A Northern Thunder (25 page)

The suited-up men walked out to the Humvees. In his molle pack, an arrangement of green suspenders and pouches with pockets and straps that could be added or removed, Will found another set of sunglasses, suntan lotion, and lip balm—all the essentials for sun exposure at high altitudes. This equipment was of the highest quality—little of it was typical govern-ment-issue—and it was all altered to appear Soviet-made, complete with Soviet labels and stitching.

The two Humvees took off from the upper camp to Bridgeport and followed a gravel, snow-covered road up the valley toward Sonora Peak. The road led through the wide-open meadow, toward the pass that would connect summer hikers to the other side of the High Sierras. Deep snowdrifts had closed the road for several months. The Humvees made a rattling sound as their snow chains grabbed snow, gravel, and rock.

The men said little during the ride. Moncrief sat in the back of the lead Humvee, cleaning and checking his M4 rifles. Will sat in the front right seat, next to Burke, who was at the wheel.

“Sir, this is your Beretta.” Moncrief handed the shiny new pistol, already in a shoulder holster, to Will, who removed it from the holster, dropped the clip from the weapon, and spotted fourteen shiny brass rounds already loaded. When he pulled the slide back, another round popped out of the chamber, hitting the window of the Humvee and falling to the floor.

After a twenty-minute ride climbing the mountain road farther up into the pass, with wheels frequently spinning in the snow, the two Humvees came to a small clearing just below a large cliff, where they stopped and turned around.

“Okay, Colonel, we’re well within the pass.” The captain leaned over the Humvee’s center console, peering at a GPS map of the mountain range. Will smiled grimly to himself, realizing by the captain’s actions just how much a threat Nampo was to the U.S. military. Light was fading fast, the sun blocked out by dark clouds moving rapidly to the east.

“What was the original plan, Skipper?”

“We scheduled a week of acclimatizing,” Burke replied, “some cold weather survival classes, and then a five-day tactical exercise. Our hardest exercise is long-distance patrolling, with food available only at certain locations.”

“Okay, let’s go straight to that,” said Will.

Moncrief let out a long moan.

“Sir, here’s map coordinates for three locations of LRRPs,” said Burke, pulling out a map. “Each location will be heavily patrolled by our enemy teams. You want to eat, you have to get to the spots.” The long-range rations, or LRRPs, were concentrated, high-caloric meals.

Will glanced at the coordinates as he pulled the captain’s map toward the light of his window.

“Each of these coordinates is on a mountain top. Each has full exposure to both your teams and the worst weather.”

“Yes.” Will smiled, knowing this sounded like a Gunny Punaros mission. “Okay, what happens if we don’t get to them?”

“No problem, sir,” said Burke. “All you have to do is follow the lights down into the valley.”

“You mean give up.”

Moncrief let out a bellowing laugh. “Yeah, right, Skipper. You’ve never served with the colonel.” He said this in as sarcastic a tone as possible.

“What’s the weather doing?” said Will.

“Sir, here’s the most recent fax,” said Burke. The thin sheet of paper was covered in tight, circular lines from top to bottom, clearly showing bad weather moving from the northwest down to the southeast.

“Bad, bad snow.” As Will said this, he looked up to see the first snowflakes coming down at a driving angle. “So, either quit or get through this storm for five days.”

“Yes, sir. Nothing for fifty miles in any direction,” said Burke. “And the exercise is through terrain so rough that some unfortunate wagon trains resorted to cannibalism a hundred and fifty years ago.”

“Thanks, Captain, we get the point,” said Moncrief.

“Okay, when and where on the fifth day?” said Will.

“Twelve-hundred hours at that gym. You have enough food for half a day,” said Burke.

As Will swung the Humvee door open, a gust of snow-driven wind pushed it back against him. He felt the cold, wet flakes strike both his face and eyelashes.

Once Will explained the plan to Scott, Stidham, and Hernandez in the other vehicle, the Humvee convoy, carrying Burke and Scott, headed back down the valley road. The four remaining soldiers looked like abandoned wayfarers grouped together with their packs and snowshoes.

For a moment after the vehicles left, the deep woods were completely silent. The cold, quiet air was a short respite for Will and his men, but it was rapidly getting darker and the winds were building.

“We know what to do. Visibility is going to go to zero shortly, so I’ll lead and let’s run a rope,” said Will, pulling a rope from his backpack. “Each of you hook on with Moncrief.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You know what to do at the tail.”

“Yes, sir, just like Greeley.” Despite all his chatter, Kevin Moncrief was the team’s second expert on cold weather survival. He had spent a winter as a Marine liaison instructor at the Army’s cold weather survival school at Fort Greeley, Alaska. Moncrief grabbed the end of the rope, tied a loop, and locked on a carabineer. The other two team members grabbed the end of the rope, twisted loops, tied them off, and locked carabineers from their molle packs onto them.

Will pulled the parka over his head and fixed his goggles. He strapped onto his wrist a Velcro compass with a large illuminated dial and pointed to a heading northwest.
Is he right?
Moncrief thought. The three peaks were more to the northeast of the valley. Will’s course seemed to take them farther northwest and deeper into the Sierras.

“H
e’s arriving!”

Although nearly as small as an oversized doll, the petite young scientist yelped the words out as she hung up the telephone at the console in Nampo’s operation center. She would never have done so with Dr. Nampo or any of his top aides present, but everyone in the operations center was ecstatic. The launch had succeeded, orbit had been achieved in less than fifty minutes, and the small explosion from the warhead had hit something—as it turned out, the target, an American West GPS satellite. And now, the nation’s leader himself, Kim Jong Il, had come to visit the facility to award Dr. Nampo the People’s Medal. “Calm yourself, girl,” said Pak Yim, Nampo’s assistant director, his stoic face giving no hint of approval.

The underground command center rarely had any more than the minimum number of people needed to man it. This was the result of a Nampo directive issued at the project’s beginning. But today, the large room was crammed with white-jacketed scientists and engineers, both men and women, many of them lined up against the rear wall.

“You know, the Americans just don’t understand,” Pak said to two of the engineers standing next to the main console. “If they had as their leader the son of George Washington, maybe they would.” Since birth, the people of North Korea had been indoctrinated not only to respect the country’s leader, Kim Il Sung, but to regard him with a spiritual reverence. And Kim Il Sung, in turn, propagated myths about his son—he had been born under a double rainbow, his birth marked by a bright star.

The young girl, barely out of her teens, hovered next to the command center door as if waiting for a rock star to arrive. Her jet-black hair framed a pure white, porcelain-like face. As the visiting guests came down the tunnel to the doors, she felt the beating of her heart.

Energy jolted through the room and the people moved closer to the door as a short, pudgy man with wild hair and oversized dark-rimmed glasses entered. He wore an olive drab Mao suit cut almost like a tunic, with matching drab-olive pants. The only thing that made Kim Jong Il stand out were black, highly polished, European-style shoes. They were actually Scotch grain shoes custom-made for him, by the dozens, in a Tokyo shop. The shoes were elevated to compensate for his barely five-foot-three stature. This was another of the well-kept secrets and indulgences of Kim Jong Il.

Trailing behind the leader was the undistinguished-looking Dr. Nampo. He wore a scientist’s white lab jacket, a gold star medal on a blood-red ribbon hanging awkwardly on its lapel. Nampo had received the highest decoration Kim Jong Il could bestow on a North Korean citizen.

“My comrades,” Kim Jong Il said as he stopped into the center of the room, signaling to the people to back up and bow. “Today, after years and years of dedicated service by each of you to your country, we have tasted our first victory. Without Dr. Nampo and his team, this project would never have reached this great success. All citizens of our great democratic republic, including my father if he were still with us, would be overwhelmingly proud of your accomplishments.”

Kim Jong Il then worked his way around the room like a Chicago politician, shaking hands with each of the scientists. This was a rare activity for him. His security guards almost never allowed him to be so exposed, but this was as safe an audience as Kim Jong Il would ever see. Each scientist had been handpicked and trained by Nampo exclusively for this project and for this center.

“Attention,” yelled a gold-braided North Korean general from the back of the room. The building’s intercom system belted out North Korea’s national anthem, and on the last note, Kim Jong Il turned, and with an escort of generals, left the operations center.

On the way out, he stopped and grabbed Nampo’s arm again, looking the scientist directly in the eyes. “You have had great success here today,” he said, “but we still have a long way to go to reach our goal. Can I trust you to ensure this is just the beginning?”

“Yes, Comrade General Secretary, it is just the beginning,” Nampo said quietly to the leader.

As soon as the dictator and his entourage departed, Nampo turned to his assistant and said, “We need everyone out of here except the essential steering committee.” He paused, then yelled, “
Now
!”

As fast as they had scurried in, all but five gray-haired scientists filed out of the entrance and down the tunnel, away from the operations center. This left the room with several rows of empty consoles and, to one side, a large stainless steel conference table surrounded by matching stainless steel chairs.

Nampo walked to one sizable chair at the end of the conference table and sat down, immediately pulling out a cigarette, lighting it up, and nervously inhaling. Then he began bouncing one leg up and down, rattling the table with his nervous twitch.

The five scientists joined him at the table, two on each side. The last to arrive was Pak, who, after closing the doors to the command center to guarantee ultimate privacy, sat in the chair opposite Dr. Nampo.

“Let me see if I understand fully what we know to have happened,” Nampo said, again inhaling his cigarette. “First, launch was a success, and thirty-eight minutes into launch, we reached the GEO synchronization orbit.”

“Yes, sir, thirty-eight and a half minutes into flight,” quietly said a gaunt, gray-haired scientist to the left of Nampo.

“And when it reached the GEO synchronization orbit, we thought it acquired the targeted west coast GPS satellite.”

“Yes, sir.” Each of the scientists nervously chirped in, expecting the hammer to fall at any minute.

“But we also know that the rocket was at least ten nautical miles from the actual target when the conventional TNT explosive discharged.”

“Yes, sir.” Again the scientists chimed in.

“And because our payload weighs no more than ten kilos, the explosive sent out a shockwave that merely jolted the targeted satellite.”

“Yes, sir,” said the oldest scientist, sitting next to Nampo. “In fact, as best we can understand, the explosion probably flipped the satellite several times and changed its orbit slightly. Then, when it came back online, the satellite’s computer reset the correct orbit.”

“Gentlemen, what we have now,” said Nampo, “is a three-hundred-million-dollar firecracker that’s far from being a weapon of devastating impact.”

There was no response from any of the scientists.

“In fact, either we have to improve our accuracy in acquiring the target, or we have to finish the miniaturization of a nuclear device and use a sufficient warhead, so we can overcome our lack of accuracy. Wouldn’t each of you agree?”

Pak Yim, pale and drawn, leaned forward in his chair and intertwined his fingers on the desktop in an effort to show respect and deference to Dr. Nampo. “As always, Dr. Nampo, you are both insightful and correct,” he said in a whisper. “Your development of a nuclear weapon capable of being carried by our rockets is essential both to this great project and to the People’s Republic.”

“Thank you, comrades. I’ve heard enough. Each of you has your mission and you’re fully aware of what’s necessary. You may go.”

With this command, each of the scientists stood at attention, slid their chairs underneath the table, and proceeded silently out of the room as if leaving a funeral.

“Assistant Director, one moment please,” said Nampo.

“Yes?” said Pak.

“Please stay briefly. I wish to talk to you.”