Rogue Threat (44 page)

“No place to screw around, that’s for sure.”

Blake navigated the bridge pylons, each one a different angle, appearing like some nouveau form of artwork. As they cleared the bridge and officially entered Chesapeake Bay, Matt saw the Duck Inn off to his right and the lights from the Bay Bridge-Tunnel ahead and to the left.

The quiet hum of the Boston Whaler’s Mercruiser engine was the only noise against the peaceful backdrop of a black night and the still waters of Chesapeake Bay. Matt looked at Peyton again, who seemed fixated on the distant horizon, many things no doubt running through her mind. Could he trust her? What was it that made him think he could not? Ballantine was ruthless, yet she had received medical treatment in captivity. And then there was the Irish Republican Army connection. Was that a true story? If so, had she gone native, as they say? What was her purpose in this operation? And there was something else, he couldn’t put his finger on it just yet, but it was close. Was her presence near him Hellerman’s way of keeping him close?

Or was she Lantini’s intermediary? His cutout? These thoughts darted through his mind like tossed boomerangs, always circling back.

One thing he did know, however, was that when a batter stepped into the batter’s box, he had to believe he was going to rap a line drive into the gap. He had to know he could beat the pitcher, no matter how good his stuff. So, there was no time for a lack of confidence or doubts about partners.

“Over there. See that giant black spot against the horizon?” Blake said, pointing.

“Roger, I’ve got it,” Matt said.

“I see it,” Peyton echoed.

“That’s the
Fong Hou
. We’ll swing wide like we’re going through the channel and then come back on its bow.”

“Okay. That should give us a view of the UAV antenna, and then we need to start looking for ladders,” Matt said.

They closed in on the black mass that quickly took the shape of an enormous commercial cargo ship with containers stacked high on top.

“Geez, they’ve got enough containers on there, all right. How the hell do they land an airplane on that thing?” Matt mused aloud.

“Like I said,” Peyton replied. “This ship could have just a shell with the containers stacked all around, leaving enough room for the UAVs.”

“Thought a UAV needed more room than that,” Matt said. “Blake, take it a bit closer. Angle over toward the third island there,” he said pointing at the giant boulders that constituted the entrance to the tunnel nearest the Eastern Shore, called the Baltimore Channel.

“This is when we need that damn Zodiac,” Blake muttered to himself, turning the wheel of the boat. He downshifted the gear box and slid the throttle into neutral, letting the boat drift. Then he shut off the engine, the absence of the motor making them feel utterly vulnerable, as if their voices could be heard for miles.

“This is as close as we want to get,” Blake said, whispering. The Boston Whaler was about a football field’s distance from the
Fong Hou
. Matt picked up Blake’s night-vision goggles and held them to his eyes like binoculars.

“Okay, there it is. The satellite antenna. Damn, right there,” Matt said quietly, then stopped. “Man. Chinese merchant ship? Iraqi general? Predators? Is this a strategic counterattack?”

They stood motionless in the boat, swaying with the subtle rocking, thinking about the nexus of the three vectors Matt had mentioned. Matt looked at Blake, whose face was drawn and worried. Clearly he understood the implications. Peyton’s face was stern, as if she were facing a firing squad with defiance.

“China and Iraq?”

“That’s the big picture,” Matt said. “Has to be. The French helped us during the Revolutionary War; why would it be a stretch for China to help Iraq? It’s all geopolitics. We’ve gone guns blazing into Iraq. Why not absorb the blow that we telegraphed for a full year and have a counterattack planned?”

They continued rocking in the boat until Peyton broke the silence.

“I see the antenna. And there’s a ladder over there.” Peyton pointed to the aft end.

“Let me see.” Matt grabbed the goggles. He surveyed the ship, top to bottom.

“Okay. We need to get closer, though, to see if we can reach the bottom of that ladder,” he said, shaking off the concept of an alliance between two powerful countries that hated the United States.

Blake looked at him. “Dangerous stuff, bro.”

“Yeah.”

Blake reached into a duffel bag and extracted two new Les Baer AR-15 rifles with close-combat optic red-dot scopes and infrared aiming devices.

“I would say this is a good start,” Matt said, handling the AR-15 before giving one to Peyton and picking up a Ruger Model 77 bolt-action rifle. “And this is even better. Seventeen caliber, right?”

“That’s right. Sniper rifle. I’ve mounted the infrared laser. There’s some pistols in there, too.”

“Where’d you get all this stuff?”

“I called some friends. The Ruger is mine, but the AR-15s . . . I had to cash in some chips.”

“Big chips.”

“Big mission.”

The boat was about twenty yards now from the ship and drifting closer, much closer than any of them believed they should be to the
Fong Hou
/
Queen Bee
, but there they were.

“What’s that noise?” Peyton asked.

They listened and could hear the screeching of metal moving.

“Sounds like an anchor lowering, but not exactly,” Matt said. He pressed the illuminating dial on his wrist watch and saw it was nearly nine p.m.

Prime time.

Then it hit him. The terrorist radio from the barn in Vermont, the voice on the other end had asked, “Is
he
dead?”

Not “Are
they
dead?” or “Is
she
dead?” but is
he
, singular, dead?

He looked at Peyton and stepped onto the gunwale of the boat.

PART 4:

Grave New World

Chapter 50

Panama City, Panama

Ambassador Sung’s sleep had been fitful. Nightmares preceded the biggest decision of his life. He awoke, got dressed, and walked through the stale, muggy Panama night air to the cinderblock hut where they all waited.

Sung eyed Ronnie Wood in his familiar position in the corner. He turned to his comrades and said, “Gentlemen, we are about to make history.”

He walked to the window of the Fort Sherman headquarters. In the moonlight, he could see the palm trees sway and the waves lap gently against the rocky beach. He knew that the next morning the sun would rise on a better day for these enemies of the United States.

“The Americans have most of their military deployed overseas and in the Middle East. They have very little capability to respond. Some of our riskier missions, such as the military transports, may be intercepted, but even with those, we have been able to hack into the military flight schedule system, and all of our attacks are legitimately scheduled flights.”

His consortium of evil stared at him from around the table. A soft Caribbean breeze blew through the open windows.

“It is time for the next phase,” Sung said. “Give the orders to your subordinate commanders to prepare for attacks.”

Lt. Col. Yeung
Park sat proudly in the back of the C-141 troop transport aircraft. He surveyed his 120 paratroopers, who wore grim looks on their faces. They were ready to fight. They knew this mission was most likely their last. Park thought about the ten other aircraft loaded in the same fashion. Eleven hundred paratroopers were invading the peaceful city of Seattle. How delightful.

The North Korean soldiers had departed from several different locations in the Caribbean Sea, where they had staged over the past year, training and rehearsing their attack plan. When given the word, they would take off and link up with the other transport aircraft in flight. The planes would meet twenty miles outside of Seattle just before the airborne invasion.

Park thought of his family, waiting for him in Pyongyang. He was certain he would never return, but he kept a small picture of his wife and two little children in his pocket. He removed the picture as they taxied along the runway of a Costa Rican airfield. One of his soldiers watched as he stared at the photo. His wife was beautiful but had aged rapidly over the years as a result of limited food and harsh living conditions. Their life was a difficult one.

And even he had to admit this plan was a bit extreme.

Their purpose was to seize Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, killing as many people at the airfield as possible, before transitioning to an attack on wealthy neighborhoods east of Seattle.

The planes would converge on the same flight route before the air traffic controller realized what was happening. In their rehearsals, they had practiced the call signs and maneuvers of American cargo-plane pilots. They would be aiming for McChord Air Force Base and veer away at the last minute to seize the Seattle airfield.

The Chinese soldiers
had infiltrated Houston over the last five years, sometimes one at a time, other times in small boats. Most had made it, though some had not. The Chinese slave trade had been the perfect cover to inject determined soldiers and operatives into the inner city. They had gathered slowly, increasing in size to two battalion’s worth, or nearly 900 soldiers. The weapons had been the easy part. There were plenty of those to be had. The liberal immigration laws and the incompetence of the Immigration and Naturalization Service had combined to make for an almost effortless infiltration.

This evening, the two battalion commanders talked on cell phones as they coordinated their attacks on a variety of targets. They had elected to concentrate their efforts on two areas. One battalion would focus on the government buildings and leadership, while the other battalion would attack the wealthy Woodlands area and kill as many civilians as possible. This would achieve the dual effect of crippling the command and control architecture and causing significant pain.

Their instructions were to hold the areas they secured, repel counter-attacks, and, after forty-eight hours, go to Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport, where military transport would pick them up. Phu Chai, the 1
^st
Battalion commander, realized that the last portion of the plan, the extraction, was not likely to happen. And he was okay with that.

His men had waited years for this moment. They had practiced and rehearsed, much like the Japanese had for the Pearl Harbor invasion.

Phu Chai looked across the dingy crack house he and his men inhabited. Other members of his team lived in many dilapidated buildings throughout the slums of Houston. If the U.S. government had cared about its people, Chai figured, they would have discovered him and his plan a long time ago. But Chinese intelligence had told them it was best to melt into the inner cities because no one cared about those places. The police rarely stopped, taxis would not venture there, and there was no commerce other than drugs—all indicators of institutional neglect. To Chai, the fact that 900 soldiers had been able to enter the United States through Mexico and across the Caribbean Sea relatively intact and prepared for a military mission spoke volumes about the American system.

He held his satellite phone in his hand, awaiting the call to attack.

The Serb soldiers
had waited a long time for their revenge. Able to muster nearly two thousand men and women, they had stowed away on a ship that departed from the port of Split in Croatia two months earlier. Tired of defecating in the cargo hold and sleeping right next to it, they were sufficiently fed up to attack the first thing they saw.

However, their mission was Jacksonville, Florida, and the Mayport Naval Station.

Stefan Ilic, a former colonel in the Yugoslav army, who had lost his entire family in the Kosovo air war, walked along the deck of the large container ship. She was a Liberian flagged vessel that had made frequent legitimate ports of call to the Balkan area and had always checked out.

After Sung had contacted Ilic four years earlier, it had taken him almost a year to find a ship that was not constantly monitored by American or British intelligence. With the insurgency in Macedonia, NATO intelligence had shifted its focus to the former rump country of Yugoslavia, and Ilic had ironically found a ship through Albanian contacts he had developed in Kosovo before the war.

Ilic had stockpiled thousands of AK-47s, RPK machine guns, light anti-tank weapons, and 82mm mortars along with the appropriate ammunition for each weapon system. Like the others, Ilic’s force was designed to be light and mobile.

Their objective was to seize the Mayport Naval Air Station and destroy all of the F-14 fighters to deny the U.S. military a rapid reaction to the internal threat they would soon discover they faced.

Standing atop the deck of the ship, Ilic could see the port of Jacksonville on the near horizon. Once notified to attack, it would take about two hours for the ship to move into the port and unload the personnel and cargo. He was certain they would have to fight their way off the ship.

Ilic looked at the stars and thought he could see the satellite that would deliver his message . . . and his freedom.

Rafael Hernandez leaned
his head forward and studied the faces of his Cuban comrades as they sat in the mesh webbing of the Russian-built Anatoly aircraft. He saw determined, nervous young men who were prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice to help unlock their country from the grip of the United States. His men bounced silently in the cabin of the aircraft, parachutes on their backs, weapons tied carefully to their sides, as they taxied into position on the runway.