Ghost Ship (NUMA Files 12)

As Laurent disappeared, Brèvard turned back to his breakfast but found he’d lost his appetite. The last thing he needed was to be exposed before he was ready to move.

Kurt and Joe rode in the back of Than Rang’s tractor trailer as it cruised along South Korean highway Route 3. Through the wonders of modern technology, Kurt could track their progress on his phone.

“Still heading for the DMZ?” Joe asked.

“Like a homing pigeon,” Kurt said.

Forty-five miles from Seoul, and no more than a mile from the edge of the DMZ, they felt the truck gear down. A series of twists and turns made it feel as if they’d gone off the highway. At the same time, Kurt’s reception went out and didn’t come back. Wherever they were, it was beyond the range of the cell phone towers.

He put the phone away and glanced over at Joe. “You can forget about calling the cavalry, we’ve lost our signal.”

“Great,” Joe muttered.

Kurt eased from his spot and crawled to the far wall where a pinprick of light was coming through a hole in the truck’s metal skin. He cozied up to it and stared through.

“Any signs saying ‘Welcome to North Korea’?” Joe asked.

“Not yet,” Kurt said. “Mostly bright lights, and a rather funky smell.”

Joe smelled it too. “It smells like . . .”

“Garbage,” Kurt said. “We’re driving into a giant landfill. I see overhead lights and dump trucks and bulldozers mashing everything down. Looks like half of Seoul’s trash is out there.”

“One of Than Rang’s companies,” Joe said, remembering the briefing.

Kurt nodded. “You know what they say: Where there’s muck, there’s brass.”

“Brass?”

“Coins,” Kurt explained. “Dinero, big bucks.”

“Right,” Joe replied. “Let’s hope that where there’s muck, there’s computer experts.”

“Better here than across the border,” Kurt added, agreeing with his friend.

The truck rumbled along, moving slower with each passing moment, eventually lurching to a stop with a hiss of the brakes. From Joe’s perspective, the glare from the arc lights illuminating the landfill was suddenly cut off. “We’ve pulled inside a shed of some kind. Maybe a loading bay.”

Kurt stretched, and made sure he was ready for action, as the truck rumbled to a stop for a second time. He got in position behind a stack of computer parts and made sure he couldn’t be seen from the rear door of the trailer. Joe did the same.

They waited in the darkness, listening to voices speaking Korean, until the sound of a heavy mechanical gearing drowned them out. Almost immediately Kurt felt the truck moving. Not forward or backward but descending.

“Why am I getting a sinking feeling?” Joe whispered.

“Because we are,” Kurt said.

The rate of descent picked up and then seemed to ease, but Kurt knew that was an illusion, like the feeling of being motionless in an airplane when one is actually moving at six hundred miles per hour. They were still dropping, but at a constant rate. Their bodies had just grown used to it.

He glanced at his watch and noted the second hand moving past twelve. It made it all the way around once and had almost reached the six o’clock position when the descent finally slowed and stopped.

“Ninety seconds,” he whispered. “How fast do you think we were moving?”

“Not all that fast,” Joe said, “maybe two or three feet per second.”

Kurt made a quick calculation. “That puts us somewhere around two hundred feet below the surface.”

After the smooth ride down, the next move was a jolt as a large crane grabbed the shipping container and lifted it off the back of the truck.

Kurt looked out through the pinhole and gave Joe the playby-play. “A big overhead crane has us, by the look of things. Appears to be moving us to some kind of platform.”