earth mineral mine in California, for more specific training and legend building, before heading to China, where the real work would begin.
Acrid Herald was a code-word operation; only a select few in the U.S. intelligence agency had any inkling what was happening. For purposes of operational security, no one at CIA Station Seoul would be informed, and certainly no personnel from any South Korean intelligence agency would be read in on the plan, because of the likelihood North Korea had a penetration agent high up in the South Korean spy services.