Blue Man was for it. Evan Tucker and Josh Potter were against it.
President Cassion approved it. That negated the two votes against. The president trumped everyone except the collective will of the voters at the ballot box every four years.
National Geospatial analysts had zeroed in on Bukchang with their satellite eyes, and what they reported back, coupled with the results of other intelligence assets, had confirmed that the adopted son and daughter of General Pak were there. They even knew which hut they were living in. And that four guards surrounded the hut.
There was also another intelligence success. General Pak had powerful friends in North Korea. One of them had managed to arrange for a coded message to be sent to the son and daughter in the camp. They would know that help would be coming.
It took another week to prep the mission. Every detail was gone over a hundred times. And every contingency as well in case something went wrong, which they knew was not unlikely.
North Korea was perhaps the toughest challenge Robie and Reel had yet faced. The country was hard to get into and even more difficult to get out of. It had millions of soldiers and a paranoid citizenry well versed in spying on each other. The terrain was difficult, the language and cultural barriers immense, and the country was located in a part of the world where, other than South Korea, the United States had few allies.
They spent a week at the Burner Box doing intense fieldwork in preparation. The rugged mountains of western North Carolina stood in for the ones they would face at Bukchang. A mockup of the prison and the targeted hut was constructed at the facility. During the first few exercises Robie, Reel, and Sook were “shot dead.” They had made great strides since. But none of them knew if it would be enough when they tried it for real.
The route in and out of the target would be unusual. As Sook had told them, prisoners escaping from Bukchang invariably headed north, toward China, whose long border with North Korea was not very far away. They would not be heading north. Too many things could go wrong, particularly with two obvious westerners in tow.
They all hoped that their out-of-the-box thinking would make it impossible for the North Koreans to follow them.
The night before they were to leave, Robie and Reel sat up late going over the plan one more time.
“Do you think Sook will hold up?” he asked.
“He’s done it before, Robie.”
“Many years ago. And it might have been part luck.”
“It might have been. But we’re probably going to need some luck too.”
“I don’t disagree with you. We have to keep our heads down, literally.”
She said, “But we’re the guardian angels. If we have to fight our way out, we’re going to have to do it.”
“I know.”
“I wonder if the president has considered the long game on this?”
“You mean us snatching the traitor’s family out from under the North Koreans?” Robie asked.
“Yep. If they were possibly going to come after us before, they’re sure as hell going to come after us if we pull this off.”
“He was pretty emotional about all this, so maybe he didn’t really think it through. But that’s not our call, Jessica. We’re just the muscle in the field.”
“Yeah, well, maybe the ‘brains’ should follow the muscles’ advice sometimes.”
“I don’t see that happening. Too many egos involved.”
“Seriously though, Robie, the North Koreans have nukes. And they’re crazy enough to use them. We pull this off they’ll feel like they’ve lost all face. They are not going to turn the other cheek. A successful mission here might just prove to be the catalyst for Armageddon.”
“Which means a lot of poor, innocent people will die because their leadership felt disrespected.”
“Which pretty much happens in every war ever fought,” she retorted.
“But this won’t be war; it’ll be annihilation.”
“You want to refuse the mission?”
Robie shook his head. “No. I’ll do the mission. I just want both of us to understand the possible outcomes.”
“I understand them very clearly. And at least the president, with all his faulty logic, is trying to make things right after what happened with Pak. I have to admire that.”
“So let’s go do this thing,” said Robie.