rural. There were virtually no modern conveniences in the entire country outside a very small handful of cities. The DPRK was another testament to the failures of communism. The entire nation was a horrific pit of misery and human suffering.
The DPRK was beset with starvation and malnutrition. Bodies fished out of rivers after floods or boys lucky enough to escape alive showed teenagers were now five inches shorter and weighed twenty-five pounds less on average than their contemporaries in South Korea. Mental retardation brought on by childhood lack of nutrition was estimated to have rendered a quarter of the DPRK’s male population unfit for military service. Even in its largest cities, like Pyongyang, Kaesong, and Chongjin, North Koreans were starving to death.
While the “free” people starved, “enemies of the state” had it even worse. The tales of North Korea’s savagery toward prisoners were brutal and legion.
Hundreds of thousands languished in hidden prison camps across the country—many sent without charge or trial. As part of a collective punishment system known as “guilt by association,” relatives, children, and entire families were imprisoned as well. To “cleanse the bloodline” of evil deeds, the DPRK often targeted three generations of a transgressor’s family.
Female prisoners were routinely forced to dig their own graves before being brutally raped by guards, and even visiting officials. The women would then be beaten to death with hammers or clubs, their bodies rolled into the graves and covered over with earth in order to hide the crime.
In addition to rape and murder, prisoners faced regular beatings, starvation, and other absolutely unthinkable acts of torture. It turned Fordyce’s stomach, as he knew it did for the rest of his team members. Every assignment required restraint and self-control, but this one especially so. There was no question what would happen to four heavily armed Americans if captured by the North Koreans.
The propaganda embarrassment for the United States would be off the charts, and Fordyce knew all too well that he and his men would be subjected to torture worse than any POW had ever seen. The team had made an unspoken pact. If things went bad, they’d do all they could to make sure they weren’t taken alive. Fordyce’s job, though, was to see to it that things didn’t go bad.
If the United States were to have any hope of deciphering the planned attack, it needed to know as much about the PLA’s landing party as possible. What were they training for? Why were they doing it in North Korea and not China? Did anything about the training suggest what kind of an attack was planned? Were they using equipment or techniques that would be applied in the wake of a biological, chemical, or nuclear attack? The list of questions was endless.
What wasn’t endless was the amount of time Fordyce and his team had to complete their assignment. They had been instructed to get in, get whatever intel they could, and get out. There was very little margin for error and every moment was going to count.
The narrow valley that was the team’s target was just under three hundred kilometers from the coast. As best any of the experts at the National Reconnaissance Office could tell, the North Koreans had shrouded parts of it with a series of overlapping nets suspended from tall poles. In order to hide what, though, was what the team had been sent in to discover.
Fordyce halted his men at the edge of the forest where the pine needles turned to scree. He wanted to give them a moment to grab a snack and rest before they went up and over the ridgeline.
He ate some cheese and sausage, the snack he liked to bring on operations, as he studied photos of the terrain. He was looking for the spot where he wanted them to cross over the top and then make their way down.
Part of the valley was being cultivated with crops of some sort, and a stream about twenty feet wide cut down the western side. The question no one had been able to answer back in the U.S. was how far they would have to descend into the valley in order to get a good enough view of what was under those nets. At some point they were going to lose the benefit of rocks and trees for cover and be left with nothing but high grass. And unlike trees and rocks, grass moved when you brushed past it.