Act of War (7 page)

The boys were ashamed of themselves, as they should have been, and they sulked off, leaving Harvath to contemplate his own courage, particularly as it related to relationships.

He wanted a family, but he knew what he did for a living would make
that difficult. Having to disappear in the middle of the night, not knowing when or if he would be coming home was almost too much to ask of the people you loved.

He had watched SEAL marriages fall apart left, right, and center. But almost to a man, those SEALs had chosen incompatible women. There were SEALs who had solid marriages and they were always the envy of the rest of the men. Harvath had always wanted to be one of those guys, but the rigors of his career had made personal relationships difficult to establish, never mind maintain.

For the people of the United States to enjoy the American dream, someone had to protect it. Harvath saw himself as one of those protectors. In his worldview, there were wolves, there were sheep, and there were sheepdogs. He was a sheepdog—he always had been, even as a child when he befriended a mentally impaired kid next door who had been plagued by bullies. Harvath had never tolerated those who preyed upon the innocent or the weak. That wasn’t in his DNA. For better or for worse, he always did the right thing even if it cost him, which sometimes it had.

But his greatest fear was of failing. Failing his team, failing his country, failing himself. It drove him and was why he pushed himself as hard as he did. It was why he had become so good at what he did.

At some point, though, he knew he would have to dial it back. Not today, not tomorrow, but at some point he’d have to hand over the watch to someone younger, faster, and able to rebound in less time. He wasn’t twenty-two anymore. What’s more, he had met someone. She was a wonderful woman with a wonderful little boy and he had begun seeing the possibility of a life together with them.

Twisting the cap off the water bottle, he popped the Motrin in his mouth and stepped closer to the TV. Yul Brynner was about to deliver a great line. When asked by one of the village leaders how there could be a gunslinger who didn’t care about money, Brynner explained that men who carry guns for a living aren’t all alike. Some don’t care about money at all. Some, for their own reasons, simply enjoy the danger.

Harvath mouthed the words just as his father had done sitting next to him in that darkened theater in San Diego when he was a little boy.
Then, grabbing a paper cup, he filled it with coffee and walked back to check on Yaqub.

Scobell stepped out of the berth to debrief Harvath on what he had learned. There were details about Yaqub’s organizational structure and how they moved men and supplies in and out of Waziristan. It was low-hanging fruit.

Harvath thanked him, told him to keep at it, and, coffee in hand, went forward to file his report.

After the submarine came up to periscope depth and his encrypted transmission had been sent, Harvath grabbed a quick shower and a shave before finding an empty bunk where he could get some sleep. It was cramped quarters, but it was warm and it was dry. This was the Four Seasons compared to some of the places he had been forced to sleep over the years.

Having left word with Scobell to wake him if Yaqub revealed anything that could be of value to their operation, he closed his eyes and, willing himself to relax, concentrated on slowing his breathing in order to help fall asleep.

As he did, his mind drifted to the four-man reconnaissance team the President had sent into North Korea. He tried to envision where they would be at this point in their operation.

He had conducted only one operation ever in North Korea and it had been harrowing. He said a prayer for the men on the ground that it would be successful. They were going to need all the help they could get.

N
ORTH
K
OREA

E
very freedom in the DPRK was restricted, especially freedom of movement. Over his years of infiltrating the communist country, CIA operative Billy Tang had organized a loose underground railroad that had helped shuttle him around. He learned quickly that the only North Koreans who believed in the government’s communist vision were the bureaucrats at the very top—and even then, the majority were only giving lip service to it in order to avoid being executed.

Human beings were hardwired to act in their own self-interest and the North Korean people were no different. Almost all of them were on the lookout for any opportunity to earn extra money. Even the smallest amount could make a huge difference in their lives and the lives of their families. Everyone did it. The key was doing so at a level that didn’t draw the attention of government officials.

Citizens in the oppressive communist state, though, were also wary of entrapment and Tang hadn’t built his network overnight. Favor by favor, envelope of cash by envelope of cash, he expanded and tended his relationships like a garden. Some of them had grown to be as strong as family ties. In fact, so many families relied on him that Tang had more than once smuggled his own money into the country when the notoriously bureaucratic CIA had been late disbursing his operating capital.

Born in the United States of South Korean parents, Billy Tang was not only of Korean extraction, but he spoke the language fluently. The North Koreans he bankrolled had no idea he was American, much less an
operative for the CIA. They believed him to be a South Korean journalist aligned with a human rights organization in Seoul. He snuck into the DPRK, or so they thought, to chronicle its abuses and help expose them to the rest of the world. It was dangerous work, but for the risks they took, his North Korean assets were rewarded handsomely.

Each time he visited, he brought not just money, but also medicine. Cholesterol lowering drugs, blood pressure medication, insulin, EpiPens, and even Viagra—he was seen as an angel of mercy and in some cases a literal lifesaver. The more Tang did for his network and their family members, the more loyal they grew. And the more loyal they grew, the greater the risks they were willing to undertake on his behalf. Some risks, though, were too great to ask even of his core people, so he had begun branching out.

Unlike the rest of the world, where organized crime tried to infiltrate the government, in North Korea the government worked hard to infiltrate organized crime. Even at the top of the totalitarian food chain, life in the “utopia” of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was so destitute that many high-level officials searched for ways to augment their own meager incomes and improve the standard of living for themselves and their families. To do that, they turned to organized crime.

They trafficked internationally in methamphetamine, opium, heroin, counterfeit currencies, and knock-off luxury goods. The illicit trade was estimated to contribute upward of a billion dollars a year to North Korea’s coffers. But while much of the organized crime was geared toward distributing products into foreign markets, there was still a certain amount of organized crime conducted within the DPRK itself. Tang’s challenge hadn’t been infiltrating one of these groups, but rather finding one that wasn’t already shot through with government officials. The last thing he needed was to be directly doing business with members of the state’s armed forces, diplomatic corps, or intelligence service. If he ever could turn one of these people, it would be best to do it through a cutout.

When Tang identified a low-level smuggler he wanted to recruit, he posed as a representative of the Jopok, South Korea’s mafia, and made the young man an enticing offer. In exchange for drugs, Tang offered him
something very hard to acquire in North Korea—real American products, not knock-offs. The young man had jumped at the chance.

The CIA purchased iPads, MacBooks, Xboxes, Jack Daniel’s, American cigarettes, and smartphones, among other coveted items. Tang made only limited quantities available to the smuggler. He didn’t want to turn him into such a big player that he drew the attention of the larger syndicates—only enough to make him reliant on Tang and hungry for more.

The kid wasn’t some country bumpkin, but he wasn’t a criminal mastermind either. Not yet. That might come at some point in the future. For now, he had just the right combination of guts and smarts to make him both useful and dangerous. Tang had made up his mind to fully exploit both qualities.

There were only two types of people who could afford the prices Tang’s American products would fetch in the North Korean marketplace—organized crime figures and DPRK officials. The young smuggler, named Hyun Su, didn’t have those kinds of contacts. He would sell the goods to the next person up the criminal ladder from him. From there, they might pass through two more rungs, their prices doubling and tripling, until they were sold to the final customer.

Knowing the electronics were destined to end up in influential hands, the CIA and NSA had made sure that all of them contained the most advanced spyware available. Thanks to Tang and his young smuggler, U.S. intelligence had been welcomed into the homes of some of the DPRK’s most powerful families and none of them had a clue.

It was a brilliant operation and one the Agency began replicating in other parts of the world. But there was an additional benefit that Tang didn’t uncover until two years into their relationship. While all North Koreans hated the DPRK government, Hyun Su’s hatred of it was
very
personal.

Highly distrustful of everyone, the smuggler had kept Tang at arm’s length. Over time, though, remarks had begun to slip. Finally, after Tang had spent the better part of an evening getting him drunk, Hyun Su’s walls had come all the way down and the truth had poured out.

Six years prior, his family’s village had been near an army barracks—a particularly unsafe place for North Korean citizens to live. One evening,
there had been pounding on their door. Hungry soldiers were out looking for food. When his father told them that the family didn’t have any extra food, the soldiers beat him with the butts of their rifles. His mother and older sister begged them to stop. The soldiers did, but only long enough to brutally rape them both before moving on to the next house.

The attack left his father paralyzed—a death sentence for a family forced to physically eke out its daily existence. After a string of indignities that followed, his sister committed suicide. Shortly thereafter, his mother stopped eating. Then she stopped getting out of bed. Soon she began having fevers. When she died, it was blamed on pneumonia. Hyun Su knew better. A broken heart could not be expected to pump life-giving blood through the body.

He had only been thirteen and his world had completely crumbled. The final straw was when his father begged the boy to kill him. It was a request no parent should ever make of a child. Hyun Su couldn’t do it. As hard as it was to find food and take care of his father, he couldn’t kill him. He loved him. His father was all he had left in the world.

Then one day, he, too, was gone. Someone, Hyun Su never knew who, had done what he couldn’t do. What he
wouldn’t
do. Someone in the village had waited for the boy to go out and had then smothered the father, putting him out of his misery.

Others in the village told Hyun Su to take it as a blessing. His father had begged to die. He was now released and so, too, was Hyun Su. He would not have to “suffer” the burden of taking care of his father any longer. He was free.

That life could be seen as so cheap disturbed him beyond words. He couldn’t live in the village any longer, especially not knowing who the murderer was.

Hyun Su gathered what few possessions were of value to him and disappeared. He left behind his innocence, his childhood, and any grudging respect he might have had for authority. The military, and the country at large, had become his enemy.

Back in the United States, Billy Tang had two small children of his own. He couldn’t begin to fathom the pain Hyun Su had been through. It did, though, explain a lot about his personality. It also meant that Tang could bring him deeper into his operations and use him for more than
just feeding NSA-rigged electronics into the local pipeline. If anyone had told him that the young smuggler would eventually become his most valuable asset, Tang wouldn’t have believed it. But at this moment, that’s exactly what he was. Hyun Su was their lifeline.

The team had hiked five kilometers in from the coast and had dug into a hide site just before daybreak. They rotated the watch. As the team leader, Jimi Fordyce went first. No one spoke and they kept all movement to a bare minimum. When Hyun Su arrived at the rendezvous point that night, he was right on time. Only after Tang had checked everything out and had given them the all clear did the camouflaged SEALs reveal themselves.

After they had been secreted in the back of the truck, Tang and Hyun Su climbed into the cab. They were both dressed in the peasant clothing seen throughout the country—a black Mao cap, baggy cotton trousers, and a loose-fitting tunic.

Hidden beneath his tunic, Tang carried a four-and-a-half-inch-long, razor-sharp CRKT knife called the Otanashi noh Ken, which meant “Silent Sword” in Japanese. It was a deep-concealment folding blade that had been created for the Special Operations community by famed knife-maker and close-quarters combatives expert James Williams. Designed for maximum penetration through clothing, it was small enough to be hidden, but long enough to reach critical organs and finish the job. The Otanashi noh Ken had one purpose and one purpose only—to kill as quietly as possible.

While firearms were excellent tools for rapidly killing one or multiple targets, there was no way to totally silence a firearm. Even a suppressed pistol emitted a muffled
pop
when fired. That was why Billy Tang preferred knives. They were completely silent. Only the victim made any noise, and that could be mitigated if you knew what you were doing.

That didn’t mean firearms didn’t have their place in Tang’s toolbox. Tucked into the door pocket next to him was a full-sized 9mm SIG Sauer P226 Tactical Operations pistol with a SWR Trident 9 suppressor. The five-hour drive would take them into parts of the country he had never been before. They had no idea who or what they would encounter.