"We're not going to get Polorski?"

"This isn't the time, Trace."

Her eyes were like two green disks of jade in the night. She wanted to get him; I'm sure that was the only reason she'd come aboard.

"d.i.c.k."

"We'll get him, Trace. You have my word. But right now, Yong Shin Jong is our priority."

Someone fired at us from the bow. Trace emptied her gun, then turned to me calmly.

"All right," she said. "It's a long jump from here. We'll have a better chance if we get down to the main deck."

"You have any more grenades?"

"Just one smoke grenade." "Use it when I give the signal," I told her. I opened the ruck and took out the MP5 ammo, giving her two and stuffing the spares box in my vest. "I'll create a diversion. Take Yong Shin Jong down and get in the water. Yell when you're jumping. I'll follow."

Polorski was most likely marshaling his forces, possibly looking for the rest of the army they thought we'd brought with us. The ship's engines were still clanking away, but the gunfire had stopped, and the place was relatively quiet-the calm before the storm.

I moved toward the stern, leaning cautiously over the side as I tried to see where the gunner or gunners were. The ship's interior lighting had been shut off, and even the shadows had shadows. I saw one of them moving ahead and stopped, dropping to a knee, waiting.

I almost gave Trace the signal to go. But as the shadow fluttered back, something in the way it moved made me realize it wasn't a person-it was the shadow of a flag above.

Once more I started ahead. The outer pa.s.sageway I was on ended at a bulkhead aft of the fantail. The superstructure cut off the view below, where I guessed one of the men who'd shot at us earlier must be holed up. If there hadn't been a corner there, the solution would have been easy-I could look down and shoot the son of a b.i.t.c.h.

Flanking him remained an option, but to do so I had to climb up again to the top of the superstructure. Even though my last try in that direction had ended badly, I decided to give it a chance. The men who'd chased me off the deck above had seen me fall, and the last thing they'd expect would be that I'd climb back up. No one's foolish enough to go back into a place they just escaped from-it'd be like breaking out of jail, only to go around and knock on the front door.

External piping gave me plenty of hand and footholds. I climbed as quickly as I could, then held my breath as I pulled up onto the top deck. The men who'd confronted me earlier were nowhere in sight. I moved to the stern and began climbing down slowly. I aimed to get close enough to whoever was at the corner that I'd have an easy time surprising him, but I didn't want to get so close that I was the one who was surprised.

The problem was, I couldn't see or hear anyone. It almost seemed as if everyone aboard had left the ship. I finally had to lower myself down to the main deck, sucking wind as slowly and silently as possible. Tiptoeing forward, I finally spotted a cl.u.s.ter of shadows ahead that looked humanlike. I pushed back against the bulkhead, and whispered to Trace that I was just about to start.

"Good. Copy," she said.

Polorski chose that moment to come back on the loudspeaker.

"d.i.c.k, listen, you've caused me a lot of trouble here," he said. He was calm, but you could hear his anger through his accent. "This is unnecessary. Let's make a deal. We can work together."

The only thing better than a commie who's turned into a capitalist is one who wants to become your business partner. A Russian mobster who already double-crossed me and played one of my best friends and employees-sure, there's someone I would trust as a partner.

I took out the radio I'd grabbed from the sailor earlier and cupped my hand over the microphone.

"Bow," I whispered in Russian. "Forward."

Someone responded immediately, probably demanding more of an explanation or asking who had transmitted. But as limited as my Russian was, I wasn't up to giving out clear directions. Besides, I had other priorities. I checked my weapon, then sprang out of my hiding place. A shot to the back of the head took out the first man, but as I turned the gun to get the second I saw that he had left his position. I walked quickly, not sure where he could have gone.

"Bystryey!" hissed a voice from around the corner. "Hurry up."

"Ya zdyes!" I answered. "Here I am."

As I turned the corner I put a bullet into the side of his head. He never knew what hit him.

"Trace, smoke!" I yelled over the radio.

I heard the pitter-patter of little feet behind me. But it wasn't the feet so much as the gunfire that got my attention.

"Go!" I told Trace.

I spun around and fired a pair of bursts to give whoever was coming up something to think about. When I turned the corner, Yong Shin Jong was hanging off the railing above.

"Jump!" I told him.

He hit the deck so hard my leg bones shuddered in sympathy. As I started toward him, the deck in front of me bubbled with automatic weapons fire, fired from the deck above. I threw myself against the bulkhead and continued crawling forward. The wind whipped the smoke from Trace's grenade downward, and within seconds I found myself in the middle of a black cloud so thick I couldn't see my own hands or the bulkhead they were feeling along.

"d.i.c.k!" yelled Trace over the radio. "Where are you?"

"I'm on the deck."

"Do you have Yong Shin Jong?"

"No. I can't see in this smoke."

I pushed along farther. There was more gunfire than you'd hear on a Miami street after curfew. Finally I felt a leg that didn't belong to me.

I pulled at the leg and heard a groan. The smoke was so thick I couldn't see the rest of his body, but I grappled him over my shoulder. I knew I was only a few feet from the rail, and that I had a straight path to the water.

I pushed myself to my feet. He was a heavy son of a b.i.t.c.h.

"I got him, Trace. Go! Go! Jump now. And that is a f.u.c.king order!"

I leaped across the deck to the rail, threw my left foot on the railing, and with Yong Shin Jong on my back tumbled inelegantly toward the water.

23 It turned out that there was a collapsible raft lashed to the superstructure, but we didn't see it at the time.

24 One of my wise-a.s.s editors just pointed out I should have called Doc around here somewhere. "Always communicate with your team," he said. "They should know where you are at all times."

Great advice. f.u.c.k you very much.

PART THREE.

FUBAR.

"I want to apologize and it will never happen again."

-KIM JONG IL.

9.

[ I ].

THE OCEAN CAME up before I had time to do anything more than get my feet together. The cold water sent an electric shock through me. I pushed to the surface and bent forward, slightly disoriented from the smoke and the fall. My "pa.s.senger" weighed me down, but at least he wasn't flailing against me or resisting. I slipped around in the water, hooking my arm around him and starting to scissor kick away.

The only progress I made at first was downward. I un-hooked my rucksack and let it sink, but what was really weighing me down was Yong, and I couldn't let him go.

I tried not thinking about those giant sucking screws at the stern. If they were shooting at us-and I expect that they were-I couldn't tell. I kicked and paddled with my free arm, willing myself away. An illumination flare shot overhead. I kept kicking, finally pulling away from the ship, either by brute determination or opportune currents.

Back aboard the vessel, Trace waited for the Russians to come down from their hiding places. She'd come aboard to get Polorski, and orders or not, she was d.a.m.ned if she was going to leave without taking a shot at revenge. She guessed that he would come down to check on things himself, and so waited as two sailors rushed by, spraying their weapons in my general direction. Trace was right about Polorski-he was a few yards behind the two men-but she hadn't counted on the fact that Mr. Murphy was even closer.

The smoke from the grenade started to dissipate as Polorski came down, barking at the men. Trace caught a glimpse of him walking toward her to her left; she brought her MP5 up to fire, then lost him momentarily. Stepping away from the bulkhead where she'd hidden, she saw a figure looming in the smoke.

"You son of a b.i.t.c.h," she said, pressing the trigger. She laced the man with bullets, heard a scream, and stepped forward-probably to kick him in the face and maybe to knife out his b.a.l.l.s, though she didn't mention either when she told what happened later on. As she did, she heard a voice shouting an alert in Russian. She didn't know the words, but she instantly recognized the voice. It belonged to Polorski, who had stayed back behind his other men and was now urging them to fire. She saw him, took a step to the right to get better aim, and fired-and simultaneously fell off the ship. Murphy-you can blame it on the earlier gunfire if you want-had removed the lifelines from the section of the deck where she was, something she couldn't tell in the smoke.

She smacked against the side of the ship going down and lost her gun. Hitting the water sideways, she was stunned momentarily, but as she flailed, her hand hit something soft. It was the raft that had fallen when I'd pulled against it earlier.

Meanwhile, I was pulling Yong Shin Jong in the general direction of the cabin cruiser. At least five minutes pa.s.sed before I heard her yelling to me.

"d.i.c.k!"

I altered course toward Trace's shouts. With every stroke, my arms felt heavier and heavier. Back in my salad days as a UDT25 wannabe, I went through h.e.l.l week with a severe case of the runs. There have been many times in my life when I've been glad for that experience-it gave me a benchmark to measure my misery by. I thought about it now, and memories of having cold water poured on me just as I was ready to collapse comatose cheered me up. No way this was worse than that. Not even close. My arms were falling out of their sockets, but this was a joke compared to So-Solly Day and the swim I'd had to do, not just kitted up, but with a full pot helmet.

s.h.i.t, if I could do that, I could do anything. Which was the idea.

I grabbed on to the raft and pulled myself half up, taking my "pa.s.senger" with me.

"G.o.d, is he alive?" asked Trace.

"I think he broke his leg when he fell," I told her. "See if there's a medical kit in the raft. He's probably in shock."

I pushed Yong Shin Jong over to check on him.

The only thing was, it wasn't Yong Shin Jong.

[ II ].

I'D SEEN YONG jump to the deck. I'd seen where he landed. Yes, it was night and the ship was wrapped in smoke, but it was only thirty or so feet from me. There was n.o.body between me and Yong Shin Jong. There was no way this wasn't Yong Shin Jong.

And yet it clearly wasn't.

THE MAN I'D towed to the raft was a sailor dressed in a jumpsuit who was about the same weight as Yong Shin Jong, but was clearly Russian. He was also dead. Cursing myself, I unceremoniously kicked his corpse into the water, hoping he'd become what he deserved, shark s.h.i.t on the bottom of the ocean.

I cursed even louder when I realized the GPS unit had been damaged somewhere along the way, possibly by the fall into the water. The device refused to update itself, then finally went blank altogether-maybe fainting because of my language.

Having gotten rid of my ruck, I'd also gotten rid of the sat phone. We tried broadcasting on the radio, but they were designed for short distances, and it was unlikely that Doc was close enough to hear. (The military's SINCGARS radios are good for about thirty-five kilometers or so. Our units in theory were a bit better-partly because they didn't have to worry about interfacing with a.n.a.log and what the industry politely calls "legacy" equipment. But their range was limited by design-the farther a signal can go, the more people theoretically who could intercept it.) By now, we'd moved more than a mile away from the ship, which was continuing toward Korea. We unstowed the oars from the bottom of the raft and began paddling in its direction. I didn't think I was going to catch up, though Trace for one would have welcomed a chance to get back on board. I figured that the closer we were to the ship, the better chance we'd have of being seen in the morning when Doc managed to convince someone to look for us.

Trace looked like she'd spent the past twenty-four hours in the back of a cement mixer. I told her to get some rest. She was her usual compliant self, and being even more cheerful than normal due to fatigue, told me not only that I could "F" myself, but that I could do it in several unnatural positions. She took her oar and punched at the water, no doubt taking out some of her frustration at not having gotten Polorski. If the ship had been a little closer, she might very well have dove into the water and started swimming after it, punched hand-holds into the skin of the ship to climb up, bulled her way to the bridge, and torn Polorski to pieces with her bare hands.

I let her get her aggression out on the waves while I took stock of the raft's supplies. It was a quick inventory: six bottles of water, a flare gun with six charges, and six signal mirrors. Obviously whoever packed it thought six was a lucky number.

While we were setting a westward course, the Greenville's skipper was headed north, following the GPS signal from the cabin cruiser, whose finicky rudder had steered it back toward Russia. It was roughly an hour before the small boat was spotted, and another half hour or so before it could be recovered and inspected properly. At that point, Doc drew the obvious conclusion, deciding that Trace and I must still be on the merchant ship, or at least nearby. With the help of some other navy a.s.sets26 and an a.s.sist from Jimmy Zim, they set a new course and began moving at flank speed in that direction.

Under normal circ.u.mstances, that would have brought them to our position just after daybreak. But what is the definition of "normal" in an operational setting?

If you answered "all f.u.c.ked up," go to the head of the cla.s.s.

The North Korean navy is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a formidable outfit. The one area where you might-emphasis on might-give them a grade of "D-" rather than their normal "F" is in the area of special operations support. They have a number of submarines, from fleet-sized to midgets, which can and have been used for special operations against South Korea and j.a.pan. (The value of those operations is another story, but going into detail here would take us many pages.) They also have a number of small craft that are useful for inserting shooters, including two different types that can be flooded to make them less visible from sh.o.r.e (nothing like arriving at the battle wet as well as bruised) and U.S. made "hand grenade launches," which are extremely fast craft that are closer to speedboats than your run-of-the-mill invasion launch. (The man who managed to procure them for the North Koreans was granted free room and board at a hotel run by Uncle Sam.) When it comes to conventional ships, however, the North Korean navy is pretty typically North Korean. The vessels are old, beaten to s.h.i.t, and were never very good to begin with. They have a couple of frigates and corvettes-the latter is the escort-sized baby destroyer, not the Chevy with the big wheels and throaty exhaust. They also have dozens of patrol craft ranging in size from missile gunboats to dinghies with machine guns. Modern or not, they have a lot of them, and it seemed as if nearly every one of them had been scrambled to meet the freighter.

We were too far from the merchant ship to see it in the dark, so our first hint that something was up came in the form of a red flare arcing near the horizon. Twenty minutes later, a pair of jets streaked somewhere overhead. The planes were probably old MiGs or maybe larger two-engined patrol bombers from one of North Korea's air bases near the coast, but of course we had no way of knowing. We kept rowing westward, night giving way to nautical twilight (the false dawn before dawn when the ocean turns from black to purple-gray). Four or five patrol boats came out in our direction. It was unlikely they saw us, either with binoculars or radar; they were probably just running a patrol to screen whatever was going on closer to the coast.

We still couldn't see the freighter, but it wasn't hard to guess that they had arranged a rendezvous. And if the Koreans were getting Yong Shin Jong, then Polorski was getting the nuke.

I had to tell Doc that. I might not have had a working radio, but the Koreans surely would.

It's very possible that the Korean patrol boats would have missed us if we hadn't done anything to call attention to ourselves. It's a big ocean, after all, and they were focused on the freighter. Still, the sun was coming up, there were an awful lot of them nearby, and there were airplanes flying overhead. I'd put the odds at fifty-fifty that they would have spotted something, and sent someone to investigate.

Maybe more like thirty-seventy, but in any event, there was no sense waiting around for it to happen. I took the flare gun and fired off a shot, then another for good measure. One of the patrol craft, and then another, turned in our direction. We dumped the radios and GPS unit, even though it wasn't working, and waited.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Trace asked as the first patrol boat closed in.

"You forget, I'm a personal friend of the Great Leader," I told her, combing my beard.

The Korean boat that came for us was a 190-ton Russian Project 215, also known as an SO-1 patrol boat. The ship had probably served with the Soviet navy around the time I was in high school. Intended primarily for ASW27 missions, even with the Koreans, it had a pair of 25mm machine guns as its main armament. The Project 215s were not known for seaworthiness. They would roll in a bathtub, let alone the ocean. The vessel lurched in our direction; it took three tries before they managed to get a line over to us.

None of the crew who waited for us aboard the ship spoke English, which suited me just fine.

"I need to talk to General Sun," I said very loudly. I took out the card Sun had given me and waved it over my head. "The general sent me on a special mission for the Great Leader, and I must report to him immediately."

The enlisted men who heard me had no idea what I was saying, but they were fairly well programmed to respond to authoritative voices, and even the two sailors armed with AK47s fell in behind me as I marched in the direction of the ship's communications shack. I barked out my intentions as I went, striding quickly through the narrow pa.s.sageway. Sailors pressed themselves against the bulkheads as I came, then joined our parade; I had quite a little army as I marched into the communications compartment, which was about the size of a phone booth. Incredibly, three North Koreans stood inside, an officer and two enlisted men hunched over equipment so old it probably worked off tubes rather than transistors, let alone circuit boards.