True Faith and Allegiance

17

As one aircraft approached the United States from the south, another flew across the country, then landed at Van Nuys airport near L.A. for a quick refueling stop. A half-hour later it was back in the air, this time for the longest leg of the journey. The men of The Campus had worked on the trip across the U.S., and they’d work some more on the last leg, but from California to Seoul, Korea, the men tried to get some sleep. The three men and one woman on board did deplane in Seoul during their fifty-minute refueling stop there, but they weren’t going through customs here in Korea so they didn’t walk more than fifty feet from the aircraft. They did stretches, ran in place, but mostly they just wandered around bleary-eyed and bored, just like they’d been on the aircraft.

After taking back to the skies the three operators used the last segment of their flight to come up with a specific plan on arrival. They had more intelligence from CIA and FBI about what they’d encounter at the scene, which was a damn good thing, considering they’d arrive close to five a.m. and have to race off the aircraft into a waiting rental car, then proceed directly to a hotel for a final comms and gear check before the nine a.m. meeting between the North Korean agents and the unknown U.S. Department of State employee.

They landed in Jakarta on schedule and went through customs, where they had their luggage checked thoroughly. Helen and Country taxied into a hangar, taking their time to do so, because the three operatives were busy revealing hidden access compartments in the galley, pulling out their Smith & Wesson M&P Shield nine-millimeter pistols, inside-the-waistband appendix holsters, extra magazines, state-of-the-art covert earpieces, emergency medical equipment, and other items they would need on their operation.

Domingo, Dominic, and Jack took their hand luggage and hurried down to the waiting rental car, while Country and Helen headed to the fixed-base operator’s office to fill out some paperwork. They would immediately refuel and restock the aircraft for the flight out of here, and then they would both find a comfortable cabin chair or sofa in the back of the aircraft and try to get some sleep, while remaining at the ready for a quick getaway.

They didn’t expect to be leaving for at least five hours, but they knew when the call came that the team was en route to the airport, they would very likely have to preflight and clear customs quickly, so a little sleep in the meantime would be helpful.

At six a.m. the three American men drove their rental to a twenty-four-hour pharmacy and loaded a handbasket up with items. Water, snacks, and other odds and ends, mostly, and Ding bought a box of fifty paper surgical masks, worn regularly here because of the potential for disease transmission and the high pollution in the air.

Back in the car, Ding passed out a fistful of masks to the other two.

Dom quipped, “We’re gonna be here for a week?”

“You start sweating, running, breathing hard, these things will get soggy fast and melt off your face.”

“Right,” he said. “Maybe I’ll wear two at a time.”

“Not if you want to breathe freely.”

Jack said, “The location of the meet is a pedestrian zone that allows bicycles and motorized scooters but not cars. Do we want to get a scooter just to have at the ready?”

Chavez pulled back onto the road, heading in the direction of downtown, where they had secured a hotel just a few blocks from the location of the North Koreans’ meeting with the unknown American State Department worker. “I think we want to get two scooters. That, and this car. It will give us more options. Like we talked about on the plane, we’re going to be winging it on this one. The more flexibility we have, the better.”

They checked into their hotel at seven a.m., and through the clerk they arranged for a pair of rental scooters to be parked next to their rental car. Then they went upstairs, where they double-checked their equipment and changed clothes. All the men wore outfits that could make them look like either joggers or very casual tourists, as most tourists usually were.

The meeting was to take place in Merdeka Square, in central Jakarta, at the foot of the National Monument, a white 433-foot tower built to commemorate Indonesia’s independence. Their hotel was just a few blocks west of the square, so they had a few minutes to drink some bottled water, eat some protein bars, and stow their binoculars around their necks and tuck them inside their shirts.

As they prepped they talked over the plan one more time, reexamined a map of the area, and tried to shake off the onset of jet lag so they could concentrate on the action to come.

The men arrived at three different corners of the square at eight a.m. Chavez parked the car to the northwest, Dom parked his scooter at the southeast, and Jack kept his helmet on and drove his scooter straight toward the location.

It was a massive space, with flat open grass fields, fountains and statues, wide cobblestone thoroughfares with scooter traffic racing by, and a significant number of pedestrians passing through the area on their way to work. The tower itself was in the dead center of the huge square, on top of a large grassy hill, and sightseers milled about, even at eight in the morning. Stone steps, some fifty yards wide, ran up ten yards or so to the base of the tower.

It made sense for the North Koreans to do the pass here, because the U.S. embassy was on the southeast corner of the square. But there were many reasons this didn’t seem like a good spot at all for a clandestine transaction, as both the Indonesian Ministry of Internal Affairs and the headquarters of the Army were both right here on the edge of the square as well.

“Damn, this is a big space,” Jack mumbled.

Chavez said, “Dom, I guess you and me are joggers. We’ll cover more territory.”

Dom groaned. “We’re gonna run for an hour before going up against DPRK agents?”

Chavez replied, “If we ID the agents in time, maybe we can avoid them. Run a few minutes, take breaks to look around, then run a little more. We’re each going off on our own here, but stay in comms.”

Jack putted down the cobblestone road through the enclosed square. “If you pull a quad, cuz, I can run down to the store and pick you up some Bengay.”

“Kiss my ass,” Dom grumbled.

As each operator moved through a different section of the square, all closing in on the National Monument and the steps there, the men talked over their comms at length about just why, in this day and age, this meeting to transfer classified material would be done in public, by hand. These things usually happened electronically these days, so this felt like the makings of an eighties spy thriller.

Dominic was the first to come up with a plausible answer. “You know what I think? If this dip e-mails documents there is the deniability factor. He can say he didn’t do it, his password got hacked, it’s a damn setup. Hard to catch someone red-handed clicking the send button.”

Chavez followed up on this line of thinking. “The North Koreans want photos of a handover.”

“Right,” agreed Jack. “And they want to do this so they can own this guy. Use that against him for further intel handoffs.”

Chavez immediately said, “All right, boys, let’s proceed on that assumption and hunt for the photographer of today’s event. We’re now looking for a standoff position, at least two hundred yards away, where a guy can use a long-range lens to get shots of the transaction. This is an outdoor pass, so it’s going to be tough to pin down the photog, but he is every bit as important as ID’ing the other DPRK guys involved. We don’t want them getting glamour shots of us, even if we do have these paper masks on.”

Immediately Dominic and Jack began scanning the area.

Jack said, “Hey, Ding. Did you read the info on this location? It’s five times the size of freaking Tiananmen Square.”

Chavez replied, “Yeah, I read it. Got eyes, too. This is too big for three of us to cover the entire square.”

Dom said, “I wish Gavin was here with a drone.”

Chavez said, “We can handle it. Just use process of elimination. The pass is supposed to be on the north side steps of the National Monument. Even though the photographer might be able to get shots of the State Department dip from most any direction, he’ll probably be following the guideline of sticking to the north. That cuts our hunt in half. He won’t be far back in the trees, and half of this place is trees, so cut it in half again.”

Jack said, “There is an observation deck on top of the monument.”

Chavez replied, “Wouldn’t make for a good picture, and it would be damn hard to exfiltrate in a rush. I wouldn’t put my overwatch there, and doubt the DPRK would, either.”

The three men moved around on the north side of the monument. After a few minutes Jack said, “We don’t know where on the steps the meet will take place, and it’s a big monument. But if you think about it, the U.S. embassy is to the southeast, so they might want to meet the American to the northwest, just in case there was any long-range monitoring from the roof of the embassy that could see over the trees. They’d have to at least account for the possibility that this guy tipped off American authorities.”

Chavez said, “Makes sense to me, Jack. Also makes me think they will put the monument between the embassy and the photographer. You’ve got the wheels, so why don’t you head to northwest and see if your theory holds water.”

Ryan began driving along the long straight road to the exit of the enclosed square to the northwest. He’d made it two-thirds of the way there when he looked to his right, just inside the line of manicured trees running along the road. There, two men who looked like they could be North Korean stood with a camera on a tripod. The camera had at least a 500-millimeter telephoto lens. At the moment it was pointing due south, not in the direction of the monument, but the camera and the men were far back enough in the trees to where it didn’t make sense to have the camera positioned there in the first place.

Jack said, “I think I’ve got eyes on the overwatch. Two subjects, say three hundred yards, maybe a little more, from the monument. They’ve got the lens to get great shots if they move it out to the road.”

Chavez said, “Good. Remember, we aren’t here for the DPRK guys. We want to ID the diplomat, bag him before he makes contact, and get him out of here, if there is any way that’s possible.”

Dom was up closer to the steps to the monument now, just fifty yards or so from the northwest corner where the men suspected the pass would go down. He said, “I’m in position where I can close down on the guy right up until the moment of the handoff. But if he gets this close, it’s up to the North Koreans how much noise this whole thing is going to make today.”

Chavez was near a fountain one hundred yards to the west of the monument. He slowed his jog, stopped and sat on a bench, and pretended to lean over as if from exertion. While he did this he pulled his small binos from inside his shirt, then brought them up to his eyes, hidden in his hands. “I’ve got six, repeat, six men moving together, approaching the fountain. They could be Korean, hard to say. They are all wearing civilian clothing, nothing uniform about their appearance, but they are all carrying either backpacks or briefcases.” After a few seconds he said, “They entered the park together, but now they are splitting up into three groups of two.”

Ryan said, “Are these guys dumbasses, showing up together like that?”

Dom answered this. “Makes me think there are others around here with eyes on. We haven’t been made, so these guys have been waved onto the X with an all clear.”

Chavez agreed. “It’s still twenty-five minutes till. With these six, Jack’s two, and the unknown other ones who gave the all clear, this is a lot of oppo.”

Jack said, “Do we want to think about doing something crazy to get this pass shut down? We’ll lose our chance at grabbing the American, but at least we’ll prevent a handoff of classified intel. One of us can flag down a cop and report a bomb.”

Dom came over the net. “Not it!”

Chavez thought it over for a second. “For now, we hang tight. We try to ID the American. If we can grab him before the pass, we do it, but if it looks like he’s going to make it to the North Koreans, one of us will pull his piece and fire off a full mag dump into the dirt. That should break up the party.”

There were a couple local cops around on motorcycles, but as this was a huge area, Chavez thought he could avoid a direct confrontation with the police.

At least he really, really hoped so.

He said, “Stay low pro, but keep your eyes peeled. This whole thing rests on getting this guy before he gets close to the North Koreans, and then getting out of here before the Indonesians get involved.”