The Phantom was based in Miami, where the CIA and Drug Enforcement Administration used it to chase drug traffickers around the Caribbean. Three days before, the agency had chartered a cargo jet and flown the boat in, landing it at Osan Air Base outside Seoul to avoid pesky Korean customs agents.
Beck and his men had spent two nights jetting around the Yellow Sea to learn the Phantom’s quirks. The boat seemed to want to fly. Jam the throttles and its nose lifted from the water as the engines opened up.
Beck hoped that tonight they wouldn’t have to take it anywhere near its limits.
RIGHT ON TIME, 5:00 P.M., the Phantom curled up to the dock. Beck hopped on and stepped into the pilothouse, feeling the slight sway of the boat beneath his feet. Inside, the air was crisp, and the tinted windows provided relief from the sun. Beck slipped his sunglasses into his jacket pocket. As he did, his fingers brushed across the plastic bag he had picked up that morning from the chief of Seoul station.
Before they left this dock he would have to tell Choe and Kang about what he was carrying in the bag. They deserved to know. They deserved the choice.
Kang sat in the navigator’s chair, scrolling through satellite photographs of Point D, the pickup site. North of the DMZ, the Korean Peninsula widened, jutting west into the Yellow Sea toward China. Point D was located on a sliver of land a hundred miles northwest of Incheon. The satellite photos showed unbroken forests on the hills around the inlet. Haeju, the nearest city of any size, was fifty miles east.
Beck and his men would arrive at the landing spot at 2330 and wait thirty minutes. If Sung didn’t show, they would assume he had changed his mind — or been killed — and wait for a new message.
“Simple enough,” Kang had said two days before, when Beck explained. “What could go wrong?”
Beck hardly needed to answer. For starters, North Korea claimed control of the Yellow Sea well past the twelve-mile limit of international law. The North Korean navy had been known to fire on fishing trawlers unlucky enough to cross their path. The Phantom would have to dodge them. Then there were the shore artillery batteries along the coast. And the minefields, some new, others left over from the Korean War.
Not to mention the possibility that the North Koreans already had arrested Sung and set them up. With the help of the NSA, Langley had done what it could to make sure that the Phantom wasn’t heading into an ambush. For the last week, spy satellites had watched the waters around the pickup spot, looking for overflights by the North Korean air force or unusual activity by the navy. So far the satellites hadn’t picked anything up.
Meanwhile, Chinook rescue helicopters and F-16 jets were on standby at Osan and the Navy had moved the USS Decatur, a destroyer, into the Yellow Sea.
But the helicopters had strict orders against violating North Korean territory. Pyongyang would view an American incursion into its airspace as an act of war. And now that the North had nuclear weapons, Washington couldn’t antagonize it needlessly.
But the Phantom was expendable. It didn’t carry American markings, or any markings at all. If North Korea captured it, the United States and South Korea would disavow knowledge of its existence. Beck and his men would have to be well outside the twelve-mile limit, fifty or more miles from the North Korean coast, to expect a rescue. Any closer, and they were on their own.
THE GOOD NEWS WAS THAT they weren’t going in blind. The Phantom carried the newest military and civilian mapping equipment, including a Global Positioning System receiver capable of pinpointing its location to one meter. The receiver was synched to software that plotted the topography of every major body of water in the world. The combination allowed Kang, the navigator, to track their course in real time.
Meanwhile, a satellite transceiver connected the boat to an encrypted radar feed from an E-2 Hawkeye circling above the Yellow Sea. Thanks to the Hawkeye, the Phantom could dodge enemy boats without risking detection by using its own radar. Beck wanted to do everything possible to stay out of sight. If they got caught in a firefight, they’d already lost. They couldn’t outshoot the North Korean navy.
And so Beck had dumped the.50-caliber machine gun the Phantom had carried when it arrived at Osan. In its place, he had added a Zodiac, an inflatable flat-bottomed boat with a small outboard motor. The Zodiac was loaded with fresh water, a first-aid kit, even a spear gun, and hooked to the hull of the Phantom.
Aside from the raft, Beck, Kang, and Choe hadn’t brought much survival gear. They each had a change of clothes, in case they wound up in the water. They had personal transceivers, a more powerful version of the ones used by backcountry skiers, which sent a signal that the Chinooks could track. But they hadn’t bothered with body armor or even helmets. Instead Kang, who’d grown up in South Florida, was wearing a Miami Dolphins hat — for luck, he said. They weren’t being nonchalant or cynical, Beck thought. They knew they would get out quickly or not at all.
BECK SAT BESIDE KANG, who was tracking the radar link from the Hawkeye on a titanium-hulled laptop attached to the Phantom’s dash.
“How’s it look around the LZ?” The landing zone.
“Quiet.” Kang was thirty-eight, though he looked younger. A tattoo of the ace of spades covered his right forearm, near the elbow. Beck had wondered about the tat for weeks, but he hadn’t wanted to ask.
Kang tapped on the laptop’s keyboard and the screen lit up with white blips. “That’s Incheon. What a real port looks like.” He clicked on the keyboard again and the screen returned to the dark area farther west. “And that’s North Korea. Dead as a whatever.”
“The good citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic don’t need the corruptions of the outside world.”
“Yeah. Like food.”
“Well, they managed to come up with a nuke,” Beck said. “How’s the boat running?”
“Choe says it looks great,” Kang said. He said something in Korean to Choe, who nodded vigorously. Beck’s Korean was weak, and Choe’s English was worse, so Kang played translator. Choe tapped the throttles forward. The engines rumbled and the Phantom’s cabin began to vibrate.
Beck looked at his watch. 1725. He wanted to reach the landing zone at exactly 2330. No reason to spend more time in North Korean waters than necessary. The Yellow Sea was flat in the summer. If they wanted, they could run safely at sixty knots. But Beck preferred to keep them in the high teens. The slower pace would save fuel and keep noise to a minimum. They would leave here in five minutes, give themselves plenty of time.
But before they went. Beck touched the plastic bag in his pocket. He didn’t want to have this conversation, but he saw no other choice. He motioned to Choe to cut the engine. The Phantom sat beside the dock, bobbing on the low waves.
“Before we go—” Beck pulled out the bag. Inside were three glass capsules. “L pills.”
“L pills?” Choe shook his head in confusion.
“L for lethal. Cyanide.” Choe still wasn’t getting it, Beck saw. “Poison. If they catch us. You bite down on the glass.” He took a capsule out of the bag and pretended to put it in his mouth.
Choe slammed a hand against the dash of the boat and stammered angrily in Korean. Kang put a hand on Choe’s arm, but Choe shook him off.
“He says you’re crazy,” Kang said. “He says—”
“Never, never,” Choe said in English.
“He says it’s a sin.”
“Yes, sin.”
“Fine,” Beck said. “But tell him he knows as well as we do, if we get caught, no one’s coming for us. No prisoner exchange. And the North Koreans, they’ll make it hell. These pills, they’re quick, and they work.”