Play it Again Sam Pt. 05

While we had been waiting in the parking garage, we had been listening closely to the terrorists talk over their radios. Sung's main job was to listen intently to the North Korean who was directing the action from the security office.

Once Julie brained him, Sung would have to get on the radio and pretend to be him. It was a job he was well suited for. He and the North Korean were from villages only ten miles apart, separated by the Korean demilitarized zone. After listening for an hour, Sung could copy his voice and speech patterns well enough to fool even the other North Koreans, especially over the radio.

Now we had to explain the commotion.

The other three North Koreans were in the ambassador's office on the fourth floor, which was well soundproofed. They probably didn't hear anything. But there were two mercs in the embassy lobby who would have heard a crash.

"What was that noise down there?" asked one of them.

Sung came on. "I have nothing on the cameras. It must have been outside."

Now my turn. The sniper was South African. I'd had a month to get his voice right.

"Some drunk didn't see the barricades. He swerved and hit the corner of the building."

"Are we compromised?" asked Sung. "Do we need to expedite the job?"

"Negative command," I answered. "The domkop pulled his car off the building and lit out. Building looks okay. We're good."

That should keep them happy upstairs for at least the next ten minutes.

I ran back to the security office. Julie had opened the door for me. The North Korean she had conked on the head was slumped in his seat behind the monitors. As usual, Julie had been too squeamish to put all her weight into the swing, so he was just unconscious.

I raised the silenced gun I had taken off the lobby merc.

THWAP-THWAP-THWAP

I shot him three times in the chest.

Julie squealed.

"Sorry. I didn't say anything before, but there can't be any survivors. We can't have them contradicting the story we're going to tell the cops and the government. If we leave one alive, they're going to squeeze them dry, and then they might notice that our story isn't adding up. These guys were going to kill millions of innocent people. I won't lose any sleep."

"Okay," I said. "We've gotta keep moving. Did you turn off the security cameras?"

"Yes, as soon as I hit that guy, I flipped the switches you told me to."

There were some things that I didn't want anybody seeing later. Like I couldn't have video of Julie walking out of the security office. She was supposed to be in the car. If they saw her walk out, they would look back for how she got in, and see someone entering four hours before the terrorists ever arrived. Now the tapes would be blank from 4:13 on. They'd have to take our word for how we did it.

Just like I couldn't afford to leave any of the terrorists alive, I couldn't have visual evidence that we were lying about what went down tonight. When I was asked how I knew all the things I did, I couldn't tell the truth. The authorities would never believe I was in a time loop. They would tear my life apart to find out how I had detailed advance knowledge of a nuclear attack.

Have you ever heard of rendition?

So I had to lie. So did Julie, though it pained her. I couldn't leave any witnesses or video that would contradict the narrative I had built.

I checked to make sure that the cameras were off. Julie had screwed that up before.

It was 4:21.

"All right," I said. "Here's the console that controls the elevators remotely. In two minutes, I want you to hit this button. Got it?"

"Got it."

"Once that's done, go get in the back of the Maybach, and stay there."

Julie gave me a hug as I was leaving. I let her.

I jogged through the lobby to the stairwell, giving Sung a thumbs up on the way. His job on the radio was done. From here on, I had seven minutes to end this. At 4:28, the North Koreans would put the nuke on a 30 minute countdown. I had no idea how to stop the timer, so I needed to get there first.

Sung was now on cleanup duty. I tossed the radio I had taken off the lobby merc on the floor near the body. Sung was to take that radio and the two on the dead mercs outside, and turn off their encryption. Mi-Sook was doing the same with the sniper team's radios.

We couldn't very well claim to have overheard chatter on our car radio if all their radios were encrypted. I'd told both of them to grab the radios through their shirts so as not to get fingerprints all over the dials.

In the meantime, I was jogging up the stairs to the fourth floor.

Once I reached the door to the fourth floor lobby, I brought my gun up and waited for Julie to send up the elevator.

I heard the "ding" as the elevator arrived.

I swung open the stairwell door and walked out gun first. Both the mercs standing guard had turned to look at the elevator.

I shot the one on the right twice in the back. The other guard made it halfway around before I shot him twice as well. They both went down.

Walking over to them, I put another bullet in each of their heads, just to be sure. I'd come a long way since getting nauseated at the sight of gore the first night I shot one of them.

At the door to the ambassador's office, I paused.

I'd made it to this point six times now.

4:25 am- "Showtime," I whispered.

Barging through the door, I saw a familiar scene.

There were cameras set up all over the room, facing towards the center.

Right in the middle was the nuclear bomb. It was a six foot long metal box, looking like a skinny coffin with a keypad on top. They had rolled it in on furniture dollies.

Two of the terrorists were standing over the cowering ambassador and his family. One had the wife by her hair. The other was looking into a camera across the room, screaming his nationalistic diatribe against South Korea and the U.S.

The third was standing by the nuke. He was between it and me.

All the North Koreans had remote detonators. I had cautioned Julie not to even breathe on the one in the security office. These three had all set their detonators on top of the nuke, with one of them staying within arms-reach at all times.

I brought my gun up and emptied my clip into the terrorist standing by the bomb. This guy was a tough son of a bitch. I'm not a good enough shot to risk going for the head, and I knew from prior attempts that if I shot him less than four times, he would still get his finger on the detonator.

I tossed aside the empty gun.

There was a shocked silence as the two remaining North Koreans stood in stunned disbelief.

This was my moment to say something heroic. I had put a lot of thought into it. I'd considered something tough and patriotic like- "Not in my country you son of a bitch!" But I'm not Toby Keith.

In the end I settled for a movie quote. It was much more me.

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass... and I'm all out of bubblegum."

Silence... and then the ambassador's teenage daughter snickered. Good for her.

One of the North Koreans made a mad dash for the detonators. I moved with him. It was a race.

We were evenly matched in speed, but he slowed down as he got there, in preparation to grab the detonator. I didn't slow down. As I neared, I leaped in the air and delivered a flying kick to the side of his head.

My foot connected solidly at his jaw line, lifting his head up and to the side. The sound of his neck snapping was like a gunshot.

I flubbed my landing and had to scramble to my feet, but the last terrorist was just standing there watching with wide eyes. He wasn't carrying a weapon, and I was between him and the nuke. He had only one way to get to the detonators- through me.

He came at me in a flurry of kicks and punches. He was using traditional hapkido, a Korean martial art. Unfortunately for him, Sung had taught me his own version of hapkido, which was much more suited to real world fighting.

I landed a succession of blows to his body and face. He was tiring fast, but I wasn't taking prisoners today.

When he tried a high kick, I caught his leg. I outweighed this guy by a good sixty pounds, so when I pulled him forward by the leg and delivered a knee to his midsection, it lifted him off his feet.

I still had his leg, and he wasn't in any shape to land on just one. He dropped like a stone and smashed the back of his head on the floor. I followed him down and delivered an elbow with all my weight behind it to his throat.

I left him writhing and choking on his own blood, as I made my way to the ambassador's family. I spoke to them in Korean.

"It's okay. You're safe now. The police will be here soon."

"Thank you. Thank you so much. Those men... they said that is a... a nuclear bomb."

"I heard yes. The professionals will be here soon to deal with it." I looked back to the last North Korean, who was still faintly twitching. "Why don't we get your wife and daughter away from all this, hmm? Your waiting area is empty. Why don't you all have a seat out there while we wait for the cavalry to arrive?"

The ambassador nodded agreeably and ushered his family out of the room.

As soon as the door was shut, I made a beeline for the laptop the terrorists were using to collect all the video they were shooting. They had intended to send it to their comrades in arms and let them broadcast it in triumph. I had other uses for the footage.

First, I stopped all the video feeds, then walked around and made sure each camera was off.

I gathered all the video and downloaded it to a storage account in the cloud. Then I used the laptop to send out several emails with the video attached, to my parents and Julie's, along with a short note that we may be detained for questioning, but here's what you need to know.

The video would speak for itself. The terrorists were quite explicit about what they were doing, repeating it in both Korean and English. And it would show me charging into the room and saving the day.

I especially wanted it to get to my father, who was a retired lawyer. Maybe I was being paranoid, letting conspiracy theories get the best of me, but I worried that the government would try to hush this up- to my detriment.

Better safe than sorry.

After that was done, I made sure to alter the radios of all the terrorists on that floor. Now all their radios were set to an unencrypted frequency.

I went down to the lobby and made sure Sung had changed the car radio. Then, I gathered the baggy sweat clothes Julie and I had worn over our clothing earlier in the day and went down to the basement, where they had an incinerator for destroying documents.

I was just getting back to the lobby when the police arrived en masse, filling the street from one end to the other.

I looked at my watch.

5:03

I'd made it to Saturday.