The Arctic Event by James H. Cobb Read Free Book Online Page A

all the international traffic for Beijing, and many of the tourists and business travelers bustling around her now were American or European.
    Cathay Pacific had been chosen as the preferred carrier for the mythical Mr. Bellerman because its boarding gates were located immediately adjacent to those of Air Koryo. Crossing to the Cathay Pacific waiting area, she took a seat that gave her a peripheral view of the North Korean gate. Once more she removed the false file from her shoulder bag and focused her false attention upon it.
    Sun Chok’s flight across the Pacific had been a long and tortuous one: from Vancouver to the Philippines, from the Philippines to Singapore, from Singapore to Hong Kong, and from Hong Kong to Beijing. Pyongyang was not an easy place to get to from anywhere. Twice during the journey, Franklin Sun Chok had been contacted by North Korean agents, who had passed him falsified passports, visas, and identification, and in Hong Kong he’d picked up his escort from the People’s Security Force.
    At each stop Sun Chok had also acquired a CIA shadow. A network of American agents had been deployed to cover the primary Pacific travel nodes, monitoring the traitor’s transit. In Singapore, the local station chief had even been forced to hastily intervene with the local authorities when a sloppily forged document had almost led to Sun Chok’s arrest.
    Randi Russell would be the last link in this chain. She would oversee Franklin Sun Chok’s final passage into darkness.
    Covertly she studied the youthful traitor. He kept glancing back down the concourse. Did he still fear some last-minute pursuit? Or could he be thinking back to San Francisco Bay and the apartment, life, and family he would never see again? Emoting to some idealized political principal was all well and good, but it was quite another thing to live out its reality.
    Randi Russell knew full well what this reality was. She had been on the ground inside the last “workers’ paradise.” The experience still occasionally made her wake up bathed in a chill sweat.
    She wondered if the young man was having second thoughts about his decision. Could it be that his fashionable intellectualist’s disdain for the United States was starting to wear thin? Could he now be sensing a ghost of what had made his parents flee to the Western world?
    If so, such considerations were coming too late. Another delegation of black-suited North Koreans had been standing by at the Air Koryo Jetway, a security team from North Korea’s Beijing embassy. They closed around Sun Chok, a few curt words were exchanged, and the American was hustled down the extendable Jetway to the waiting airliner, past the Chinese People’s Police officer, who was careful to not see him or his escorts.
    Randi caught his eyes as he looked back one last time, and then he was gone.
    She closed her eyes and sat unmoving for a long moment. Mission accomplished.
    She knew what would happen next. The information contained within Franklin Sun Chok’s laptop computer and within Sun Chok himself would be poured into the North Korean ballistic missile program. The information would promise leads in the direction of a foolproof countermeasures system that could defeat the U.S. antimissiles and leave the cities of the American West Coast open to attack.
    But one after another, each promising lead would reach a technological dead end after devouring a precious percentage of the North Korean military budget and thousands of equally precious research and development man hours.
    Eventually it would become apparent to the North Koreans that they had been duped, that their intelligence coup had, in fact, been a time bomb planted within their armaments program by the United States.
    North Korea’s “Dear Leaders” would be displeased. Specifically, they would be displeased with Franklin Sun Chok. The displeasure of the “Dear Leaders” would not be trifling.
    Randi snapped her eyes open. If she were not