Ghost Ship

THIRTY-SEVEN

Kurt and Joe rode in the back of Than Rang’s tractor trailer as it cruised along South Korean highway Route 3. Through the wonders of modern technology, Kurt could track their progress on his phone.

“Still heading for the DMZ?” Joe asked.

“Like a homing pigeon,” Kurt said.

Forty-five miles from Seoul, and no more than a mile from the edge of the DMZ, they felt the truck gear down. A series of twists and turns made it feel as if they’d gone off the highway. At the same time, Kurt’s reception went out and didn’t come back. Wherever they were, it was beyond the range of the cell phone towers.

He put the phone away and glanced over at Joe. “You can forget about calling the cavalry, we’ve lost our signal.”

“Great,” Joe muttered.

Kurt eased from his spot and crawled to the far wall where a pinprick of light was coming through a hole in the truck’s metal skin. He cozied up to it and stared through.

“Any signs saying ‘Welcome to North Korea’?” Joe asked.

“Not yet,” Kurt said. “Mostly bright lights, and a rather funky smell.”

Joe smelled it too. “It smells like…”

“Garbage,” Kurt said. “We’re driving into a giant landfill. I see overhead lights and dump trucks and bulldozers mashing everything down. Looks like half of Seoul’s trash is out there.”

“One of Than Rang’s companies,” Joe said, remembering the briefing.

Kurt nodded. “You know what they say: Where there’s muck, there’s brass.”

“Brass?”

“Coins,” Kurt explained. “Dinero, big bucks.”

“Right,” Joe replied. “Let’s hope that where there’s muck, there’s computer experts.”

“Better here than across the border,” Kurt added, agreeing with his friend.

The truck rumbled along, moving slower with each passing moment, eventually lurching to a stop with a hiss of the brakes. From Joe’s perspective, the glare from the arc lights illuminating the landfill was suddenly cut off. “We’ve pulled inside a shed of some kind. Maybe a loading bay.”

Kurt stretched, and made sure he was ready for action, as the truck rumbled to a stop for a second time. He got in position behind a stack of computer parts and made sure he couldn’t be seen from the rear door of the trailer. Joe did the same.

They waited in the darkness, listening to voices speaking Korean, until the sound of a heavy mechanical gearing drowned them out. Almost immediately Kurt felt the truck moving. Not forward or backward but descending.

“Why am I getting a sinking feeling?” Joe whispered.

“Because we are,” Kurt said.

The rate of descent picked up and then seemed to ease, but Kurt knew that was an illusion, like the feeling of being motionless in an airplane when one is actually moving at six hundred miles per hour. They were still dropping, but at a constant rate. Their bodies had just grown used to it.

He glanced at his watch and noted the second hand moving past twelve. It made it all the way around once and had almost reached the six o’clock position when the descent finally slowed and stopped.

“Ninety seconds,” he whispered. “How fast do you think we were moving?”

“Not all that fast,” Joe said, “maybe two or three feet per second.”

Kurt made a quick calculation. “That puts us somewhere around two hundred feet below the surface.”

After the smooth ride down, the next move was a jolt as a large crane grabbed the shipping container and lifted it off the back of the truck.

Kurt looked out through the pinhole and gave Joe the playby-play. “A big overhead crane has us, by the look of things. Appears to be moving us to some kind of platform.”

They began to pivot as the crane operator manipulated them into a proper alignment.

“I can see the other truck,” Kurt said. “And Calista. She’s headed for what I’d guess is the control room.”

Kurt watched her rap on the door of the control room and wait for the door to be opened. “Don’t do it…” he whispered.

No one heard his psychic warning. The lock was released and the door pushed open. She handed the first guard some type of manifest and, as he looked at it, she calmly drew her gun and opened fire. The shots were accurate, fired in rapid succession, but unhurried and without a sense of panic. She was cold and efficient.

At almost the same instant, Calista’s friend grabbed the other driver and broke his neck with a quick twist and a sickening crack. Two men came running from beside the crane to intervene but were quickly gunned down. The room went still.

“What about the other driver?” Joe whispered.

“He’s probably dead,” Kurt suggested, figuring Calista would have killed him before she got out of the truck.

“This girl of yours is cold as ice,” Joe said.

“She’s not my girl,” he said.

“Are they coming this way?”

“No,” Kurt said. “They’re going into the control room.”

Unaware that she was being watched, Calista strode into the control room and immediately began working one of the computers. It took only thirty seconds for her to break into the system.

Egan, her third brother, ducked in. “The loading platform is secured,” he said. “Does anyone know we’re here?”

“I got them before they could sound the alarm,” Calista said. She ran through the security protocols and checked for any sign of trouble. “We’re fine. Get the hackers out of the second van. We’ll escort them through.”

“How many men on the other side?” Egan asked.

“A full million in the North Korean Army,” she said with a smile.

“You know what I mean.”

“According to the duty roster I was able to pull up on the computer, the North Korean station is manned by a hundred twenty. Most of them are restricted to the surface level and the topside loading zone. Only forty are cleared to enter the lower levels and they comprise two shifts, so we’ll be dealing with no more than twenty at a time.”

“There are only two of us,” he pointed out.

“Makes it interesting, doesn’t it?”

He stared.

“Relax,” she said, opening a pack with three silver canisters that had odd numeric markings on them. “This will even the odds.”

“Nerve gas?”

“Nothing so dangerous,” she explained. “It’s an RPA, a rapid paralytic agent. Freezes the central nervous system for ten minutes or so. It won’t knock them out or kill them, but it will make them easy to hit. We take the main control room by surprise, then pump this through the station, and the rest will be easy.”

“Do we have gas masks?”

Calista produced two small filters that looked like bulkier versions of the masks surgeons wore. They fit over the nose and mouth. “Won’t need them for long,” she said. “The gas goes inert after sixty seconds.”

“We still have to get through the tunnel first.”

At that moment a message appeared on the screen. It was in Korean. Calista scanned it with a handheld device that translated it to English.

“Our invitation,” she said. “They’re awaiting transfer of the hackers. Get them out of the truck and into the tram.”

“What happens to them when we fire off the gas?”

“They get frozen in place,” Calista replied, “which will keep them from getting in the way.”

Done asking questions, Egan left the control room as Calista made one last check of the system and patched command of the system to a remote unit she’d brought for just this purpose.

From there, she made her way to a tram that sat at the entrance to a long tunnel. With an open top, it looked more like an ore car than the passenger tram so familiar to most airport travelers.

She climbed in as Egan dragged the hackers from the rear of the second truck.

Xeno9X9, ZSumG, and Montresor were powerful men in the underworld of computing but were less than magnificent to behold in real life. Three scrawny, scruffy-looking specimens. Their faces were pale, their eyes sunken, and their arms and legs thin and spindly. There seemed little about them to suggest danger or the ability to bring down nations all around the world. Not one of them had offered any resistance since their capture, though that probably had more to do with the sisters, wives, and children being held at the Brèvard compound than any sort of docile natures.

“Get in,” she growled.

They climbed onto a tram that rested just in front of the platform on which the first trailer had been deposited.

With Egan in front, Calista took the rear seat, keeping the hackers between them. By typing a code into the remote, she activated the equipment, and the sound of a powerful generator spooling up reached everyone’s ears. When a light flashed green on the remote, she pressed the go switch and the tram began to accelerate down the long lighted tunnel.