early prototype to catch fire, a rumor circulated that the SEALs had canceled the program. In fact, it had merely been put on hold until a student at MIT conceived of a completely new way to deal with the batteries. At that point, it was full speed ahead.
The minisub could be launched from any Virginia-class submarine and had a range of over 150 miles. For the insertion into North Korea, the ASDS had been launched from the USS Texas. Once the four-man team had exited the minisub via its moon pool, the ASDS left to rejoin the Texas and cruise the Sea of Japan for the next seventy-two hours until returning for the team’s extraction.
What was to have been a four-SEAL DEVGRU reconnaissance and surveillance team ended up being three SEALs and an agent from the Central Intelligence Agency’s Special Operations Group. The SEAL leading the mission hadn’t been crazy about the substitution. Thirty-two-year-old Lieutenant James “Jimi” Fordyce of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, thought swapping out one of his shooters for a spook, even one with local contacts and language capability, was neither a good idea nor necessary for the successful outcome of the mission. The Pentagon, the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Joint Special Operations Command had all disagreed, and Fordyce had been overruled.
The other two SEALs on the team were twenty-eight-year-old Petty Officer First Class Lester Johnson of Freeport, Maine, and twenty-five-year-old Petty Officer Second Class Eric “Tuck” Tucker of Bend, Oregon.
Rounding out the team was thirty-year-old CIA operative Billy Tang from Columbus, Ohio.
Billy not only spoke the language, but he knew North Korea better than almost anyone else in the United States. Over the last six years, he had successfully infiltrated the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea eleven times. Whether his teammates appreciated it or not, there was a host of problems they could end up facing in the DPRK that weren’t going to be fixed with the business end of a gun.
Because the North Koreans had the ability to pick up transmissions beamed out of the country, this was going to be a no-comms op. The men could communicate with each other via their encrypted radios, but even then they had been instructed to do so only sparingly. If they were compromised or captured, there would be no rescue. The United States would disavow any knowledge of the men and why they were there. That was why Billy Tang had been added to the team. If things went south, Billy was their insurance policy.
As soon as Jimi Fordyce had given the all clear, the men had begun swimming and the minisub had gone to rejoin the Texas. The ASDS had the capability to remain submerged for days without resupply, but the sooner it left, the better. Even along this remote, jagged strip of the North Korean coastline, a coastal patrol had passed right above them. Putting the minisub down in a depression in the sea floor had allowed them to just barely escape detection. Leaving the getaway car idling in the driveway would have been just asking for trouble and they were already going to have enough of it.
Nothing about the mission was going to be easy, but that’s why Operation Gold Dust had been built around the SEALs. No matter what happened, they would see it all the way through. And things did happen. Even in a business this precise with men this well trained, Mr. Murphy, of the eponymous Murphy’s Law, had a way of popping up at all the worst times. The SEALs had witnessed it during the Bin Laden raid and on multiple other operations. Sometimes, things just happened. But when they did, SEALs adapted and overcame. Failure in their culture was never an option.
The surface swim was made difficult by a strong current that tried to drag them off target. When they finally reached the shore and pulled themselves and their equipment out of the water, they had taken a few minutes to rest. They needed their strength. Towering above them was a cliff the height of an eighteen-story office building.
As if they could read each other’s minds, the three SEALs rose in concert and began prepping their climbing gear.
Billy Tang had worked with SEALs before. They were smart, hard men just this side of machines. They embodied a toughness that very few possessed these days. No matter how bad things got—no matter how cold, how desperate, how dangerous, or how deadly—the SEALs pushed on.