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someone came to rescue them. They settled down to pray and wait.
Kei knew better. Even so, he could not resist looking up at the pirates as they glared down through the hold at them. He could not help pleading with his eyes.
It did no good. They opened fire.
The deep-throated rumbling roar of the AK-47s didn’t stop until the last plaintive cry for mercy, the last shrieks of horror were silenced, and nothing remained but the eerie creaking of the old scow as she rocked in the sea swell.
Extract # 2
White House Situation Room
“You’ve got to be kidding!” President Adolphus Brown ex- claimed in disbelief. “Let me get this straight. You’re proposing I okay our personnel invading a sovereign country. And one that’s not particularly friendly, either.”
The briefing room, in the fourth basement under the West Wing of the White House, resembled any high-level executive conference room. The recessed indirect lighting reflected the dark walnut wainscoting and beige fabric wall covering. A pair of Monet prints added a bit of color to the long wall behind the President.
This room was a bit different from the average office-suite conference room though. When the heavy wooden doors were shut, it was totally isolated from the outside world. No sound wave or stray electron penetrated the sophisticated security barrier that protected its occupants from even the most advanced attempt at surveillance. The NSA engineers had used every trick, down to routing the room’s electrical power through a series of isolation transformers, just in case someone came up with a new way of tapping the room through those lines. This was a place intended for use when the most secret and sensitive decisions had to be discussed.
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Dr. Samuel Kinnowitz sat across the conference table. He looked the President directly in the eye when he answered his rather pointed question.
“Yes, sir, Mr. President. It would definitely be considered an act of war if the team were detected. Even bringing the sub in close enough to deploy and retrieve them in their territorial waters would be an act of war.”
“Sam, are you telling me that there’s no other way? That with all that hardware we have orbiting around up there, we can’t spot nuclear weapons in North Korea?” President Brown asked. His jaw was clenched tightly as he looked around the table at the others who were assembled there. If the press had even an inkling that these people were all gathered in one place at the same time like this, the vultures would have themselves a field day, speculating on the possibilities and manufacturing their own wild theories about what might be going on. Even then, they would likely never guess the nature or the magnitude of the crisis that led to this meeting. Dr. Kinnowitz had gathered the heads of all the various intelligence and homeland security agencies for the job of briefing President Brown about the apparent North Korean nuclear threat. Now they had to come up with a way to verify and counter its existence.
No one spoke in response to the President’s question. The Director of Central Intelligence shook his head slightly but remained silent. No one else moved. None of them wanted to be the one to confirm the NSA’s bad news.
Dr. Kinnowitz finally answered the President’s question. “No, sir. There’s no other way. We have to know for sure that the North Koreans have the weapons before we can do anything about them.”
“Why don’t we just go public with it? Demand they allow U.N. inspectors in?”
“You know the answer to that, sir. They’ll just deny it and accuse us of looking for an excuse to invade their territory. Now, if you will allow Admiral Donnegan to continue with the brief, you will see that what we are proposing is the only option we have available to us.”
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President Brown nodded and sat back in his chair, rubbing his chin thoughtfully as he turned to where the tall black Naval officer stood.
Admiral Tom Donnegan aimed his laser pointer at a large map of North Korea and eastern Siberia. The tiny red dot rested squarely on the port city of Najin.
“Mister President, as we discussed earlier, we believe that two Russian nuclear weapons were smuggled into the DPRK naval base at Najin aboard a tramp steamer. The weapons are both old Soviet-era nuclear torpedoes that have the NATO designation of ‘Type 53-65.’ They each have a twenty-kiloton yield. As a torpedo, they have a range of twenty thousand yards. They require a Russian 53-centimeter torpedo tube and a Felix-Artika variant fire control system. It makes a real nasty anti-submarine or anti- carrier weapon.”
“Do the North Koreans have a submarine that can shoot this thing?” Brown asked.
The admiral was ready for this line of questioning. He didn’t miss a beat. “They have several old Whiskey-and Foxtrot-class boats that the Soviets gave to them back in the fifties. They have 53- centimeter tubes all right, but they don’t have the Felix-Artika fire control systems. They could be fired with a portable test set if they weren’t too concerned with accuracy, though. The safety interlocks are crude and pretty easy to circumvent. But we don’t see how they could deploy the torpedoes. All of their boats are rusting alongside the pier. None have been underway in two decades so…”
“Damn! I don’t understand,” President Brown interrupted again. “Why steal a nuclear torpedo if you don’t have any way of using it?”
“Mr. President, that has us confused, too,” Donnegan answered. “Even if they pulled the warhead off the torpedo body, it’s still a big hunk of metal. The bastard weighs over a ton. It’s not something the Koreans could set on top of a missile or that a suicide bomber could strap on and carry into some disco in Tel Aviv. That’s a piece of the puzzle we don’t have a good answer for. But remember this. The Koreans know why they stole them and