Thirty minutes after leaving the emergency supplies, the pilot of Bird One homed in on a small blot of black in the center of his green night-vision goggles. The blot was an uninhabited atoll eight miles east of North Korea’s Taehaw Island, itself a dozen miles off the mainland. During the early spring and summer, North Korea’s small fishing fleet regularly plied these waters, but in late fall the fishing was terrible, and the potential for ferocious storms kept the area nearly empty.
“We’re sixty seconds from go/no go,” the pilot told Rankin.
Rankin switched his radio onto the command frequency, linking with Van Buren.
“Bird One ready,” Rankin told Van Buren.
“You’re good to go,” said Van Buren. “Be advised there are two fishing vessels approximately three miles southeast of your target.”
“What are they fishing for at one o’clock in the morning?”
“Thinking here is that they’re smugglers, bringing goods back from China,” said the colonel.
“Thirty seconds from go/no go,” said the pilot.
“Roger. Team is committed,” said Rankin. He switched into the shared frequency, talking to the other three helicopters that made up the emergency extraction force. They’d all rendezvoused en route after dropping off their caches. “We’re committed. Two minutes to target.”
An officer might have said something like, “Make it look good,” but Rankin left it at that. The bullshit pep talks always bugged him when he’d been a member of Special Forces.
Technically, he still was a member of Special Forces, and, in point of fact, several of the men on the mission with him outranked him. But joining the First Team had put him into his own special category, not only in terms of rank—there was no question Rankin was in charge of the extraction team—but also in terms of the government bureaucracy. Officially, he was assigned as a special aide to someone at the Pentagon whom he’d never met. Unofficially, he worked for Ferguson and the CIA. They took their orders, to the extent Ferguson took orders, from Corrine Alston and maybe—Rankin wasn’t entirely clear because he didn’t get involved in that end of things—from the head of the CIA.
The First Team gig was the sweetest assignment Rankin had ever had, a grab bag of action that never got dull. Working with Ferguson was the only downside. The CIA officer was extremely clever and could handle SpecOps as well as the fooling-people spy stuff, but Rankin didn’t appreciate his wisecracks and know-it-all attitude. Without the CIA agent around, though, things were good.
“Beach is clear, sir,” said the pilot.
“Let’s get in,” said Rankin.
The helicopter zoomed over the rock-strewn beach and turned toward a small knot of trees. Rankin leapt out as it touched down, racing through the copse to make sure no one had managed to hide themselves here. The two Special Forces soldiers who’d been in the back of the chopper fanned out, making absolutely sure the spies in the sky hadn’t missed anything.
The small island was barely two and a half acres, so it didn’t take that long to search.
“Landing area is clear. Chopper Two, come on in,” Rankin said over the radio when the reecee turned up nothing beyond a few pieces of driftwood. Then he went to help the pilot get the camo net on Bird One, just in case the smugglers decided to bury their loot here.