The disappearance of army aircraft 579 quickly gained notoriety. Sokch'o Control contacted Camp Page Control with the report. Camp Page Control alerted the battalion commander of the 309th Helicopter Battalion. When the battalion commander found out that no one had authorized the flight, and also that live Stinger missiles were on board, he quickly notified his higher headquarters at the 17th Aviation Brigade in Seoul.
Following standard procedures, a nationwide alert was put out for the missing helicopter. All U.S. and Korean agencies were informed. A search was mounted off the coast in the vicinity of Sokch'o to look for helicopter wreckage. It didn't occur to anyone that the helicopter had not crashed.
Mitchell led his men carefully through the dark. It was only seven hundred meters south to the streambed, but they were moving very slowly.
The night was clear. The moon would be rising in another two hours. Until then, they had only the starlight to guide them. Mitchell was wearing the only set of night-vision goggles; the rest of the team stumbled along in the dark. Only four hundred meters to the east, they could see the fires of the Chinese picket line.
Mitchell tried to force all thoughts out of his mind, except for those needed to make this move. He didn't want to think about the two men heading up the mountain. He didn't want to think about the slim chance that a helicopter would make it to the pickup zone tonight. He didn't want to think about what he would do when the helicopter didn't show. In spite of his efforts, these thoughts swirled around in his mind.
He was walking slowly, to allow those behind him to keep up. Hoffman and Comsky carried the stretcher, watching each step to avoid dropping Olinski. Hoffman, at the lead end of the stretcher, was only two feet behind the captain, following two small pieces of luminous tape sewn into the back of the captain's black watch cap. Comsky held onto the trail edge of the stretcher and shuffled his feet along the ground to avoid tripping. C.J. brought up the tail, staying in contact by continuously reaching out and touching Comsky's back.
After only a hundred meters, Mitchell realized that he was going to have to help carry Olinski. The man's weight was too much for Hoffman. Mitchell grabbed the lead end of the right stick with his left hand. His right arm was still tied against his side to prevent the sutures from pulling out, and his MP5 hung on its sling on his chest. The indomitable Comsky handled the tail end of the stretcher by himself.
Mitchell led the way through the undergrowth. They were going downhill slightly, as the terrain sloped into the streambed. After forty minutes, they reached the edge of the thicker undergrowth along the bank. Mitchell cautiously guided them downstream. He wanted to get as close to the picket line as they could before the action started. Slowly he moved them another two hundred meters closer. He halted the team in an area of especially thick underbrush. Carefully, trying not to make any loud noises, they crawled under the bushes and sat down in a tight circle to wait. It was 10:45 p.m. Another hour and forty-five minutes until the shooting started.
That phone call the previous night was bugging Moore. It was a loose end, and he didn't like loose ends. If the Strams people were still playing their game, he wanted to know about it. They had more important things to worry about here than some stupid simulation.
Moore grabbed the file for the Dragon Sim-13 exercise from his safe and flipped through it until he found the administrative phone numbers for the Tunnel. He scanned the list until he spotted the office number for the man who had outbriefed them yesterday. Moore wasn't sure if anybody would be at work on a Saturday, but he wanted to try and clear up this thing. Moore punched in the number on his secure STU III phone. He waited as it buzzed on the other end. On the seventh buzz he was just about to hang up when it was picked up.
Wilson had barely heard the ringing of the secure phone on his desk. He was in Meng's office, where the two were going over the Medusa program. Wondering who could be calling on a Saturday, he jogged out and picked up the phone. "Doctor Wilson here."
"Doctor, this is Colonel Moore. Could you please go secure?" I hope he isn't calling about the damn after-action report, Wilson thought as he turned the key that made the phone secure for classified conversations. "Yes, sir. What can I do for you?"
The voice at the other end sounded hesitant. "This is kind of strange, but I'd like to know whether you all are still running something with Dragon Sim-13."
"What do you mean, Colonel, running something? We shut down yesterday right after you all left."
"Well, my duty officer got a strange phone call last night from someone claiming to be the commander of DET-K, saying something about having troops on the ground in China that he had to get exfiltrated. I was wondering if it might have been someone from your Tunnel, checking up on us after the fact, so to speak."
Wilson frowned. "No, sir. No one from here called as far as I know. Like I said, we shut down yesterday morning. Did you call Colonel Hossey in Korea to see if he really was the one calling?"
"It's after midnight over there, and I doubt that anyone will be at the DET-K compound. I'd have to contact the Eighth Army duty officer to get ahold of Hossey. I really didn't want to go through all that hassle if someone was just pulling a prank. I am worried, though, because whoever was calling obviously had some classified information about the exercise."
"Well, I can't help you on this end."
"Thanks anyway. I'll try tracking down my people. Maybe it was one of them. Out here."
Wilson put the phone down slowly. It was odd. He looked down Tunnel 2 at the door to Meng's office. It had been a strange morning ever since he had shown up, three hours ago. Meng had been acting very weird, even for him. As the two of them worked on the Medusa program, Meng had seemed to be trying to pass on to Wilson as much information about the program as he could — almost as if Meng felt he wasn't going to be around much longer.
Something occurred to Wilson. He looked down his phone number list taped to the top of the desk and punched in a four-digit number on the secure internal NSA phone. The phone was picked up on the first ring.
"Imagery. Sandra."
"Sandra, this is Ron Wilson from the Tunnel."
"Yeah, Ron. What's up?"
"Could you check on something for me?"
"Sure. What do you need?"
"My boss, Doctor Meng, had some pretty interesting imagery of a crash site that we were going to use. I was wondering if you could give me an idea of where and when that imagery was taken. Doctor
Meng said something about you all pulling it from your files yesterday."
"Wait a minute. Let me check the log." The minute stretched into two. Finally Sandra was back. "If you're talking about some photos we faxed down to you and over to Korea early yesterday morning, I've got it here. Let's see, it was 0614 Zulu on the ninth, and that was hot off the computer down link. Real-time stuff. I don't know why Meng thought it was coming out of the files. He asked for it specifically by location."
Wilson looked toward Meng's door. "Could you tell me what area that imagery was covering?"
"Let's see. Yeah. It's in China. Northeast. Manchuria. Real close to where the Chinese, Russian, and North Korean borders come together."
Wilson felt as though he'd been punched in the stomach.