Tom Clancy's Op-center_ Op-center Part 3

"It's Steve Burkow."

Hood was instantly energized. At this hour, it had to be something big.

Alexander had used the distraction to hit his father's proxy with two quick flying kicks, and as Hood rose Johnny Cage fell backward, dead.

"At least you don't get to rip out my heart," Hood said as he set the joystick down and headed toward the door.

Now his wife's eyes were wide.

"Guy talk." Hood said as he hurried past her, giving her a loving pat on the behind when he was behind the door.

The bedroom phone was a secure line, not a portable. Hood was on it for only as long as it took for the National Security Adviser to tell him about the explosion and to come to the meeting in the Situation Room.

Sharon sauntered in. From the bedroom, Hood heard the sounds of combat as Alexander battled the computer.

"Sorry I didn't hear him," she said.

Hood stepped from his pajama bottoms and pulled on his pants. "It's okay. I was up anyway."

She c.o.c.ked her head toward the phone. "Is it big?"

"Terrorism in Seoul, a bomb blast. That's all I know."

She rubbed her bare arms. "By any chance, were you touching me in bed?"

Hood s.n.a.t.c.hed a white shirt from the closet doork.n.o.b and half smiled. "I was thinking about it."

"Mmmm must've come through in my dream. I could swear you did."

Sitting on the bed, Hood slid into his Thorn McCanns.

Sharon sat down beside him and stroked his back as he tied his shoes. "Paul, do you know what we need?"

"A vacation," he said.

"Not just a vacation. Time away-- alone."

He stood and grabbed his watch, wallet, keys, and security pa.s.s from the nightstand. "I was just lying here, thinking that."

Sharon didn't say anything; her twisted mouth said it all.

"I promise, we'll have it," he said, gently kissing her on the head. "I love you, and as soon as I save the world, we'll go and explore some part of it."

"Call me?" Sharon said, following him out the door.

"I will," he said as he jogged down the hall, took the stairs two at a time, and flew out the front door.

As he backed the Volvo from the driveway, Hood punched in Mike Rodgers's number and put him on speaker.

The phone barely rang once. There was silence on the other end.

"Mike?"

"Yeah, Paul," Rodgers said. "I heard."

He heard? Hood scowled. He liked Rodgers, he admired him a great deal, and he depended on him even more. But Hood promised himself that if the day ever came that he caught the two-star General off-guard, he would retire. Because his professional life just wouldn't get any better than that.

"Who told you?" Hood asked. "Someone at the base in Seoul?"

"No," said Rodgers. "I saw it on CNN."

The scowl deepened. Hood himself couldn't sleep, but he was beginning to think Rodgers didn't require sleep. Maybe bachelors had more energy, or maybe he'd made a deal with the devil. He'd have his answer if one of his twenty-year-old girlfriends ever landed him, or when another six and a half years pa.s.sed, whichever came first.

Since the car phone wasn't secure, Hood had to couch his instructions with care.

"Mike, I'm on my way to see the boss. I don't know what he's going to say, but I want you to get a Striker team on the field."

"Good idea. Any reason to think he'll finally let us play abroad?"

"None," Hood said. "But if he decides he wants to play hardball with someone, at least we've got a head start."

"I like it," Rodgers said. "As Lord Nelson put it at the Battle of Copenhagen, 'Mark you! I would not be elsewhere for thousands.' "

Hood hung up, feeling strangely uneasy about Rodgers's remark. But he put it from his mind as he called night-shift a.s.sistant Director Curt Hardaway and instructed him to have the prime team in the office by five-thirty. He also asked him to track down Gregory Donald, who had been invited to the celebration-- and who he hoped was all right.

CHAPTER NINE.

Tuesday, 6:10 P.M., Seoul

Gregory Donald had been knocked down three rows from where he'd been sitting, but he'd landed on someone who had cushioned his fall. His benefactor, a large woman, was struggling to get up and Donald rolled off, taking care not to land on the young man beside him.

"I'm sorry," he said, bending close to the woman. "Are you all right?"

The woman didn't look up, and only when he asked again did Donald become aware of the loud ringing in his ears. He touched a finger to his ears; there was no blood, but he knew it would be a while before he heard anything clearly.

He sat there for a moment, collecting his wits. His first thought was that the grandstand had collapsed, but that clearly wasn't the case. Then he remembered the crashing roar followed an instant later by the hit in his chest, a rolling impact that knocked him down and out.

His head cleared quickly.

A bomb. There must have been a bomb.

His head snapped to the right, toward the boulevard.

Soonji!

Rising unsteadily, Donald waited a moment to make sure he wasn't going to pa.s.s out, then hurriedly picked his way down the grandstand to the street.

Dust from the explosion hung in the air like a thick fog, and it was impossible to see more than two feet in any direction. As he pa.s.sed people in the grandstand and then in the street, some were sitting in a state of shock, while others were coughing, moaning, and waving their hands in front of their faces to clear the air, many trying to get up or down or out from under debris. b.l.o.o.d.y bodies lay here and there, riddled with shrapnel from the blast.

Donald hurt for them, but he couldn't stop. Not until he knew that Soonji was safe.

The m.u.f.fled sound of sirens tore through the ringing in his ears, and Donald paused as he searched for their flashing red lights: that would be where the boulevard was. Spotting them, he half walked, half stumbled through the powdery mist, sometimes stepping suddenly and awkwardly around victims or large pieces of twisted metal. As he neared the street he could hear m.u.f.fled shouts, see hazy figures in white medical coats or blue police uniforms moving this way and that.

Donald stopped cold as he nearly walked into the wheel rim of a truck. The ma.s.sive metal disk was turning slowly, shards of rubber hanging from it like dark seaweed from a galleon. Looking down, Donald realized that he was already on the boulevard.

He stepped back and looked to the right- No. The other way. She'd been coming from the direction of Yi's.

Donald tensed as someone grabbed his arm. He looked to his right and saw a young woman in white.

"Sir, are you all right?"

He squinted and pointed to his ear.

"I said, are you all right?"

He nodded. "Take care of the others," he yelled. "I'm trying to get to the department store."

The woman looked at him strangely. "Are you sure you're all right, sir?"

He nodded again as he gently removed her fingers from his arm. "I'm fine. My wife was walking there and I've got to find her."

The medic's eyes were strange as she said, "This is Yi's, sir."

As she turned to help someone leaning against a mailbox, Donald stepped back several steps and looked up. The words had hit him like a second blast and he struggled to draw breath into his tight chest. He could see now that the truck had not only been knocked on its side, but blown into the facade of the department store. He squeezed his eyes shut and clutched the sides of his head as he shook it vigorously, trying not to picture what might be on the other side.

Nothing happened to her, he told himself. She was the lucky one, they'd always known that. The girl who won door prizes. Who picked winning horses. Who'd married him. She was all right. She had to be.

He felt another hand on his arm, and turned quickly. The long black hair was flecked with white, and the fawn-colored dress was smudged with dirt, but Soonji was standing beside him, smiling.

"Thank G.o.d!" he cried, and hugged her tightly. "I was so worried, Soon! Thank G.o.d you're all right"

His voice trailed off as she suddenly went limp. He moved his arm to catch her around the waist, and the sleeve of his jacket stuck to her back.

With a mounting sense of horror, he knelt with his wife in his arms. Carefully shifting her to her side, he looked at her back and choked when he saw where the clothing had been burned away, the flesh and fabric both soaked with dark red blood, white bone peeking through. Clutching his wife to him, Gregory Donald heard himself as he screamed, heard clearly the wail that rose from the bottom of his soul.

A flashcube blazed, and the familiar face of the medic bent close. She motioned to someone behind her, and soon there were other hands pulling at his, trying to wrest Soonji from him. Donald resisted, then let them have her as he realized that his love was not what this precious girl needed now.

CHAPTER TEN.

Tuesday, 6:13 P.M., Nagato, j.a.pan

The pac.h.i.n.ko parlor was a smaller version of the ones made famous in the Ginza district of Tokyo. Long and narrow, the building was nearly the length of ten railroad boxcars laid end to end. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and the clattering of ball bearings as men played the games that lined the walls on both sides.

Each game was comprised of a circular, upright playing surface a yard high, nearly two feet wide, and a half-foot deep. Under a gla.s.s cover, b.u.mpers and metal flippers jutted out from a colorful background; when the player inserted a coin, small metal b.a.l.l.s dropped from the top, banging pinball-like against the arms and falling this way and that. The player spun a k.n.o.b in the lower right in an effort to see that each ball reached the bottom; the more b.a.l.l.s that were collected in the slot, the more tickets the player won. When the player collected enough tickets, he took them to the front of the parlor where he was given his choice of stuffed animals.

Though gambling was illegal in j.a.pan, it was not against the law for a player to sell the animal he'd won. This was done in a small room in the back, small bears earning twenty thousand yen, large rabbits fetching twice that, and stuffed tigers selling for sixty thousand yen.

The average player spent five thousand yen a night here, and there were typically two hundred players at the parlor's sixty machines. While they enjoyed winning, few men came here to turn a profit. There was something addictive about the way the b.a.l.l.s poured through the irregular maze, about the suspense of luck going for you or against you. It was really the player against fate, determining where he stood in the eyes of the G.o.ds. There was a widespread belief that if one could change their luck here, it would change in the real world as well. No one could explain why this was, but more often than not it seemed to work.

The parlors were scattered throughout the j.a.panese islands. Some were run by legitimate families, whose ownership went back centuries. Others were the property of criminal organizations, princ.i.p.ally the Yakuza and the Sanzoku-- one a league of gangsters, the other an ancient clan of bandits.

The parlor in Nagato on the west coast of Honshu belonged to the independent Tsuburaya family, which had run it and its predecessors for over two centuries. The criminal groups made regular, respectful overtures to buy the parlor, but the Tsuburayas had no interest in selling. They used their earnings to set up businesses in North Korea, potentially lucrative toeholds that they hoped to expand whenever unification became a reality.

Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, Eiji Tsuburaya sent millions of yen to North Korea through two trusted couriers based in the South. Both men arrived on the late afternoon ferry, carrying two empty, nondescript suitcases, walked directly to the back room of the parlor, left with full ones, and were back on the ferry before it turned about and left for the 150-mile trip to Pusan. From there, the money was smuggled north by members of PUK-- Patriots for a Unified Korea, a group comprised of people from both the North and the South, everyone from businessmen to customs agents to street cleaners. It was their belief that profit for entrepreneurs and greater prosperity for the North Korean public in general would force the Communist leaders to accept an open market and, ultimately, reunification.

As always, the men left the parlor, climbed into the waiting cab, and sat quietly for the ten-minute ride to the ferry. Unlike other days, however, this time they were followed.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

Tuesday, 6:15 P.M., Seoul