Devil's Fork (22 page)

“
Yes. But they are also
spread out because they don’t know where he’s trying to
go.”

“
Can we launch the other
mission we talked about?”

“
You mean the Snatch
mission?”

“
Yes. Can our friends
snatch that person they were watching? Maybe we can get that person
to tell us who this spy is, where he is going, what they all know,
and anything else. They need to move fast and get that person to
the North quickly.”

“
OK. I’ll tell them to
conduct the Snatch mission right now. Luckily this is something
they are actually good at.”

“
Yeah. They can be useful
for something. Call me when it’s done.”

CHAPTER 32

WEDNESDAY

Northeast Coast, North Korea

Tom was kneeling at the edge of the woods. A
long dirt road stretched out in front of him. Past him it also went
as far back as the eye could see. Tom was at Waypoint 1. The plan
was to get to this road and follow it at the edge of the woods
until it reached a particular ridge. The ridge led to a smaller
dirt path that went directly to the base.

For now Tom sat and watched the road through
his night vision goggles. He had avoided that last KPA patrol with
the zig zag run. In fact, he had veered a bit more to his right to
get away.

Before moving up this road, Tom wanted to
observe it. He wanted to see if there were any patrols on it or if
anyone else was observing the road. He was looking for anyone
trying to see him walking along it.

Up ahead, about 1,500 feet away Tom could
see a vehicle patrol. A military car was driving towards him. On it
a large, bright light was shining on the woods. It was shining on
the side of the woods he was on. Around the vehicle, several KPA
soldiers were walking on foot. The group was moving very
slowly.

Strange that they are just giving away their
position like that.

Tom took a moment to think to himself. If he
were trying to find an operative, he would try to do it quietly.
Someone can see a light and then maneuver around it. The smart
thing to do would have been to have people quietly sitting and
watching for movement along the road without a light.

Suddenly Tom’s earpiece started talking.

“
I hope you are going to
avoid that patrol.”

Tom whispered into his microphone.

“
Affirmative. I am
observing them right now. I will evade them once they are within
1,000 feet of my position. Over.” It helped that the Command Room
could see what he was seeing. But it also felt strange sometimes
when they commented on what they saw in front of him Tom
thought.

He looked through the scope on his M4 at the
team ahead. Now they looked like they were standing around. Their
flashlight was large and bright and focused on the section of
forest in front of them. One of the men had what looked like a
radio up to his ear. He seemed to be nodding. Tom tried to look
more carefully. Most of the soldiers did not even seem to be
looking for anything. They were standing around. Maybe one was
actually looking at the forest.

What are they doing?

Maybe they are just taking a break from
patrolling, he thought. He knew that he needed to get around them
somehow to continue down the road. He realized one option was to
cross the road and move along the other side. That side did not
have a flashlight shining at it and it did not appear that the
patrol was observing it at all. Tom stared for a minute at the road
in front of him. It was open space. He estimated that he would need
to cross about twenty feet to get to the other side. That twenty
feet had no cover. He would have to run across open air and be
completely visible for a moment. He already had to do this on the
beach, and he felt he had accomplished a miracle by not being seen.
He might as well have walked on water. Trying this again would not
feel right he thought.

He thought about his other option. He could
go back into the woods behind him, where he just had been playing
hide-and-seek. If he went deep enough, he could walk past the unit
ahead without being seen by its large flashlight. But then he would
be back in the midst of the many patrols in those woods. He had
just maneuvered past them.

He continued sitting right at the edge of
the woods, staring through his M4. He was weighing the benefits of
each option.

Suddenly he smelled something unusual. He
lowered his M4 and focused on the smell.

Cigarette
smoke
.

He looked across the road,
but could not see anyone. Then he looked behind him at the road
stretching in the opposite direction. There was a squad of soldiers
walking at the side of the road 30 feet from him. Several were
smoking. They were walking at a brisk pace and for the moment did
not see him, both because of the pitch-black night and the fact
that he was nestled at the edge of the woods. But these soldiers
were looking around actively. They were searching. Tom assumed that
in less than half a minute, one of these soldiers would see him. He
had no choice now. Almost without thinking, he backed up into the
woods, turned around, and started moving deeper into the forest
from which he had just come. He could feel an adrenaline rush kick
in. He was displeased with the amount of noise he had made turning
around. Thirty feet away, he thought, they
had
to have heard him. He picked up
his pace to put some distance between him and that patrol. He could
not hear anything behind him and did not turn around to see. He
imagined that a SERE instructor would have yelled at him for what
he just did. He made two mistakes after doing one thing right.
First, he disturbed some vegetation as he quickly tried to turn
around and get back into the woods. That KPA patrol, he thought,
would now be able to examine the bushes and branches at the edge of
the forest and figure out that someone had been sitting there.
Second, he was now jogging. Movement was supposed to be slow and
controlled. But he had no time. He had been surprised. Smelling the
smoke was one thing he performed correctly. Tom remembered that at
SERE they were trained to actively look, listen, and
smell
. Smells could often
alert one to enemy presence before looking or listening would. The
smell of a campfire traveled far and wide. In this case, without
focusing on smells, Tom would not have seen those soldiers until it
was too late.

His mind continued running through what just
happened.

How did that patrol come
out of nowhere
?

Now he heard voices coming behind him from
the edge of the woods. The patrol had stopped.

CHAPTER 33

WEDNESDAY NIGHT/ THURSDAY MORNING

Seoul, South Korea

Jiyeon was walking home from the office. It
was late, so the streets were quiet. The occasional car passed by.
The city’s bright lights made the darkness less frightening. Her
apartment building was just two blocks away.

She had stayed in the office until she
started to feel her eyelids become heavy. Good, she thought, maybe
she can go home and actually fall asleep.

Most of the street front stores and shops
were shut. A few 24-hour bodegas illuminated the dark street around
them. Jiyeon increased her pace. She wanted to get home sooner.
There were not many others walking this late. Up ahead an old lady
was slowly maneuvering her way through the block. A couple of drunk
men were sitting in the nook of the building at the corner of the
street.

Jiyeon had started to get spooked sitting in
the office all alone. She had given up on the idea of receiving a
call about Tom. She had thought it would be better to go home and
fall asleep. By the time she woke up the next morning, it would
probably be all over, she thought. Maybe Tom would be waiting for
her at Yongsan Garrison, sitting with coffee and breakfast and
peacefully watching something on TV. She wanted to see the small
smile he made when she had come into her living room that morning.
If she had blinked, she would have missed it.

She thought about how she had left the
office. It almost made her laugh on the street thinking about it.
When she had stood up to go, her mind was still walking through
Tom’s mission and her heart was still recovering from the scare she
got from Mr. Kim. Suddenly as she had started walking down the
hall, Mr. Kim’s phone had started ringing. It had pierced the
silence of the office and made Jiyeon jump. She had gained control
of herself and had listened to it ring, wondering who could be
calling Mr. Kim in the middle of the night. Then again, she had
thought, given that Mr. Kim was always in the office, other people
probably assumed that they could always reach him at an
unreasonable hour. After six or seven rings, the phone forwarded
the call to Mr. Kim’s cell phone. All of the analysts in Jiyeon’s
group had their work phones set up this way. They could always be
reached.

Jiyeon was now crossing the street to get to
the block her apartment building was on. The old lady was only a
few feet in front of her now. She looked like she was struggling.
She was walking with a cane and trying to hold a couple bags.
Jiyeon sometimes felt a tear when she saw old people struggling to
walk by themselves on the street. They never seemed to complain or
ask for any help – they were just trying to get through their
day.

When she caught up to the old lady, Jiyeon
turned to look at her. She could not see her face, as the lady was
hunched over and staring straight at the ground. Suddenly, Jiyeon
saw that the lady’s glasses fell on the ground in front of her.
Jiyeon watched as the old lady stopped, tried to steady her cane,
and started thinking about how best to deal with her bags before
trying to bend down to pick up her glasses. Jiyeon stopped. She
felt that tear forming. She decided to help the old lady.

“
Here, I’ll help you,
miss,” Jiyeon said as she approached.

Jiyeon bent down to grab the glasses.

When she got them, the lady grabbed her
hand. Immediately she slapped a handcuff onto Jiyeon’s wrist, then
quickly grabbed her other hand and connected the other side of the
handcuff. As Jiyeon looked up at her in shock, she saw the old
lady’s face. But no old lady was looking down at her. The girl who
slapped the handcuffs on Jiyeon looked less than 30 years old.
Before she had time to process anything, she felt a hand behind her
grab her mouth and a set of strong hands grab her feet. Soon she
was not on the ground anymore, but being carried by four hands
somewhere. She tried screaming but could not – the hand covering
her mouth was also making breathing difficult. She was more
concerned with sucking in enough air through her nose to stay
conscious.

She was pushed into the back door of a car
and could feel others get inside after she had been thrown in. It
looked like an SUV. The hand was still on her mouth. A man who was
sitting in the trunk space reached over and stuck a needle into her
neck. She felt a painful pinch while she was struggling. She tried
kicking and wiggling but everyone was pressing their arms on her
body and she felt like she was lying under a rock.

She could feel the car start to move. Soon
she became dizzy and could not wiggle anymore. She looked up. A
young girl in an old lady’s outfit was staring down at her. A man
with eerily calm eyes had his hand on her mouth. She had seen him
sitting drunk in a corner moments ago. Jiyeon’s eyes closed.

CHAPTER 34

WEDNESDAY NIGHT / THURSDAY MORNING

Northeast Coast, Democratic People’s
Republic of Korea

Captain Kim cursed at his
radio as it tried saying something. Instead of broadcasting
clearly, it garbled the message and he could not understand
anything. By now he and his four men were almost at the road near
the forest. He told his men to stretch out in a line formation. He
knew lines were predominantly used in 18
^th
and
19
^th
century warfare, when armies marched in neat formations, stood
facing each other, and fired relentlessly until one side ran away.
But he wanted his men to use line formation to search for this spy.
If they were spread out, they could cover more ground while they
walked. As a unit would be more likely to find clues that this
infiltrator left behind. His small team did find a clue back deeper
in the forest. One of his men had spotted what looked like an
indentation in the dirt near a bush. It was circular and looked
like it might have been created by a knee placed on the ground. But
it also could have been something else. It was difficult for
Captain Kim to tell exactly what it was. But at least it gave him
confidence to keep going straight forward. He knew that the other
patrols in the woods were not being so careful. They were just
walking around in columns shining their flashlights everywhere. It
would be much harder for them to find anyone. Kim shook his head as
he thought about it. Some people in this country, he thought, are
such
clowns
. Why
did they not take anything seriously or care? Was it because they
had such bad equipment, like this blasted radio, that they just
gave up?

He had his men stop where they were. He
wanted to try to get his radio working without having to walk. In
front of them was a small hill sloping up with a fallen tree on a
large rock about ten feet away. It was a cozy, secluded place to
stand for a moment, he thought. His radio was still garbling up
some message. He tried to open the back and see if he could play
with any wiring. This radio had probably been used in the
Fatherland Liberation War against the Americans over half a century
ago, he imagined.