“Ask him,” Beck said to Kang. “Ask him why he’s killing us.” Beck was even more furious with himself than with Sung. He should have checked the bag as soon as Sung got on board. But he simply hadn’t imagined that Sung would destroy his own chance for escape.
“If he doesn’t start talking, I’ll put a bullet in him.” Beck drew his pistol. “I will, too. Tell him.”
Kang finished translating. The cabin was silent. Then Sung spoke, the words coming in broken spurts.
“He says the security services have his family. Wife, parents, children, cousins. They’ll all die if he doesn’t follow orders.”
“How did he blow his cover?” When Sung heard Kang’s translation, he shook his head before muttering a response.
“He didn’t. He’s sure. It must have been someone on our side. One day the police came. Nothing he said mattered. They knew.”
“Why didn’t they just arrest us, sink the boat, when we landed?”
This time Sung said nothing at all. Beck put aside his pistol and kneeled on Sung’s chest and hit him in the face, twice. He got his shoulder behind the second punch and felt Sung’s flat nose break under his fist. “There’s no time for this.”
Sung spoke, the words so quiet that Kang had to lean in to hear. “He doesn’t know. He thinks they wanted to see where we were going, who would meet us.”
“Why didn’t you warn us?” Beck asked Sung directly in Korean. The North Koreans had forced Sung to ask CIA for the pickup, of course. But he could have flashed a different code, one that told them that he’d been compromised.
“No choice.”
“Of course you had a choice,” Beck said.
Sung murmured to Kang. “He wants to show us something. Says you have to get up,” Kang said.
Beck stood. The North Korean shrugged off his nylon sweatpants. He wasn’t wearing underwear, just some surgical gauze over his crotch, stained black-red with blood.
Sung lifted the patch.
“Jesus,” Beck said.
Sung’s penis and testicles had been removed, leaving a raw hole in his crotch that had been pulled together with crude black stitches. A plastic catheter poked from the wound, spilling drops of reddish-tinted urine.
“Fuck. Animals.”
Tears ran down Sung’s cheeks, mixing with the blood still streaming from his nose, the combination a ghastly purple under the cabin’s blue running lights. More than ever, Beck was glad for the little glass capsules in his pocket. He pulled up Sung’s sweatpants as gently as he could. Sung was talking again, his shoulders shaking.
“He says, he says they told him he would die no matter what,” Kang said. “For betraying Kim Jong Il. But they said if he warned us, they’d hurt his sons and his father also, the same way they hurt him.”
“Tell him he’s not gonna die. We’re not letting him die. Even if he wants to.”
NOW THAT BECK HAD DUMPED the transceiver, the North Koreans had lost them, at least temporarily. The radar feed from the Hawkeye showed that the Su-25 and the helicopters had made two loops around the transceiver. Soon enough they’d realize their mistake and widen the search.
Meanwhile, Choe had changed the Phantom’s course, turning the boat to 165 degrees, south-southeast, angling slightly toward South Korea. If they had both engines running, they could have gotten to international waters in twenty minutes. Instead they had an hourlong ride. Still, Beck wanted to believe the worst was over. With every minute that passed, they were closer to getting out.
Sung lay curled against the wall, a hand covering his crotch, his body shaking. Beck wanted to ask more questions, but this obviously wasn’t the time. Beck reached for his emergency first-aid kit. He grabbed a bottle of forty-milligram OxyContin and shook one and then another of the yellow pills into Sung’s hand. The North Korean popped them into his mouth with a hopeless shrug and choked them down. Whatever you’re giving me, his eyes said, whatever it does, I’ll take it.
FIVE MINUTES PASSED, and another five. Sung sighed and closed his eyes, and Beck hoped the Oxy had knocked him out, or at least dulled his pain. The feed from the Hawkeye showed that the helicopters and the Su- 25 had split up, circling south and west as they searched for the Phantom. Through the blown-out windows at the back of the cabin, Beck saw one of the helicopters making long diagonals to the north, its spotlight shining down on the empty black waves. We might get out of this, Beck thought. Busted engine and all. We really might.
Then—
The pilothouse vibrated as the sonar waves bounced off the Phantom’s hull, three in a row in quick succession. Beck had never felt sonar so strong. The boat’s sonar-detection system began to sound its automatic alarm, the whine of its horn filling the cabin, telling them what they already knew: a submarine had targeted them. From very, very close. Just like that, they were in worse trouble than ever.
“Where is he?” Beck said.
“Six hundred yards east. Periscope depth. Want me to ping him back?”
“No.” What was the point? They had no torpedoes or depth charges, and on the one-in-a-million chance that the sub had missed them, they might as well stay quiet.
“Choe,” Beck said. “Heading two-one-five.” Southwest again.
“Two-one-five.” Choe began to turn the helm.
“Tell him to push that engine as fast as he can,” Beck said to Kang.
“I think he figured that out all on his own.” But Kang said something in Korean to Choe nonetheless. Without looking up, Choe said in English, “Thirty-three knots.” He spat a stream of Korean, a language that had never sounded uglier to Beck than at this moment. Beck knew enough of what Choe was saying to understand that Choe was cursing him for leading them on a mission doomed to failure even before it began. Nonetheless, Choe pushed the throttle forward and the Phantom picked up speed.
Again the cabin rattled. The sub was double-checking its range. Its skipper couldn’t believe how close he was either. But Beck didn’t think the sub would fire without being certain it wasn’t accidentally targeting a fishing trawler.
He looked east but couldn’t see the periscope. He wondered if the sub had tracked them all the way from the rendezvous point. Probably not. The North Koreans had ordered it here in case the Phantom somehow escaped their cordon. Running across the sub was nothing more than bad luck. The kind of bad luck that would kill them all.
Still, as long as it could move, the Phantom had a chance, Beck knew. North Korean subs were badly made copies of Russian Romeo-class subs, whose basic design was fifty years old. Thus the telltale active sonar pings. Unlike modern subs, the Romeos needed active sonar to lock on their targets, even at close range.
The North Korean torpedoes were equally dated, copies of old Russian 53–61 Alligators, with a top speed of forty knots and a range under ten miles. With both engines, the Phantom could easily have outrun the torpedo. Instead, the boat’s fate would depend on how quickly the North Koreans could load and fire, how badly the years of famine had degraded their readiness.
Beck’s watch read 00:00:30. A new day. He hoped he’d see the end of it.
Thirty seconds later, Kang looked up from his screen. “They’ve launched,” he said.
“Range?”
“Twelve hundred yards.”
Now it’s just math, Beck thought. Either that Alligator runs out of juice before it gets to us, or it tears us up. The torpedo was running 1,200 yards a minute, give or take. With its blown engine, the Phantom was limited to about 1,000 yards a minute. The torpedo had started 1,200 yards behind, but it was picking up roughly 200 yards a minute, maybe a little less. Unless it ran out of fuel, it would be making their acquaintance in six minutes, seven at most.
For a moment, Beck thought about ordering Choe to stop the Phantom so they could try to launch the
