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  To Herbert D. Kelleher

  A man who had more friends

  than anyone I’ve ever known

  ONE

  The F/A-18F Super Hornet threaded between hills at less than three hundred feet. Had it been daytime, the craggy terrain would have been a blur, trees and rock rushing past like a Star Wars jump to light speed. As it was, on a clear half-moon night, the hills were no more than fleeting glimpses of shadow in the periphery.

  It was enough to hold the attention of both the jet’s occupants.

  The pilot, Commander Dan “Gonno” Rhea, was navigating using the thermographic display from their latest and greatest gadget, a forward-looking infrared pod that gave a righteous picture for hand-flying the jet at MSA—minimum sane altitude. He took particular care not to stroke the afterburner. They were flying single ship, and completely unannounced, deep inside North Korean airspace. That being the case, he had no desire to advertise their presence with thirty-foot-long plumes of fire from the twin exhaust cans. Along the same lines, he was careful not to break the sound barrier and throw a sonic boom across the countryside. That would be like ringing the doorbell on air defense networks which had so far remained quiet. The fact that Rhea was committing every synapse to flying his jet was probably just as well—his egress back over the border could prove even more problematic.

  “Sir, are you sure about this?” he asked again through the intercom.

  “Never more sure in my life,” came the response from the back seat.

  Rhea had always thought himself unflappable—as Navy pilots tended to be. Yet this present situation, to put it mildly, had his full and undivided attention. What mystified him was the guy in back. Rhea was sure he wasn’t an aviator, yet he seemed infused with a surreal calmness. His voice was more level now than when they’d been standing next to the briefing room coffee pot. His words were perfectly focused, his responses clear and succinct. Whoever and whatever he was … the guy was in a zone.

  Commander Rhea didn’t even know how to address his stand-in weapons system operator. As far as he knew, the man wasn’t a military officer. But he definitely had clout—more than any admiral Rhea had ever seen. The air wing commander had given explicit orders: Give him anything he wants. Emphasis on anything. Unfortunately, what he wanted—and hadn’t mentioned until after they were airborne—seemed like a death wish.

  Rhea wished he had more time to think about it. More time to weigh the risk-reward balance of a maneuver that was going to put his career on a fast track: whether it was to aviation legend or Leavenworth he had no idea. But then, it was probably for the best—in the dead of night, at two hundred feet above the ground and 550 knots, there was no time to dwell on his next fitness report.

  He couldn’t avert his eyes from the terrain display for more than a second. He stole the occasional glance at the map. A momentary cross-check of airspeed and the time-to-target clock. He’d given up trying to talk his nugget backseater out of what they were about to do. That had been settled definitively ten minutes earlier. Rhea’s eyes flicked again disbelievingly to the standby compass on the far right side of his instrument panel—it was no longer functional, a bullet hole dead center.

  “Ninety seconds,” Rhea announced. “We’re gonna pop-up now, slow to the speed we briefed.”

  “Do what you have to, Commander.”

  “Double-check that lever.”

  A pause. “NORM position confirmed.”

  “Okay,” Rhea said, because what else could he say? “Thirty seconds.” He pulled the throttles to idle, and the aircraft began to decelerate. Rhea pulled back, the G-forces increasing smoothly until the jet was established in a twenty-degree climb. The deceleration became more pronounced, the airspeed tape winding down as if falling off a cliff. The sudden slowdown caused a slight uptick in the computed arrival time as the nav computer corrected for the lower speed.

  “Last chance to change your mind…” Rhea said, more a comment than any kind of advice.

  For the first time there was no reply from the back seat. Rhea didn’t know what to make of that. He’d only met the man a few hours ago. He was slightly on the tall side, in very good shape. Sandy hair and unusual gray eyes, a five-day beard to suggest he was either trying for the chic rough-hewn look, or that grooming had become secondary in recent days. Rhea would have bet his pension on the latter. The man’s English was effortless, but there was a hint of an accent Rhea couldn’t quite place. Yet he always found himself coming back to the eyes—they held a surreal intensity. Rhea had the feeling that every word he’d spoken in his quick-fire preflight briefing had been recorded on some kind of hard drive in the guy’s head. Oxygen mask, fast pants, parachute procedures—every detail, notched word for word.

  Gotta be a snake-eater or a spook, he decided. Maybe both.

  Commander Rhea had seen a lot in his fifteen years in the Navy. Plenty of combat during cruises to the Gulf and Med, two spins through TOPGUN, one as a student, another as an instructor. He’d strafed ISIS strongholds and dodged surface-to-air missiles. But he’d never done anything as dodgy as this. Never heard anyone think about performing such a move. Not over open ocean or a desert training ground. Sure as hell not over North freaking Korea. The maneuver wasn’t in any NATOPS manual. Not really. Then again, as a graduate of TOPGUN, he did see one parallel. It made Rhea think of the tables for a JDAM precision bomb, or maybe a Maverick missile. He was making a weapon delivery of sorts.

  “Yeah,” he whispered to himself, “that’s exactly what it is.”

  “What?” said the backseater.

  “Nothing.” The radar altimeter was passing three thousand feet, airspeed falling through two fifty. Rhea checked the timer, began to trim forward with his thumb. “Ten seconds. Remember the position—spine straight, look forward.”

  “Got it.”

  “And by the way … best of luck, Killer.”

  “Thanks. And thanks for getting me this far.”

  Rhea glanced at the bullet hole in his compass. “Two … one … go!”

  David Slaton, who was already gripping the yellow handle between his thighs, pulled it sharply upward and hung on for dear life.

  TWO

  Twelve days earlier

  Having committed fourteen years of his life to safeguarding the most prized weapons in the Korean People’s Army, Captain Jung Dong-hwan found it disquieting to stand looking at an open bunker door.

  The lighting inside the underground chasm was typically poor. A snaking series of overhead bulbs ran along the ceiling, the wire-encased fixtures dim on the best of days and subject to the power outages that were endemic across North Korea. Tonight, however, the usual d
eficiencies had been compounded by the visitors who’d taken over the place—a group of men, dressed in simple workers’ coveralls, had severed the light string near the entrance, leaving a fifty-foot tract of darkness as the only connection to the outer world.

  Jung strained to see through the open entrance, searching for the benevolent glow of the partial moon. At least the open door gave ventilation, he reasoned, the usual stagnant air stirred ever so slightly by a cool evening breeze. His musings were interrupted by a barked command.

  “Outside!”

  He turned to see his colonel’s stony face—he was jabbing a finger toward the exit.

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  Jung turned to his senior NCO, Sergeant Kim, tapped him on the shoulder, and together they began walking.

  That their commander was here at three in the morning was notable in itself. The regiment’s mission was to guard a network of eighteen similar bunkers spread across the nearby hills. The colonel, however, rarely ventured into the field, preferring the warmth of the headquarters complex—thirty miles away at Panghyon airfield. Jung typically saw his commander once each week, when he traveled to headquarters for the regular Tuesday-morning staff meeting. To the best of Jung’s knowledge, the colonel had never set foot in this particular tunnel.

  It was called Bunker 814. The question of whether there could possibly be 813 other such fortifications in the network run by the People’s Strategic Rocket Forces—or for that matter, a thousand or two thousand—was something he and Sergeant Kim had often debated. It seemed incomprehensible that so many tunnels might be carved into the northern hills. Then again, there was no denying the government’s emphasis over the last twenty years. Jung couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a road or a power line built whose primary purpose was not military. He knew bunkers like 814 were carved into countless mountainsides, burrowed into valleys, and that all of it was connected by thousands of miles of roads and tunnels. Whatever the true scope of the project might be, there was no denying it was a shell game of the grandest proportions.

  Jung hoped the imperialists would someday see the folly of their ways. His countrymen were starving, disease running rampant, all thanks to the aggression of America and its deranged leaders. As was often made clear by Chairman Kwon, a strong nuclear capability was of paramount importance. Indeed, as Jung’s colonel so regularly attested, it was the only thing that stood between peace and invasion. He felt pride that Bunker 814 was doing its part.

  With their boots crunching over the gravel, the two men passed through the massive main doors. Jung had always thought they looked like something from a bank vault, two great slabs of meter-thick steel. When fully open, as they were now, the tunnel was wide enough to receive a Rodong missile transporter. For years the trucks had come and gone on a regular basis, at least one arriving each week. They typically stayed between two and ten days, the duration of their visits ostensibly a strategic decision, although Jung had come to suspect it might have less to do with any military scheme than the availability of diesel fuel on a given day. At the height of last summer, however, things had changed. The regular visits of ballistic missiles to Bunker 814 came to an abrupt halt. What arrived in their place was a mystery, and a matter of quiet speculation within the unit.

  Jung reached the tunnel entrance with Kim at his shoulder, and they were met by a cold and clear night. Dim moonlight filtered through the camouflage netting overhead, and the air seemed alive, chill and fresh compared to the sulfuric humidity of the tunnel.

  By design, there were few external traces of the bunker’s existence. Drilled deep into the mountain, the entrance was camouflaged by plastic trees and vegetation. A two-hundred-meter gravel access road weaved through dense forest, the canopy of which was augmented by more netting. That road connected to a nearby paved artery that was opened sporadically to commercial traffic. Sergeant Kim insisted the Americans’ satellites could not be so easily fooled, and Jung thought he might be right.

  Kim was a technically gifted young man, and until last year had been posted near the DMZ. The unspoken assumption was that such individuals had great insights into the outside world. Internet connectivity in North Korea was strictly forbidden, but those who lived close to the southern border, and who dared defy the prohibition, found ways to connect. A friend with a smartphone or tablet computer, a hijacked signal. Rumor had it the South Koreans encouraged such connections, and Jung didn’t doubt it. He also believed what he read in Workers’ Party communiqués: that the South fabricated incomprehensible achievements in industry, commerce, and sport, all while erasing news of rampant unrest. Drug use, pornography, greed—as he’d been told since he was a child, these were the enduring products of capitalism.

  Jung led his second to a small rock outcropping and paused there.

  “Where have the others gone?” Sergeant Kim asked, his eyes searching. The rest of Jung’s unit, a contingent of sixteen men, had been ordered outside an hour earlier when the visiting team had taken over.

  “I don’t know—I thought they would be here.”

  “Might they have been sent home?”

  Jung shook his head. “I never heard the bus,” he said, referring to the rattletrap shuttle that at the end of every shift transferred crews to their barracks fifteen miles away. “Anyway, someone would have told me if our watch was standing down.”

  “Perhaps we should ask what is happening.”

  He frowned at his senior NCO. Sergeant Kim had a habit of making such suggestions, and Jung took it as a critique of his own decisiveness.

  “All will become clear. You heard the colonel—our orders are to assist these men in every way.”

  “But when they leave … there will be no one to secure the bunker. How can we manage without our men?”

  Jung didn’t respond.

  Kim looked at him tentatively. “Do you think they might be closing 814?”

  The question had crossed Jung’s mind. And how could it not given what they’d seen? He and Kim had both been on duty that warm night six months ago when a new consignment arrived and was put in their custody. It rode in on the biggest forklift either of them had ever seen—carried on twin prongs, an off-white steel container that was the length of a small car, but narrow and peculiarly shaped with bulges on either end. Based on how the forklift strained and swayed with every turn, it was also tremendously heavy, giving the sum impression of a giant barbell. Together, he and Sergeant Kim had watched it disappear into Shaft 3, going so deep that the sound of the forklift’s engine ultimately faded to nothing.

  Jung had never ventured inside that passage, either before or after the delivery—it had always been off-limits. Yet according to the site map—which, as shift commander, it was his duty to commit to memory—Shaft 3 was the deepest in the complex, over twice the length of any other. For reasons never explained, the Rodongs were prohibited from using it. The passage had remained dormant as long as anyone could remember, and until that night had fallen to little more than a curiosity. Jung assumed the shaft suffered from either instability or flooding, which he knew from his headquarters meetings was a problem at some of the other complexes.

  The arrival of the big cask put that notion to rest. And whatever it was, the container had become a permanent fixture. Jung and his men were briefed that what lay down Shaft 3 was highly radioactive—perhaps because it was, or perhaps to tamp down any thoughts of a closer inspection. They’d also been ordered in strictest terms to not speak of its presence. As far as Jung knew, those warnings had been heeded. He himself had not gone near Shaft 3 since the mystery container arrived, and he could honestly say he’d never heard rumors that any of his men had done so. More curiously, since that balmy summer day, the visits of the Rodong transporters had ceased completely.

  “I am glad they’re taking it away,” said Kim. He was looking at a sturdy flatbed trailer sitting in wait. It had brought in another big forklift, which was presumably now retrieving the container. Three men stood guard
next to the truck, compact semiautomatics slung across their chests. Jung had glimpsed at least two others at the top of the road.

  “I too am glad,” Jung replied. “I didn’t like so many inspections.”

  Since the cask’s arrival, teams from headquarters had been coming on a stepped-up schedule, often unannounced, to inspect 814. They scrutinized security measures and interrogated Jung and his men. Notably, however, not a single inspector had ever ventured into Shaft 3 for a direct look at whatever they were guarding. Like any company-grade officer in the Korean People’s Army, Jung knew being in the spotlight had little upside. He’d always answered the inspectors’ questions truthfully, happy he had nothing to hide. Even so, he’d never been able to shake the unease that whatever lay in Shaft 3 was going to have a bearing on his career. Jung knew it had to be extremely valuable—more so, apparently, than mobile ballistic missiles fitted with nuclear warheads.

  “Do you think we have done something wrong?” Kim asked. “What if the inspectors reported our work as being deficient?”

  “No. If that were true, they would not remove this thing. It would be far easier to replace us with another brigade.”

  The two exchanged an uncomfortable glance. Before either could speak again, a distant rumble stirred from the tunnel. Like a cough from the throat of some waking beast, the reverberation grew. As the forklift neared the tunnel mouth, Jung felt its arrival more than he heard it—the ground trembled beneath his feet.

  Finally the container emerged. With the forklift not yet in view, it seemed to levitate through the great steel doors. It looked much as Jung remembered. Under the forklift’s floodlights, he noticed the white outer shell had gone to a dull gray, a result of the dust that accumulated on everything placed in the tunnel for any length of time. As before, he had the impression of a great leaden barbell, an image amplified as every movement was translated to the machine behind.