Payback wi-10, page 31
part #10 of WW III Series
“Ever notice,” said Aussie, “how all these bloody dictators call their countries the ‘Democratic Republic’? Whenever you hear that, you know they’re fucking tyrants.”
Sal grabbed the big flat-headed bolt cutters after Gomez and Eddie had gone over the box for any signs of a trip mechanism wire or of tampering with the box’s sides, bottom, or lid. He found it impossible, however, to even slide the head of the big cutters far enough under the first of the four metal straps to get a grip.
“Fuck forensics!” said Aussie irritably, striding over and heaving the red fire axe out of its holder. “Here, let me have a whack at it. Stand back.”
The other seven tired men, including the general, did as he said, and Aussie brought the heavy fire axe down hard on the first metal band, which sprang apart, its zinging sound echoing in the armory. He whacked the second band, and they heard the wood splinter along with the vibration from the first band still reverberating. Aussie paused. None of them had slept after the grueling eight-hour mission, and the high adrenaline rush had been replaced by what Aussie habitually called the “three-ton-truck” that weighs anyone down after their body has been on a high-alert, high-stress job, made worse by people trying to kill you.
Aussie paused for breath, then whacked the box twice more and pried it open. “Well, I’ll be screwed!”
“Not by me, you won’t,” intoned Sal dryly.
“Nor by me,” said Choir — Johnny Lee, Gomez, Eddie, and the general all grinning like the proverbial Cheshire cat.
“It better not be fake,” said the general, looking down.
It wasn’t, the launcher sky blue, and, cradled by its side, the Igla 2C, its brownish translucent nose shining brightly against the armory’s white ceramic dazzle. And on the launcher’s shaft, the small yet distinct Korean lettering and MID number.
“Son of a bitch,” said Sal softly. “You did it, General.”
“We did it,” the general corrected him. “Only wish that Bone were here to see it.”
“Maybe,” said Gomez, “he is.”
Freeman shrugged noncommittally, then added, “Well, I know for sure who is going to see it — those lying sons of bitches in Pyongyang. They’re going to see that we caught them with the smoking gun. We’ll get it on CNN and Al Jazeera.”
“The American-haters,” put in Aussie, “won’t believe it.”
“You’re right,” the general replied. “But they’re not the ones we need to see it. We need every American and ally and potential ally in this war to see it — to see just what we’re up against — child-murderers.” The general paused and looked from man to man. “We, gentlemen, are going to do what JFK did when he gave those pictures of the Cuban missile sites to our U.N. ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, to take to the U.N.” Freeman smiled at the thought. “Stevenson asked the Soviets whether they had put any intercontinental ballistic missile sites within ninety miles of American soil. The table-thumping Soviets denied it, then Stevenson had his assistants uncover the map stand with all the photographs of the Cuban sites. Commie sons of bitches had to ’fess up, and Kennedy got their missile-loaded ships to turn back and dismantled the missile sites in Cuba. U.S. lost some good men getting those U-2 pix of the sites, like we lost Brady at Kosong. But we nailed the bastards.”
“Give ’em shite, General,” said Aussie.
“Rest assured, gentlemen,” promised Freeman, “I will. And I have a hunch that the White House isn’t going to want this ad hoc phone conference on scrambler at all. I think that they’ll want to hear about the contents of this box quickly in—”
“Plain bloody language,” cut in Aussie.
He was right. The White House did want to hear it in plain language. But not as bloody as that which normally peppered a soldier’s battlefield vocabulary, and so the Yorktown’s skipper, under the CVBG’s commander, Admiral Crowley, instructed Yorktown’s TV room’s satellite-to-ship-to-shore producer to put the general on a seven-second delay with the White House in order to delete any “impolitic rhetoric…vis-à-vis the North Koreans.”
The director of ship’s signals aboard Yorktown had to bleep Freeman four times in as many minutes as he “unloaded” and, as Marte Price would later report to the world, “lit into the North Korean Communists and their ‘running-dog lackey’ terrorists”—using the Korean phrase Johnny Lee had quickly tutored him in. The general also lit into “those damn closet Commies who still lie waiting in the new Russia to seize power, republic by republic”—a comment that struck everyone as odd, but the general wasn’t convinced North Korea didn’t have some “old commie supporters” abroad, as he told Aussie.
A sanitized version of the general’s Yorktown—White House conference, albeit with him standing in front of Yorktown’s camera, his sodden uniform stained by Brady’s blood, was broadcast on the networks an hour later. But even with the editing, the force of his words, fused like armor-penetrating rounds by Bone’s painful absence, still electrified America, along with the MANPAD evidence the team had uncovered, and the general’s explicit warning that for as long as America and her allies had been fighting terrorism, it was unfortunately, as the British had so persistently cautioned, “early days yet.”
“Muslim fanatics,” said Freeman, “are like any other. They are unrelenting. And to defeat them, the American-British-Australian coalition, and all those who have the guts and political will for the long haul against terror, must be just as unrelenting in our determination to exterminate the vermin. To do this we must spill our treasure and, what is much worse, our blood. But there is no other way.”
And so the general continued to give them “shite.” What the general habitually and contemptuously referred to as the “Useless Nations” for once became useful under the glare of not only the American public but anyone who even contemplated boarding an airliner in the future. The U.N.’s Secretary General endorsed a General Assembly motion to immediately stop all technical aid to North Korea, but under the urging of the United States, food aid for the suppressed people of North Korea, especially for children, was to continue.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
All through the Pentagon, clutches of officers were watching a tape of Marte Price’s “exclusive” interview with Freeman, the audio gaps caused by the bleeps in this tape resulting in a segmented sound track that Freeman would subsequently describe to Marte Price as having been sabotaged by Big Brother.
“Which Big Brother?” Marte had pressed in the pre-broadcast interview, the kind of question that endeared her to him. “They’re everywhere, Douglas.”
“Marte,” he’d told her, “next to mass murder, the worst thing, the very worst thing, these bastard terrorists have done to us is to excite those who love bossing other people around, spying on them, cutting into freedom of speech, freedom of movement. Hell, I never used one profanity in my teleconference, but the White House had to go and bleep me.”
“You did call the North Koreans scumbags, General.”
“Well, dammit, they are. Any creep who makes missiles to use for the express purpose of blowing children and other civilians out of the air is a scumbag, and needs to be bagged as scum!”
“Can I use that, Douglas?”
“You betcha.”
She used it, and the Pentagon saw the interview. Halfway through, General of the Air Force Michael Lesand was shaking his head as he heard Freeman’s epithets for the North Korean leadership, the epithets, articulately spoken, clearly calculated to tell the world just what General Douglas Freeman thought of those “gutless child murderers in Pyongstink who provided shoulder-fired missiles to terrorists.”
Of the three terrorist “duos,” one pair, the Guatemalans at Dallas/Fort Worth, killed themselves and several passengers with what the FBI now determined was their backup Igla 2C in the map case, the first Igla having been the missile that had brought down the Brazilian airliner.
Of the other four remaining terrorists, two were run to ground, found at JFK, as Freeman had postulated to Eleanor, toweling themselves down in one of the international terminal’s “Executive Class” bar-equipped suites. At LAX, the two Army of Palestine terrorists were cornered in one of the circular waiting rooms, screaming in Arabic, until they were felled by the SWAT team’s shotgun-fired nonlethal bean bags and taken away.
Ironically, had the Dear Leader and his North Korean henchmen kept quiet about the Kosong raid, they might have gotten away with their lie that the missile and launcher displayed by Freeman were fake, or that the Americans had bought them to try to frame the NKA. But all the histrionics of denial with which Pyongyang initially greeted the “blatant attack on our freedom-loving people” were undone the moment they’d tried to make propaganda out of a false confession from Bone. By showing Bone Brady’s face to the world, admitting the American attack had taken place, they were now caught utterly off guard when the launcher and missile with the Korean MIDs were presented by Freeman, the rest of the SpecFor team’s faces being blacked out on Freeman’s orders — not to deny them the glory of their moment, but to protect their identities.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Homeland airport security, quite independent of Freeman’s message to search their infrared tapes at Honolulu Airport had, as a matter of post-9/11 standard procedure, already done so. They could see two possible intruders who had crossed from the civilian section of the huge airport into the “Restricted — Deadly Force Authorized” area between 2200 and 2247 hours on the night during which the big SOCOM — Special Operations Command — Galaxy had landed with its cargo of all-weather-wrapped equipment aboard.
Facial ID was impossible, the infrared cameras recording merely two “bleeds”—white thermal blobs on a grayish background. One figure, a tall individual, seemed to be wearing what looked like coveralls, like so many mechanics at both the civilian and military ends of the huge complex of runways. His ID badge, which he wore around his neck, was giving off a civilian employee’s IR dots, the same kind of stick-on, off-the-shelf IR dots as had been used by Freeman’s team. This told Homeland Security Agent Johnny Suzuki and FBI Agent Jenny Osaka that whoever it was holding the big IR binoculars and what appeared to be a small camera was almost certainly a spy who had guts, for there were random Humvee night patrols, especially after 9/11 and the triple hit against the airliners. But whoever it was also seemed to know the location of the invisible laser beam that would trigger alarms at the military airport’s headquarters, should they be trespassed.
The second intruder was a figure who was not bleeding IR radiation but was surprisingly cool and had recognizable Navy IR dots — probably one of the Navy SEALs from Pearl Harbor honing his “infiltration and exfiltration of enemy bases” techniques.
There seemed to be no doubt that the taller individual was the primary suspect, but neither Homeland Security’s Johnny Suzuki nor FBI’s Jenny Osaka could be 100 percent sure. When Johnny Suzuki, at Homeland Security headquarters in downtown Honolulu, did the computer search for all those registered in Honolulu and the rest of Oahu who either owned or had bought zoom IR binoculars and IR cameras, it took only three and a half minutes, something that would have astonished his Nisei great-uncle who had worked as a military policeman until he was interned during World War II.
Of the seventeen names that popped up on the computer, two were now deceased, three in old-age homes, and only one of the remaining twelve — information that Johnny had been able to acquire by using the man’s Social Security number given at the time of purchase of the binoculars — was over six feet tall. It was now easy to identify the man from the civilian airport’s photo ID security files. His name was Yudah Ulama, a Muslim of South Asian descent, originally from Indonesia, who had been granted U.S. citizenship in November 2004.
General Freeman, more used to tactical and strategic maneuvers than to counterespionage, nevertheless made what Aussie described as a “bloody good suggestion” to Homeland Security and the FBI — namely, to be a little lax, though nothing too obvious, regarding airport security on the return flight of the Galaxy, with the RS, again all-weather-wrapped and bearing the three bogus helo engine mounts, to Hawaii.
The plan worked, up to a point. That is, intel must have been passed from Yokohama, from where the Galaxy took off, to Hawaii, regarding the departure of the plane loaded with what seemed to be a triple-engine helo or boat in all-weather wrap. In any event, the intruder showed up again near the military/civilian airport perimeter, obviously trying to gather more information about the strange craft hidden under the wrap than he’d been able to garner when he’d first seen it being loaded aboard the Galaxy on its way to Japan.
But what could Homeland Security or the FBI arrest him for? Trespassing? Instead, they put the suspect under 24-7 surveillance. The next day, he worked a long, twelve-hour shift as a food dispenser in a small teriyaki/rice concession stand outside Honolulu’s domestic terminal, which would explain, as Jenny Osaka pointed out to Johnny Suzuki, why they had been unable to identify him inside either the international or domestic terminals.
For both Johnny and Jenny, the intruder and his teriyaki-stand cover seemed as good a connect as they were going to get. His religion and height — six feet, two-and-a-half inches — in a predominantly short population only added to their certainty. But he had still not met anyone, though both Homeland Security and the FBI now knew he had a darkroom in the small bungalow he rented in Chinatown, and must be developing the photos of the Galaxy and the RS. Besides this infraction of the Patriot Act, not registering his lab, he had not committed any more serious a crime than trespassing in a DoD-restricted area.
The break for Johnny Suzuki and Jenny Osaka came on the second day, when, on what was obviously his day off, the man, Yudah Ulama, took the beach bus to Hanauma Bay, where he left a can of Coke beneath a rock well back from the beach’s concession stand, after which he changed under cover of a beach towel and went swimming, joining the hundreds of others who were enjoying watching the myriad marine life in the crystal-clear waters of the horseshoe-shaped bay.
He had been gone no more than a minute before a young Japanese-American youth emerged from the water, went to the open showers, and quickly toweled himself down as he walked casually to the rock, retrieved the Coke can, and then mounted a mountain bike for the steep, hot ride up to Kalanianaole Highway.
The mountain biker, in his early twenties, rode to the post office a couple of miles away at Hawaii Kai, where he was arrested in the process of mailing a canister of film from the fake piggy-bank Coke can to a post-office box on the island of Kauai. Yudah Ulama was arrested as he was about to board the Waikiki-bound Beach Bus.
Johnny Suzuki and Jenny Osaka identified themselves to the postmaster at Hawaii Kai, and a quick computer search told them that the post-office box in Kauai was rented by a Tayama Omura, who, a concomitant computer search revealed, was now nearly ninety, living in an apartment block down above Brennecke’s Beach near Poipu on the southeastern end of the Garden Isle.
Jenny Osaka told Johnny Suzuki that it was kind of sad to have to arrest such an old man, but Johnny would have none of it. “Just like a woman,” he said, knowing it was clearly a blatant sexist remark. “I remember my grandma saying that they shouldn’t have hanged Tojo after the war because he was ‘getting on in years.’ You think those Nazis, those child torturers like Mengele, hiding down there in South America, shouldn’t have been taken out by the Israelis just because they were ‘getting on in years’?”
“I just think it’s sad,” responded Jenny. “I just think of a woman holding a baby in her arms. What happens?”
In a moment of unpleasant revelation, Johnny replied, “Look, my great-uncle was in Navy Intel here during the war, but he stepped over the line. When they were interning the Nisei after Pearl Harbor, he and an older black guy raped a young woman in the camp. He was demoted, and they put him in the stockade. This Omura, whoever he is, is old, but he’s probably been working against the U.S. for North Korea — and who knows who else? — for years. Probably cost a lot of our guys their lives.” Johnny pointed to the computer screen. “Says here he was interned during World War Two. And now we’ve got him as the owner of the post-office box in Kauai that would have received that dead drop at Hanauma Bay. He’s a ninety-year-old spy, Jenny.”
“I know,” she said.
When Tayama Omura, after doing his midday Tai Chi stretches, called his two stringer agents, twice, between the contact time of 3:00 and 4:00 P.M. and didn’t get a response, he assumed both had been arrested. One of the stringers, the mountain biker, might have been in a traffic accident — it was gridlock in Honolulu these days, which was why Tayama had moved to Kauai — but neither of them responding was a bad sign.
En route on the twenty-six-minute Aloha flight from Oahu to Kauai, Johnny Suzuki received a call on his cell from Honolulu headquarters. “Johnny, those two jokers we have in cells have both received calls on their home phones from the same number. We traced the calls back to the P.O. box guy in Kauai. Be careful.”
“Thanks,” said Johnny, then informed Jenny Osaka, who was now tying her shoulder-length black hair into a ponytail so that it wouldn’t interfere with her firing if she had to.
“Hope he comes quietly,’ she said.
“Listen,” Johnny warned her. “This guy’s a pro, right? A ninety-year-old can pull a trigger same as a nine-year-old, only with better aim. So when we get there, have your weapon drawn before we get anywhere near his apartment. I’ll enter first.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be fine,” she said.
“I know.”
Tayama Omura’s face had none of the serenity that long life sometimes brings those who have endured and have peacefully turned their backs on the mad rush of humanity in the congested places of the earth. His countenance was more like that of an angry mask from one of the early Tahitian warriors. The effect of a mask, however, ironically caused many a warrior to assume the personality of the mask, frightening their owners more than their enemies.
