Free The John Milton Series: Books 1-3 by Mark Dawson Page A

and let it drift. He was two miles off the eastern coast, drifting through a thick blanket of sea mist. He had initially thought that the weather had been kind, shielding him from view as he put out from the tiny inlet near to Jungsan in Pyongyang Province. On two occasions he had heard the engines of old Russian-built MiGs overhead, and both times the jets had curved away with no indication that he had been seen. Now, though, the fog was less helpful. It blinded him, too, and he needed to see where he was going so that he could make his rendezvous.
    It had taken him and Su-Yung two days to reach the coast. The first day was the worst, crawling through the city until they found quieter roads where they could travel more quickly without causing suspicion. They found a deserted barn near Taedong and sheltered there until darkness had fallen, and then set off again. They travelled only at night, driving carefully, the van’s lights off, the M-4 laid out across his lap and the 9mm thrust into the waistband of his jeans. There had been several moments where he had been sure they were about to be discovered. The worst was the army jeep that had bounded along the main road just as they had turned off it. The driver had stopped at the beginning of the bridge that spanned the creek they had just crossed, the spotter in the back scanning the landscape with a pair of infra-red binoculars. A big .30 calibre machine gun was mounted on the back of the jeep; if they saw them, he knew that that monster would chew them up. Su-Yung and Milton were quiet, hardly breathing, but the soldiers did not see them. They moved away after a long five minutes, and they did not come across them again.
    The North Korean landscape recalled the black brushstrokes of Oriental paintings. They passed through areas that were strikingly beautiful, reminding Milton of the American Pacific Northwest, yet these gentle hills and plains were washed out, as if the colour had been bleached away by the poverty. There were the dark greens of the firs, junipers, and spruce offset against the milky grey of the granite peaks. The paddy fields were brown and insipid at this time of year. Everything was yellow and brown, the colour leached away and faded. There was no signage on the roads, and he saw only a handful of cars, just sickly oxen lowing in their pastures, the ploughs they were expected to pull waiting alongside.
    The next night they reached Jungsan. It was a small fishing village, and they had found the boat that Kun had arranged for him without difficulty. Su-Yung waited at the jetty as he embarked, transferring his weapons into the wheelhouse. Her face was blank, austere, and he knew that she was thinking of her brother. She waved him off as he started the engine and put out to sea. Milton had tried to persuade her to head north, to China, but it was a pointless exercise. She had decided to go back to the city to look for Kun. She was determined, and she would not give him up.
    Milton relied on the tracking beacon to guide him to the exfiltration point. It had been silent for the first few hours, but then it had started to chirp. It sounded regularly now, a low buzz every few seconds. He knew he was close, but he couldn’t see where he was supposed to be going.
    He thought, then, that he saw a hulking shape to port, but the mist rolled in even thicker, and he doubted himself. The temperature was icy, and the journey had chilled him to the bone, his teeth chattering helplessly. He cocked his head, listening. All he could hear was the slow lap of the water against the prow of the boat, the buzzing of the beacon and, he fancied, the mournful boom of a foghorn in the direction of the shore.
    A voice away to his right. He held his breath, listening hard. The voice came again, distorted in the mist, and he pulled on the oars, nudging the skiff around in the direction that he guessed it was coming from. He saw a dull glow, a bloom of fuzzy light a hundred yards to his