A Small Island
Just as Yeon-woo had said, the other boats still had scales and fishing byproducts lodged in the gaps of their decks despite having been cleaned — but one among them was strangely, almost unnaturally clean.
"How many trackers did we bring?"
Han Hae-un answered immediately.
"We brought three."
"Then let's put one on this boat for now. We can't be certain with just this, but the odds look good."
"Understood."
Han Hae-un immediately relayed the order to Kim Su-hyeok.
Kim Su-hyeok stripped off his clothes without ceremony and pulled a latex diving suit from the bag he'd been carrying. It was a dry suit of the kind typically used for scuba diving — everything but the hands and head would stay dry even underwater.
The feed Yeon-woo and Han Hae-un were watching was transmitted from a camera mounted on Kim Su-hyeok's clothes, so when he set the clothes aside, the camera locked in place. He angled it toward the harbor, set the clothes down, and changed into the dry suit.
"Ready. Diving now."
"Confirmed. Be careful."
Kim Su-hyeok took the round device in hand, stood at the edge of the harbor, and jumped into the sea. He leaped from a cement wall about a meter high; a light spray of water rose, and his figure vanished from the monitor.
A short stretch of time passed.
Before long, having apparently completed the mission, Kim Su-hyeok climbed back up the stairs at the right end of the harbor.
"Whew. Securely attached to the underside of the hull. Please confirm the signal."
On the map Yeon-woo and Han Hae-un were watching, a new signal — not Kim Su-hyeok's — began to blink. It meant the transmitter affixed to the boat's underside was functioning normally. Unless that boat sank and flipped over, no one would ever find a signal transmitter stuck to the bottom of the hull.
"Signal is good. Well done. You'll be cold. Head back to the lodging and rest."
"Understood."
The boat with the transmitter attached didn't move until two days later.
In the meantime, Kim Su-hyeok had been trying to secure a boat to go out on — and a snag had developed in the plan. Starting the year before last, accidents involving tourists taking rented motorboats far out to sea had become frequent enough that rentals to outsiders had been shut down entirely.
On the map, the blip presumed to be their boat was heading out to open water — and sure enough, something was off. It was going somewhere completely different from the routes the nearby fishing boats normally used.
"At that kind of distance, going out without power looks impossible. It's also well beyond the max flight range of the drone Kim Su-hyeok brought."
Yeon-woo nodded at Han Hae-un's words. Unpowered vessels meant kayaks or small yachts without engines. Riding something like that out to the far-sea region marked on the map was out of the question.
"Hmm. Where are we going to get a boat?"
Yeon-woo stared at the monitor, turning it over in his mind, while Han Hae-un dug through materials looking for some other approach. Kim Su-hyeok, hoping there might still be somewhere that rented boats, had punched a rental company he'd found online into his nav and was heading that way.
Then Yeon-woo spotted a familiar stretch of road in the scenery scrolling past on the monitor.
"...Wait. Hae-un, tell Kim Su-hyeok to make a U-turn."
"A U-turn? Understood."
Yeon-woo immediately zoomed the map and checked the village near Kim Su-hyeok's location.
"Right. This was near where Kim Su-hyeok is."
"Order given. Where should he head?"
Yeon-woo copied the address from the map and passed it to Han Hae-un.
"Tell him to go to this village and look for someone named 'Kirihata.' He might be able to help."
"Understood. Who is this person?"
"Just an old man in that village who runs several fishing boats. It's been a long time, but I figure he's still living there. Assuming he hasn't already passed away."
"Runs several fishing boats... so in Korean terms, a local big shot in a fishing village?"
Yeon-woo nodded at Han Hae-un's words.
"Something like that. He owes me a debt, so if he's still alive, we can at least talk. Set up voice modulation in advance in case we end up on a call."
"Yes. I'll set it so you sound roughly like a man in his forties."
Kim Su-hyeok drove to the address Yeon-woo had marked. A quiet farming village appeared — utility poles lined both sides of a narrow one-lane road. Han Hae-un tilted his head at the scenery.
"You said he owns several fishing boats. This isn't a fishing village."
"The old man doesn't take the boats out himself. I think he was a seaman when he was young, but by the time I met him he was renting the boats out to other fishermen for a fee."
Back then, Yeon-woo had also borrowed a small fishing boat from him, posing as someone shooting an environmental documentary while carrying out a reconnaissance mission.
After a long drive down the peaceful, quiet road with fields stretching out on both sides, they entered the village outskirts and a fairly large white two-story house came into view.
"That's the one. The white two-story."
"Definitely a local big shot."
Even at a glance, the scale put the other houses to shame, and Han Hae-un nodded.
Following Han Hae-un's instructions, Kim Su-hyeok parked in front of the house's wall and got out. Standing before a large reddish-brown wooden gate made of treated lumber, Kim Su-hyeok pressed the bell.
Bzzzt—
After a short wait, a response came from inside in Japanese.
"Who is it?"
"Is this the Kirihata residence? I've been sent by an old friend."
Kim Su-hyeok delivered the words exactly as Alpha-Beta had told him. Silence stretched for a moment with no answer from inside.
Click—
The gate simply opened without a word, and Kim Su-hyeok went in. Passing through a small Japanese-style garden, he stood before the front door as a white-haired old man opened it and stepped out.
"...I am Kirihata Daichi, but you're rather young to be calling yourself an old friend. Who might you be?"
Kim Su-hyeok pulled the smartphone from his jacket and held it out toward the old man.
"I'm not very fluent in Japanese. Your friend would like to speak with you directly."
Kirihata stared blankly at Kim Su-hyeok, who had shown up out of nowhere saying something so odd, then tilted his head and took the phone.
"I've got the phone. Who is this?"
A low male voice came through the receiver. It was Yeon-woo, voice modulated.
"Mr. Kirihata. Have you been well? Yuta's leg is all right, I hope?"
"Yuta's leg? Who are you to know my grandson's name..."
Kirihata trailed off, then something seemed to click and his mouth fell open.
"H-Hirokazu? Is that you?"
"That's right. Hearing your voice so clear and strong is a pleasure."
Yeon-woo on the other end of the line smiled a little awkwardly. Aside from Han Hae-un, this was the first time he'd spoken directly with someone who remembered him from his past life. Of course, what the old man remembered was a young documentary director investigating ocean pollution.
From there, the conversation moved at a clip.
"Khahaha! Come in, come in. So you're Hirokazu's assistant? Then you're the one my old friend sent. Of course you are."
The old man hung up, laughed heartily, and invited Kim Su-hyeok inside.
"Then I'll impose on you."
Kim Su-hyeok removed his shoes and stepped in. The interior was far more elegant than anything you'd expect in a rural village house — a clear demonstration that Kirihata's wealth ranked among the highest in the area.
The old man offered him a seat on the sofa and sat down himself.
"So you need a small fishing boat for your reporting, is that it? Of course. For Hirokazu, I ought to give you my biggest boat."
Kim Su-hyeok shook his head at the old man's words.
"I'll be taking it out alone, so something large would actually be inconvenient. A small boat, please."
And inwardly, he marveled.
Just how far does Alpha-Beta's network reach? An ally in a remote country village on an island like this?
Meanwhile, Han Hae-un — whom Kim Su-hyeok believed to be Alpha-Beta — was just as astonished that an unexpected connection had solved the problem. Han Hae-un asked the real Alpha-Beta:
"Team Leader. What exactly is your connection to that old man? He's extremely well-disposed toward you."
"It wasn't anything major. When I was on an infiltration mission out there, the old man's grandson went missing for two days and the whole village was in an uproar. I found him. He was up on the mountain behind the village."
At the time, the old man's ten-year-old grandson had gone up the back mountain to pick mushrooms and gone missing. When Yeon-woo found him, he'd fallen into a pit and couldn't get out. It came out later that the hole had been dug by the Japanese forces of the time during the Battle of Okinawa in June 1945, as they resisted the American occupation.
Han Hae-un continued after hearing the explanation.
"Team Leader, you do have a habit of rescuing old men's grandchildren, don't you?"
"Hmm?"
"Baek No-ya was the same, wasn't he?"
Yeon-woo thought it over and realized Han Hae-un was right. Baek No-ya, too, was lending his strength now because Yeon-woo had helped smuggle his granddaughter to America when she was being hunted by the organization, back when Yeon-woo had been running the domestic desk.
"Well. It just worked out that way."
After that, they managed to talk the old man out of insisting on lending his biggest boat and received a small fishing vessel instead.
"Are you sure you don't need me to go show you myself?"
"It's fine. Will lending us the boat cause you any trouble, sir?"
"These days everyone's left for Tokyo. Hardly anyone's left, and I've got boats sitting idle all over. Use it as much as you like — just bring the key back safe when you're done."
Kim Su-hyeok nodded, took the key, and left the old man's house. He got in the car and reported in.
"I'll begin the reconnaissance mission in earnest tonight. Do we have the target's movement path secured?"
Han Hae-un looked at the movement path marked on the map and nodded.
"Secured. I just sent the intel over the secure channel. Confirm it."
In the meantime, Yeon-woo had been investigating the destination those people had headed for. Digging through old records, cross-checking them one by one, looking for discrepancies — he found something. The more he looked into it, the more interesting the island became.
I was wondering why they'd come all the way to Okinawa to build something like this — but if this place is, as I suspect, a site for producing or storing drugs, it makes a certain amount of sense.
For one thing, the island wasn't marked on any map. The whole island was only about the size of an elementary school playground — small, yes — but that wasn't why it was missing from the maps.
"In the early 1970s, the U.S. military base stationed in Okinawa leased several uninhabited islands from the Japanese government for experimental purposes."
"What? So Baeksol went into American territory?"
Yeon-woo shook his head at Han Hae-un's words.
"No, that can't be it. According to the records, this nameless little island — N-17 — was returned by the U.S. military in the mid-eighties, and somewhere in that process it passed into the hands of a yakuza."
After that, the paperwork was cleverly manipulated so that N-17 was recorded by Japan's Maritime Self-Defense Force as an island still leased by the U.S. military, and by the U.S. military as an island already returned to the Japanese government — and so it was erased from the maps.
According to the intelligence obtained in Berlin, Baeksol's leadership consisted of seven people. Of those, Yeon-woo and Han Hae-un had identified three so far — and of those, Hwang-geum had been eliminated, so he was likely not a major figure. That meant they should count two major figures identified so far.
"So Baeksol running operations on yakuza land means..."
Yeon-woo nodded at Han Hae-un's words. There was no guarantee that all seven of Baeksol's core members were Korean.
"It means there's a yakuza in the mix, covering for them from behind."