even contemplated boarding an airliner in the future. The U.N.’s Secretary General endorsed a General Assembly motion to immediately stop all technical aid to North Korea, but under the urging of the United States, food aid for the suppressed people of North Korea, especially for children, was to continue.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
All through the Pentagon, clutches of officers were watching a tape of Marte Price’s “exclusive” interview with Freeman, the audio gaps caused by the bleeps in this tape resulting in a segmented sound track that Freeman would subsequently describe to Marte Price as having been sabotaged by Big Brother.
“Which Big Brother?” Marte had pressed in the pre-broadcast interview, the kind of question that endeared her to him. “They’re everywhere, Douglas.”
“Marte,” he’d told her, “next to mass murder, the worst thing, the very worst thing, these bastard terrorists have done to us is to excite those who love bossing other people around, spying on them, cutting into freedom of speech, freedom of movement. Hell, I never used one profanity in my teleconference, but the White House had to go and bleep me.”
“You did call the North Koreans scumbags, General.”
“Well, dammit, they are. Any creep who makes missiles to use for the express purpose of blowing children and other civilians out of the air is a scumbag, and needs to be bagged as scum!”
“Can I use that, Douglas?”
“You betcha.”
She used it, and the Pentagon saw the interview. Halfway through, General of the Air Force Michael Lesand was shaking his head as he heard Freeman’s epithets for the North Korean leadership, the epithets, articulately spoken, clearly calculated to tell the world just what General Douglas Freeman thought of those “gutless child murderers in Pyongstink who provided shoulder-fired missiles to terrorists.”
Of the three terrorist “duos,” one pair, the Guatemalans at Dallas/Fort Worth, killed themselves and several passengers with what the FBI now determined was their backup Igla 2C in the map case, the first Igla having been the missile that had brought down the Brazilian airliner.
Of the other four remaining terrorists, two were run to ground, found at JFK, as Freeman had postulated to Eleanor, toweling themselves down in one of the international terminal’s “Executive Class” bar-equipped suites. At LAX, the two Army of Palestine terrorists were cornered in one of the circular waiting rooms, screaming in Arabic, until they were felled by the SWAT team’s shotgun-fired nonlethal bean bags and taken away.
Ironically, had the Dear Leader and his North Korean henchmen kept quiet about the Kosong raid, they might have gotten away with their lie that the missile and launcher displayed by Freeman were fake, or that the Americans had bought them to try to frame the NKA. But all the histrionics of denial with which Pyongyang initially greeted the “blatant attack on our freedom-loving people” were undone the moment they’d tried to make propaganda out of a false confession from Bone. By showing Bone Brady’s face to the world, admitting the American attack had taken place, they were now caught utterly off guard when the launcher and missile with the Korean MIDs were presented by Freeman, the rest of the SpecFor team’s faces being blacked out on Freeman’s orders — not to deny them the glory of their moment, but to protect their identities.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Homeland airport security, quite independent of Freeman’s message to search their infrared tapes at Honolulu Airport had, as a matter of post-9/11 standard procedure, already done so. They could see two possible intruders who had crossed from the civilian section of the huge airport into the “Restricted — Deadly Force Authorized” area between 2200 and 2247 hours on the night during which the big SOCOM — Special Operations Command — Galaxy had landed with its cargo of all-weather-wrapped equipment aboard.
Facial ID was impossible, the infrared cameras recording merely two “bleeds”—white thermal blobs on a grayish background. One figure, a tall individual, seemed to be wearing what looked like coveralls, like so many mechanics at both the civilian and military ends of the huge complex of runways. His ID badge, which he wore around his neck, was giving off a civilian employee’s IR dots, the same kind of stick-on, off-the-shelf IR dots as had been used by Freeman’s team. This told Homeland Security Agent Johnny Suzuki and FBI Agent Jenny Osaka that whoever it was holding the big IR binoculars and what appeared to be a small camera was almost certainly a spy who had guts, for there were random Humvee night patrols, especially after 9/11 and the triple hit against the airliners. But whoever it was also seemed to know the location of the invisible laser beam that would trigger alarms at the military airport’s headquarters, should they be trespassed.
The second intruder was a figure who was not bleeding IR radiation but was surprisingly cool and had recognizable Navy IR dots — probably one of the Navy SEALs from Pearl Harbor honing his “infiltration and exfiltration of enemy bases” techniques.
There seemed to be no doubt that the taller individual was the primary suspect, but neither Homeland Security’s Johnny Suzuki nor FBI’s Jenny Osaka could be 100 percent sure. When Johnny Suzuki, at Homeland Security headquarters in downtown Honolulu, did the computer search for all those registered in Honolulu and the rest of Oahu who either owned or had bought zoom IR binoculars and IR cameras, it took only three and a half minutes, something that would have astonished his Nisei great-uncle who had worked as a military policeman until he was interned during World War II.
Of the seventeen names that popped up on the computer, two were now deceased, three in old-age homes, and only one of the remaining twelve — information that Johnny had been able to acquire by using the man’s Social Security number given at the time of purchase of the binoculars — was over six feet tall. It was now easy to identify the man from the civilian airport’s photo ID security files. His name was Yudah Ulama, a Muslim of South Asian descent, originally from Indonesia, who had been granted U.S. citizenship in November 2004.
General Freeman, more used to tactical and strategic maneuvers than to counterespionage, nevertheless made what Aussie described as a “bloody good suggestion” to Homeland Security and the FBI — namely, to be a little lax, though nothing
The plan worked, up to a point. That is, intel must have been passed from Yokohama, from where the Galaxy took off, to Hawaii, regarding the departure of the plane loaded with what seemed to be a triple-engine helo or boat in all-weather wrap. In any event, the intruder showed up again near the military/civilian airport perimeter, obviously trying to gather more information about the strange craft hidden under the wrap than he’d been able to garner when he’d first seen it being loaded aboard the Galaxy on its way to Japan.
But what could Homeland Security or the FBI arrest him for? Trespassing? Instead, they put the suspect under 24-7 surveillance. The next day, he worked a long, twelve-hour shift as a food dispenser in a small teriyaki/rice concession stand
For both Johnny and Jenny, the intruder and his teriyaki-stand cover seemed as good a connect as they were going to get. His religion and height — six feet, two-and-a-half inches — in a predominantly short population only added to their certainty. But he had still not met anyone, though both Homeland Security and the FBI now knew he had a darkroom in the small bungalow he rented in Chinatown, and must be developing the photos of the Galaxy and the RS. Besides this infraction of the Patriot Act, not registering his lab, he had not committed any more serious a crime than trespassing in a DoD-restricted area.
The break for Johnny Suzuki and Jenny Osaka came on the second day, when, on what was obviously his day off, the man, Yudah Ulama, took the beach bus to Hanauma Bay, where he left a can of Coke beneath a rock well back from the beach’s concession stand, after which he changed under cover of a beach towel and went swimming, joining the hundreds of others who were enjoying watching the myriad marine life in the crystal-clear waters of the horseshoe-shaped bay.
