They checked into their hotel at seven a.m., and through the clerk they arranged for a pair of rental scooters to be parked next to their rental car. Then they went upstairs, where they double-checked their equipment and changed clothes. All the men wore outfits that could make them look like either joggers or very casual tourists, as most tourists usually were.
The meeting was to take place in Merdeka Square, in central Jakarta, at the foot of the National Monument, a white 433-foot tower built to commemorate Indonesia’s independence. Their hotel was just a few blocks west of the square, so they had a few minutes to drink some bottled water, eat some protein bars, and stow their binoculars around their necks and tuck them inside their shirts.
As they prepped they talked over the plan one more time, reexamined a map of the area, and tried to shake off the onset of jet lag so they could concentrate on the action to come.
The men arrived at three different corners of the square at eight a.m. Chavez parked the car to the northwest, Dom parked his scooter at the southeast, and Jack kept his helmet on and drove his scooter straight toward the location.
It was a massive space, with flat open grass fields, fountains and statues, wide cobblestone thoroughfares with scooter traffic racing by, and a significant number of pedestrians passing through the area on their way to work. The tower itself was in the dead center of the huge square, on top of a large grassy hill, and sightseers milled about, even at eight in the morning. Stone steps, some fifty yards wide, ran up ten yards or so to the base of the tower.
It made sense for the North Koreans to do the pass here, because the U.S. embassy was on the southeast corner of the square. But there were many reasons this didn’t seem like a good spot at all for a clandestine transaction, as both the Indonesian Ministry of Internal Affairs and the headquarters of the Army were both right here on the edge of the square as well.
“Damn, this is a big space,” Jack mumbled.
Chavez said, “Dom, I guess you and me are joggers. We’ll cover more territory.”
Dom groaned. “We’re gonna run for an hour before going up against DPRK agents?”
Chavez replied, “If we ID the agents in time, maybe we can avoid them. Run a few minutes, take breaks to look around, then run a little more. We’re each going off on our own here, but stay in comms.”
Jack putted down the cobblestone road through the enclosed square. “If you pull a quad, cuz, I can run down to the store and pick you up some Bengay.”
“Kiss my ass,” Dom grumbled.
As each operator moved through a different section of the square, all closing in on the National Monument and the steps there, the men talked over their comms at length about just why, in this day and age, this meeting to transfer classified material would be done in public, by hand. These things usually happened electronically these days, so this felt like the makings of an eighties spy thriller.
Dominic was the first to come up with a plausible answer. “You know what I think? If this dip e-mails documents there is the deniability factor. He can say he didn’t do it, his password got hacked, it’s a damn setup. Hard to catch someone red-handed clicking the send button.”
Chavez followed up on this line of thinking. “The North Koreans want photos of a handover.”
“Right,” agreed Jack. “And they want to do this so they can own this guy. Use that against him for further intel handoffs.”
Chavez immediately said, “All right, boys, let’s proceed on that assumption and hunt for the photographer of today’s event. We’re now looking for a standoff position, at least two hundred yards away, where a guy can use a long-range lens to get shots of the transaction. This is an outdoor pass, so it’s going to be tough to pin down the photog, but he is every bit as important as ID’ing the other DPRK guys involved. We don’t want them getting glamour shots of us, even if we do have these paper masks on.”
Immediately Dominic and Jack began scanning the area.
Jack said, “Hey, Ding. Did you read the info on this location? It’s five times the size of freaking Tiananmen Square.”
Chavez replied, “Yeah, I read it. Got eyes, too. This is too big for three of us to cover the entire square.”
Dom said, “I wish Gavin was here with a drone.”
Chavez said, “We can handle it. Just use process of elimination. The pass is supposed to be on the north side steps of the National Monument. Even though the photographer might be able to get shots of the State Department dip from most any direction, he’ll probably be following the guideline of sticking to the north. That cuts our hunt in half. He won’t be far back in the trees, and half of this place is trees, so cut it in half again.”
Jack said, “There is an observation deck on top of the monument.”
Chavez replied, “Wouldn’t make for a good picture, and it would be damn hard to exfiltrate in a rush. I wouldn’t put my overwatch there, and doubt the DPRK would, either.”
The three men moved around on the north side of the monument. After a few minutes Jack said, “We don’t know where on the steps the meet will take place, and it’s a big monument. But if you think about it, the U.S. embassy is to the southeast, so they might want to meet the American to the northwest, just in case there was any long-range monitoring from the roof of the embassy that could see over the trees. They’d have to at least account for the possibility that this guy tipped off American authorities.”
Chavez said, “Makes sense to me, Jack. Also makes me think they will put the monument between the embassy and the photographer. You’ve got the wheels, so why don’t you head to northwest and see if your theory holds water.”
Ryan began driving along the long straight road to the exit of the enclosed square to the northwest. He’d made it two-thirds of the way there when he looked to his right, just inside the line of manicured trees running along the road. There, two men who looked like they could be North Korean stood with a camera on a tripod. The camera had at least a 500-millimeter telephoto lens. At the moment it was pointing due south, not in the direction of the monument, but the camera and the men were far back enough in the trees to where it didn’t make sense to have the camera positioned there in the first place.
Jack said, “I think I’ve got eyes on the overwatch. Two subjects, say three hundred yards, maybe a little more, from the monument. They’ve got the lens to get great shots if they move it out to the road.”
Chavez said, “Good. Remember, we aren’t here for the DPRK guys. We want to ID the diplomat, bag him before he makes contact, and get him out of here, if there is any way that’s possible.”
Dom was up closer to the steps to the monument now, just fifty yards or so from the northwest corner where the men suspected the pass would go down. He said, “I’m in position where I can close down on the guy right up until the moment of the handoff. But if he gets this close, it’s up to the North Koreans how much noise this whole thing is going to make today.”
Chavez was near a fountain one hundred yards to the west of the monument. He slowed his jog, stopped and sat on a bench, and pretended to lean over as if from exertion. While he did this he pulled his small binos from inside his shirt, then brought them up to his eyes, hidden in his hands. “I’ve got six, repeat, six men moving together, approaching the fountain. They could be Korean, hard to say. They are all wearing civilian clothing, nothing uniform about their appearance, but they are all carrying either backpacks or briefcases.” After a few seconds he said, “They entered the park together, but now they are splitting up into three groups of two.”