Threat Level Black (13 page)

Dr. Park got up from the chair and went to the window, bending his head to look up at the sky past the nearby mountainside. A few faint stars glimmered in the darkness; he thought of the folktale about the cowherd and the weaver, the constellations separated by a father’s jealousy.

Why was he here? The unit Dr. Park had been told he would help had not arrived; in fact, there were no more than a dozen men all told, if that. The camp seemed as forlorn as any Dr. Park had ever seen. The airfield a few miles away where the tests were supposed to be held was emptier still, abandoned for months if not years. The open hangar at the far end of the runway area held two small aircraft, the remains of a UAV project that until now Dr. Park had only heard rumors about, but the crews who cared for the planes, as well as the men who had developed them, were absent. The other buildings there were falling in on themselves.

The buildings here were not much better. The rooms in his small bungalow smelled of mildew. A cook made meals only once a day; the rest of the time Dr. Park had to forage for food in the large kitchen in the administrative building, apparently as the others did. The few men he had contact with were young soldiers who answered questions with shrugs.

Had he been sent here as punishment for Moscow?

He did not think this could be so, for surely punishment would be more severe. It seemed more that he had simply been forgotten. He was free to wander back and forth and spend his hours playing one-man Ping-Pong against the folded side of a game table. A soldier or two was never far away—one had gone with him to the airfield the other day, and down the road for a walk the day before—but none ever stopped him.

Most likely the situation was a product of the growing disarray in the country, the confusion between different branches and departments. Even in this isolated place Dr. Park saw it: A dignitary had arrived yesterday and yet received no official greeting; his car had swung in the gate and gone up to the main administration building, and if the man had even gotten out, let alone taken a tour of the place, Dr. Park did not know about it.

Dr. Park decided he would take a walk. He began thinking of the folktale again, the cleverness of coming up with an earthly story to explain the movement of the heavens. Dr. Park had always been interested in the stars; he saw it as an extension of his interest in science and math. He had vaguely hoped that if he was successful in leaving for America, he would be able to pursue those interests somehow. Perhaps there was a space project he might be assigned to, or some department dealing with the study of the stars. But the failure in Moscow—his own failure, he knew—had sealed his fate. He would live out his days as an engineer for the state, as preordained.

He walked around the perimeter of the camp, admiring the stars. Tomorrow he would find the camp director or someone else in authority and make inquiries, he decided. If he was not needed, perhaps it would be possible to visit his mother’s cousin in Dao; she was his last claim on family, though it was doubtful she even knew that he was there.

Dr. Park took one last look at the stars before going back inside his hut. Now he thought about his grandmother when she had told him the folktale of the stars that could meet only once a year. He felt again her warm embrace, the only memory he had now of the day his mother and father died together.

The memory lingered as he crossed the threshold of the hut. It stayed with him even as the thick blade of a hatchet smacked into the back corner of his skull, sending the life from his body.

Tyler leaned across the rock, training the nightscope on the runway. The airfield was practically unguarded, with only two men watching the road at the south. It seemed to have been used as a storage area but had been abandoned sometime before. The army camp where their contact was living was two miles away. At one time a cross between an army base and a factory, it, too, seemed almost abandoned: There were skeleton posts around the perimeter, with no more than a dozen guards. A three-man team had already scouted it; they had a way in if their man didn’t show. Another team was sitting near the field itself, ready to intervene if the pilot needed help.

The communications man tapped him. Tyler cupped his hand over his ear and then clicked into the circuit, talking into the miniature boom mike that extended near his collar.

“Etha bleekah,”
he said. It was a transliteration of
3mo 6u3ko
, Russian for
It’s nearby.
While the odds against the radio signal being intercepted were practically nil, they had decided to use Russian code words unless there was a problem. The phrase was arbitrary, intended to tell the controller that everything was clear but that the Korean had not yet arrived.

“Da,”
responded the controller.
Yes.

Howe was on schedule. All they needed was their package.

The communications man tapped him, then held up two fingers.

Team Two had the Korean in sight.

Tyler moved across the rise to a spot overlooking the road, careful not to stand upright where he would risk being silhouetted in the moonlight.

The man was alone, riding a bike.

He went back to the communications sergeant, who was handling the team’s twenty-pound radio, a modern version of the Raytheon AN/PSC-5(V). The radioman could select satellite, line- of-sight, UHF, and VHF frequencies.

“Eh-ehta harasho,”
Tyler said into the mike, stuttering as he tried to pronounce the words
3mo xopowo: It’s all right, we’re cool, let’s kick butt, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.

He pulled off his headset, straining to hear the hum of a jet in the distance.

Howe stood on the brakes as he touched down, the aircraft like a fully loaded tractor-trailer trying to grab the last spot in the Wal-Mart parking lot fresh off the Interstate. Short-landing characteristics were one thing; fitting yourself onto a postage stamp was something else again. The aircraft drifted to the right as he rode down the hard-packed runway; he pushed his whole body gently as he worked the stick, centering the aircraft with as much an act of will as muscle. Shadows flicked across his path; the g forces pinning him back to the seat suddenly eased, and one of the hangar buildings loomed on the left.

And then he saw the battery-powered lights the Air Force special operators had set to mark the edge of the runway.

He was in.

In.

Howe had just enough room and momentum to turn the S-37/B around at the end of the runway. As he did so, he popped the double canopy open and stared back at the shadows near the buildings. The lights told him that the air commandos and their Army brethren were all around him; all he had to do was sit and wait.

He had a pistol in his survival vest. He reached for it, pulling it out: It was a Makarov, in keeping with his cover, bulky and somewhat awkward, especially compared to his service Beretta, but it was reassuring nonetheless. He put the gun into his lap, holding it there, not wanting to scare the Korean off but not wanting to be caught unarmed either.

Belatedly, Howe pushed the timer button on his wristwatch, counting down his idle time. The buzzer would ring after ten minutes, but he’d already decided he would wait now as long as it took.

Four minutes had drained from the face of the clock when a figure appeared less than ten yards from the front of the plane. He had a gun in his hand; Howe involuntarily winced, bringing his own pistol up.

“American?” shouted the figure.

He ran to the side of the plane as Howe got out of the cockpit. The gun he held was a pistol—a revolver, Howe thought, from the shadow of the long barrel.

“American?” the man repeated. The accent had the hip-hop sound of a native Asian speaker, where tonal variations played an important role in meaning. “American?”

He pointed the pistol at Howe. Howe realized he was pointing back.

They had not set a password: How many jets would be appearing at this base; how many lone men would just happen to be close to it?

“American?” asked the man again.

“Yeah,” said Howe.

By now the Korean was looking for a handhold. Howe reached down and pulled the man onto the front winglet. The Korean threw a small bag into the backseat, then reached to climb in.

“The bomb,” yelled Howe. “Is the bomb here?”

“No bomb,” shouted the Korean.

“Where is it?”

The man said something, but between the sound of the jet engines beneath them and the man’s accent, it was impossible to understand.

“Snap on your restraints,” said Howe. The Korean fumbled with the helmet; Howe pushed it over his ears, then made the connections. He checked the seat restraints and started back for his cockpit when he thought of something else.

“Your gun,” he told the Korean, though there was no way the man could hear with the helmet on.

Howe reached over and grabbed for it; the man slapped his hand on Howe’s.

“No,” said Howe, shaking his head. “I get it.”

The Korean didn’t let go. Howe reached and took his own weapon; he thought of threatening the Korean but then thought of something better: He threw it down toward the ground.

Finally the Korean let go of his hand. Howe tossed the weapon down.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said, going forward and climbing in.

Tyler saw the vehicle before anyone else did.

“Take him,” he said over the discrete-burst short-range com system that connected him with the men guarding the approach.

As he gave the order, the jet engines kicked up several notches on the field below, the plane roaring from the runway.

Belatedly, Tyler realized he had made a mistake. The truck was too far away to see the plane.

“Wait!” he yelled.

But it was too late: A Russian-made RPG grenade fired by one of his men blew through the windshield of the truck and exploded. A second later the rest of the team peppered its occupants with fire from their AK-47s.

“Shit,” said Tyler.

“Major?” asked the warrant officer in charge of the team that had just destroyed the truck.

“My fuckup,” said Tyler. “Make sure they’re dead, then let’s see what we can do about getting rid of the truck.”

Like the Russian design it had been based on, the S-37/B had special rough-field grates that helped keep debris and other nasties from shredding the engines on takeoff. Something big cracked against one of them as the Berkut built speed; Howe felt the shock but pressed on, committed to taking off both by momentum and situation. He had his nose up but his wheels still on the ground: Air-speed wasn’t building quite as fast as he expected. Something rumbled to his right and he held on, more Newton’s passenger than his own.

The Berkut stuttered, then lifted freely.

He cleaned his gear and felt another rumble.

He was losing the right engine.

Howe’s hands flew around the cockpit even as his mind sorted out the situation. Something had smacked against one of the louvers and sent bits of metal or debris into the right power plant. It couldn’t have been much—the engine still
wanted
to work—but he could see the oil pressure shooting toward red and the power plant’s output sliding.

Like most jets, the Berkut had been designed to operate on one engine, and now that he was off the field with a relatively light load, he’d dodged the worst of the situation. Even so, flying with one engine meant changing his flight plan. The nap-of-the-earth route out required good reserve thrust; there were several points where he’d have to pull the nose up and make like a pole vaulter, squeaking over obstacles, just not doable on one engine.

He could go directly south, but that path bordered on suicide. Better to take it higher and round off some of the edges. He had the Russian ID gear, darkness, and, if all else failed, the cannon.

“Ivan to Sky,” he said over the satcom system connecting him to the mission coordinator in the RC-135 over the Sea of Japan. “I have a situation.”

“Sky,” acknowledged the coordinator, asking Howe to detail his problem.

“Down to one engine. Am proceeding.”

“Copy that. You’re on one engine.”

“I’ll run as close to the course as possible,” added Howe.

The controller didn’t answer right away.

“Sky?”

“Roger, we copy. Godspeed.”

Howe thought of his passenger in the backseat. He flipped the interphone circuit on.

“We have a slight complication,” said Howe, pausing, as he worried that Dr. Park might not speak English well enough to understand what he said. “We’re down to one engine.”

“I understand,” replied the Korean.

His voice was so calm that Howe was sure the man didn’t know what he had said, but Howe let it go. He banked gently to the north, moving his stick gingerly as he came onto the course bearing. He did an instrument check, then broke out his paper maps and began working out his alterations to the course.

One of Fisher’s ideas in raiding the Washington Heights apartment was that if it was connected to a terrorist operation, even tangentially, hitting it might shake up everyone else connected to it and get them to do something stupid. Given that they had a whole net of wiretaps working and another apartment under surveillance, the idea was not without merit. While Fisher was not by nature an optimist, he did hope that the suspect in the other apartment—home at the time—might lead them to something that would, if not blow open the case, at least crack it a bit.

The problem with that theory, however, was that it required the team watching the apartment and the suspect not to lose track of the man. Which they promptly did within five minutes of his leaving the apartment an hour after the raid. He’d gone down to park near the Triborough Bridge, headed for the drug dealers who held market on the street nearby, then jumped into a small motorboat tied up on the rocks below. The boat had, of course, disappeared.

“Shoulda shot him,” said Fisher when Macklin related the story. “Don’t you teach these guys anything?”

They kept the surveillance teams on the apartment, waiting to see if their man, Faud Daraghmeh, returned. Fisher in the meantime sorted through various leads and made the rounds of the borough’s coffee shops. He did better with the latter than the former, finding a Greek place just a few blocks from the surveillance post that managed to impart a burned taste even to the first drop of liquid from the pot. As for Caliph’s Sons, the arrest of the men in the first apartment led to a variety of leads, none of which had panned out. Fisher wasn’t sure whether this was because the DIA had been charged with running them down, though he had his suspicions.

The command post for the surveillance operation was a second-story office up the street from the apartment, located over a twenty-four-hour Laundromat. The machines rumbled constantly, and the place was so hot that one of the detectives assigned to the post theorized that the dryers were being vented through some hidden mechanism directly into the office.

A bank of televisions fed by video cams showed every possible approach to the apartment; in addition, a small radar unit and two bugs gave the detectives and agents a full picture of what was happening inside.

Which was nothing.

Fisher surveyed the feeds for a few minutes, then picked up the latest intelligence summary on the case, which ran down intercepts the NSA had made with any possible connection. That, too, was a blank, with the only mention of a blackout coming in a conversation that clearly had to do with basketball coverage.

“You missed the morning quarterback session,” said Macklin, showing up with a bag of doughnuts around eleven. “Hunter was asking for you.”

“Use any four-letter words?”

“Many.” Macklin ripped open his bag and spread it over the table at the center of the room. “I’m thinking of pulling the plug on the surveillance. I have warrants so we can go search the place. What do you think?”

Fisher took two of the doughnuts from the table. “I think it’s time to find out how good a cup of coffee Mrs. DeGarmo makes.”

“DeGarmo? The landlady?”

“Yeah,” said Fisher. He checked his watch. “Maybe if we stay long enough, she’ll invite us for lunch. Plate of cold spaghetti would really hit the spot.”

“Who’s there?”

“Andy Fisher.”

“Who’s Andy Fisher?”

“FBI.”

“Who? The plumber?”

“Yeah. You have a leaky faucet?”

The doorknob turned and the heavy door creaked open. Fisher saw a pair of eyes peering at him about chest high.

“You’re a plumber?” she asked.

“FBI.” He showed her his Bureau “creds,” a small laminated ID card.

Mrs. DeGarmo squinted at it. In the right light, the picture looked a bit like that of a dead rat.

In bad light, it was the spitting image of one.

“Where’s your tools, if you’re a plumber?”

“I have to look at the leak first,” said Fisher.

“Okay,” said the woman, pulling the door open.

Lillian DeGarmo was ninety if a day. Her biceps sagged beneath her print housedress and her upper body pitched toward the floor. She tottered slightly as she walked but soon reached the kitchen, which lay just beyond the long entry hall.

“Sauce smells good,” said Fisher.

“The faucet’s in the bathroom, around the corner,” said the old lady, pointing to the doorway at the other end of the small kitchen.

“Actually, I’m here for something else,” said Fisher. “I’m an FBI agent. Say, is that coffee warm?”

“You want coffee?”

“Well, I have doughnuts,” said Fisher, pulling the doughnuts from his pocket.

“Oh, I can’t,” said Mrs. DeGarmo. “The doctor said they’re bad for my diabetes.”

“Doctors. Probably told you not to smoke, right?”

She pursed her lips for a moment.

“I hate doctors,” said Fisher, pulling out his cigarettes.

“Me too,” said Mrs. DeGarmo, grabbing the pack.

By the second cigarette Mrs. DeGarmo had told Fisher all she knew about her tenant. Faud Daraghmeh went to St. John’s University, where he was a prelaw student. He claimed to be Egyptian—he was actually from Yemen, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service—and greatly admired the United States. Until a few days ago he had kept a very strict schedule, always in by nine o’clock and always in bed before the eleven o’clock news, which Mrs. DeGarmo watched religiously. He got up within a few minutes of eight o’clock every morning—during the
Today
show—and left by noon, before the afternoon soaps (she called them her “stories”) came on.

“You can hear him above the TV?” Fisher asked.

“Big feet,” said the old lady, waving her hand. “More coffee?”

“Sure,” said Fisher. “So a couple of days ago he just stopped coming home, huh?”

“Sometimes he goes away, but usually he tells me when he’ll be back. ‘Mrs. D,’ he says, ‘I go to see friend in Florida.’ ”

“Florida?”

“I think he said that.”

“He said that this time?”

“No. Other times. This time, eh…
ragazzi.”

Technically the word
ragazzi
meant “boys
,”
though coming from the old Italian lady the word implied much more.

“He’s a nice boy,” added Mrs. DeGarmo quickly. “He’s not in trouble, I hope.”

“Might be,” said Fisher.

“He’s very nice. He helped me out.”

“How?”

“Little jobs. He could fix things. You want lunch? I have sauce on the stove: Have a little spaghetti.”

“Spaghetti’s good,” said Fisher.

Mrs. DeGarmo made her way to a pantry at the end of the hallway in the back where she kept extra groceries. The groceries were on a small bookcase in the hall; the pantry itself was occupied strictly by grocery bags. If there was ever a shortage, she could supply the city for months.

“Look at that,” she said, pointing to the floor as she took the box of Ronzoni.

“What?”

“The rats are back,” she said.

“Rats?” asked Fisher. “Rodent rats?”

“They always come back. This time at least they stayed away for weeks.”

“Good exterminator’s hard to find,” said Fisher, helping himself to another cup of coffee as they returned to the kitchen.

“Faud knows how to chase them away,” said the landlady, checking on her large pot of water.

“Really?” said Fisher.

“Oh, yes. He was very good at that. He was a very good boy.”

“He put out traps?”

“No. Fumigate.”

“Fumigate?”

“Very stinky. We had to go outside the whole day. He sealed it off. Smelled like Clorox when he was done, but there were no rats.”

“Sealed what off?”

“Downstairs. Two times, he did it.”

“Two times?”

“He was a very good boy.”

“Mind if take a look?” asked Fisher.

“First you have something to eat. Then you fix the faucet,” said Mrs. DeGarmo. “Then you take a look.”

“Can’t argue with that,” said Fisher, twirling his spaghetti.