“Ten downhill miles,” Squires said. “That’s ten uphill back to get picked up.”
“Right. Not a good exit strategy, especially if any of the troops down there are looking for us.”
Squires indicated the Nodongs. “They haven’t got the bomb on these things, have they?”
“Despite all the hoopla in the press, they aren’t quite there yet, technologically,” said Rodgers, still studying the map. “Though a payload of a couple hundred pounds of TNT per Nodong will put a helluva dent in Seoul.”
He pursed his lips. “I think I’ve got it, Charlie. We don’t leave where we came in but about five miles farther south, which the enemy will never expect.”
One of the clear eyes squeezed shut. “Come again? We make it tougher on ourselves?”
“No, easier. The key to getting out isn’t to run, but to fight and then walk. Early in the second century A.D., during the first Trajanic campaign, legionary infantry of Rome were engaged by a smaller number of Dacian warriors in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. It was the mail and heavy javelins of Rome against bare chests and spears, but the Dacians were victorious. They snuck in at night, took the Romans by surprise, then led the enemy into the hills where the legionnaries were forced to spread out. When they did, the soldiers were picked off by enemies working in pairs. With the Romans dead, the Dacians were literally able to stroll back to their camp.”
“That was spears, sir.”
“Doesn’t matter. If we’re spotted, we’ll lead them off and use knives. The enemy wouldn’t dare use firearms at night, in the hills, or they might start picking off their own people.”
Squires looked at the map. “The Carpathian Mountains doesn’t exactly sound like home turf for the Romans. The enemy probably knew that land as well as the North Koreans know their terrain.”
“You’re right,” Rodgers said. “But then, we’ve got something the Dacians didn’t have.”
“A Congress wanting to cut back our asses?”
Rodgers grinned and pointed toward the small black bag he’d been carrying earlier. “EBC.”
“Sir?”
“Something Matty Stoll and I cooked up: I’ll tell you about it after we’ve finished making our plans.”
FORTY
Tuesday, 11:25 P.M., Seoul
Kim Chong wondered if they’d figured the cipher out.
She’d been playing piano at Bae Gun’s bar for seventeen months, sending messages to men and women who stopped by irregularly-watched most of the time, she knew, by agents of the KCIA. Some of them were dashing, some beautiful, some scruffy, all of them doing a good job playing the successful businesspeople or models or factory workers or soldiers they were supposed to be. But Kim knew what they really were. The same talent that enabled her to memorize musical pieces allowed her to memorize distinctive features or laughs or shoes. Why is it that undercover operatives who took such pains to change their attire or makeup or hairstyle came back wearing the same shoes or holding their cigarettes the same way or fishing the almonds from the peanut bowl first? Even Mr. Gun had noticed that the scraggly artist type who came in now and then had the same chronic bad breath as the ROK Private who showed up once a week.
If you ‘re going to play a part, you must play it completely.
Tonight, the woman she’d nicknamed Little Eva was back. The lithe woman watered her drinks with a lot of ice; obviously a health nut, obviously not accustomed to drinking, obviously not drowning her sorrows alone but nursing her scotch while she kept a close eye and ear on the piano player.
Kim decided to give her something to chew on.
She rolled from “The Worst That Could Happen” into “Nobody Does It Better”; Kim always used songs from movies to send her messages. She played the first note of the second measure, a “C,” an octave lower than it was written. She trilled the “A” below middle “C” in the third measure, then played the entire twentieth measure without the pedal.
Anyone who knew the music well would recognize the discrepancies. The “C” and “A” were wrong, and a pedal measure corresponded to a letter of the alphabet: in this case twenty, or “T.”
She’d spelled CAT for the KCIA, and wondered if they’d get it; there was no letter frequency ratio, nothing a cryptanalyst could hook onto in the way of a regular substitution or transposition cipher. Kim watched as her man Nam left, his departure noted by Little Eva. The counterintelligence agent didn’t go after him; maybe someone else did. Nam said he never saw anyone following him home, but he was old and half blind and when he came here he drank most of what she paid him. She could just imagine the contortions the KCIA went through trying to figure out how Nam and her other letter boxes sent their messages.
It was almost a shame to take money for this-money from the North as well as a salary to play here. If she were back in her hometown of Anju, north of Pyongyang, she’d be living like an empress.
If I were back home-
Who knew when that would be? After what she had done, she was lucky to be alive. But she would go back one day, when she had enough money or had her fill of the self-righteous South or learned something of the whereabouts of Han.
She finished playing the James Bond song and segued into a honky-tonk version of “Java.” The Al Hirt song was her favorite, the first one she remembered hearing as a child, and she played it every night. She often wondered if the KCIA thought it had something to do with her code: the next song after it was the one with the message, or maybe information was hidden in the little improv she did with the right hand in the second section. She couldn’t even begin to imagine what the intelligence minds on Chonggyechonno were coming up with. And at the moment, she couldn’t care less.
Ba-da da-da da-da …
She shut her eyes and hummed along. Wherever she was, whatever she was doing, “Java” always brought her back to when she was just a baby, being looked after by her much older brother Han and their mother. Her mother’s husband, Man’s father, had died in the war, and her mother had no idea which soldier passing through was Kim’s father, whether he was even Korean or whether he was Russian or Chinese. Not that it mattered: she loved her daughter just the same, and food had to be put on the table somehow. And when they found that box of 45s stolen from the South, her mother used to put Java on an old hand-cranked record player and they’d dance around their small shack, causing the tin roof to rattle and scaring the chickens and goat. Then there was the priest who had a piano and saw Kim sing and dance and thought she might like to play-
There was a commotion in the nightclub and her eyes snapped open. Little Eva rose as two clean-cut men wearing suits and hard expressions entered by the front door and another pair came in through the kitchen door, behind a beaded entranceway to her left. Remaining otherwise motionless, Kim reached down with the toe of her right foot and lifted the wheel lock that held the piano in place. When she saw Little Eva look at her and knew why the men had come, she jumped to her feet and pushed the piano lengthwise across the beaded passage, blocking it. Little Eva and the other men still had to make their way through the tables, which gave Kim a few seconds head start.
Grabbing her purse, Kim ran for the rest rooms that were in the other direction. She swung into the men’s room, remarkably calm and focused. Her six months of training in North Korea had been brief but effective: she had learned how to plan and walk through her exit routes with care, to keep money and a variety of handguns hidden.
The window was always open in the men’s room, and climbing on the sink, she slipped through. Once outside, she discarded her purse after fishing out the switchblade she kept there.
Kim was in the small backyard of the bar. It was cluttered with broken stools, discarded appliances, and surrounded by a high wooden fence. Clambering on top of the row of garbage pails, cats scurrying in all directions, she held the knife in her teeth and put her hands on the top of the slats; as she was about to vault over, a shot chewed the fence just inches from her left underarm. She froze.
“Think it over, Kim!”
Kim’s stomach tightened as she recognized the voice. She turned slowly and saw Bae Gun standing there, holding the smoking Smith & Wesson .32 automatic he kept to protect the bar and its take. She raised her hands.