Warriors

CHAPTER 56

Hail to the chief, my brother!” Stoke said, striding over to the long conference table to embrace Chief Charlie Rainwater. Rainwater was a tall, good-looking full-blooded Comanche warrior. He wore his long blue-black hair in a heavy ponytail that fell to his waist. To hold his hair back, he wore a solid gold napkin ring, a little souvenir he’d picked up in one of the late Mr. Gadhafi’s many palaces.

The chief had blazing black eyes beneath thick black brows, and his long nose was sharp as an arrow above somewhat cruel lips and white teeth. He wore a great deal of southwestern silver jewelry on his wrists and around his neck for a stone-cold warrior. Bare chested as always, Rainwater was wearing a pair of worn skintight buckskin breeches that Hawke recognized immediately.

“The baddest of the bad,” Rainwater said, pointing at Stoke and smiling broadly.

“And the largest of the large,” Stoke said, smiling back at his old comrade.

Hawke called out to the big ex — Navy SEAL. “You are indeed a sight for sore eyes, Chief!”

“And you as well, Hawke,” Rainwater said, his big teeth bone white in his copper-colored face.

There was a good deal of back-pounding going on when Hawke and Brock mounted the final set of steps and entered the War Room at the new and improved Fort Whupass.

A big, strapping Irishman with close-cropped red-gold hair entered the room with Froggy in tow and went directly to Hawke. He was ruddy complected and weather burned from years spent out of doors, but his clear green eyes still shone brightly through sun-wrinkled flesh. And his close-clipped matinee-idol moustache was always animated above his smile.

“FitzHugh McCoy, Commander,” Fitz said, reintroducing himself in his thick Irish brogue. “Aye, we’ve been counting the hours. How are you, sir? And how do you like our new digs?”

Hawke saluted the Congressional Medal of Honor winner, as was his due under U.S. military code.

“Magnificent, Fitz, on both counts. Things must be going well.”

McCoy laughed out loud, leaning back, hands on his hips.

“Things are going to shit, m’lord! That’s why we’re doing so well.”

“Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, Fitz. Not to mention, men.”

“Good Christ, is that right,” he said. “Whoever is steering the ship of state needs a few strongly worded lessons in fookin’ navigation, eh?”

“Bloody hell,” Hawke said, “I’m not sure anyone’s even at the helm these days, Fitz.”

“And so we find ourselves with yet another little mess to tidy up, don’t we?” the chief said. “North Korea? Never been. Cannot wait.”

“Shall we roll up our sleeves, then?” Hawke said, and then, eyeing Rainwater’s bare chest and arms, “You’re excused, of course. From rolling up your sleeves, I mean.”

Rainwater laughed. “Still the Hawke I remember from the Cuban incursion. I am happy we are all comrades in arms once more. Please. Everyone gather around the table. We have gamed a few scenarios to discuss.”

Hawke looked over at the table. It was a large round plate of thick clear glass, perhaps twelve feet across. Above it, a digital projector had been suspended from the ceiling. This table was apparently used for multiple displays of maps, satellite imagery, infrared thermal imaging, live on-site weather, et cetera, on the tabletop. There were state-of-the-art systems like this inside the Pentagon, the White House, and NSA in Washington, he knew, but surely nowhere else in private hands.

These modern soldiers of fortune were impressive, to say the least. T&L was taking twenty-first-century counterterrorism straight to the future. The team gathered round the display table as the first 3-D holographic images appeared.

Hawke said, “Gentlemen, we thank you for agreeing to be part of this hostage rescue operation. Our success is hugely important from Washington’s point of view as well as our own as America’s closest ally. It is, as you well know, a joint op using combined resources from both CIA and MI6. Mr. Brock here is our CIA coordinator for the duration of the mission. I, as mission commander, represent my team at Six HQ in London. Understood?”

“Aye-aye,” they all said in unison.

“All well and good, then,” FitzHugh McCoy said, and swiped a finger across the glass. This action pulled up a satellite photo of the coast of North Korea.

“Commander Hawke,” Fitz said, “you will recognize this as a CIA shot you forwarded to us from MI6 in London. It was taken six weeks ago by an American spy satellite at 0200 hours. It shows the relevant geography of the NK coastline. Good weather, good clear shot.”

“Yes,” Hawke said, “that’s the best one we got from them. Could you zoom in on that crescent-shaped bay? The one farthest north, just southwest of Chongjin?”

“Done,” McCoy said, using two fingers to swipe a zoom. “Here? This the one, sir?”

“That’s it.”

Hawke pointed to the spot and said, “This bay is the point of insertion my team in London recommends we use. We have studied all the other options and concluded that this is it. It has the best access to the camp, the shortest overland travel through the mountains. This small bay is where we go ashore. Weather forecasts for the area are generally good for the next week. But on Tuesday, one week from today, there will be a moonless night. Obviously, we will all agree on that as the target date for insertion?”

“Agreed,” everyone around the table said.

“So let’s all take a good close look at the enemy defenses, shall we?” Fitz said.

He swiped his finger again, and an image of desolation appeared. They saw a long finger of land, by turns mountainous and barren, surrounded by the sea and a mountain range on one side and a wide river on the other. Endless rows of shoddy wooden barracks were visible, but they knew a good deal of the death camp was built underground to keep what happened there a secret from U.S. spy satellites just like this one.

“Fitz, are you and your team quite sure this is the camp where the escapee identified possible American hostages?”

“Why don’t we ask him and find out.” Fitz smiled. “Froggy, will you ask the colonel to step inside?”

Froggy went to the door as Stoke said, “Don’t tell me you actually found this guy, Fitz?”

“Better than that. Ex-commando, South Korean army. Tough as nails, smart as bloody hell. I found him and I hired him — I had to talk him into leaving Stanford where he was in a doctorate program in political science. Wasn’t easy, I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse — the chance for a little payback time in North Korea.”

The tall South Korean escapee walked in, followed by Froggy.

“Good morning,” he said. “I am Colonel Cho Chang-ho. Please call me ‘Cho,’ easier that way. Welcome to Fort Whupass, gentlemen. Just a heads-up, we have no turn-down service and no pillow mints here.”

Stoke laughed out loud. He already liked this guy.

They shook hands all around, and Fitz turned the meeting over to Colonel Cho. Hawke suddenly found himself feeling a whole lot better about the mission’s chances for success. This man had been on the inside. And he knew, to put it crassly, where all the bodies were buried.

Cho flicked on a light stick for use as a pointer and began pulling up aerial images of the northern peninsula.

“The NKs run four of these camps, strung like islands in an archipelago running north-south the length of the interior of North Korea. They all look pretty much the same from above. Luckily, Commander Hawke, the CIA provided sat-photo close-ups of all four primary camps. This camp, six miles inland, was my camp. Kwan-li-so Number 25. Chongjin Political Prison Camp. I was there for ten years. I escaped into China by swimming across the Yalu River, seen here.”

“And you had good reason to believe there were American prisoners there, Colonel?” Hawke said.

“I did. There were rumors all over the camp. But they were kept away from the general population. I never actually saw them — until a few days ago. I’ll explain that in a few minutes.”

“What are all the long rectangular structures?” Stokely said.

Cho said, “Barracks. Where the more privileged prisoners sleep. There are roughly three thousand prisoners interned here, making it the smallest of the camps. Camp 22, near the Chinese border, has over fifty thousand. The bulk of the so-called political internees sleep underground. A lot of them never come back up.”

“Buried alive,” Chief Rainwater said.

“Yes. Please take a close look at this CIA picture taken some years ago. Tell me what you think.”

He swiped again, and an aerial image appeared. It was an extremely grainy black-and-white shot of three people walking across open ground.

“Notice anything?” Fitz asked.

“Children,” Hawke said.

“Correct,” Cho said. “The average height of a prisoner in this camp is something around five feet, give or take. Due mostly to the fact that they’re on lifelong starvation rations. Most die ten to twenty years after entering the camps. This picture was taken five years ago, in 2009.”

“The year Bill Chase and his family were kidnapped in Washington,” Hawke mused.

“Yes, sir. This shot’s dated one month after their abduction in Georgetown.”

“Couldn’t they be North Korean, Cho?” Brock said. “The kids, I mean.”

“They could be, Mr. Brock, they certainly could be. That’s what CIA analysts believed at the time. But I don’t think so. There are children born every year in the camps, although very few are ever interned prior to the teenage years. But look at the body morph shapes on the two depicted. Much fitter than the other children, most of whom are walking skeletons, bags of chicken bones. While these two are normal sized, slightly taller, and clearly healthier. And a whole lot more meat on their bones.”

“Americans,” Stoke said. “Damn straight.”

“Because of the timing of the sat shot… and because of the children’s obvious physical condition… I am convinced that these two children you’re looking at are none other than Milo Chase and his older sister, Sarah.”

“I agree,” Hawke said. “It only stands to reason.”

“Let’s go get those poor kids the hell out of there,” Stoke said.

“Before those monsters bloody starve and beat them to death,” Hawke said, his eyes suddenly gone hard with determination and a sense of renewed purpose. He knew the hostages were in there. With Colonel Cho by his side, he stood a damn good chance of getting them out alive.

He had it in for people who starved, tortured, and murdered children.

“Fitz, let’s talk logistics a minute,” Hawke said. “You’ve got a lot of men and equipment to move halfway around the world. How do you intend to accomplish that?”

“Dumbo. That C-130 you may have passed coming here. She’s getting on in years, but our pilot, Froggy, makes sure she’s airworthy. You just have to tell me where the sub will pick us up and we’ll be there.”

“I was just thinking about that. I know a remote place in the backwaters of the East China Sea. It’s called Xiachuan Island. It’s an old World War II Japanese air base with a serviceable eight-thousand-foot airstrip. The good news is it’s completely deserted because of Japan’s territorial dispute with China. I was intending to use it recently, land an F-35 Lightning there, but I got diverted by a relentless Chinese SAM missile, sadly enough.”

“Sounds perfect, Hawke,” Froggy said. “I’ll plug Xiachuan Island’s coordinates into our flight plan.”

Fitz said, “Let’s go over the camp’s defenses, gentleman, shall we? Colonel Cho and I have provided a detailed analysis and have some preliminary thoughts on how to get in and out of the damn place once the sub puts us ashore.”

The meeting went well into the night.