Numa Files: Ghost Ship Part 24

"Great," Joe muttered.

Kurt eased from his spot and crawled to the far wall where a pinp.r.i.c.k of light was coming through a hole in the truck's metal skin. He cozied up to it and stared through.

"Any signs saying 'Welcome to North Korea'?" Joe asked.

"Not yet," Kurt said. "Mostly bright lights, and a rather funky smell."

Joe smelled it too. "It smells like . . ."

"Garbage," Kurt said. "We're driving into a giant landfill. I see overhead lights and dump trucks and bulldozers mashing everything down. Looks like half of Seoul's trash is out there."

"One of Than Rang's companies," Joe said, remembering the briefing.

Kurt nodded. "You know what they say: Where there's muck, there's bra.s.s."

"Bra.s.s?"

"Coins," Kurt explained. "Dinero, big bucks."

"Right," Joe replied. "Let's hope that where there's muck, there's computer experts."

"Better here than across the border," Kurt added, agreeing with his friend.

The truck rumbled along, moving slower with each pa.s.sing moment, eventually lurching to a stop with a hiss of the brakes. From Joe's perspective, the glare from the arc lights illuminating the landfill was suddenly cut off. "We've pulled inside a shed of some kind. Maybe a loading bay."

Kurt stretched, and made sure he was ready for action, as the truck rumbled to a stop for a second time. He got in position behind a stack of computer parts and made sure he couldn't be seen from the rear door of the trailer. Joe did the same.

They waited in the darkness, listening to voices speaking Korean, until the sound of a heavy mechanical gearing drowned them out. Almost immediately Kurt felt the truck moving. Not forward or backward but descending.

"Why am I getting a sinking feeling?" Joe whispered.

"Because we are," Kurt said.

The rate of descent picked up and then seemed to ease, but Kurt knew that was an illusion, like the feeling of being motionless in an airplane when one is actually moving at six hundred miles per hour. They were still dropping, but at a constant rate. Their bodies had just grown used to it.

He glanced at his watch and noted the second hand moving past twelve. It made it all the way around once and had almost reached the six o'clock position when the descent finally slowed and stopped.

"Ninety seconds," he whispered. "How fast do you think we were moving?"

"Not all that fast," Joe said, "maybe two or three feet per second."

Kurt made a quick calculation. "That puts us somewhere around two hundred feet below the surface."

After the smooth ride down, the next move was a jolt as a large crane grabbed the shipping container and lifted it off the back of the truck.

Kurt looked out through the pinhole and gave Joe the playby-play. "A big overhead crane has us, by the look of things. Appears to be moving us to some kind of platform."

They began to pivot as the crane operator manipulated them into a proper alignment.

"I can see the other truck," Kurt said. "And Calista. She's headed for what I'd guess is the control room."

Kurt watched her rap on the door of the control room and wait for the door to be opened. "Don't do it . . ." he whispered.

No one heard his psychic warning. The lock was released and the door pushed open. She handed the first guard some type of manifest and, as he looked at it, she calmly drew her gun and opened fire. The shots were accurate, fired in rapid succession, but unhurried and without a sense of panic. She was cold and efficient.

At almost the same instant, Calista's friend grabbed the other driver and broke his neck with a quick twist and a sickening crack. Two men came running from beside the crane to intervene but were quickly gunned down. The room went still.

"What about the other driver?" Joe whispered.

"He's probably dead," Kurt suggested, figuring Calista would have killed him before she got out of the truck.

"This girl of yours is cold as ice," Joe said.

"She's not my girl," he said.

"Are they coming this way?"

"No," Kurt said. "They're going into the control room."

Unaware that she was being watched, Calista strode into the control room and immediately began working one of the computers. It took only thirty seconds for her to break into the system.

Egan, her third brother, ducked in. "The loading platform is secured," he said. "Does anyone know we're here?"

"I got them before they could sound the alarm," Calista said. She ran through the security protocols and checked for any sign of trouble. "We're fine. Get the hackers out of the second van. We'll escort them through."

"How many men on the other side?" Egan asked.

"A full million in the North Korean Army," she said with a smile.

"You know what I mean."

"According to the duty roster I was able to pull up on the computer, the North Korean station is manned by a hundred twenty. Most of them are restricted to the surface level and the topside loading zone. Only forty are cleared to enter the lower levels and they comprise two shifts, so we'll be dealing with no more than twenty at a time."

"There are only two of us," he pointed out.

"Makes it interesting, doesn't it?"

He stared.

"Relax," she said, opening a pack with three silver canisters that had odd numeric markings on them. "This will even the odds."

"Nerve gas?"

"Nothing so dangerous," she explained. "It's an RPA, a rapid paralytic agent. Freezes the central nervous system for ten minutes or so. It won't knock them out or kill them, but it will make them easy to hit. We take the main control room by surprise, then pump this through the station, and the rest will be easy."

"Do we have gas masks?"

Calista produced two small filters that looked like bulkier versions of the masks surgeons wore. They fit over the nose and mouth. "Won't need them for long," she said. "The gas goes inert after sixty seconds."

"We still have to get through the tunnel first."

At that moment a message appeared on the screen. It was in Korean. Calista scanned it with a handheld device that translated it to English.

"Our invitation," she said. "They're awaiting transfer of the hackers. Get them out of the truck and into the tram."

"What happens to them when we fire off the gas?"

"They get frozen in place," Calista replied, "which will keep them from getting in the way."

Done asking questions, Egan left the control room as Calista made one last check of the system and patched command of the system to a remote unit she'd brought for just this purpose.

From there, she made her way to a tram that sat at the entrance to a long tunnel. With an open top, it looked more like an ore car than the pa.s.senger tram so familiar to most airport travelers.

She climbed in as Egan dragged the hackers from the rear of the second truck.

Xeno9X9, ZSumG, and Montresor were powerful men in the underworld of computing but were less than magnificent to behold in real life. Three scrawny, scruffy-looking specimens. Their faces were pale, their eyes sunken, and their arms and legs thin and spindly. There seemed little about them to suggest danger or the ability to bring down nations all around the world. Not one of them had offered any resistance since their capture, though that probably had more to do with the sisters, wives, and children being held at the Brevard compound than any sort of docile natures.

"Get in," she growled.

They climbed onto a tram that rested just in front of the platform on which the first trailer had been deposited.

With Egan in front, Calista took the rear seat, keeping the hackers between them. By typing a code into the remote, she activated the equipment, and the sound of a powerful generator spooling up reached everyone's ears. When a light flashed green on the remote, she pressed the go switch and the tram began to accelerate down the long lighted tunnel.

"They're gone," Kurt said. "They took off down some tunnel. Now's our chance." He made his way to the door and unlatched the panel on the back of the trailer. Hopping out, he took a quick look around. There were only dead men left in the control room. Dead men and blinking computers that Calista had tampered with. If he guessed right, anyone watching the room from a remote location would get nothing but a report that said Situation normal.

"We'd better arm ourselves," he suggested, grabbing a pistol from one of the dead men. Joe crouched by one of the other bodies and did the same. Then they left the control room to take a quick look around.

The s.p.a.ce was huge, the size of an aircraft hangar. On one side, the big rig that had hauled them sat alone on an octagonal platform. Stripped of the container that had once been on its back, it looked small, out of place.

"Reminds me of a turntable in the railroad yard," Joe said. Kurt agreed. He looked up. An empty shaft, matching the dimensions and shape of the platform, ran upward into the darkness. The walls of the shaft were notched, and huge wheeled gears that must have intersected these notches sprouted from four of the platform's eight sides.

"I'd guess those gears move it up and down," Joe said. "Like an incline railway, only vertical."

Kurt had to agree. "That explains how we got down here, but it doesn't explain why."

Looking for the answer to that question, he moved to the horizontal tunnel, the one Calista and her friend had vanished down on a silent tram. It seemed to run on to infinity, colored in bands of white and gray where the overhead lights and the shadows between them alternated.

"What do you make of all this?" Joe asked.

"I'm not sure," Kurt admitted, "but I'm getting the idea that Than Rang isn't quite as neutral as Colonel Lee and the CIA seem to believe."

"You think this tunnel goes under the DMZ?"

"It's the only conclusion that makes any sense," Kurt said. "For one thing, we're right up against the border. For another, the North has been digging tunnels under the DMZ for years. I can't remember how many have been found, but there are at least three or four major ones. Most were smaller and designed for infiltration, but supposedly the largest of them was capable of handling a division of men and light equipment in an hour or so. From the pictures I've seen, even that has nothing on this place."

Joe nodded. "I thought the South was always listening for signs of more tunneling. Shouldn't they have heard this thing being excavated?"

"We're directly under a landfill," Kurt pointed out. "With all those bulldozers moving around, not to mention the cranes, the dump trucks, and the compacting equipment, this place is a constant source of noise. I'm guessing that any stray sounds detected from this area could easily be written off as coming from the landfill. Beyond that, we're down here pretty deep. That has a tendency to m.u.f.fle noise as well."

"Gotta hand it to them, the landfill's a perfect cover. Even gives them a place to hide all the dirt and rock they had to excavate."

Kurt nodded but didn't reply. He was gazing down the long tunnel and had caught sight of movement. There was no sound like a subway train screeching down the rails, but something was definitely headed their way.

"Take cover," Kurt said.

He and Joe crouched down and readied their guns as the approaching target continued to race toward them. It had no wheels or cables. It simply seemed to be flying.

"Maglev," Joe said, using the short term for "magnetic levitation." "That explains the high-voltage generators."

"Another way to keep the operation quiet," Kurt said. "It's almost silent."

The car slowed rapidly the last hundred yards and was almost motionless as it exited the tunnel and slid onto a platform similar to the one their shipping container now rested on. As the sound of the humming generator waned, the new arrival dropped several inches, settling onto the platform with a surprisingly dull thud.

Kurt waited but no one came out.

"Empty car?" Joe guessed.

Suspicious of the whole scenario, Kurt crept up to the square cart and looked over the edge. "No pa.s.sengers," he said. "But it's not empty."

He reached inside and scooped up a handful of the cargo. "Pellets," he said. "Extremely light."

Joe took a quick look, rubbing one of the pellets between his fingers. "t.i.tanium," he said. "Not fully processed yet but halfway there."

"I think I get it now," Kurt said.

"Get what?"

"Than Rang's played-out mines that are producing three times what they did a decade before . . . His alliance with the shadowy figures in the North . . . He's salting his own mines," Kurt said. "The generals send him half-processed t.i.tanium that he ships to a processor as if they came from his own mine and he sends them computer hackers, high-tech supplies, and probably a steady diet of cold hard cash in return. The North Koreans get technology and access to markets the UN sanctions prevent them from touching, and Than Rang gets cheap ore at fire-sale prices."

As if in response to the arrival of the ore-bearing car, a series of yellow lights began to flash around the base of the platform on which the shipping container had been placed-the one Kurt and Joe had been riding in with the high-tech servers.

"Last train to Clarksville," Kurt said. "Let's make sure we're on it."

He and Joe dashed for the open door of the shipping container, jumping inside just as the platform levitated upward. Kurt pulled the door shut and the container began to accelerate rapidly and smoothly. In seconds, they were moving fifty miles an hour, all without the slightest sound of machinery or even the grind of wheels on the road.

"Since we seem to be on the express train here," Joe began, "I should probably ask what we're going to do when we get to the other side."

"My guess, we'll either be entering a dead zone or an all-out firefight," Kurt said.

"We could have waited for them to come back."

"What if they plan to take another way out?"

"You got me there," Joe said.

It wasn't long before the big container began to slow. As it settled onto the receiving platform at the far end, it became clear there was no firefight in progress. A minute of silence rang in their ears before Kurt dared crack the rear door open.

A quick look revealed several dead soldiers in North Korean uniforms and no sign of fighting or alarms in sight.