The Korean Intercept (14 page)

"Any number of good men could pinch-hit for me." Galt closed his laptop computer. "I've just downloaded and reviewed the latest intel and analysis on the
Liberty
situation."

"Something's wrong with this connection." Fleming's tone was testy. "I've just finished telling you that what the president—"

"The connection is fine," said Galt. "I also downloaded a supposedly unconnected piece of trivia from our defense system satellites."

"Do tell." Fleming's tone dropped a few more degrees.

"Uh huh. Seems that a covert US. tracking station over there has monitored North Korean and Chinese troop movement along their border."

"Galt, you know damn well that there's been routine Chinese incursion along that border from both sides since the border was drawn, for Chrissake. No one cares, including the countries involved. China and North Korea are allies, more or less."

"There's also a new airfield with an unusually big landing strip in Hamgyong Province. Those are remote mountains with no strategic value, a real backwater. There's no reason for an installation like that with a runway big enough to land a space shuttle. The CIA received intelligence on it from a contact they have on the ground as soon as the regional military command went to work constructing it, and our spy satellite flyovers have confirmed. That airfield is right in the sector where the shuttle went down."

Fleming's expression changed, the irritation softening. "Look, as of now intel from the ground is nonexistent on this. We do not want to get into a hot war with North Korea and China. North Korea has its army on full alert. South Korea's defense minister has his army on alert. Our military forces are at Charlie Threat Level. We've got pilots in fighter aircraft ready to take off within ten minutes of the president issuing the command. This could very easily tumble into a major confrontation, and I am talking nuclear."

"I'm in charge of covert operations," said Galt, "remember? We need a presence on the ground over there, and right now. Hook me up with General Tuttle. He and I could—"

"You will follow your president's orders and return to your office and your official duties no later than oh-eight-hundred hours tomorrow," stated Fleming flatly, as if that settled that.

Galt's response was to end the conversation. He reopened his laptop and fingered a sequenced code that provided a connection so secure that even his own pilot was out of this loop.

Meiko answered on the second ring. Her caller ID would not register the source of this call. "Yes?"

He heard something wrong immediately in her intonation. "It's me."

"Trev, it's my father." There was a vulnerable sadness to her words. "I just heard from Tokyo. He's dead. He's passed away, as you say here."

He hadn't expected something this personal, and he heard himself mouthing the obligatory, "Meiko, I'm sorry." He'd known of her father's reputation before he met her. Kurita Industries was one of a surviving handful of mega-corporations that had gone global during the Japanese boom of the 1980s. Under the stewardship of Kentaro Kurita, K.I. had grown to prosper into this new century with dynamic ties to European and United States makers and shakers. But the only insight Galt had ever had into Meiko's family situation was gleaned from his monitoring random, passing, offhand comments now and then, from which he'd drawn the conclusion that she did not like her stepmother, whom Mister Kurita had married seven years after the death of his first wife, Meiko's mother. Meiko and Galt related compatibly in the here-and-now on a number of levels, but families were not discussed. Meiko's soft voice interrupted his mental wandering.

"Trev?"

He processed this information he'd just received, a confluence of circumstances that could not be ignored. "If you're flying back to Tokyo, I'd like to go with you."

"I was sort of hoping you'd accompany me," she said. "I'm taking a four-fifteen flight this afternoon to L.A." Her voice across the crystal-clear connection was fragile and small. The keening whistle of the F-15 in flight barely penetrated Galt's helmet. "Are you sure about this, Trev?"

"I'm sure." He glanced at his watch, estimating the F-15's remaining flight time. "I can make it. I'll meet you at the loading gate."

"That would be very nice. I love you," she said, and terminated the connection.

 

Washington, DC

 

The waiting area at the terminal gate was crowded with family, friends and associates who had come to see off those boarding the Los Angeles flight. There was standing room only, and little of that. Meiko was surrounded by a cacophony of conversations in many languages.

Galt navigated his way through the condensed mass of humanity toward her. He wore an open-neck white shirt, a navy blue sports jacket and pressed slacks with black shoes. He felt mildly ill-at-ease wearing the uniform of a civilian. He only ever felt like he was in uniform when he was not wearing a soldier's uniform. There was a black leather travel bag over his shoulder and he toted his laptop computer.

"How are you doing, Meiko?"

She was dressed for travel, wearing a modest, belted black dress, set off by a string of white pearls, with matching purse and shoes.

She was studying his eyes. "I'm having second thoughts."

"About what?"

"About us. About how smart I was to tell you that I loved you over the phone, the way I did."

"Meiko, come on, you're under stress."

"That's what I meant. That's something neither one of us has ever said to the other before, Trev. I told myself that between the two of us, I would not be the first one to say it. Is that stupid?"

He touched her arm. "Meiko, relax. We've got a lot of flight time ahead of us. I don't have to accompany you, if that's what you'd prefer."

"I don't know what my preference is." She continued to study him, almost dispassionately. "Are you coming with me because you care, or are you using my family tragedy to further your own objectives?"

"You want to know the truth?" he said. "I've been asking myself that. I'm sorry, Meiko. I won't go with you."

"That's not what I want, either. You wouldn't be undertaking an action like this on your own, without official sanction, if you thought that the government was doing its best to locate and rescue your wife and the crew."

Galt blinked. He glanced around. No one seemed to have overheard her.

"What do you know about that?"

She held his gaze. "Your expression right now tells me everything I need to know, Major."

"Does it?"

"Don't worry. We don't have to talk about it. I don't know anything, except that there is an information blackout. And here you are, wanting to be a good friend and accompany me home, coincidentally to that hemisphere, for the funeral of my father."

"I'm sorry, Meiko. Please accept my condolences. And call me when you get back, if you want to." He started to turn, to leave.

She arrested his movement with a touch of her fingertips on his arm. "You may not believe this," she said, "but right now I don't want to know anything classified about your shuttle or your wife or anything else. It's enough that I understand the depth of feeling you still have for the woman who is still your wife. You're initiating some sort of personal effort of your own, and with a missing NASA space shuttle involved, that means you're risking everything."

A lull had fallen over many of the surrounding conversations when a pair of airline employees assumed their positions to either side of the boarding door.

He pitched his voice low. "I'm making this up as I go along, but you're right. It's the right thing for me to do, because I do have a chance of accomplishing something." He grimaced. "And yes, you're right. I was going to use your family's situation as an excuse."

She considered this, gazing into his eyes. "You're risking your life and your career for Kate and the lives of the other crewmembers? I'm not sorry that I told you I love you. You are a brave and noble man."

He avoided her gaze. "Aw, shucks."

"I want to help. You may accompany me to Tokyo. Use me as a cover for whatever you intend to do."

"I do want to be there for you."

"You shall be. But first, tell me, Trev. I have to know. Are you still in love with her?"

"No." He bent an arm and scratched the back of his shaggy head, frowning, searching for the right words.

"Not in love. But I
do
love her, if that means caring about her. I was going to wait until she got back before I told her about us. I figured it could wait, since she and I were already separated when you and I met. That shuttle flight has been the only thing in her life. I didn't want her distracted while she was on mission."

"Was on mission?" Meiko repeated, studying him with her probing gaze. "The shuttle has come back to earth," she surmised, "only no one knows about it. It went down somewhere in Asia."

He glanced around. Again, no one seemed to have overheard. Her voice was pitched low, and those in the boarding area were engrossed in their own conversations and farewells. An airline employee swung open the boarding door, while another lowered the thin rope that had barred the entrance leading to the plane.

Galt watched this as he spoke to her. "Meiko, I can't talk about that."

"All right," she said reasonably. "Let's just talk about Kate, then. What were you going to tell her when she got back from outer space?"

"I'm going to tell her that there is no doubt in my mind that I want a divorce."

"But Trev, you and I were going to talk before either one of us did anything drastic."

"Isn't that what we're doing now?"

Her eyes clouded. "I could certainly use a loving friend at my side."

People around them began funneling toward the gate. He reached into a pocket and produced a boarding pass. "I've got the seat next to yours."

The trace of a smile touched her lips and a sparkle flashed in her eyes. "You are the most incredible man, Trev Galt. How did you manage that, this close to boarding?"

He clasped her hand in his free hand, giving hers a gentle squeeze. "Let's just call it the power of the White House perk," he said, "and hope that the corporate exec who got bumped to the next flight won't raise too much of a stink."

 

There were 143 passengers aboard the Tokyo-bound Concorde SST jet out of LAX. Galt was among the more industrious, alternating work at his laptop with hourly five-minute breaks to lean his head against the cushion of his seat, resting his eyes. He and Meiko barely spoke during the long flight, except for small talk at mealtime. Meiko lost herself in a thick paperback tome of American political commentary.

Galt reflected that, had he been aboard this lengthy a flight in the past, he would ordinarily have been working on a stiff drink within minutes of takeoff. He thought about the roughing-up he'd given the NASA scientist in Houston. The ends justified the means. And Eliot Fraley would go to his grave knowing Galt as a heinous brute capable of torture and the murder of a sick woman. And yet here Galt was, wearing his civilian uniform, flying in style and polite society. Seated across the aisle from him was a beautiful, sophisticated woman who loved him. But Meiko had never seen the side of him that Eliot Fraley saw. Galt had come to understand that the knowledge that such a brute existed within him was much of the reason why he had sought the anesthesia for the soul and mind that liquor had provided him; But he hadn't taken a drink in months, and he intended to never have another drink of alcohol.

Concerning the women in his life, well, he had braved bullets and faced death, but if he feared anything it was his own heart. Was there a man alive who was any different? Dear, earnest Meiko, for all her world-class journalism credentials, could never begin to imagine the side of him that he'd unleashed on that weasel, Fraley. With Kate, he'd done what he could to cope with the miscarriages and career shifts, but the love they'd shared still went south. So why bother heading down that same road for heartache with someone else? The problem, of course, was that his heart had already been taken by (or given to?) the woman he'd been sharing his off-time with, including bedtime. Galt was not promiscuous, not a man who could make love with a woman unless he had real feelings for her. He wasn't a casual sex kind of guy. Which is why he felt guilty about exploiting Meiko's family tragedy for his own agenda… precisely as she'd accused him of doing. She'd agreed to participate but her understanding, and the forgiveness this implied, did nothing to ease his guilt. But hell, he told himself, he had to think pragmatically. He was on a mission, even if it was his own, and the expediency of using this trip was inarguable. Accompanying Meiko to Japan provided him with the perfect cover.

He closed down that stream of thought. He focused on the mission. Would it take until tomorrow before Fleming and the president realized that he had skipped town?

Throughout the flight, he monitored, via his laptop's ongoing download, the multiple satellite intel flowing into the Pentagon's intelligence fusion center concerning the continuing Chinese and North Korean military troop movements along their shared border. As the laptop automatically sorted, processed and filed this data, Galt likewise mentally processed what he was learning into the context of what he already knew.

North Korea's first Communist leader, Kim Il Sung, had seized power with help from the Soviet Union and China in 1945. His dream of uniting the Koreas by force led North Korea to its war with America, the "forgotten" war that had resulted in the death of 520,000 North Koreans, 415,000 South Koreans and 34,000 Americans after the United States pitched in to defend the democratic South from the Communist aggressors of the North. The present-day stalemate of this divided country had existed ever since. Erosion of North Korea's tightly controlled society was exacerbated with the end of the Cold War, when the North's Soviet support evaporated. The Chinese became increasingly irritated with North Korea's unwillingness to consider the economic reforms that Beijing was adopting. Kim's death in the 1990s had created a sudden and critical leadership crisis that further deepened the country's formidable economic troubles. This led to civil unrest, a phenomenon previously unheard of in North Korea.