Act of War (21 page)

“Is she coughing anything up?”

Tang asked the boy and then looked at Tucker and nodded. “He says sometimes there’s blood.”

Even before the response, Tucker had already begun digging into his medical kit. He removed a surgical mask and handed it to Tang. “Explain to Ginseng that he needs to put this on and keep it on.”

“Why?”

“Because it sounds like his sister has TB.”

“Tuberculosis?” Tang replied as he explained to Jin-Sang what he was doing and then helped place the mask on the boy.

Tucker nodded. “Multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis is a shape-shifter and it’s surging in North Korea. We’re not taking any chances.”

Jin-Sang said something and Tang translated. “He wants to know if we have medicine that will help his sister.”

Tucker was about to answer when Fordyce interrupted him. “You tell him that before we talk about helping his sister, we need to know what’s going on down there.”

Tang relayed Fordyce’s directive and waited for the little boy to respond. When he did, Tang said, “The Chinese are here for farming.”

Fordyce set his camera down. “We got that point. But first of all, how does he even know what China is? They only teach these kids enough reading to understand how to operate sweatshop equipment. They never learn more than basic addition and subtraction.”

“He says his father had worked for the North Korean government. He had been a trade negotiator. Not only spoke Korean, but English and Chinese, too. He fell out of favor and was accused of taking bribes. That’s what led to the family’s imprisonment. His father taught him where China was and that if he could ever escape, that’s where he and his sister should go.”

“So why didn’t he? If he’s able to get out of the camp, why hasn’t he run?”

Tang waited for the boy to explain and then said, “Because the parents made the children promise to watch over each other. He wants to run, but his sister has been too afraid. Rather than leave without her, he’s been staying to protect her.”

The men respected the young boy’s sense of honor.

“So his father taught him about China,” Fordyce clarified. “What has he learned about the Chinese since they’ve been here?”

“He says they’ve been bringing through waves of farmers, thousands of them. They’re also being given military training and have bullets that hurt real bad.”

“What kind of bullets?”

Tang asked the boy to explain. When he was done, Tang replied, “It sounds like rubber ones.”

“And they’ve been using them on the prisoners? What the hell for?”

“The Chinese have established multiple farms across the valley. Every couple of days, the guards select a group of prisoners and tell them that if they can successfully raid any of them, they will be given extra food. The Chinese are being trained how to defend their farms. That’s why they’re using the rubber bullets.”

Tang paused for a moment before saying, “The Chinese are being told to envision the prisoners as starving Americans coming to steal from them.”

Fordyce was repulsed by what he heard.

“He says,” Tang continued, “that the Chinese farmers have even killed a few prisoners. Now, before each exercise, they are reminded not to attempt headshots, especially on the children. One of the kids Jin-Sang went to school with was killed by one of the rounds.”

Fordyce shook his head. “Let’s back up. Why
exactly
are the Chinese here? Does he know?”

The boy nodded and asked again about medicine and food for his sister.

“We’re not doing anything for him, or his sister, until he tells us all he knows,” Fordyce replied. “In fact, take that Fentanyl pop away from him. Maybe if his leg starts hurting again, he’ll get more cooperative.”

Tang looked at Fordyce. “Seriously?”

“As serious as a heart attack. We’re running out of time on target.”

“But he’s just a kid.”

“Listen to me closely, Billy. Maybe you’ve gotten used to operating by yourself in Indian country, but as long as you’re on this team, you’ll respect my command. Our orders are to gather as much intelligence as we can and get out. We’re not here to open a children’s hospital, dig a well, or build a new school. We’re way behind enemy lines and the security of our country depends on what we do here. I will not allow this operation to fail because you can’t do what needs to be done. Are we clear?”

Tang didn’t like being spoken to that way. It mattered little that Fordyce was completely justified and that Tang had brought it upon himself. “We’re crystal clear,” Tang said, as he snatched the Fentanyl pop away from Jin-Sang.

As the startled boy looked at him, Tang launched into a series of angry questions in Korean. The boy would begin to answer, only to have Tang cut him off and either repeat the question or berate and browbeat the child. Tang’s good-cop persona had completely evaporated. If Lieutenant Fordyce wanted him to play rough with an eleven-year-old, he would give him what he wanted.

The SEALs watched the exchange between Tang and Jin-Sang ebb and flow for a good fifteen minutes. Several times, the little boy was reduced to sobs.

When it was over, Tang handed him back the Fentanyl lollipop and pinched the bridge of his nose.

Fordyce waited until the quiet CIA operative opened his eyes before asking, “So?”

“You have no idea what this poor kid has seen.”

“I’m sure it sucks. For right now, though, I only want to hear the details relevant to our mission. Got me?”

Billy Tang nodded. “The Chinese are here for both military and agricultural training.”

“Two areas in which they far outpace the North Koreans. I don’t buy it,” Fordyce replied.

“From what I can gather, they aren’t here to necessarily learn how to farm well, but to learn how to farm in extreme hardship. When the
Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s and agriculture-related subsidies to North Korea dried up, the North Koreans had to learn new methods very quickly.”

“Yeah,” said Tucker. “They
learned
how to starve. One million North Koreans died in that famine. That’d be like losing twelve million Americans. What could the Norks possibly have to teach anyone?”

“
How to survive
. How to survive with no pesticides. How to survive without commercial fertilizers. How to survive without electricity. How to survive without running water. How to survive with little to no fuel for generators or vehicles. How to breed and raise livestock under medieval conditions. How to ration much-needed supplies when they barely trickle in from abroad. And how to protect all of it from roving bands of angry, starving American citizens. That’s what the North Koreans are teaching the Chinese.”

“Do you believe him?” Fordyce asked.

“Do I think he’s telling me the truth?” said Tang. “I think he would tell me anything if he thought it would help. But, yeah, I think he’s telling me the truth.”

“What about the nets? Those things are the size of football fields. We can see a lot of people coming and going, but what specifically are the buildings underneath them?”

“Jin-Sang has not been allowed in that sector, but his sister has. According to her, they have built a small American downtown, complete with storefronts, a restaurant, those kinds of things.”

“Why?”

“For some reason, they think rural Americans are much more likely to survive the attack. They believe they will band together in small towns similar to what has been created here. Jin-Sang says the farmers may need to trade with them and may possibly recruit them as laborers. The town exists to teach them what they may encounter.”

“What was his sister doing there? Was she a role-player?”

Tang nodded. “A role-player who speaks Chinese
and
English.”

“The father taught her?”

Tang nodded again. “He saw it as a skill that could make her useful to the DPRK. Then they were arrested. He kept it up with her in the camp.
Maybe it allowed them to secretly communicate, or maybe it just functioned as a way to hold on to something from their old life. It sounds like the father didn’t put much effort into teaching Jin-Sang. Only words and phrases he thought might be helpful if they ever escaped to China.”

“What about the attack?” Fordyce asked. “Does the boy know anything about it at all?”

“No, but he says his sister knows—a lot.”

J
OHNSON
S
PACE
C
ENTER
, H
OUSTON
, T
EXAS

F
BI Special Agent Heidi Roe looked at the text that had just come across her BlackBerry.
Unbelievable
.

Her partner saw her shaking her head. “What’s up?”

“Our task force officer in Nashville says Tommy Wong never got off the plane.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I wish.”

“What happened?”

“I have no idea,” said Roe, “but I intend to find out. Are you good here if I duck out for a minute?”

Her partner nodded and Special Agent Roe stepped out of the conference room they had been assigned. It felt good to stand up and stretch her legs. They had been at it nonstop since arriving from Los Angeles. The FBI had brought their best people in from all across the country. They were in Houston to conduct interviews and follow up every single lead in relation to six Muslim engineering students who had gone missing and were suspected of plotting a mass-casualty terrorist attack on the U.S.

But just because the FBI had called for all hands on deck didn’t mean other cases could be allowed to lapse. Roe and her partner had already been working on breaking the LA arm of a Chinese transnational criminal organization involved in narcotics and child sex trafficking. After identifying the major players, they had focused on members further down the
food chain. Their hope was to find cause to arrest one of them, and then offer immunity if that person would become an FBI mole within the organization. Tommy Wong was the man they wanted.

They had placed Wong under loose surveillance and had been watching him for several months. They knew he was up to something. They just hadn’t been able to put their finger on what that
something
was. To do that, they’d need to devote a lot more manpower to the surveillance. Roe had run it up the flagpole at the LA field office only to be told that without something more substantive, no additional resources could be assigned at this time.

It was a typical Catch-22. She knew the guy was dirty and her bosses knew he was dirty. He was too small a fish, though, to justify investing any more dollars in. But if they didn’t invest more, they wouldn’t get what they needed to roll him and move up the triad food chain. In her head, she understood the bureaucratic limits that she had to work under, but in her heart they still pissed her off. It was one of her biggest complaints about law enforcement. Cops and FBI agents had to operate by the rules. Bad guys were free to do whatever they wanted. Even with all the government’s tools for eavesdropping, tracking, and surveillance, the bad guys still kept coming up with ways to stay ahead of them.

Roe, who had been an attorney before joining the FBI, understood the importance of law. Without it, freedom was impossible. She was amazed by how many Americans, when asked what kind of system of government the U.S. had, would answer, “Democracy.” America wasn’t a democracy. It was a republic, and that was because of one thing—the law.

When each of her three kids started studying government in grade school, she made them watch a YouTube video called “The American Form of Government.” She wanted them to understand why America was different and why their mom had joined the FBI and worked a lot of late nights and weekends.

The video began with Ben Franklin exiting the Constitutional Convention and being asked by a woman, “Sir, what have you given us?” Franklin’s response? “A republic, ma’am. If you can keep it.”

It then went on to describe the difference between a democracy and a republic. A democracy was where majority ruled. If a posse rode off after
a horse thief, caught him, and voted fifteen to one to hang him, that was democracy. He would be hanged by the neck until dead.

In a republic, though, the sheriff arrives and tells the posse that they can’t hang the alleged horse thief. He has to be returned to town where he will stand trial by a jury of his peers because that is what is dictated by law. In fact the word “republic” came from the Latin
res publica,
or the “public thing,” meaning the law.

It took seeing the video for her kids to fully grasp that without law, there was chaos, and with too much law, there was tyranny. In order for the right balance to exist, the laws needed to be enforced and citizens needed to be vigilant stewards of the republic and strive to elect the most responsible leaders.

What the video didn’t teach, and what she had tried to keep her young children shielded from, was the absolute evil that existed in the world. As an FBI agent she had seen horrors she hoped her children would never know about, much less experience. Man’s capacity for inhumanity was boundless.

Roe had grown up in a solidly middle-class family with a mom, a dad, two siblings, and a cat, just outside Detroit. Her parents had taught her right from wrong and had encouraged her to become the best she could be. Their vision of the American dream was to see their children go farther in life than they had. Her parents had succeeded. Their daughter was happily married with a family of her own and she loved her job. When people screwed up, though, it made her angry.

Wong’s purchase of a last-minute plane ticket to Nashville had immediately caught Roe’s attention. There had been no phone or email contact with anyone in Nashville, and as far as they knew, Wong didn’t have any friends or associates there either. It was completely out of character for him, which was why Roe and her partner had been so interested to see where he went and with whom he met. This could be the break they were looking for.

Pulling up the phone number in Nashville, Roe hit Dial and raised the phone to her ear. Moments later a man’s voice answered on the other end.

“Detective Hoffman,” the voice said.