“Nobody is banging that trooper.” Marcus growled through clenched teeth. His voice cut the air with the quiet ferocity of a senior drill instructor. Marcus jabbed his left index finger into Tomer’s chest like a short steel rod. “And you will never insult her again.”
Marcus drove the point deep into the agent’s mind by slamming his head against the wall with a flip of his powerful wrist. “Now, there are eight dead men in the woods about thirty miles from here. I suggest you get some backup and go check it out. And if you ever open your mouth about anything that happened in this room, you’d best think hard before it comes out of your lips.”
He released Tomer. The FBI agent collapsed to the floor, gagging and gasping for breath. The purple hue in his face faded as the denied oxygen gradually perfused back into his blood cells.
Marcus towered over him. “Get your people out here to go check out that site,” he commanded. “We’ll leave someone to lead them to the location when they get here.”
Marcus turned toward the room. Lonnie rose from Sgt. Choi and walked toward them.
“What did he tell you?” Chief Wasner asked Trooper Wyatt as she approached.
“He’s a sergeant in the People’s Army of North Korea. He’s not really a commando. He’s a technical specialist who designed a device that could sniff the air for a specific chemical compound.” She looked back at Choi and said, “I told him that if he gave us everything he knew, we would untie him, and that we would try to get him immunity from trial and hide him here in America.”
“Ah, yes,” Wasner exclaimed. “Leave it up to a girl, and not only does he get to keep his balls intact and burn free, but he gets a ‘get out of jail free’ card, too.” He smiled at her sarcastically.
“We have to act fast. The others who got away have some really nasty bio-chemical weapon with them, and he wasn’t sure, but thinks they’re planning to use it right here in Alaska.”
Tomer recovered from the altercation and spoke into his cell phone. He hung up and rejoined the group with a newfound humility. “A team is on the way — two FBI and one more trooper. Where exactly is this site?”
Marcus turned to face him, but Tomer wouldn’t look into his eyes. “I’ll leave a pair of the SEALs here to lead you to it.”
The air of belligerent superiority with which Tomer had entered the room was gone. Lonnie had not heard their conversation, but had seen Marcus assault on the agent and had assumed what had happened. The personality change was very welcome.
“All right,” Wasner said, “what else did Choi say?”
“The substance was created a long time ago. He wasn’t sure how long, but it was very old, like maybe the sixties or even older. He said they knew of it through a man who had been a spy here in the early seventies. He was a soldier in the US Army and worked with a chemical weapons unit. There were several truckloads of chemical and biological weapons that had been disposed of after a UN treaty made them illegal. The government was basically covering up the fact that they had the stuff. The spy told them he had been in the unit that drove the trucks onto the back of the base and put it all in those bunkers, then buried them.”
“How did they get to it, then, if it was buried in a bunker? Aren’t those things usually several feet thick with concrete?” Tomer asked.
“The Halloween earthquake was centered only about thirty miles north of here. The fault line ran right underneath the bunker. The spy — Choi only knows him as Mr. Lee — contacted contacted his command people in North Korea and told them about the possibility that the earthquake may have cracked open the bunker. Nature had provided them with the opportunity to get this particular weapon. I understand you guys have a sample of it?”
“Yeah, the little bugger tried to smash the vial open on us when we caught him.” Wasner pulled the black plastic eyeglasses box from his coat pocket and handed it to Lonnie.
She inspected it, then pulled a Ziploc freezer bag out of the small supply pouch on her belt. She carefully put the box in the bag and zipped the top over it.
“Marcus, do you have a towel or something I can wrap this thing in, and some tape?” she asked. “I really don’t want to risk breaking it before I can get it back to town to have the forensics guys take a quick look at it.”
“Yeah,” he replied and went into the kitchen.
Tomer asked, “Does he know where the men went who got away?”
“Only that they went to a house on Farmer’s Loop road. He’s not sure where, because they had been told not to return to the same house as before, and their emergency rendezvous was yet a different place. Only the officers knew the next house, and only one of them is still alive.”
Marcus returned with a thick, red bath towel and two 30-gallon black plastic trash bags. He took the Ziploc bag from Lonnie and set it in the center of the towel. Then he folded the towel in half lengthwise over the vial. He folded the long ends toward the center, then rolled the whole thing up in a thick, tubular bundle and taped over the entirety of the cloth.
As he packed it all up, he said, “We have a picture with the license plate of the Suburban they drove out. Your folks can try to find that vehicle in town and maybe we can catch them before they get away.”
“They are already looking for the Suburban,” Lonnie said. “Bannock called me earlier with the information. I’ll call them back to say they should look around Farmer’s Loop Road.”
Marcus placed the tape-wrapped bundle inside one of the large trash bags and sealed that with more tape around the whole mass. That bundle went into the second trash bag, and was likewise taped up.
Wasner added, “Make sure to tell your cop friends that these guys are the real thing. They are all armed and trained professionals. Don’t expect any of them to surrender peacefully. The real commandos among them are going to be committed to the death.”
Marcus handed the package to Lonnie. She took it out to her cruiser. As she walked, she keyed her radio and relayed the information to AST headquarters.
“All right guys. Let’s move,” Wasner said. “Philips and Andersen, you two stay here and lead the cops out to the site. Bell, you ride with Trooper Wyatt. If the prisoner gives you any trouble, hit him with the Taser. Take the gun from Stingle.”
“Shouldn’t Forester go with the guy, Chief? I only know a couple of bad words in Korean.”
“No. Wyatt is fluent, and I need Forester with us if we catch up to the other guys.”
“Aye, aye, Chief. I just hope no one sends a picture of me in the back seat of police car to my mom….she’d have a fit.”
Bell was a Mormon boy from Utah. He was always worried his mom would hear of something bad he did. The twenty-six-year old warrior seemed more afraid of his mother than any horde of militant extremists or assassins he had ever confronted.
“Bell, I don’t know how your mother even sleeps at night, with you do in this line of work,” Andersen said.
“Oh, she ain’t worried about me dying in battle at all. She’d probably be proud if I had a hero’s funeral, and brag all over town about her son, the decorated SEAL in the flag-draped box. But if she was to hear of me getting drunk or arrested or such — man, she’d fight her way through a whole battalion of screaming Taliban just to give me a whooping!”
Laughter rang in the cold night air as they headed outside, clouds of steam rising from their breath.
Two of the SEALs untied Choi and led him to Trooper Wyatt’s cruiser. Bell sat in the front with Wyatt. The protective glass between the seats prevented Choi, who sat meekly in the back seat, from doing anything harmful to them.
The other SEALs piled into their F350 pickup trucks, having stowed their gear while Choi was being interrogated. Wasner got into the Jeep with Marcus. They left the snowmobiles behind for the investigation team to take into the woods.