Dragon Sim-13

15

Hearing the knock on his door, Meng turned down the image on his computer screen so it could not be seen. "Come in." He relaxed slightly when he saw it was only Wilson carrying the debrief file.

"All done in Tunnel 3. Those US-SOCOM guys about broke down the door heading out. I guess they have an early flight down home to Florida."

Meng took the file. "Everything shut down?"

"Yeah." Wilson sat down on the other side of the desk. "This was a pretty straightforward mission. The computer didn't throw them any curves. I guess US-SOCOM will look pretty good over at the Pentagon when they see the after-action report on Dragon Sim-13."

Wilson noticed something on the desktop. He picked up the copies of the imagery that Meng had ordered the previous day from NSA. "What's this?"

Meng thought quickly. "It's part of a variation of the simulation. One of the possibilities called for one of the exfiltration helicopters to be lost on the way out. That picture is supposed to represent the crash site."

Wilson whistled. "Damn. Nothing could have lived through this. You can't even see there was a helicopter there. Where'd you get these pictures? Is this some real crash site?"

Meng shrugged casually. "I don't know. NSA sent over satellite pictures when I requested them during the initial programming for 13. I imagine it's an old crash site they drew out of their files."

Wilson dropped the imagery back onto Meng's desk. "Well, that wraps up 13. We've got a whole five days before we do 14. When do you want to start the programming for it?"

Meng wasn't really worried about 14. He didn't think it would ever run. "Come in tomorrow and we'll do some work on the Medusa program. I'll knock off 14 on Sunday and Monday." He could tell that Wilson wasn't happy about working on Saturday. But Meng also knew that he didn't have much time left. His sense of duty urged him to get as much done on the Medusa program as he could, before the facts on Dragon Sim-13 surfaced.

Wilson headed for the door. "All right, see you tomorrow."

After the door closed, Meng locked it. He slowly walked back to his desk and looked at the imagery one last time. No one could have survived the crash, and there had been no SATCOM radio calls from survivors. Meng said a brief prayer for the dead men, then fed the imagery through his shredder. He sat back down at his desk and shut down the SFOB program.

The survivors of Team 3 were huddled together beneath the low branches of a weatherbeaten pine tree. The night stretched ahead endlessly. A night spent freezing, high in the mountains, did not possess the same sense of time as a normal night. The hands on a watch slowed down, moving sluggishly. Sleep never came. Instead, there were bouts of a shivering unconsciousness, lasting only a few brief moments, ending with a start.

For the hundredth time, Riley adjusted his meager clothing, trying to get better insulation. He was pressed between Mitchell and the pilot. Riley estimated the temperature to be in the high forties and dropping. With no equipment or extra clothing, and not able to build a fire for fear of discovery, the team was suffering through a long, cold night. Riley had briefly considered building a fire, but he'd decided that being cold was better than being dead. At this point some of the team members might have been willing to argue that point, if they could have spared the energy.

Riley could feel Mitchell shivering in the dark and pressed his body closer, trying to give his team leader what little body warmth he had. During the dash across the open field, the captain's sutures had pulled out and the wound had begun bleeding again. Comsky had used all the sutures in the survival kit to sew up the wound again. Riley didn't think Mitchell could make it much farther.

They had to assume the helicopter crash site had been found by now. That Z-9 must have seen the burned area on its way up the draw. That meant they would begin to see search parties tomorrow. Riley very much doubted the team's ability to make it across the border into North Korea. In fact, he wasn't sure North Korea would be any better than China. The farther down the mountains they got, the more populated the countryside would get — and the greater the likelihood of being found. Already they had passed the first signs of man — two dirt roads leading to old mines on the wall of the draw they were descending.

Riley felt despair seep through him. It was a cold, hollow feeling, chilling his soul as much as the air was chilling his body. He'd been pushing the team ever since the crash, but he was running out of mental energy.

They'd continued walking for three hours after sunset, until finally Riley had been forced to call a halt. They were stumbling along and he was afraid someone else would get hurt in the dark. And they needed some rest. Everyone was exhausted.

Riley still couldn't sleep. It wasn't just the cold. Despite his exhaustion, he wouldn't allow himself to lapse into unconsciousness. He was trying to figure a way out of this mess. Then he saw the lights.

It looked like a car or truck. He watched the headlights until they were turned off about a kilometer and a half away. He hadn't heard the engine, but he was positive it was a vehicle.

He woke up Hoffman and Comsky. "I saw a set of headlights over there." Riley pointed in the dark. They all turned and looked.

"Maybe we can steal the vehicle and drive to the coast," Comsky offered hopefully.

Riley shook his head. "As soon as it got reported, they'd be down on us in a heartbeat. Plus, what are we going to do at the border? Wave at the North Koreans while we break down the barrier? And what are we going to do at the coast?"

Hoffman spoke slowly. "Hey, Top. We don't need to take the truck.

We just steal the battery. That will get reported, but it won't make them as suspicious as the whole vehicle missing."

Riley immediately understood what Hoffman meant. He woke up Mitchell and told him the plan. After a few minutes of preparation, Riley, accompanied by Hoffman and Chong, left the little camp under the pine tree. Comsky stayed behind to take care of the wounded. Riley took Mitchell's MP5 silenced submachine gun, just in case.

It took the three of them thirty minutes, in the dark, to reach the small dirt road. Bending down and running his numbed fingers over the surface, Chong could feel recent tire tracks. They followed them, and five minutes later the dim lights of a shack came into view. A pickup-style truck was parked outside. Riley halted them briefly while he considered the setup. There was one shuttered window in the front, to the right of the door. A rutted road ran to the right of the shack. Probably heads toward a mine in the valley wall, he figured.

Riley whispered the improvised plan to Hoffman and Chong. Together, they crept up to the derelict truck. Riley crawled to a position from which he could cover the front, while Chong slipped around back. Hoffman slid up to the old truck. Riley angled the submachine gun at the door while Hoffman carefully opened the hood. The old metal obliged grudgingly. Riley tightened his grip on the gun. He didn't want to kill a civilian if he could help it, but they couldn't risk being discovered.

Hoffman was messing around in the engine. Come on, come on, Riley urged silently. Hoffman finally pulled out the battery and slowly lowered the hood. Riley couldn't believe the people inside didn't hear the creaking of metal. Hoffman laid the hood as far closed as it would go without slamming it, then turned and hurried back into the trees.

Chong appeared from behind the house and joined him. Once the two were out of sight, Riley backed off and joined them. They retraced their steps back to the rest of the team.

Comsky softly challenged them as they loomed up in the dark. Giving their mission code names, the three men crawled in under the tree.

"Go ahead and set that thing up, Dan," Riley indicated to Hoffman.

As the engineer busied himself arranging the transmitter and wires,

Riley spoke to the rest of the team in a low voice. "Anyone have any idea what frequency to send on and who to send this message to?" He turned to C.J. "Is there some sort of international distress band that's always monitored on high frequency?"

C.J. considered this. "Yeah, there is, but the Chinese and Russians monitor it, too. Unless you want them to hear the message, you probably don't want to use that."

Mitchell stirred. "Hey, you're forgetting something you taught me, Dave. You must be getting senile in your old age. Let's stick with the plan and use the guard net frequency we agreed on with Hossey."

Riley shook his head. "They won't be monitoring that, sir. Trapp will have told the Old Man that we torched the 70. They think we're all dead."

"That may be so," Mitchell agreed, "but we're still going to stick with the plan. It's as good as anything else."

Riley looked at Mitchell and decided. "Yes, sir. Let's go for it. I'll use a DET-K3 in the clear to start it and then put the rest in code."

Riley pulled out the small New Testament he carried, and began leafing through the pages. Chong held a red-lens flashlight so he could see. Riley wasn't carrying the Bible because he was particularly religious; this Bible was the key to their coding. He'd write out the message, then transcribe it using a trigraph and the letters on a designated page of the Bible. A trigraph was simply a listing of three-letter groups. Riley would take the first letter from the message he wrote in clear text, the second letter from the page in the Bible, and, finding the three-letter combination on the trigraph, write the third into the message. Using the same Bible page and trigraph, Hossey would be able to decode the message by reversing the process.

It was a long shot but better than nothing. Shakily, blowing on his hands every few seconds to get some warmth back in them, Riley wrote the message and transcribed it. Hoffman finished his final adjustments with the transmitter and strung an antenna wire between two trees.

Riley looked at the luminous dial of his watch. It was almost five forty-five in the morning in Korea. If someone was monitoring, he hoped that person was awake.

"Ready?" Riley asked.

Hoffman nodded and hooked the twelve-volt battery into the transmitter. Riley slowly read the letters to Hoffman, who tapped out the message using two wires. They made it through the message.

"Again," said Riley.

Meng's spirits sank as he looked at the day's headline from the New York Times:

It is too late, Mister President Bush, Meng thought. Soon the word will be out on the attack on the pipeline. What will you do then? Meng looked at the paper again. Between the two columns was a large picture of Prime Minister Li Peng. Meng stared at it with undisguised hatred. What will you do then, Mister Premier?

Hoffman was in the middle of his fourth repeat of the message when the transmitter started to smoke and sparks flew. He quickly disconnected the battery. Opening up the transmitter, he peered inside with the red-lens flashlight.

"It's fried," he announced mournfully.