A Northern Thunder (26 page)

When the departing scientists heard that, they shuddered. They were not unfamiliar with Dr. Nampo’s leadership style. Pak waited until each man left, and then pressed a pad on the door, sliding it shut.

Turning to Pak, Nampo said, “You know that the accuracy of the acquiring team is faulty?”

“Yes, sir,” Pak said meekly, afraid to incur Nampo’s wrath.

“Comrade Nung-Say is in charge of the acquisition team. Can his assistant handle the requirements we expect of that team?”

Again, Pak was aware that only an affirmative response would be acceptable. “Yes, sir, without a doubt,” Pak said. “He has a young scientist, Ko My, who works as Nung-Say’s direct assistant. Ko My is probably brighter than he is, and they have a complete team I believe can do the job.”

“Then have Nung-Say removed tonight.”

By this command, Nampo did not mean have him relieved, replaced, retired, or reassigned. The man would be taken to the front entrance and placed on a UAZ Soviet jeep. He would ride the short distance to Kosan, where his wife and two young children would be picked up as well. The wife would see her husband’s look and begin to cry. She would know why the armed guards were present. After a full day’s travel to Wonsan and then by train across much of North Korea, the small family would be delivered to Haengyong near the Chinese border. Haengyong was also known as Camp 22. At Camp 22, the State Security Agency kept nearly fifty thousand prisoners in brutal, frigid, starvation-like conditions.

“Comrade, if we don’t succeed, and I mean succeed quickly, each of us will make that journey to Camp 22.” Nampo was not inclined to fail—and certainly not inclined to fail in this mission.

“Yes, Comrade Director, your directions shall be followed explicitly.”

“Good. Let us replace him quickly and move on with our tests,” said Nampo. “Comrade Assistant Director, I have come to the conclusion that we’ll never be able to achieve the needed accuracy and efficiency with a conventional warhead. It’s clear we must have a nuclear weapon that matches the Taepo Dong-3X’s range and payload size. We don’t have time to develop another rocket. We don’t have time to develop a greater payload capacity. We’ll have to develop a weapon that can operate within the payload capacity and still reach the GEO orbit.”

“Yes, Comrade Director, you’re absolutely right.”

“And the clock is ticking.”

A
s the small team climbed through an aspen grove, Kevin Moncrief noticed, amidst an intensifying snowfall, that it was becoming more difficult to see Shane Stidham ahead of him on the rope. Stidham, stopping ahead of Moncrief, held his hand up high, then made a circling motion. He was relaying a signal. The colonel had stopped and was calling them to the front.

Moncrief moved rapidly up the line, grabbing the excess rope as he caught up to Stidham. From there, both moved forward together to Hernandez. The crew had spent years together, and like riding a bike, quickly became reacquainted with each other’s moves to the point where they could already begin to anticipate one another’s actions.

Moncrief felt the cold wet snowflakes each time he turned into the wind. He lifted his goggles, only to feel the sting as the increasingly dense snow struck his eyes. It wasn’t the ice on his face that surprised him as much as how comfortable he actually felt. The few layers of Polartek and Gortex were infinitely superior to the equipment supplied during his last visit to Bridgeport. The Marines were then doling out Korean War-era pants and multi-layered parkas with fur-lined hoods. The old clothing covered them like heavy Mexican blankets, weighed as much, and was constantly damp, inside from the sweat and outside from the melting snow.

At the edge of the grove, the four men huddled low, their backs to the wind. “We’ll be crossing a saddle about five clicks to the north, northwest,” Will whispered to the three. The snowstorm may have deafened sound, but Will was taking no chances—a voice in the mountains could carry, and he assumed patrols were near.

Moncrief was again perplexed by the direction in which the team was headed. Of the three peaks, one was to the southeast and the other two were south of that one. “The storm is worsening, and it’ll be dark in about an hour,” said Will. “I want to build two ice caves and ride out the worst of it here.”

“Yes, sir.” Moncrief knew well the coziness of a well-made ice cave. A break from the increasingly ferocious wind would probably add twenty degrees of warmth.

“Gunny, you and Staff Hernandez will take one, and Staff Stidham and I will take the other. Stidham and I will carve out both caves while you two cut some evergreens to line them.”

“Yes, sir.” Moncrief turned as he spoke to Enrico Hernandez. “Staff, this is getting worse. We probably need to stay tethered together so we don’t get lost.”

“I saw several pine trees on the edge of the grove about five hundred meters back,” Hernandez said.

The two crews silently went to work building the two shelters. At the edge of the aspen grove where the face of the mountain rose sharply, Will and Stidham found a large boulder between two deep drifts of snow. In silence, Will pointed Stidham to the right, then began himself on the left. At the edge of his drift, Will bent down on his knees, removed his pack, took off one of his snow shoes, and dug like an oversized mole, using the snow shoe as a small shovel, first down a few feet and then into the drift. Meanwhile, Stidham dug on the right. Once down and in, both started carving out small caverns deep below the snow.

Will stopped after a time, climbing carefully out of the etched hole, and spotted a stick, the size and shape of a long broomstick, near an aspen tree. He crossed over, pulled the stick from the snow, and broke off a few branches, making a long straight pole. Carefully, he leaned over the cave’s top and gently poked the stick down, through the roof and into the cavity, slowly moving it in a circle until he had created an opening the size of a golf ball. He then tossed the stick over to the entrance of Stidham’s cave.

Will opened his pack, searching through it until he came across a small white candle. Any pack outfitted for basic survival in the cold, snowbound woods would contain one. Holding it, he crawled into the cave, lit the candle, and began making circular motions on the ceiling, causing drops of water to splash onto his face. The melting snow built a bond of ice molecules, and as the increasing cold returned to the cave and darkness fell, the water turned to ice. The ceiling was streaked with light black marks created by the candle’s smoke. When finished, he had melted and frozen a solid dome capable of supporting a man who might accidentally walk on it.

As Will pulled himself out of the cave, Moncrief appeared at its entrance with a large pile of small cut evergreens. “Sir, you stay in there and I’ll get these through to you.”

Will slid back through the entrance and waited as the first of several piles of evergreens was passed through the entrance. Soon, the inside of the cave was covered with a deep, pine-smelling layer of small greens. After the last pile, Moncrief handed Will’s pack to him. At practically the same time, Stidham came over and handed his pack through the opening to Will.

“Gunny,” said Will.

“Yes, sir,” said Moncrief.

“It’s going to be totally dark in fifteen minutes.”

“Can’t see much now, sir.”

“Yeah, I’m guessing it’s zero visibility and that’ll probably last through the night.”

“What’re you thinking, boss?” said Moncrief.

“We’ve got several candy bars in our packs,” said Will. “Let’s bed down for a few hours and then move out before dawn.”

“Sir, the tail end of the storm will still be cooking then.”

“Yeah, I know, but we need some cover. They’ve got people at the food stops, but they may be out patrolling as well.”

“Good point, boss.” Moncrief, now certain they were headed in the wrong direction, figured at this rate, they’d be off the military base in a few miles, and much deeper into the mountains. But he knew not to speak up.

“See you in a few hours.” Will, with Stidham right behind him, crawled back into the cave. Like two wild creatures in a burrow, they wiggled tightly together, and in orchestrated fashion, Stidham pulled himself out of the opening. Using a pine bough, he brushed the footprints near the opening, then gathered up a large pile of snow the size of a large playground ball and pulled it to the doorway, snugly plugging the hole. In only a short time, the snowstorm would blanket over the remaining tracks and conceal any trace of this part of the team. A patrol, if it braved the storm, would walk across the domes of the caves and never realize the men were a few feet below.

The two lay in tight quarters, with the candle lit in the corner near the small breathing hole. The cave warmed up quickly, and both men soon unzipped their parkas and lay down on them.

“Well, it could be worse,” Will said with a smile.

“How’s that, sir?”

“You could be on that mountaintop, guarding the food.”

“Yes, sir,” Stidham laughed.

The Marines on top of Wells Peak were not laughing. Keeping a defensive posture was the worst. After a long, miserable night spent in two-man foxholes below the cut of the wind, they quietly cheered when first light showed. By that time, however, Will’s team was long gone, climbing over the saddle between the two mountains and over into the next valley. By seven, the storm was still raging, only slightly less severe than the worst of the night, and by ten, the men could barely see in front of themselves.

G
unny Moncrief again pulled the caboose, the last man on the tethered rope. For several hours without stopping, they had come down through a deeply wooded valley into another large aspen grove. Stidham again held up his arm to signal a stop. Moncrief, leaning away from the wind next to a large aspen the size of a street pole, felt a rough cut to the smooth aspen bark and noticed an etching carved into the tree.

“I’ll be damned,” he said quietly as he recognized not the initials “R.S.” as much as the date—“May 5, 1908.” Aspens had sat as silent observers on these mountains for quite some time.

A tug on the rope pulled his attention back to Stidham, giving a hand signal to move forward. It was only as he left the aspen grove that Gunny Moncrief first noticed the stream crossing to the left near the wall of the canyon. Only a few minutes later, he noticed the shape of a small, red-stained cabin next to the stream, followed by another and another. Will stopped at the third cabin while his team held tight to the tethered rope.

“I thought we were a little off-course, sir,” said Moncrief.

“No, we were right on-course—just not their course.”

Moncrief smiled in appreciation. Under the rules of the exercise, they could hit the mountaintops for food, but only if they wanted to. As far as Will was concerned, wanting to wasn’t a necessary part of the mission.

“The cabins have plenty of bunks,” said Will. “Each has a fireplace and stacked firewood.”

“What about Pickle Meadow?”

“We’re at least six clicks off their maps. By the time they even get curious, we’ll be gone.”

“Yes, sir,” said Moncrief. “And food?”

“This place is still owned by a retired Marine gunner who lives in Reno in the winter,” said Will. “He’s got a pantry stocked in the main cabin, and it’s not locked. It’s the code of these mountains that if you get this far back, you can use whatever you want. We’ll leave a few bucks for him when we get back to Fallon.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Besides, he and I served together here in the eighties. He’ll get a kick out of the story.”

In less than an hour, the crew had a fire raging in the largest of the cabins, cooking green beans, corn, and steaks that Hernandez had found in the back of a turned-off freezer still cold enough to keep the meat frozen.

“Okay, boss, what’s this mission all about?” Moncrief raised the question after they’d stuffed themselves with the makeshift meal.

“Kevin, I can’t tell you much.”

Will’s tone was more serious than Moncrief had remembered in a long time. He hadn’t used the gunny’s first name, especially in front of Stidham and Hernandez, in a decade. One night in Kuwait, when Will had just gotten word that their Anglico team would not be helo’d out, but would have to walk out past a regiment of the Iraqi National Guard, Will had used “Kevin” to explain the depth of the problem. They lost two men that night.