“Only two bugs,” Max Hanley mused quietly. “The Koreans really do trust their Syrian customers.”
Juan Cabrillo, the chairman of the Corporation and the captain of the merchant ship Oregon, tore the fake mustache from his upper lip. The skin beneath was lighter than the layers of self-tanning cream he’d used to darken his complexion. “Remind me to tell Kevin in the Magic Shop that his appliance glue is worthless.” He had a bottle of the suspect glue and reapplied a line to the back of the mustache.
“You looked like Snidely Whiplash trying to keep that thing in place.” This from Hali Kasim, the third-generation Lebanese-American who’d been newly promoted as the Oregon’s Security and Surveillance director. He was the only member of her crew who didn’t need makeup and latex inserts to pass as Middle Eastern. The only problem was he didn’t speak enough Arabic to order a meal in a restaurant.
“Just be thankful the Koreans left their translator at the airport,” Cabrillo said mildly. “You mangled the little soliloquy you’d memorized and delivered during the car ride. Your proposed examination of the missiles sounded more proctologic than scientific.”
“Sorry, boss,” Kasim said, “I never had an ear for languages, and no matter how much I practice, it still sounds like gobbledygook to me.”
“To any Arabic speakers, too,” Juan Cabrillo teased.
“How are we on time?” Max Hanley asked. Hanley was the Corporation’s president and was in charge of all their ship’s operations, especially her gleaming magnetohydrodynamic engines. While Cabrillo negotiated the contracts the Corporation took on and was responsible for a great deal of their planning, it fell on Max’s capable shoulders to make sure the Oregon and her crew were up to the task. While the crew of the Oregon were technically mercenaries, they maintained a corporate structure for their outfit. Apart from his duties as the ship’s chief engineer, Hanley handled day-to-day administration and acted as the company’s human resources director.
Under his robes and head scarf, Hanley was a little taller than average, with a slight paunch. His eyes were an alert brown, and what little hair remained atop his reddened skull was auburn. He had been with Juan since the day the Corporation was founded, and Cabrillo believed that without his number two, he would have gone out of business years ago.
“We have to assume Tiny Gunderson got the Dassault airborne as soon as he could. He’s probably in Seoul by now,” Chairman Cabrillo said. “Eddie Seng has had two weeks to get into position, so if he’s not alongside this scow in the submersible now, he never will be. He won’t surface until we hit the water, and by then it’ll be too late to abort. Since the Koreans didn’t mention capturing a minisub in the harbor, we can assume he’s ready.”
“So once we plant the device?”
“We have fifteen minutes to rendezvous with Eddie and get clear.”
“This is gonna hurt,” Hali remarked grimly.
Cabrillo’s eyes hardened. “Them more than us.”
This contract, like many the Corporation accepted, had come through back channels from the United States government. While the Corporation was a for-profit enterprise, the men and women who served on the Oregon were for the most part ex–U.S. military and tended to take jobs that benefited the United States and her allies, or at the very least, didn’t harm American interests.
With no end in sight on the war on terror, there was a never-ending string of contracts for a team like the one Cabrillo had assembled — black ops specialists without the constraint of the Geneva Convention or congressional oversight. That wasn’t to say the crew were a bunch of cutthroat pirates who took no prisoners. They were deeply conscientious about what they did but understood that the lines of conflict had blurred in the twenty-first century.
This mission was a perfect example.
North Korea had every right to sell ten single-stage tactical missiles to Syria, and the United States would have begrudgingly let the sale proceed. However, intelligence intercepts had determined the real Colonel Hazni Hourani planned on diverting the Asia Star so that two of the Nodongs and a pair of mobile launchers could be off-loaded in Somalia and given to Al-Qaeda, who would launch them hours later at targets in Saudi Arabia, notably the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, in a twisted plot to oust the Saudi royal family. It also appeared, but couldn’t be verified, that Hourani was acting with the tacit approval of the Syrian government.
The United States could send a warship to intercept the Asia Star in Somalia; however, the vessel’s captain would only have to claim that they were diverted for repairs, and the ten missiles would end up in Damascus. The better alternative was to sink the Star en route, but if the truth came out, there would be an international outcry and swift retaliation from terrorist cells controlled by Damascus. It was Langston Overholt IV, a high-ranking official in the CIA, who came up with the best alternative: using the Corporation.
Cabrillo had been given just four weeks to plan how to get rid of the problem as quietly and with as little exposure as possible. Cabrillo had intuitively known that the best way to prevent the missiles from reaching their customers, be they legitimate or otherwise, was to stop them from ever leaving North Korea.
Once the Oregon was in position off Yonghung-man Bay, Cabrillo, Hanley, and Hali Kasim headed to Bagram Airbase outside of Kabul, Afghanistan, in a Dassault Falcon identical to the one used by Colonel Hourani.
CIA assets on the ground in Damascus confirmed the flight time for Hourani’s trip to Pyongyang, and a dedicated AWACS had tracked the corporate jet as it flew halfway around the world. Once it entered Afghan airspace, an F-22 Raptor stealth fighter that had been flown expressly to the theater for the mission had taken off from Bagram. The Corporation’s own Falcon had left a moment later, heading south, away from the Syrians. While the U.S. controlled all of the radar facilities capable of monitoring what was about to happen, it was imperative that there be no evidence of the switch.
In one of the few zones where radar coverage was nonexistent, Tiny Gunderson, the Corporation’s chief pilot, began to turn back north. Only this time the Dassault Falcon wasn’t alone. She’d been joined by a B-2 stealth bomber from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. Because the bomber was larger than the Falcon, yet undetectable by radar, Tiny kept his aircraft fifty feet above the flying wing. No ground-based radar on earth could track a B-2, and by shielding the Falcon, the Corporation’s jet remained hidden as they began to close on Hourani’s plane.
At forty thousand feet, the Syrian Falcon jet was at her maximum ceiling, while the Raptor fast approaching her could have made the intercept four miles farther into the sky. The timing was critical. When the B-2 was a mere half mile behind Hourani’s aircraft, the Raptor opened her weapons bay and unleashed a pair of AIM-120C AMRAAM missiles.
Had the Syrian jet carried threat radar, the missiles would have appeared out of nowhere. As it was, the older French-built aircraft didn’t have such a system, so the two missiles impacted the Garrett TFE-731 turbofans without the slightest warning. Even as the Dassault exploded in midair, the pilot of the B-2 dove away from Tiny Gunderson’s Falcon. At that altitude anyone on the ground who saw the brief fireball would have assumed it was a shooting star. And anyone watching a radar screen would have noticed the Syrian aircraft suddenly vanish for an instant, then reappear a half mile to the west before continuing on normally. They might have guessed their system had glitched, if they gave the incident any thought at all.