Operation Hail Storm

Wonsan, North Korea

Victor Kornev was as close to a panic as he had ever been.

He had pushed the UAZ, the goat, just as fast as the light-weight vehicle could go. He never in a million years thought he would be grateful to see the ugly city of Wonsan come into view. But he was. The Wonsan highway was the frickin yellow brick road and he longed to be in the safety of OZ up ahead.

Kornev turned off the highway on to the road that led to Kaeson-dong. If he remembered correctly, the square in Kaeson-dong led to the Dongmyong Hotel. Even though he hated the place, he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. The Minister of State Security for North Korea, Kim Won Dong, was his connection with his cargo plane to get out of North Korea. From the explosion he had experienced as he was driving away from the warehouse, and then the massive explosion when the warehouse had been vaporized; Kornev had to assume the Minister had been fried to a crisp.

Kornev reached the circle in Kaeson-dong, drove around it twice until he found the road that led to Pongchun-dong. He yanked the wheel to the right and saw some sort of light ahead of him on the horizon.

Once he had checked into the smelly Dongmyong Hotel, he could then call in a favor from an influential friend and find a safe way out of the country. He sure wished he knew who was trying to kill him. It wouldn’t help him now, but at least he could plan his next move based on a factor other than fear.

There it was. Up ahead. The wretched Dongmyong Hotel. And it would appear that his luck was changing. For maybe the first time in a month, the hotel had electricity. That meant a working elevator and a shower and a…

The blast was so intense that Kornev felt his face blister and his ears rupture. He slammed on the goat’s breaks, but his eyes were closed. When the car went into a skid, Kornev was helpless to do anything but hang on to the steering wheel and ride it out. The car slid sideways, flipped into a ditch and ejected Kornev fifteen feet into the thick muck.

Kornev lay in the ditch, dazed, face down, unmoving until his senses came back to life and told him that he was drowning. Pulling his face from the muddy water, coughing and spitting out black mud, Kornev raised his head from the ooze and looked up. What he saw amazed him. The Dongmyong Hotel had been turned into fiery rubble.

Any man in Victor’s current condition might consider himself ill-fated to be shot in the hand, almost assassinated, ejected from a car, burnt, temporarily deafened and now face down in a ditch in North Korea. But on the contrary, Victor understood that if he had arrived a few minutes earlier, he would have been checking into that hotel at the same instant it had been obliterated. Kornev was a very lucky man and he knew it. Someone was on his side. Not God, but someone else that he believed in and they believed in him. But somewhere along the way he had also made a formidable enemy; a person or persons that were so powerful that they had the resources to blow up an entire hotel in North Korea in order to kill him.

Now all he had to figure out was who.