Read The Expediter Online

Authors: David Hagberg

Tags: #Thrillers, #Fiction, #Suspense, #Espionage, #Crime

The Expediter (6 page)

BOOK: The Expediter
4.59Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

 

EIGHT

 

Pak’s Lada was smoking badly by the time he and Sergeant Ri reached the airport and were stopped at the security checkpoint so that their credentials could be checked. The instant the young guards saw Colonel Pak’s red identity booklet they stiffened to attention and saluted. From this point the terminal blocked the taxiway.

“Has the jet to Beijing taken off yet?” Pak demanded.

“I think it is leaving at any minute, sir,” one guard said, handing back the ID booklet, as the other raised the barrier.

Pak slammed the car in gear, floored the accelerator, and they shot through the gate and raced toward the road around the terminal that would give them access to the airfield.

“Radio the tower and order them to hold the plane,” Pak told his sergeant.

“If we’re not in time we can always tell the crew to turn around,” Ri suggested.

“If the assassins are actually aboard the plane, they wouldn’t hesitate to hijack it.”

“Still time to order up a couple of fighters to shoot it down.”

“And what happens if we kill more Chinese citizens?”

“I see your point,” Ri said. He got on the radio, switching to the
tower’s frequency, as they reached the south end of the terminal building and turned out onto the apron that led to the taxiways and runways. The big Tupolev was lumbering toward runway 07, its engines trailing thick plumes of black exhaust.

“Sunan tower, this is Colonel Pak Hae, State Safety and Security Agency,” Ri said into the telephone handset. “Copy?”

Pak headed directly across to the taxiway behind the jetliner.

“That’s right, State Safety and Security Agency,” Ri was saying. “I want that jet stopped before it reaches the runway. I want its engines shut down, its hatch opened, and all passengers and crew held on board.”

Pak couldn’t hear the other side of the conversation, but Ri suddenly shouted.

“I don’t give a shit who’s aboard. This is a matter of state security, you idiot. Dear Leader has ordered us here.” Ri grinned. He loved throwing his colonel’s weight around.

The jetliner was fifty meters away from turning onto the active runway when it slowed down and came to a ponderous halt. The engines immediately began to spool down. The truck with the boarding stairs came out from the terminal, as the aircraft’s forward hatch swung open.

Pak drove under the starboard wing and swung directly in front of the airplane, blocking any possibility that the pilot could change his mind and try to reach the runway.

He and Ri got out of the car and walked back to the hatch as the truck pulled up and slowly maneuvered the stairs into position. One of the flight attendants was standing at the open hatch, a frightened expression on her pretty round face.

“Take out your pistol,” Pak told his sergeant as they started up the stairs. “If anyone makes a move shoot them.”

“Anyone?” Ri asked, impressed. He pulled out his Russian-made 9 mm Stechkin autoloader.

“Anyone,” Pak said.

At the head of the stairs he showed his identification booklet to the attendant and then to the pilot and copilot.

“How long will we be delayed here?” the pilot asked.

“Until I say so,” Pak replied. He turned to the attendant. “I want the passenger manifest.”

“Yes, sir,” the young woman said.

The aircraft was almost completely full. The passengers were sitting up and watching Pak and especially Ri with his drawn pistol. No one looked happy, and a lot of them were obviously frightened. Only the handful of Chinese businessmen, none of whom had apparently heard about the shooting, seemed to be indifferent.

The attendant handed Pak a clipboard with the names, nationalities, passport numbers, and seat assignments of the one hundred and twenty-five passengers. Twenty-two of them were South Koreans—thirteen men and nine women.

Pak moved into the cabin, stopping at the third row. The two South Koreans seated in A and B were old men, one of them with a long white beard and traditional peasant’s hat. They’d most likely come to visit relatives.

Seven rows back he passed two women, one of them Japanese. Her seatmate, a South Korean, looked petrified, as if she expected to be shot at any moment. Pak gave her a reassuring smile and moved aft.

The next three South Korean males were a father and his two teenaged sons from Seoul, seated with a woman. Pak stared at the father for a hard moment, but he was too slightly built to be one of the shooters from the surveillance tape, and his sons were both too young and too small.

He looked up in time to catch the eye of a man four rows back, who immediately turned away. He was identified on the manifest as Kwan Sang-hung, from Seoul, well built for a Korean, typical for a Southerner. His seatmate was Yi Hwang-jap, also from Seoul, a much smaller man, with narrow shoulders and a round face.

They were the shooters; Pak was almost 100 percent certain of it.

“Keep on your toes,” he told Ri, and he walked aft to the pair, who both turned and looked up at him.

The smaller man seemed to be extremely nervous, but the other one was calm. He was a professional.

“Let me see your passports,” Pak said.

“Is there a problem?” Yi asked, handing his over. “Everything was in order in the terminal.”

Soon handed over his passport, and so far as Pak could tell it was legitimate, or else a damned good forgery. The few visa stamps were for Japan. Yi’s passport looked real as well, but it contained no visa stamps.

“What was the purpose of your trip, Mr.Yi?” Pak asked.

“I’ve always wanted to see the North—Chosun. I’m a history teacher. I can tell my students about my trip.”

“What else did you do while you were here?”

“I don’t understand.”

Pak turned to the other man. “Your story is the same, Mr. Kwan?”

“I’m not a teacher, but I was curious about what it was like up here.”

“Were you satisfied?”

Soon shrugged. “I like the South better.”

“I imagine you do,” Pak said. He stepped back. “On your feet, both of you.”

“What?” Yi stammered.

“Your papers are not in order. You’re coming with us. On your feet.”

No one in the aircraft made a sound, and for a long moment Pak was sure that the schoolteacher was going to cry out for help, but then Soon unfastened his seat belt.

“Better do as they say,” he told his seatmate. “We’ll catch the next flight home.”

Yi wanted to do something, anything but stand up and leave the aircraft. He looked like a cornered animal ready to bolt or fight back, but there was nowhere for him to go, nothing for him to do, and he finally realized it.

He unfastened his seat belt and got awkwardly to his feet. “What about my luggage?”

“Don’t worry about your luggage,” Pak said. He let the man step out into the aisle, and quickly patted him down. Then he turned him around and secured his wrists with a plastic restraint.

“Am I under arrest?”

“For now,” Pak said. He handed the man forward to Ri, and turned back to Soon who’d already spread his arms.

“What are the charges?”

“No charges yet,” Pak said. He patted the man down for weapons, but there were none.

Soon turned around and held his wrists behind his back to be secured.

“This has happened to you before,” Pak said.

“I was a cop in the Army.”

“You should not have come here, Mr. Kwan,” Pak said.

“Evidently not.”

 

 

 

NINE

 

As soon as the prisoners were settled in the backseat of the Lada, Ri covering them at gunpoint, baggage handlers came out to the jetliner, opened the cargo bay hatch, and began unloading the luggage until they found the suitcases matching the numbers on Kwan’s and Yi’s claim checks. Pak had them load the bags into the trunk, then got behind the wheel and headed away.

“Nice car,” Soon said.

Pak glanced at his image in the rearview mirror.

“Shut your mouth,” Ri warned.

“No, let him talk,” Pak said. He drove toward the south end of the
terminal building. “I’d like to hear his views on how much better things are in the South.”

“There’s no comparison with this shit hole, but you people are so cut off up here you’d never understand,” Soon said. He glanced over his shoulder as a start truck trundled out to the jetliner to power up the engines.

“Why are we under arrest?” Yi asked fearfully. “I’ve done nothing.”

“You were identified across the street from the Chinese Embassy early this morning,” Pak said.

Yi was thunderstruck. “That’s not possible, sir. I was in my hotel all night.” He looked at Soon. “Mr. Kwan will verify it.”

“I doubt it, because he was there with you.”

“No,” Yi protested. “Tell him that we never left the hotel.”

“We never left the hotel,” Soon said. “Anyway, don’t you people have guards posted at the bridges?”

“Actually you two were quite ingenious,” Pak said. He pulled up at the security checkpoint and rolled down his window. But the guard glanced at the prisoners in the backseat and Ri’s drawn pistol, and immediately motioned for the barrier to be opened.

“I swear on my honor that we didn’t leave the hotel,” Yi pleaded as Pak drove through the gate and headed back into the city. “We never had access to an automobile.”

“Of course not,” Pak agreed. “It’s why you killed those two cops, stole their uniforms and weapons and swam across the river. What are their mothers to be told? That they died defending the motherland?”

“Murder?” Yi squeaked.

“For those two deaths alone, you’ll face a firing squad. But the other, General Ho, why did you assassinate him? What did you hope to gain?”

Yi had lost his voice.

“Of course you’re not on your own,” Pak said reasonably. “Your planning was too good, and certainly your passports are first-class. Not amateur. But your knowledge of the general’s schedule was nothing short of brilliant. Who sent you to do this thing? Was it the NIS?”

Neither man answered. Pak turned onto the main highway and they drove in silence for ten minutes until in the distance behind them they heard the roar of the jetliner taking off. Soon turned and looked out the rear window.

“You almost made it,” Pak said. “Except that we found the bodies of those two cops faster than you thought we would. Just chance, I’m told, that they turned up so fast a couple of kilometers downriver from the hotel.”

“Now you want our confessions,” Soon said.

Something about the man’s attitude was slightly bothersome to Pak. He was too calm, too self-assured. Yi was understandable, but not Kwan.

“We’ll have them sooner or later, won’t we,” Ri said. “The easy way or the hard way.” He glanced at Pak. “Funny how these sorts usually take the hard way. Do you suppose it’s because they’re stupid, Colonel? Or brave?”

“Okay, you win,” Soon said. “We did it. But we didn’t swim, would have got our clothes all wet and messy. We smuggled a hang glider and flew to the other side. You should teach your people to look up every now and then.”

“Hang glider?” Yi whispered.

“He’s right. It wasn’t a hang glider. It was a rowboat. You’ll probably find it floating somewhere downriver.”

“That’s a lie,” Yi protested weakly. “I was asleep in my bed the entire night. I didn’t even wake up until Mr. Tae telephoned us that it was time to come down for breakfast.”

“Okay, we used a mini-sub.”

“Those cops you killed were good boys,” Ri warned. “Let me shoot this one now, Colonel.”

Pak was missing something important here, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. “Who hired you to do this?”

Soon looked out the window. The divided highway they were on was almost completely devoid of traffic, but people on foot were walking into the city in the median. In the distance the empty shell of
the Ryugyong Hotel rose like a massive black pyramid from the city’s center. It had been designed in the eighties to be the world’s largest luxury hotel, but bad engineering and lack of money had permanently stalled the project.

Almost no traffic moved downtown, though there were a fair amount of people on foot, and less than a half hour after they’d left the airport, Pak drove through the gate into the agency’s compound and around back to his parking space.

BOOK: The Expediter
4.59Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Dev Dreams, Volume One by Ruth Madison
Wrecked by Cat Johnson
Shapeshifter by Holly Bennett
The Last Word by Lisa Lutz
Anna Meets Her Match by Arlene James
The Lost Bee by L. K. Rigel
Zom-B Gladiator by Darren Shan
Just a Taste by Deirdre Martin
Attack on Pearl Harbor by Alan D. Zimm