Yang-do Island, North Korea
Rafiq sipped his tea, keeping his face the very picture of calmness. The four large wall screens at the front of the stadium-style room were blank, waiting for inputs. The dozen operators sat behind their computer workstations, idle.
He’d shaved and donned his olive-green North Korean officer’s uniform. The rest of the operators were similarly dressed in their best, their dark hair combed, caps resting in their laps.
“Chul, it’s time,” said So-won. Her thin face had a glow of excitement.
Rafiq nodded but said nothing. This was their moment of truth, the moment when they found out if their audacious plan was going to work. He was confident about their ability to control Beijing and Japan, but the Americans worried him. The US physical security was too great: too many layers, too many opportunities for failure. But every network, no matter how secure, was only as strong as its weakest link.
Rafiq believed he’d found his weak link, someone who could circumvent all that security and take Rafiq’s code right to the heart of the network. But finding and compromising an inside operative was a tricky business. Some people, no matter how good they looked on paper, when faced with a moral choice found a core of confidence even they didn’t know they possessed. Others, unable to live with the potential consequences, tried to hurt themselves. There were relatively few who could handle the pressure of being compromised and still perform.
Money was rarely the difference. Often the telltale pressure points were minor in the grand scheme of life, but they mattered a great deal to the individual. Things like pride. And shame.
Rafiq had a nose for weakness. He knew how to ferret out individuals with a fatal character flaw and exploit that softness to maximum effect.
Lieutenant Commander Weston Merville had been his choice. Now Rafiq would find out if he had chosen wisely.
He set his teacup down with care and leaned over the keyboard, entering the command to ping the program sleeping on the servers of the USS Blue Ridge.
If it was even there.
He sat back and folded his hands in his lap, waiting.
The cursor blinked as steady as a metronome beat.
“It may take some time, Chul,” So-won whispered.
They were in uncharted waters. No one had any idea how long it would take for the command ping to establish contact with the program residing on the USS Blue Ridge.
If the program was even there. If Merville had done his job.
The cursor blinked.
This could take minutes, maybe even hours. He passed his teacup to a soldier, amazed that his grip showed not even a tremble to reveal the quaking mass of anxiety roiling in his gut.
“More tea, please,” he said.
The soldier nodded and hurried off.
The cursor blinked.
What would he do if the access to the US network failed? Pak would still be pleased. The access to the Chinese and Japanese networks alone was more than enough to fulfill the assignment from the Russian Bratva. Hell, if he believed the intelligence reports from the DPRK Special Branch, the Chinese were already causing havoc in the region—and Rafiq had yet to do anything!
Pak would take credit for it, of course, but that was Pak’s reason for being. Just as Rafiq could size up an individual and see immediately how the person could be exploited, Pak could size up any situation and assess his personal gain from it just as quickly. He had a nose for profit. He was just born into the wrong society.
The tea arrived and Rafiq accepted the cup without so much as a ripple in the surface of the liquid. Meanwhile, So-won shifted in her chair and fretted next to him. She reached for the keyboard and he stayed her hand.
“Wait” was all he said.
She nodded and leaned back. Rafiq sipped his tea. The operators in the room all watched them, watched him. What would they do if the command ping failed? Surely there was at least one spy in the group. He had chosen his people carefully, but in North Korea, spying was assumed as a fact of daily life. Children spied on parents, neighbors spied on each other, people spied on strangers on the bus. In a way, it was the genius of the DPRK: a self-policing state with a completely flat hierarchy of power. There was the Supreme Leader, then everyone else. But everyone else believed that if they could just amass a certain amount of notice, they would be elevated above the crowd. They would find themselves on a new level of power beneath the Supreme Leader.
It was a fallacy. Rafiq had seen the Supreme Leader execute peasants and his most trusted generals on the same day for the same offense: lack of loyalty. Even the great man’s uncle and half brother had fallen prey to his need for unquestioned faithfulness.
Rafiq tore his eyes away from the screen and scanned the room. At least one of you is a spy. Show yourself.
“Look,” So-won said, pointing to the screen.
The cursor had stopped blinking.
Rafiq sat up in his chair. Was the program hung up? Should he send another ping? He reached for the keyboard, but So-won stopped him.
“Wait,” she said.
The cursor seemed to flicker; then a torrent of code spilled down the screen, faster than Rafiq could absorb it.
So-won, still sitting next to him, wept.
The screen resolved into a map of the western Pacific. The label at the top of the screen said US SEVENTH FLEET. As more data flowed in, new contacts began to show up on the map.
Rafiq tapped in a sequence of commands, and the wall screens at the front of the room displayed the picture. The operator’s mouths opened in wonder. Spontaneously, they began cheering and clapping.
Rafiq stood and waved.
His gamble on Merville had paid off. Let the chaos begin.