A Northern Thunder (5 page)

“Judge, you look like you’d rather be on the farm today than trying this case.” No matter the response, Will knew he was right.

Roamer was a man Will had great respect for. A linebacker at Georgia on one of the early teams Vince Dooley coached, Andy Roamer slept under red and black sheets at night—a Georgia bulldog whose loyalty ran deep. He was a man who looked you in the eye and gave you an iron grip of a handshake.

“Yeah, Will,” he said, “and I understand you had a visit from some DEA agents.”

It didn’t take the town long to put a spin on this
, Will thought. But he actually liked the idea.

“Yes, sir, but please don’t tell anyone. The U.S. attorney general wants me to help prosecute a major drug case against a Colombia drug cartel. It probably means I’ll have to resign.” Will liked the “don’t tell anyone” touch. As much as he liked Anderson Roamer, he knew the news would be all over town in less than an hour. The judge would call his wife while his secretary listened through the cracked door. It’s the nature of small towns. The opportunity to share gossip was a special treat for a resident of a sleepy little place like Vienna.

“What do you think, Judge?”

“Well, I don’t want to lose you, but I can’t think of anyone better to do a job like that.”

“I told ’em I’d think about it. And I appreciate that comment.”

Roamer turned and pushed the half-smoked cigarette into the sand of an old, dented ash can. It was full of half-smoked cigarettes he’d put there during prior trial breaks. He thought back to his many and long experiences with Will, recalling the time he accompanied Will, a skilled outdoorsman, on a southern quail hunt. The hunters would walk through the scattered brush of a pine tree forest, following trained dogs that shifted back and forth over a field, hoping for a sniff of the birds. Occasionally, a dog would jump the covey, causing the quails to fly up in several directions. In an instant, the hunter had to pick a target and fire. The judge would hear a single shot from a shotgun, but two birds would fall. The accuracy required to fire one shot to down two crossing birds was like that of a golfer sinking a hole-in-one, but Will did it several times that day.

Following the loss of his parents, Will became more of a loner, and Roamer, on more than one occasion, tried to change that.

“Well, let’s get this case finished.” He zipped up the robe and strode into the courtroom as the deputy sheriff jumped up from his seat.

“All rise, the court is now in session,” the deputy bellowed.

Will sat down at the prosecutor’s table. Probably for the first time in his career, he failed to listen as the judge read the charges against the defendant.

As he sat on the stiff wooden chair, Will thought of his dangerous new mission, trying to identify Peter Nampo in a country that afforded little opportunity for U.S. spies to get near enough to take a photograph. And what made Peter Nampo so valuable?

Will was sure of one thing—the money wasn’t important to him. This mission would be a huge personal challenge—one that tested every part of his ability to think and survive. It was the challenge that intrigued him. It might give him a chance to resolve a great deal.

• • •

As the black car pulled away from the courthouse, Krowl reached for a small black object in the wooden compartment between him and Scott. He dialed a number and pressed a small red button that scrambled the signal. The Leprechaun SINCGARS radio sent the voice over an encrypted, secure narrow band that jumbled the conversation into digital bits that could only be put back together by another similar SINCGARS band receiver. It would be impossible for anyone to tap into this conversation.

“Chief, this is Admiral Krowl. Patch me into the J-3 secured line.”

The chief petty officer, a communications expert, sat in the Admiral’s G-V Gulf Stream jet parked at the airfield in Albany, some thirty miles away. “Yes, sir, I’ll connect you through now,” he said.

Krowl heard two clicks. “Joint Staff, J-3 Vice Director’s Office, Captain Kyle speaking.”

“Kyle, this is Admiral Krowl. Connect me on a secure net to General Kitcher at U.S. Strategic Command.”

“Yes, sir.”

After a moment, a deep voice came on the line. Air Force General Michael Kitcher was the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command. He was responsible not only for placing Defense Department satellites into orbit, but also for operating them. By the end of the last decade, the United States had placed more than four-hundred and ninety satellites into space. Kitcher’s command responsibilities were growing daily—a Congressional report estimated that in the year 2010, a total of seventeen hundred commercial satellites would be aloft. Over eighty-five hundred objects were being monitored in space. The intelligence and military satellites were continually at greater risk due to increased traffic. The sky was rapidly becoming filled with a host of satellites—some the public was aware of, and some it was not.

“Admiral Krowl, what’s the word?” said Kitcher.

“General, I have authority to commence Operation Nemesis. Can you have USA82X in place by the December-January time frame?”

Certain U.S. military satellites were coded by the letters “USA” followed by a number. Occasionally, the satellite was given a name like “Dark Cloud.”

The satellite USA82X had no such name. Few knew of its existence and very few, even at U.S. Space Command, knew its purpose. It had been secretly sent into space two years earlier as a piggyback atop a more conventional satellite. They announced that the Titan rocket was putting another weather satellite into orbit when, in reality, it was setting up two. Once in space, the USA82X was quietly maneuvered to a higher altitude.

“We will easily have it on station during that time frame,” Kitcher said, “but final testing has not occurred. U.S. Strategic Command cannot warrant this bird until it has been fully tested, and that will take another year.”

“General, I can assure you that JCS is aware of the limitations of this equipment. However, if we don’t move by the December time frame, the Taepo Dong-3X project will be beyond our control.”

“We will have USA82X on station during your requested time frame.” Kitcher did not appreciate the admiral’s strong-arming, but the mere mention of the Taepo Dong-3X project reminded him of the grave threat involved. In fact, he could think of no other threat as serious.

As he turned off the SINCGARS radio, Krowl looked at Scott, a smile on his face.

“It’s all coming together.” Krowl lit another cigarette and took a long draw.

“I’m not sure how you’re going to get him in,” said Scott, “or how you’re going to get him out. It was never our plan to do an insertion.”

“Scott, you described the mission. Just get it done.”

“Oh, and Admiral, an RFJ reward for twenty-five million dollars? That was a nice touch. Hell, and just how is J-3 going to fund that? And how are they going to do it without Congress finding out?”

“Scotty, old boy, they didn’t make me an admiral for nothing. I imagine your boys at the Agency have a few unmarked dollars—if they’re ever needed.”

As a Navy SEAL, Krowl was known as a man who got his way at all costs. His men in Vietnam called him “Mr. Fame and Pain”—
his
fame derived from
their
pain. His SEAL unit had the highest casualty rate of any similar unit, but Krowl had decided, even then, that priority number one was climbing the promotion ladder. As he moved through his subsequent promotions, Krowl learned how to keep his grading superiors content, often at the price of his subordinates. Soon, the junior officers learned and carried out the fine art of getting transferred so as to avoid working under Krowl. As many knew, an officer transferring in less than thirty days would not have a graded fitness report completed by his superior. It would be a small gap in a career officer’s record and one easily overlooked at promotion time. Better to have such a gap than to be crucified by Krowl.

“You just get Parker prepared and I’ll take care of the rest,” said Krowl. “Do you have your team available?”

“Yes. But a December launch? It’s late June now. I won’t know for at least two months if he’ll even have a chance.”

The admiral scowled disdainfully. “Scott, you just get your goddamn team together and get him to that valley on time.”

Kosan, North Korea
One Week Later

S
everal years before the first trucks started to arrive, the people’s committee had chosen the valley just south of the village of Kosan, both for its location and secrecy. Kim Il Sung, the dictator and founder of North Korea, and the supreme commander of the People’s Armed Forces, personally approved the selection. Kosan was south of the eastern port city of Wonsan, and met all the criteria for the project. Less than thirty miles from the coast, it was in a valley surrounded by the Taeback Mountains. Security for the underground facility, though near the border with South Korea, could be easily maintained.

The Taeback Mountain range stretched along most of the eastern coast of North and South Korea. Sharp, jagged mountains were cut by the winds and rains of time, and the twelve thousand-foot Taeback peaks jutted up from the coastline, causing deep valleys inland to the west. Dark forests of pines and evergreens covered some of the western hillsides and valleys. By prohibiting any commercial development, the communist regime allowed the region on the North Korea side of the border to become pristine forest with increasing populations of wildlife. Roe deer and bear began returning to the mountains. Even tigers, nearly eliminated during the World War II years of Japanese dominance, were occasionally seen.

The roads to and from Wonsan were free of vehicles, except for the convoys of North Korea military units approaching or leaving the DMZ to the south. Only the infrequent farmer, usually on bicycle, traveled these roads. It was the perfect setting for a top secret military base—the Democratic People’s Republic wanted the base to be as close as possible to the east and to Japan, and as close as possible to U.S. forces.

The Kumgang peaks stood out in the Taeback Mountain ranges. A series of knife-like points in a close area, Kumgang was for centuries a place of far-reaching vistas that emperors from China and Korea would travel to for inspiration and beauty. The Korean coast mountains peered out over the Sea of Japan.

But Kumgang was north of the DMZ by only a few miles and just out of South Korea’s reach. Older Koreans remembered a time prior to the Korean war when they commonly traveled to Kumgang to hike the peaks, wander the forests, search for mushrooms, and stop by the waterfalls of the mountain streams and the Pukhamyang River that flowed north to south across the border and down to Seoul. Kumgang was, as the Koreans called it, the Diamond Mountain, both sharp-edged and beautiful, and a great irritation to those in the South who had to abandon it to the isolationist, hermetic, communist government in the North.

Kosan was also on a north-south railroad, so any missiles could easily be transported from Yongbyon in the north, across the North Korean peninsula to Wonsan, and then south to Kosan. The village was also easily in range of all the major cities and roadways of South Korea. The Demilitarized Zone that separated North and South Korea was less than an hour’s travel to the South and, more importantly, a short distance from the eastern coast of North Korea, across the Sea of Japan and the eleven million inhabitants of Tokyo.

On and off for centuries, Japanese armies had dominated the Korean peninsula, ruthlessly murdering, raping, and destroying any living thing that showed a hint of resistance. North Korea’s hatred of Seoul was only amplified by South Korea’s alliances with Japan and the United States. As the soldiers of North Korea, with the aid of China and Russia, fought the Japanese, it became easy and convenient for North Korea to fall into the communist ranks. Russia, a strong ally, aided in the training of young North Korean leaders. The father of the North Korean government and the North’s absolute dictator for several decades, Kim Il Sung had been militarily trained at Moscow’s finest academies. And with this training, he developed his ironclad rule of Stalinistic communism.

Kim Il Sung’s gulags, as brutal as Stalin’s, held nearly a quarter million men, women, and children labeled as political criminals. In camps along the Chinese border to the northeast, children lived in death camps of unimaginable horror.

Kosan was perfect for an extension of the Yongbyon project. So when Peter Nampo first appeared in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, Kim Il Sung himself instructed the National Defense Committee to give his project priority. It was rumored that even on his deathbed, Kim Il Sung instructed his son and successor Kim Jong Il to provide Dr. Nampo with all necessary resources. Nampo was a national treasure to be protected at all costs. But jealousy had intervened. Other scientists had convinced Pyongyang to not trust the American-trained engineer. Only the failure of the TD2 missile convinced the government to give Nampo the opportunity.

Nampo knew his important place in the nation’s pecking order. In a country short of fuel and food—in fact, unable to meet virtually all needs of daily life—he received great respect and full support. He was appreciated. Here, the last haven of absolute Stalinist communism, his work was seen as helping the grand cause—stopping the spread of imperialism and the influence of the United States.