Fires of War (9 page)

~ * ~

ankin, back pressed against the side of the building as he stood on the narrow balcony, listened as Thera told Norkelus that her roommate was “dead out.” The scientist grunted but apparently didn’t believe her; the light flicked on, and Rankin saw the curtains flutter. He grabbed hold of the rope and put his foot on the building, ready to climb if he had to.

“Yes, then, good. I will see you in the morning,” said Norkelus gruffly. The light flipped off; Thera appeared.

“Wait,” whispered Rankin.

“Why?”

“Case he comes back.”

“He won’t.”

“Wait.”

Thera scowled but then disappeared. Rankin squatted, waiting. He’d heard a bit of Ferguson’s act through the door. It was vintage Ferguson. The CIA officer had a gift for bullshit; he’d seen him talk his way into and out of dozens of tight places, blustering and cajoling and always ladling on the crap.

It was part of the game, a tool, but it left Rankin vaguely uneasy. One of the things about Special Forces was that the people you worked with didn’t bullshit.

Except for officers. Officers were always full of it.

Guns stuck his head over the railing above and whistled, signaling that the coast was clear.

“Come on, Thera,” whispered Rankin. “Let’s get this done.”

~ * ~

14

SOUTH CHUNGCHONG PROVINCE, KOREA

Three hours later, armed with Thera’s hand-drawn map, Ferguson and Rankin stepped toward the rear door of an Air Force C-130 Hercules.

“Ready, Rankin?” Ferguson said, yelling over the rush of the wind in the rear of the plane.

“If you are.”

“Hey, piece of cake,” said Ferguson, clamping the oxygen mask against his face.

A night jump into a black hole from thirty thousand feet was not exactly Rankin’s idea of a piece of cake, but he still felt a certain elation as he stepped out of the Herky Bird into the cold night air. Airborne training had been one of Rankin’s favorite “schools” in the army, an absolute blast from the let’s-get-acquainted-with-gravity first jump to the hairiest night dive into the raging ocean. Even now, after maybe five hundred jumps—most recreational and from a considerably lower altitude—he loved the smack of the wind against his body and the loud rush that filled his ears as he spread his arms and began to fly rather than fall.

He was still more brick than airplane, if truth be told, since he was in fact plummeting at a good rate, documented by the dial altimeter on his left wrist. A global positioning satellite (GPS) device was strapped to his right; there was very little starlight and no moon, and he’d need to rely on it rather than his sight to get down to the target area.

A few meters to the right, Ferguson tucked his right side slightly to keep himself on course as he fell. The cold, thin air pressed through his jumpsuit, icy hands squeezing his ribs. It felt as if someone—an angel, maybe—were flying above him, holding on, guiding him to earth.

When he was little, Ferguson’s mind had been filled with stories about angels. He’d had vivid dreams of them, including one in which an angel grabbed him in his or maybe her arms and whisked him from danger.

The danger happened to be a particularly nasty Catholic nun—one of his teachers that half year—but that hadn’t seemed to bother the angel.

The altimeter buzzed, telling him it was time to pull the rip cord. The harness yanked hard against his body as the chute deployed. Ferguson made sure it had deployed properly, then checked his position with the GPS device.

He was roughly two hundred meters north of the spot he’d set for his target, but he still had a long way to fall. Ferguson moved his right toggle downward, working against a slight breeze that wanted to push him east.

Finally he saw the dim outline of the clearing in front of the perimeter fence off to his left. A sudden surge in the wind threatened to take him into the wilderness area; Ferguson dipped the wing of his chute and corkscrewed in the direction he wanted to land. The maneuver got him onto the right side of the fence but nearly collapsed his chute. He came down hard on the side of a hill about fifty yards behind the cameras. Collapsing onto his left knee, he slid for a few yards until he managed to twist downward and stop.

“Auspicious,” he said aloud in a mocking tone. “That’s what happens when you start thinking about angels.”

Rankin landed nearly thirty yards away, a nice walking touchdown on level land. Both men quickly gathered their chutes, bundling them with the rest of their jump gear. They stowed them near some bushes at the base of the hill where Ferguson had landed, then went to take care of the video camera and sensors that covered the fence where they wanted to get out.

The camera could be pivoted by remote control to cover the fence area; it was also set to respond to a motion detector covering the area in front of it. Ferguson identified the wires from the motion detector, then, with a penknife, carefully stripped small bare spots through the insulation. He clamped alligator clips on them, testing the connection to a small black box and antenna. When a light on the box indicated current, he clipped the wire, eliminating the motion detector from the circuit. He took out what looked like a cell phone and began pressing the arrow keys; the camera responded as if it had detected a large animal in the brush.

With the camera pointed all the way to its stop, Ferguson unscrewed the rear housing. He’d just gotten the last screw off when it began moving; the security people were panning it by remote control.

Ferguson waited for the camera to finish moving, then gingerly lifted off the back. He identified the wires supplying power to the circuit board and clamped a fat clip over them. Then he plugged what looked like a thick cell-phone battery into the other end of the wire and tucked it onto the camera chassis. He picked up the ersatz cell phone and pressed the center key. The screen over the keypad turned white, then slowly began to fade to gray, indicating the operation had been a success.

“Fader works,” he told Rankin, putting the housing back on the camera.

Ferguson used his short-range radio to call Guns, who was watching the plant’s main entrance and the administration building from a rise about a hundred yards from the gate.

“Anything going on?” Ferguson asked, adjusting his night-vision goggles before setting out down the hill.

“Aniyo
,” said Guns.

“Learning the lingo are we?”

“I got the MP3 player with me.”

“Great. Just don’t get so caught up in the pronunciation that you forget about us, right?”

“Ne, dwaetseoyo
,” said Guns. “OK.”

Ferguson and Rankin picked their way through trees and rocks for about an hour before coming to an old stone wall. The vegetation had been cleared on the other side of the wall, and within fifteen minutes they could see the buildings at the center of the complex.

They continued down a ravine that ran behind the low-level waste storage area. The radioactive dump had been sited inside the side of the hill. The entrance to the area looked like a mine shaft, albeit one large enough for a pair of trains to drive through. The actual disposal areas were shafts dug deep within the hillside. There were no fences blocking off the entrance, nor were there security cameras. The nearby ground was flat and open, though obscured from the rest of the site by a parking area for the train cars.

“First tab is over near those trains,” said Ferguson, pointing. “We’ll get it, then split up.”

They hadn’t taken more than a few steps before Guns warned them that the security people were starting a round in their pickup truck. Seconds later, Ferguson saw the vehicle’s headlamps swinging in their direction.

“No place to hide around here,” said Rankin.

“Into the mine shaft.”

“There’s radioactive waste in there,” said Rankin.

“There’s radioactive waste all over the place here, Skippy. Better to glow than get shot.”

Actually, the waste was stored far below, in containers and compartments that prevented contamination. The entrance looked like a train tunnel or a very large mine shaft. The roof and walls were tiled with large cement blocks, reinforced at intervals by triangular-shaped steel pillars and crossbeams. The train tracks ran along the floor, bending to the right as the shaft turned and disappeared from sight.

Ferguson stopped at the first set of pillars, watching as a four-door pickup circled in front of the shaft opening, then darted away.

“Gone?” Rankin asked.

“Gone,” said Ferguson, stepping out. “The radiation is all contained, Rankin. You don’t have to worry about it.”

“Yeah, all right.”

“You remember that from the briefing, right?”

Rankin shrugged.

“You don’t believe them?” Ferguson asked.

“Who the hell knows what to believe?”

They trotted across fifty yards of open ground to a pair of railroad flatcars and a small diesel shunting engine. They could see the truck in the distance as it returned to the administration building, the patrol over.

“You should have at least thirty minutes before the next security run,” said Guns. The irregular intervals was intentional, designed to make it difficult for anyone who might try to time them. “Maybe as much as an hour.”

“You get the three on that side,” Ferguson told Rankin, pointing to the left of the operations station. “One’s in the rail there, another is over by that little power transformer set, and then there’s the one in the siding of the building.”

“I remember, Ferg. Jeez.”

“You got one camera on the corner of that building there.” He pointed to it. “Go.”

Rankin nudged forward, moving in a half crawl to the shadows on the other side of the railroad track. He got down on his hands and knees and began groping for the tiny sensor.

Ferguson, meanwhile, trotted in the opposite direction, running through a dark shadow toward the fence guarding the recyclable reactor rods. It was the hardest tag to get, because it was within view of the recycling area’s guard post. Ferguson reached the fence and threw himself on the ground. As he did, he saw the pant leg and boot of a man in the round glow of light ahead. Fearing he’d been seen, he reached for his pepper spray; there would be enough trouble if they were caught without killing the guards.

But the sentry continued without noticing him, walking across the macadam toward the administration building. Ferguson watched his boots disappear into the shadows, then snuck to the corner. Thera had stuck the sensor into the metal loop connecting the fence to the pillar; he retrieved it and retreated back toward the reception area for the other tags.

“Truck comin’ down toward the plant,” warned Guns. “Going to the front gate.”

“What, are you kiddin’?” said Rankin. “It’s way after closing time.”

“No shit, man. Really.”

“Where are you, Rankin?” said Ferguson.

“Other side of the reception building, near the little power cabinet.”

“Truck is at the gate. Going in,” said Guns.

“Rankin, stay where you are until the truck goes through.”

Ferguson hunkered down as headlights swept in front of him. The truck was a six-wheeler, a bit stubby looking, the type used by small firms in the States for local deliveries. It headed in the direction of the low-level waste disposal area, bumping over the tracks close to the railcars where he was supposed to meet Rankin.