The Socotra Incident (4 page)

The mark, his eyes wide with fear, looked at the not-dead Ritter in disbelief. A line of pain flared into life against his chest as Ritter brought his arms up to defend himself. The mark dropped the knife like it was a piece of hot iron and ran off into the alleyway.

“He owes me money,” Ritter said to the khat dealer as he swept up the
janbiya.
He reached back with the knife like he was throwing to home from right field and hurled the knife at the fleeing man.

The blade spun end over end, and the pommel smacked into the mark’s shoulder. The mark stumbled but kept his forward momentum as he passed through the alleyway. The mark lurched onto the asphalt road and pulled himself upright.

He had less than a second to gawk at the bus that smashed into him. The clap of man and bus told of broken glass and bone as the bus squealed to a stop beyond Ritter’s narrow view through the alleyway.

“Damn it,” Ritter said as he made his way through the alley. He looked down at his chest. Blood had seeped from the cut and darkened his vest. It stung—it needed to be stitched—but he’d had worse.

The crash site was silent. Onlookers drifted toward the scene as if it were a magnet. A huddle of men surrounded the mark a few yards from the front of the bus. Ritter made his way past the shattered glass and bent bumper, and shoved his way into the huddle.

“I’m a doctor! Let me through!” Ritter said. Yemenis peeled away and gave him a clear path to the mark.

A triangle of glass was embedded in the man’s forehead. The rest of his face was a mass of blood and mangled flesh. Blood bubbles grew and shrank from what remained of his mouth as his lungs kept pounding.

“Move over.” Ritter pushed away a shoeless street urchin, who was pawing through the mark’s vest. His first aid training was rudimentary, and if was going to pass as a doctor, he’d better start selling it.

“You! Go call an ambulance.” He pointed to a bystander holding a cell phone. “Someone give me a pen—he’ll need a tracheotomy.”

“A what?”

“I have to punch a hole in his neck so he can keep breathing!” Yemenis burst into action as his orders spread to everyone in earshot.

Ritter pulled the Applegate-Fairbairn fighting knife from the sheath over his lower back and cut open the mark’s shirt from the nape of his neck to his sternum. Blood coated his hands as he peeled away the shirt; ribs had broken and burst through the mark’s chest. Under the shirt was what Ritter sought, a cash belt. A once-white harness held pockets that could carry stacks of bills inconspicuously. Ritter patted each pocket. His teeth ground together as pockets came up empty. Whoever he’d been sent to pay had their money.

His fingers brushed against a hard object, no bigger than his thumb, in one of the pockets.

“Doctor, pens!” someone said.

Men held dozens of pens toward him. Ritter cursed his luck and picked through the myriad of pens until he found a clear plastic pen.

“My hands are too slippery. Take the ink out of it and give me the case,” he said. Jamming a pen case into the man’s trachea was the last thing Ritter wanted to do, but he needed to buy more time.

He turned his attention back to the mark, whose chest had stopped moving. Ritter leaned over the man and hovered his ear a few inches above the wounded man’s mouth. With his body blocking the crowd’s view, one hand sneaked into the money belt pocket and grasped the item within. His fingers drew broken bits of plastic into his fist, and he sat back up.

The mark had stopped breathing. His eyes had lost focus and looked into a sky he couldn’t see.

“He’s dead. To Allah we belong, and to Allah we return,” Ritter said to the crowd, giving the traditional Arabic death announcement. The men around him repeated the prayer. Ritter wiped his bloody hands against his already-bloody vest to camouflage his wound and slipped the broken plastic into a pocket.

Men slapped him on the shoulder and shook his hand, thanking him for trying to help the dead man. Ritter felt his face flush with shame as he tried to retreat from the body. He knew he was culpable for the mark’s death. For a lifetime of guilt, the bus driver would feel like an accessory to manslaughter.

Ritter saw a minaret jutting into the air and made his way toward it. There would be a mosque and a water spigot for
wudu
, ritual washing before prayer. He could clean himself up there before he found his car and high tailed it to the international airport in Sana’a.

People stared at him as he passed, a man with blood on his hands figuratively and literally. He hadn’t wanted to kill the mark, the dead being notoriously hard to interrogate. Yet the deed was done, and regret was useless.

Ritter shook his head with a small, quick motion.
Focus on the mission
, he told himself. Getting hit by a bus wasn’t impossible in Aden. The body would be fleeced by every pair of hands that touched it, and the loss of whatever Ritter had lifted would be rationalized.

The khat dealer was a loose end. The local CIA station could pay him a visit, give him a few rials to remember nothing.

Ritter tapped a bloody hand against the broken plastic in his pocket. Whatever it was, he wasn’t sure whether it was worth a man’s life.

Kim Seok Lee unlocked the cargo container door and grabbed the steel latch. The Kenyan spring was known for its humidity, and equally miserable to the mugginess of his native Pyongyang. He pulled the cargo container open with a squeal of rust, his hands stinging from the simmering metal. A wave of overheated air and the smell of sweat washed over him and the two guards standing behind him. A man in nothing but boxer shorts sat against a small corroded hole—no bigger than a golf ball—in the container wall. Kim made a mental note to have that patched over the next time he threw someone in the hot box.

Kim flicked a finger at the man in the box, and his two thugs dragged the man out by his arms without a struggle. They dropped him in the dirt, which clung to flesh glistening with sweat. The man gasped at the air as if he’d just been saved from drowning.

A quick shove of Kim’s foot flipped the man onto his back. Kim shook his head and squatted alongside the man, whose flesh had gone pale and puckered from water loss.

Kim pulled a CD case from his waistband, a few words in English were scribbled on it, and tapped a corner on the dehydrated man’s head.

“You ready to tell me where you got it, Park?” Kim clacked the steel teeth in the left side of his mouth together. He loved the sound of steel on steel. Loved the way it made the workers flinch, knowing their overseer was close, ready to dispense indiscriminate punishment. Getting the steel teeth had been necessary after a senior party member had nearly beaten him to death with the butt of a rifle for misappropriating government funds. A Chinese mistress was expensive, particularly the young ones. The incident that had cost him half his teeth had also cost him his position in Yuanbao, smuggling luxury goods from China into North Korea. Now he had to suffer the heat of the African continent as the second act of his punishment.

Park coughed and shook his head.

Kim smacked his lips and ran his hand through Park’s sweat-matted hair. Kim gripped the hair and jerked Park’s head into the air.

“Look at me, you piece of shit. Do you know what the penalty for listening to capitalist propaganda is? Religious songs are forbidden by the party leadership and is a direct insult to our Dear Leader.”

Kim slammed Park’s head into the dirt and pulled him back into the air.

“You’re a good worker. The state needs your skills, which is why I think this reeducation period will be enough. But I can’t have you, or anyone else, infecting the camp with lies from the puppet regime in Seoul. Where did you get the music?”

“Jesus…will save my soul,” Park croaked.

Kim growled and pulled a pill bottle from his back pocket. He held it in front of Park’s face and shook the bottle. A single large, yellow pill rattled within. Seeing the pill brought life back into Park’s body; he squirmed against Kim’s grasp.

“Tell me where you got the music, and you can martyr yourself quickly. Keep pissing me off, and you can have this. The last traitor lasted three minutes before he begged me to cut him open and take it out. How long do you think you’ll last?” Kim said.

“Byeon Un, from Wonsan. Got it from one of the Kenyans in the marketplace,” Park said, his eyes glued to the pill bottle.

“So that’s all it takes to get past your faith? Worthless.” Kim dropped Park and motioned to one of his thugs, who handed him a pistol.

Kim put two rounds in Park’s chest and handed the gun back.

“Go get Byeon Un and the two workers standing next to him. Throw them all in the box until they confess,” Kim instructed one of his men.

Kim stalked off, muttering to himself. Park had been his best electrical engineer, and his loss would have to be explained. The truth would make Kim look weak and unable to control his workers. The report of a load of rebar rods falling onto a group of workers would cover everything. A convenient accident to take the life of Park and others would be suitably tragic.

He stalked through the work site back to his office. Hundreds of North Koreans worked with renewed fervor to build the Kenyan government’s newest building. Amazing how a summary execution could motivate laborers who had been paid in little more than food and slave wages the regime taxed at 80 percent.

“Supervisors” stood over work crews, members of North Korea’s Special Forces selected for their loyalty and experience as guards at the Kaechon prison camp for dissidents. The supervisors were as easy to spot by their swagger as by the fact that they looked well fed and healthy. Laborers were kept on a diet of rice and collard greens, which was an upgrade from the boiled grass and ground tree bark soup these peasants would eat in North Korea.

One of his supervisors opened the door to Kim’s foreman’s trailer as Kim approached. Kim hurled his construction helmet into the opening and stomped into his office. This project was a week behind and there was only so many more corners he could cut before the Kenyans complained.

The sound of a long snort welcomed him. A dark-haired and impeccably dressed man sat at his desk, hunched over a mirror covered in rails of light-blue powder.

“Ambassador, you’re taking profit from our Dear Leader,” Kim said. The ambassador had a sealed one-kilogram bag of crystal methamphetamine next to the mirror; the plastic had been ripped open, and kernels of meth had spilled out across the table.

Ambassador Jung-nam squeezed his sinuses and looked at Kim through dilated pupils.

“We’re dead men, Kim—all dead—and we didn’t do anything wrong.” Jung-nam’s words came out of his mouth in a rapid-fire manner; the meth in his system had him wired like a harp.

“We make our payments to Pyongyang on time. This contract is sound, and our distribution network—if you don’t use it all first—is intact.” Kim grabbed a tuft of Jung-nam’s hair as he bent for another hit. He twisted his hand and used the pain to bring Jung-nam to his feet.

“They killed everyone in Room Fourteen! Lined them up in the center of Kim Il-sung Square and shot them in the back of the head. They’re going to do that to us too!” Jung-nam thrashed against Kim’s grip on his hair, his voice shrill.

Kim shoved Jung-nam against the sheet metal wall and pressed his forearm against the ambassador’s throat, cutting off his protest.

“I will bury you in concrete if you scream like that one more time. We don’t report to Room Thirty Nine, not Room Fourteen, you idiot. What is your problem?” Room Thirty Nine, the state sponsored criminal organization specializing in counterfeit currency, drug trafficking, and smuggling laborers and female “entertainers” around the world, coordinated all hard currency-generating activities for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Kim wasn’t entirely sure what Room Fourteen was. Showing an interest in matters of state that didn’t directly involve him was a sure way to get denounced as a spy.

Jung-nam made a hacking noise and slapped the forearm crushing his windpipe. Kim eased the pressure.

“Fourteen 14 was supposed to make a delivery, but it got hijacked. Pirates! They didn’t tell the party because they thought they could ransom it out before anyone noticed. The buyer went berserk when the package wasn’t delivered, which came as an unpleasant surprise to the party,…and it all got worse from there,” Jung-nam said.

“What package?”

Jung-nam cackled and squirmed like a kitten held in its mother’s jaws. Jung-nam lowered his voice to a whisper.

“A nuke.”

Kim let Jung-nam go and stepped back.

“A little bit of meth, a little money laundering—no big deal. The world doesn’t care so long as the right palms are greased. But if word gets out that we’ve sold a nuke to—to anyone, even the Chinese won’t stand with us. Sixty years of brotherhood or not.” Jung-nam flopped back into Kim’s chair and swiveled from side to side.

“Why do you know about this?” Kim asked.

Jung-nam sprang forward and snorted another rail of powdered meth.

“You have to get it back. The—the head of the Workers’ Party called me an hour ago. If you don’t get it back, then you, me…” Jung-nam put a forefinger to his temple and cocked his thumb.