was given the all clear by the operative in the stairwell, they exited the room.
With Harvath pulling the case down the brightly carpeted hall, they made their way to a service corridor where another one of Levy’s people was waiting with the freight elevator. After making sure the coast was clear downstairs and the BMW was at the loading area, they stepped into the elevator and depressed the button for the ground floor.
Once they were there, Cowles met them and helped Harvath wheel the Storm Case out the service entrance, down the ramp, and load it into the trunk of the waiting BMW. Harvath took the front passenger position, Levy got in behind him, and Cowles sat behind the driver.
Quietly they pulled away from the loading dock, down the alley, and disappeared into the deepening night of Bur Dubai.
CHAPTER 16
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NORTH KOREA
During the five-hour drive, the Operation Gold Dust team tried to catch some more sleep, but it came only in fitful snatches. The North Korean roads were terrible. No sooner would they fall asleep than the truck would hit another rut, or a mammoth pothole, and they’d all be slammed awake.
When they arrived at the drop-off point, which was nothing more than a kilometer marker and a sign for the next village over one hundred kilometers away, they climbed out of the truck. While Billy Tang discussed the pickup with Hyun Su, the SEALs fanned out and took up firing positions.
Once Billy was done talking, he said good-bye to Hyun Su and rejoined the team. Fordyce studied their position on his map and compared it to what his GPS was telling him. With a lot of ground to cover and limited darkness in which to do it, he was anxious to get going.
The team waited until Hyun Su had driven off and they could no longer hear the sound of his engine. And then they waited some more.
They let the pitch-black North Korean night close in around them as they familiarized themselves with every sound it produced. Finally, Fordyce gave his men the signal to move out.
Their course would take them up through a series of steep, forested foothills and over the back side of one of the mountains that bracketed their objective—the tapered valley that had been partially obscured from satellite view. They were expected to be dug in by sunrise and to spend the day collecting as much intelligence as they could before retreating to the pickup point, where Hyun Su would drive them back to the coast. There, they’d link up with the minisub and be delivered back to the USS Texas, where they could prepare a full briefing and securely transmit it back to the States.
So far, the forest floor was covered with soft pine needles and reminded Fordyce a little bit of Pennsylvania. If his Lab Bailey had been along, he could have imagined for a moment that they were out for a nighttime hunt. That was until the gradient began to change.
Even though the team was in top physical condition, the steep angle, combined with the eighty-plus pounds of gear each of them was carrying, made the climb more difficult.
They drank water from their Camelbaks via the hoses threaded through their pack straps and kept their suppressed rifles ready to fire. Fordyce, Johnson, and Tucker all carried H&K 417 carbines, while Tang carried an M4 by FN, which had been secreted in the back of the truck with the SEALs.
Their direction of approach had been chosen not because it would give them the best view, but because it was the most challenging and, they hoped, would be less guarded than the other ways into the valley.
As Fordyce checked their progress once again on his GPS, he reviewed the mission for the thousandth time in his head.
According to the intelligence the CIA had developed, China was training some kind of landing force on the other side of this mountain in rural North Korea. It hadn’t been described as an invasion force, but rather a follow-on force that was supposed to land after a major attack on the United States took place. No one, though, seemed to know what kind of attack it was going to be. All Fordyce and his team had been told was that it was designed to wipe out at least 90 percent of the U.S. population.
Using the term “rural” in the mission briefing had drawn head-shaking from the SEALs. There wasn’t much of North Korea that wasn’t