Black Wind

“Perhaps your failure to dispose of the crew was not a bad thing,” Kang stated with a slight glare. “It will further embarrass the Japanese and keep the American intelligence effort focused on Japan. They will, of course, be searching for the Baekje. The sooner she can be put back to sea, the better.”

“I will provide a continuous update from the shipyard,” Tongju replied. “And the two Americans?”

Kang perused a leather-bound schedule book. “I am traveling to Seoul for an engagement with the minister of unification this evening and shall return tomorrow. Keep them alive until then.”

“I shall give them a last supper,” Tongju replied without humor.

Kang ignored the comment and stuck his nose back into a stack of financial documents. Taking the clue, the assassin turned and departed Kang's office without making a sound.

A half mile from the Inchon enclosed dock where Baekje was undergoing its cosmetic refit, two men in a dingy pickup truck slowly circled a nondescript shipyard building. Empty pallets and rusting flatbed carriers littered the grounds around the windowless structure, which was marked by a faded kang shipping company sign perched over the main entrance. Dressed in worn coveralls and grease-stained baseball caps, the two men were part of a heavily armed undercover security team numbering two dozen strong who patrolled the supersecret facility around the clock. The dilapidated exterior of the building hid a high-tech engineering development center filled with the latest super computing technology. The main and upper floors were dedicated to developing satellite payloads for Kang's satellite communications business. A small team of crack engineers worked to incorporate concealed eavesdropping and reco

The I-411's deadly bombs had been quietly transferred into the lab, where an ordnance expert had assisted the biologists in separating the powdery smallpox virus from the sixty-year-old compartmentalized aerial bombs. The viruses had been freeze-dried by the Japanese, allowing the pathogens to remain inert for storage and handling. The smallpox-laden bombs were designed to maintain their deadly efficacy for the duration of the submarine's voyage until hydrogenated upon deployment. Over sixty years later, their porcelain casings had repelled all destructive effects from decades of submersion. The aged bomb payloads were still every bit as potent as when they were loaded.

Placing samples of the cream-colored powder into a bio safe container, the biologists carefully initiated a controlled reconstitution of the viruses using a sterile water-based diluent. Under a microscopic eye, the dormant, block-shaped microorganisms could be seen waking from their long slumber and bouncing off each other like bumper cars as they resumed their lethal state. Despite the long period of dormancy, only a small percentage of the viruses failed to rejuvenate.

The research lab was run by a highly paid Ukrainian microbiologist named Sarghov. A former scientist with Biopreparat, the old Soviet Union civilian agency that fronted the republic's military biological weapons program, Sarghov had taken his knowledge of bio weapon genetic manipulation and sold his skills in the marketplace to the highest bidder. Though he never desired to leave his homeland, his stock as a budding scientific leader in the agency was tarnished when he was caught in bed with the wife of a politburo member. Fearing for his life,

he made his way through Ukraine to Romania, where he hopped a Kang freighter in the Black Sea. A hefty bribe to the ship's captain led him to higher contacts in the company, where his scientific skills were recognized and soon put to illicit use.

With ample resources, Sarghov quietly compiled a high-tech DNA research laboratory stocked with the equipment and tools necessary for a skilled bioengineer to splice, dice, isolate, or recombine the genetic material of one microorganism to another. In the confines of Sarghov's secret laboratory, a smorgasbord of dangerous bacterial and viral agents was littered about the facility, the seeds he cultivated to create a garden of death. But he still felt impotent. His stock was a commoner's cache of easily acquired agents, such as the hepatitis B virus and tuberculosis mycobacterium. Potentially lethal agents in their own right, they were nothing like the deadly Ebola, smallpox, and Marburg viruses he had worked with during his days at the Russian facility in Obolensk. Sarghov's feverish attempts at creating a knockout killer agent with the resources at hand had failed. He felt like a boxer with one hand tied behind his back. What he needed and desired was a truly lethal pathogen, one from the A-list.

His gift to evil science came from an unexpected source. A North Korean agent in Tokyo had infiltrated a government records disposal center and intercepted a cache of classified Japanese documents. Expecting to find a bonanza of current Japanese security secrets, the agent's handlers in Pyongyang were angered to find that the records were old World War II classified documents. Included in the heist were reports relating to Imperial Army experiments with biological weapons, records that were to be destroyed for fear of embarrassing the government. A sharp intelligence analyst stumbled upon the Imperial Army's involvement with the final missions of the I-403 and I-411, however, and Sarghov was soon on his way to his own supply of Variola major.

In the Frankenstein world of genetic engineering, biologists have found it a daunting task to create an entirely new organism from scratch. But manipulating existing microorganisms through deliberate mutation, then prompting their reproduction to useful quantities, has been an ongoing art since the seventies. Laboratory-formulated agricultural crops that are resistant to pestilence and drought have been a major societal benefit of such bioengineering, along with the more controversial creation of super developed livestock. But the dark side of genetic surgery has always been the potential creation of a new strain of virus or bacteria with unknown, and possibly catastrophic, consequences.

For a man of his propensity, Sarghov was not content simply to regenerate the supply of smallpox. He had much more up his sleeve. With help from a Fi