This whole thing was making Kuzumi search memories he had long hoped had disappeared from his mind. A light blinked to his right. A line to his high-ranking contact in the Parliament. Another fire to be put out, probably something to do with the trade war being waged with the United States.
Kuzumi put the picture away and picked up the phone.
CHAPTER 5
Lake watched the figure in the mirror. Muscles flowed as the legs and arms performed one of the required movements of a fourth-degree Aikido black belt.
“Kai!” Lake yelled, his fist halting a millimeter from its reverse image. He slowly pulled the fist back as he returned to the beginning stance. The windows in the one-room efficiency were open and the chill night air hit the sweat pouring off his bare chest, creating a thin layer of steam. He wore only a pair of cutoff white painters’ pants. His feet slid across the floor as he began another formalized kata. The calluses that years of working out had built up made little notice of the rough wood floor.
The room was empty except for his clothes hung and stacked in the closet. A bed sat near the window but Lake had never used it. He slept on a thin mat, moving its location on the floor every night. Sometimes he slept right under the window; sometimes just behind the door; sometimes he folded his body into the scant space in the bathroom, a gun always laying close at hand.
Lake’s leg snapped up high: front kick to the face. He froze for a second, then slowly lowered the leg, his head canted to one side. A phone was ringing down at the end of the hallway. A door slammed. Footsteps. Lake reached down and picked up the Hush Puppy, pulling the slide back and taking it off safe.
“Hey, man,” a voice outside his door yelled. “You got a call.”
“All right.”
Lake waited as the footsteps retreated and the door slammed shut. He threw on a T-shirt and tucked the gun into the waistband of his shorts, making sure the shirt covered the handle. He checked the peephole, then pulled the chain off. He quietly walked down the hall and picked up the receiver on the battered pay phone.
“Yeah?”
“Hey, it’s me.” Jonas’s voice was surprisingly clear, “I asked for the room number like you said. Man, when are you going to upgrade your facilities?”
Lake didn’t feel like chatting. “What do you have?”
“They want their shit tonight.”
“I said Monday night.”
“Yeah, well, change of plans. They’re throwing in an extra five grand for early delivery. And no deal if you don’t deliver tonight.”
Lake closed his eyes briefly, then they snapped open. “When and where?”
Two and a half miles away from Lake’s hide, the computer awoke with a chime. The man had been reading a newspaper which he carefully folded before flipping open the lid. The display told him Nishin was moving. He shut the lid and gathered his equipment.
Nishin was indeed moving. He was following four North Koreans who had just left the ship. Two of the men carried duffle bags, but the ease with which they carried the folded bags told Nishin there was nothing in them.
Once they were off the pier he slithered down and followed, staying in the darker shadows, blacker than the night sky. The Koreans made little attempt to lose a tail, which Nishin had expected. They were not spies. They were soldiers.
North Korea’s idea of covert operations was to take the uniforms off some soldiers and send them to a foreign country with specific orders on the mission to be accomplished. Subtlety was not a prized trait, as the North Koreans had demonstrated time and time again in their operations. Being on the other side of the Sea of Japan from the Korean Peninsula, Nishin was familiar with their operations. On top of that, his preparations for the mission into Hungnam had required intelligence preparations that had updated him on his potential foes. He had to know their history to know what they could be capable of in the present.
History said the North Koreans were direct and to the point when it came to taking action. In 1968 thirty-one North Korean soldiers had infiltrated across the DMZ and made their way down to Seoul to raid the Blue House, the home of the South Korean president. The mission had failed, with twenty-eight men killed, two missing, and one captured.
Shortly after that attack, on 23 January 1968, North Korean Special Forces men in high-speed attack craft seized the U.S.S. Pueblo with highly-publicized results. Later that same year, a large North Korean force of almost a hundred men conducted landings on the coast of South Korea in an attempt to raise the populace against the government. It failed, but such failures didn’t daunt the North Korean government. In 1969, a U.S. electronic warfare aircraft was shot down by the North Koreans, killing all thirty-one American service members on board. To these transgressions it looked like all the outside world could do was sputter in indignation. World opinion meant nothing to Pyongyang.
The Korean DMZ was the hottest place on earth, and contrary to what most people believed, Nishin knew it was active with both sides probing the security of the other side. People died there every year, but usually they were only Koreans, and Nishin was world wise enough to know that in the West that didn’t mean much. When an American officer was beaten to death in the same place by North Korean guards with ax handles — now that was news over here.
As security stiffened in South Korea over the decade of the seventies, North Korea moved its attentions overseas, not caring about the international effect. In 1983, three PKA officers planted a bomb in Rangoon in an attempt to kill the visiting South Korean president. That mission also failed, although of course there were those in the way who died. Later in 1983, four North Korean trawlers — similar to the one Nishin had been conducting surveillance on-infiltrated the Gulf of California to conduct monitoring operations against the United States mainland. One of the ships was seized by the Mexican authorities, but that didn’t prevent the North Koreans from continuing such operations.
The breakup of the Soviet Union had never been acknowledged by Pyongyang, except in cryptically worded exhortations to the people, telling them they were the last bastion of communism in the world. The North Koreans truly believed they were part of the final line in the war against Western imperialism, especially with Cuba crumbling around the edges.
Nishin had never heard of the North Koreans conducting an active covert operation on American soil, but he also had never heard of the Genzai Bakudan project or Hung nam before this month. With stakes this high, who knows what they were capable of? That wasn’t the question that concerned Nishin, though. The question was what were they here for? What evidence of Genzai Bakudan was here in San Francisco? Nishin hoped he would soon find out and leave this country of no values.
The Koreans continued up the Embarcadero, through the center of the waterfront tourist district. It wasn’t hard for Nishin to follow. He made sure he was inland of them, prepared if they turned in the only other direction they could go. After twenty minutes they passed Fisherman’s Wharf. They circled around Fort Mason, moving purposefully and ignoring all other pedestrians. As they passed the marina, there were less and less people around. Then they were into the Presidip, the former army post that had been turned over to the National Park Service.
First established in 1776 by Spanish explorers, the Presidio evolved into a military post for the area. Covering sixty-eight square miles of land at the northern point of the peninsula, the terrain that didn’t hold former military buildings was covered with pine and eucalyptus trees, making it an ideal site for covert operations at night, Nishin knew. In 1993 as part of the base-closings trend the post had transitioned from the military to become the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which removed the gates and the military police that used to patrol the area.