The Korean Intercept (7 page)

They were less than a kilometer from the
Liberty
, by Kate's estimation, though it had been difficult to be certain as the old man led them along the rugged, circuitous route to get here. It had been extremely slow going with Ron hobbling along, staying off his broken leg as best he could, leaning heavily on Ann Chong. Kate and Bob transported Terri.

Several times along the way, they had done what Scott had first commanded them to do while still at the shuttle, when a North Korean gunship equipped with searchlights had swept by as low as the hazardous terrain would allow, without spotting the camouflaged shuttle. Then, and several times en route, their small group had been forced to huddle beneath the cover of tall pine trees while military helicopters rumbled by overhead at a slow rate of speed like bloated, low-flying prehistoric birds searching for prey.

"Ahn said we're about three kilometers from the airfield," Scott said after the most recent flyover, listening carefully with an ear cocked. "That chopper's getting set to touch down."

"We expected that, didn't we?" Kate spoke matter-of-factly. "If they find us, they'll know the shuttle is nearby."

"Which means we do our best to see that they don't find us," Scott grunted.

The old North Korean civilian had then led them the final short distance to the cave, which they'd crawled into just as another helicopter had flown over. Kate didn't know if it was the same one. She and Bob Paxton stretched Terri Schmidt out on the ground of the cave as gently as they could.

Kate despaired for Terri, who looked to be in terrible condition. Her pulse beat was faint, scarcely detectable. There was a trickle of blood snaking from Terri's left ear, indicating a serious concussion. Kate brushed the blood away. Terri's eyelids fluttered from time to time, but she had lapsed into unconsciousness.

They were hardly inside the cave when Scott and Ann Chong launched into an exchange in Korean. Then the old man left them.

"He said he has to get back to his village or he'll be missed," Scott explained. The tautness in the flight commander's voice was the only indication of the excruciating pain he had to be feeling from his broken leg. "He thinks we'll be safe here. He promised to come back as soon as he can and bring us food."

Paxton frowned. "That gives the troops in those choppers more time to find us. And why should that old guy want to help us? I say we don't trust him."

Kate remained kneeling beside Terri, dabbing the woman's forehead with a piece of tissue dampened from Kate's canteen. "We have to get Terri some medical attention."

"Ann Chong told me that there aren't any medical facilities anywhere near here." Something approaching exasperation crept into Ron's voice. "The only doctors in. this region are military, and the nearest one is fifty kilometers away."

"So you are suggesting that we just stay here all day?" Paxton asked. He shook his blond head. "Hell, we're sitting ducks."

"No more than if we venture out in broad daylight," countered Scott, "with North Korean army patrols and helicopters already looking for us. Mr. Ann also informed me that there are bandits in these hills. They've been terrorizing the locals on both sides of the border. They're heavily armed. Ahn Chong said they pose as much of a threat to us as the military."

The lines of apprehension in Bob Paxton's features had only grown deeper. "Speaking of the military, how do we know they're not looking for us so they can help us?"

"Here's why. Ahn says that after the soldiers started work constructing that base we flew over, the locals were told to stay away or they'd be shot, and there have been regular patrols through the villages to intimidate them. I'm not about to trust our well-being and a four-billion-dollar space shuttle to thugs like that, if we can help it."

Kate stepped forward to join the conversation. "Do you still think someone forced us down? Were we supposed to land at that airfield?"

Paxton uttered a rude, exasperated snort of dismissal. "But that's crazy. How could anyone pull off something like that and hope to get away with it?"

"I don't know," Scott admitted with a frown. "Maybe it happened like that, maybe not. But here are my orders. We're going to He low until we get a better handle on whatever it is we've gotten ourselves into. For now, one of us has to find some cover outside and keep an eye out in case anyone does come this way. We're on high ground here. We should have some advance warning. We'll risk making a break for it if we have to."

"I'll volunteer for guard duty," Paxton said. "But I still don't like the idea of trusting that old gook."

Kate eyed him with open disapproval. "Bob, this is Ron's call. You heard his orders."

Scott locked eyes with Paxton. "Maybe you've got a better idea?"

"Maybe I do." Paxton avoided looking Scott in the eye. "Uh, maybe I should take command. Y'know, sir, with that busted leg of yours—"

"Kate is second in command, if anything happens to me. You know that."

Kate said, "We've already discussed it, sir."

Scott studied the blond-haired man before him as if for the first time. "Then what the hell, Specialist?"

Paxton stared with a trace of contrition at the cave floor. "I just want to make sure we get out of this alive."

"We all want that," Scott snapped. "But we will maintain the chain of command. Is that clear?"

Paxton gulped audibly. "Yes, sir. It's clear."

"Position yourself outside. Kate and I will take turns relieving you every few hours. Stay under cover."

Paxton's jaw tightened. "I know enough to take cover. Don't treat me like I'm stupid."

"Then stop acting like you are."

Kate said, "Stop it, both of you. We've got to get along if we're going to pull through this."

"Don't you get on me too," Bob groused at her. "I'm on my way."

He leaned down to crawl through the shrubbery concealing the cave. Scott suddenly gripped him by the shoulder.

"Wait. Someone's coming."

Kate heard it too: the shuffling of footfalls on rock outside the cave, not far away. Voices in conversation in what sounded like Korean. Someone emitted a coarse laugh.

At that moment, Terri Schmidt's eyes opened. The eyes were glassy, unblinking and semi-conscious. Tern's head began rolling from side to side. Her moaning filled the cave. "Mom, I'm sorry," she mumbled weakly. "Dad? Where's Jimmy… Mom, don't… where are you? Mom…"

Bob Paxton glared around with a look of pure panic. "Make her shut up!"

Kate bit back an angry reply. She placed her fingertips lightly across Tern's lips, leaning down to coo comforting, whispered sounds. It worked. Terri's moaning and mumbling tapered off.

Too late.

A voice outside shouted something at the others. The laughter and conversation stopped. Kate heard the metallic snapping of rounds being chambered into weapons. Footfalls began advancing across the rocky ground outside, toward the cave entrance.

Scott and Bob Paxton were poised just inside the entrance, their pistols held up and ready. Kate unholstered her revolver. Terri began moaning again, louder than before.

"They've got us," Paxton said, desperation in his eyes and in his voice. "We're dead."

 

Houston, Texas

 

There is a pervasive order and simplicity about the Johnson Space Center, the 100-building complex where more than 10,000 NASA employees work amid a purposefully comfortable setting of uniformity and coherence. Neat green lawns, trees, walkways and man-made ponds of symmetrically landscaped quadrangles sparkle between sprawling work centers.

In a corner of the massive parking lot adjacent to the concrete-and-glass command center building, Special Agent Claude Jackson, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's counter-espionage branch, surreptitiously placed a radio beeper on the inside surface of a Volvo's rear fender in a movement so practiced, so slick, it would have gone unnoticed even by someone paying attention to him. However, no one was paying undue attention to the tall black man striding into the parking lot. Passersby coming and going from the building were occupied with their own determined preoccupations, as were the drivers of those cars that entered and exited the parking lot in a moderate but steady flow. They paid scant attention to Jackson as he stooped down briefly, sprightly for a man of his considerable bulk, as he passed between the Volvo and the vehicle in the next parking space. In no more than the length of time it would take to flick a twig from his pants cuff or a speck of dust from his shoe, it was done. He continued on to the unmarked Bureau car parked several aisles away where Chalmers, his partner, sat waiting behind the steering wheel. The car's interior was comfortably warm from the early afternoon sunshine pouring in through the windshield.

A pair of binoculars and a long-lens camera, loaded with high-speed film, rested on the car seat. Jackson lifted the binoculars, focusing them on a side exit of the building. He said, "Better let 'em know we're in place."

Chalmers spoke into his lapel mic, reporting across the tac net to their senior watch officer stationed with backup nearby. "We've set up surveillance."

Jackson and Chalmers worked the enforcement detail out of the center's FBI office. Undercover agents were in place at every level of the center, a protective measure designed to neutralize sabotage and/or espionage. The Johnson Space Center held the secrets of everything relating to the American space program, and so every person on center grounds had to be considered a potential security risk. This was the reality that mandated the Bureau's security operations in Houston. For the inhabitants and workers of the space center, it was no secret that undercover FBI agents worked among them. Such agents were viewed resentfully as spies by hardworking Americans, who took offense at the suspicion of their integrity and patriotism implicit in such undercover activity, nor were they much appreciative of the routine use of lie detectors and surveillance.

As viewed through Jackson's binoculars, the space center appeared to function as normal. His partner had selected a surveillance position well inside the parking lot, with enough distance from the building to ensure that their daylight surveillance went wholly unnoticed by the parade of briefcase carriers hustling about. The slight increase in their number, discernible only to Jackson's trained eye, alone indicated the massive event of a few hours ago.

Chalmers slapped the steering wheel impulsively. "Damn, this is like trying to catch a fart with a butterfly net. We're spread way too goddamn thin to get results as fast as Washington wants." He had a youthful face set above a middle-aged body. He and Jackson had been partners for eighteen months.

Because of the time it would take to go over every personnel file at Houston for any possible leads to what had happened to
Liberty
, the assistant director who honchoed counter-intel ops from Washington had promised reinforcements before the day was out. Chalmers knew this. He was just an impatient guy.

Without taking the binoculars' focus from the building exit, Jackson said, "At least we have those prelim scans to work from."

Chalmers grunted irritably. "I guess that'll have to do. The pressure's on, that's for goddamn sure."

"If there is someone who brought that shuttle down, it's someone working in Mission Control."

Chalmers grunted again. He slapped the steering wheel again. "Someone inside NASA, reprogramming computers. That sure as hell is a first. I wonder if we have our man."

"Lennick seems to think so." Jackson was referring to the senior watch officer. "The red flags are sure there."

Chalmers nodded. "Wife terminally ill. Seeing an Asian woman." The files on primary Mission Control personnel had been reviewed as soon as word had come from DC about the shuttle. "Yeah, I guess going on what we know," said Chalmers, "I'd put my money on Eliot Fraley."

"There he is," said Jackson.

Fraley was the stereotypical brilliant, middle-aged computer nerd, a wiry little guy wearing a bow tie. His sports jacket didn't match his slacks. He had thick-lensed, wire-rimmed glasses and a balding pate encircled by a thatch of untamed, curly hair. He exited the building, making a beeline toward the parking lot. His wiry legs scissored with that hurriedly awkward stride of one not used to hurrying. He reached and boarded his waiting Volvo, backing it from his parking space and leaving the parking lot.

Jackson and Chalmers followed, observing surveillance distancing as the Volvo drove down Highway C in the direction of the front gate.

Jackson said into his lapel mic, "Subject is moving."

 

Fraley was one of the ground team of flight controllers assigned to the Johnson Space Center Flight Control Room. There he'd labored, functioning like an automaton, endless week after week. At first, when his job had been a challenge, he'd loved it. But week after week had turned into month after month, then year after year. He himself did not fully understand it, but eventually the initial joy of computers and space technology had become reduced for him to a grinding drudgery made worse by the pressures of an overburdened personal life.

Less than an hour earlier, in the immediate aftermath of the blackout from
Liberty
, he'd been standing with the growing crowd of NASA scientists and administrators around the flight director's console, which was the heart of the rows upon rows of monitors and their attending technicians. At first, he'd feigned interest and concern, standing there with his co-workers who moments earlier had been operating their computers, digesting their radar data, plotting the orbiter's path on the large map projection screen on the front wall. Then, eventually, he had been able to unobtrusively unplug his station from the flight director's loop, had set down his headset and walked away from the hubbub of concern. Don't panic, he'd told himself.

He was still telling himself that as he stepped up to a pay phone on the concourse leading to the waiting area at the loading gate, where he was supposed to meet Connie. He'd already scouted the seating area where they were supposed to meet. People were beginning to congregate for the flight, which was scheduled to board in ten minutes. Fraley glanced at his digital watch. Actually, the flight was to board in nine minutes and forty seconds. He snapped his eyes away from the security of mathematics, a logical world that always made sense. He again scanned the busy scene around him: arriving and departing people and their accompanying parties pouring along the concourse in both directions.