by Ward Larsen
As Park approached, the chairman was busy writing at his desk. When he finally looked up, Park felt his first moment of true unease.
Kwon rose and greeted Park joyously. A hands-on-the-shoulders embrace, a gleeful smile. Kwon led him by the hand to the wide sitting area. The chairs there were the deepest in the room, with traditional upholstery depicting bamboo and birds. They took opposing seats, and Kwon sat looking at him expectantly. A child waiting for the start of his favorite show.
Today, apparently, it was the happy dictator.
Park was relieved—one never knew what to expect. The Supreme Leader’s public persona was cast unerringly: in every published picture and video, he was the man now in front of Park. The one who found delight in everything from school choirs to ICBM launches. In those imageries, he was invariably sided by clapping, ever-smiling minions who walked the fine line between sharing their leader’s bliss and standing in awe of his leadership. Park, being one of the few true insiders, had seen the other side. Seen the stare that would turn coal into diamonds. Seen the executioner who showed mercy to neither friend or foe. Or for that matter, family.
The attractive woman disappeared, and in her place came another who might have been a clone, perhaps a slight variation in the length of her hair. She too was clad in a white coat and skirt, and her effortless advance with a tray of tea and scones would have passed muster in Buckingham Palace. She set the tray between them and, without being asked, poured two cups of tea. The clone disappeared in a whorl of white silk and a whiff of jasmine.
Kwon plucked up a scone and bit into it carelessly, crumbs dribbling across his faultlessly fitted tunic. He said, “General Gae tells me you have sent a team to Vienna.”
Gae was the head of military intelligence—Park had long come to think of him as more a nuisance than a rival. The man was a plodder who’d risen by family ties more than merit—his mother was a cousin to the dynasty. Still, Gae had resources, and more troublingly, he was outside Park’s chain of authority. Which was why Kwon had brought it up—stirring a bit of healthy infighting.
“Military intelligence is useful close to home,” Park said. “They’ll tell you what is happening at American air bases in the South, or with our friends in China. But yes, I sent a few men to Vienna. It is only a minor operation. There have been reports that some of our expatriate workers in Eastern Europe are skimming their wages before transferring them home. I thought a private word might convince them this would not be in their best interests … nor that of their families.”
Kwon gave a shrug, then used a fingernail to pluck something from an eyetooth. “What about the show we planned for the Americans? Have we been keeping open the doors of the right caves?”
He was referring to an ongoing campaign: manipulating which elements of their nuclear program should be put on display to enemy reconnaissance. North Korea’s nuclear means had long been a guessing game for the West. Park was one of the few who knew the truth: on that day, they had to their credit thirty-one viable nuclear weapons. The count put them light-years beyond South Korea, who wasn’t even in the game. Yet not yet in a league with Pakistan, and nowhere near the Chinese. The drive to catch up was ceaseless, draining resources that could better be used elsewhere. As for the Americans, they had their intelligence estimates, but a bit of showmanship to magnify what truly existed was undeniably economical, notwithstanding that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Much like rainbows, the splendor of nuclear weapons was a vision with no apparent end.
“We are managing things as best we can,” said Park. “The Americans’ satellites are predictable, but their spy planes less so. We believe they have a new hypersonic aircraft that can span our country in a matter of minutes.” Kwon’s carefree demeanor seemed to sink, and Park sensed an error. “But we don’t think it can deliver any kind of weapon,” he added quickly, and without regard to facts—a recent study by the army’s technology division had suggested quite the opposite.
It was no use—Kwon’s mood had flipped. “We have been in an appeasement mode for too long,” he complained. “The Americans talk freely of reunification, yet they say nothing about lifting sanctions. As my father often said, ‘It is time to make life difficult for another American president.’”
“I agree.”
“What do you propose?”
Park tried to appear thoughtful, not believing his good fortune. He touched two fingers pensively to his lips. “I think we must show strength,” he said.
“A threat with our nuclear weapons?”
“Yes, but … something indirect. Perhaps a new capability, one the Americans haven’t yet had to worry about.”
“Such as?”
Park told him, and Kwon seemed to consider it. For the second time in less than a minute, his mood reversed. “Yes!” said the chairman, his eyes brightening. “That will stir them up!”
“True … but again, we must be cautious. The threat can only be vague. Perhaps something about how miscalculations or mistakes might threaten either side.”
Kwon nodded. “Will you draft the communiqué?”
Park smiled.
* * *
They discussed the idea for another twenty minutes, Kwon asking questions that Park mostly answered honestly. At that point the Supreme Leader of North Korea declared business to be at an end. He invited Park to join him for a meal, which of course was no invitation at all.
A table for two had been set in an adjoining room. Park was glad for the change of venue—the office had seemed unusually stifling. Over a buffet that could have sated a dozen hungry men, Kwon guided a wildly divergent discourse. Park conjectured as best he could as to the direction of NATO, the state of the Chinese economy, and confessed a hopeless lack of expertise on American basketball. They dug into platters of sushi, caviar, and fresh fruit from the tropics, notwithstanding the fact that large swaths of rural North Korea were enduring yet another winter of hunger.
A Bordeaux was uncorked and gurgled from its bottle with traditional promise. Park took a glass because he had to, and nursed it with care. More than any place on earth, he had to keep his wits about him here. Kwon seemed not to notice, and by the time lunch ended he seemed slightly giddy.
At the end Park left the same way he’d arrived. In the anteroom he collected his coat, checked his watch, and heaved a great sigh. Two hours—not a record, but an extended session. How many more will I have to endure? he wondered.
He noticed that three of the security men were right where he’d left them, fixed like living statues. The others had been relieved by new men, these every bit as stone-faced. Without comment, the head of SSD turned and walked away.
As he made his way down the first hall, Park prioritized his tasks. The communiqué would come first. It had to be worded very precisely. Something about the dangers that vast nuclear arsenals presented. It would be colored indelibly in Dear Leader’s signature phrases. No hint whatsoever of SSD in the background. Simple enough.
Park then addressed the thornier issue. Vienna had become a problem. Slaton had become a problem. If El-Masri’s information made its way to authorities, the entire mission could be compromised. Khang might be able to stave off the trouble, particularly if Slaton’s family could be leveraged. His jaw tightened.
Success was near, almost within reach. But things were moving more quickly than expected. Park saw but one recourse.
He wasn’t sure if advancing the schedule was even possible. But he knew he had to try. He pulled out his phone, trusting its security measures like never before, and from the halls of the chairman’s beloved palace, he placed a call that lasted twenty-eight seconds.
FORTY-NINE
General Park’s fleeting call was received, and his orders carried out, on a very small island in the South China Sea.
Eight years earlier there had been no island at all—only a coral reef which, on mean low tide, had enough exposure to create the odd tide pool. The Chinese government was instrumental in correcting thi
s defect. Over the course of eighteen months, it undertook the dredging of millions of cubic meters of sand from nearby shallows. Enough sand that an island was eventually formed. Soon after that came a runway, a few buildings, a small hangar, and—most important of all—a fifty-meter-tall flagpole upon which a red flag with five stars was flown in all its splendor. As land grabs went, the campaign was as audacious as it was clumsy. The newly created Glorious Dawn Cay was among China’s first attempts to commandeer a foothold in the South China Sea.
It was also the least successful.
To begin, the location had not been adequately surveyed—the department responsible for “repatriation operations,” China’s Ministry of Natural Resources, had not been made aware that a sister agency, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was at the endgame of secret negotiations with Vietnam about who was claiming what. A third department, the oft-ignored Ministry of Ecology and Environment, also had an opinion on the matter, having declared in an internal government report that the shallows in question were the least economically viable zone of ten being evaluated—a report, not surprisingly, that had never been shared with the Vietnamese.
The final blow, however, was quite literal.
Her name was Super-typhoon Indira, and she ripped through the South China Sea one late October night, three years earlier, with a vengeance that seemed almost personal. By morning light, little was left standing on Glorious Dawn Cay. The runway was covered in sand, the lone pier damaged, and most of the buildings had simply disappeared. One small reinforced hangar stood in defiance, if a bit crookedly and minus its entry door, and a savaged fishing boat, which would curiously never be claimed, had washed ashore on the lone taxiway. The flagpole was never seen again.
It was here that China aligned its administrative ducks. Deep in a carefully worded foreign ministry statement it mentioned the island under a new name—Friendship Cay—and included a map that showed the outpost in international waters. In effect, not claiming the island, but also not ceding it to anyone else. The dredges moved on to reefs with greater promise, and without so much as sweeping the runway, the atoll was vacated. What remained fell into complete disrepair. Yet if the name Glorious Dawn Cay was forgotten, the island itself was not.
Which was how, when the leadership of North Korea made an inquiry with its most intimate neighbor about finding a remote island airfield from which a few flights might operate undisturbed, the Chinese government had just the place.
* * *
The first small boatload of North Koreans had arrived sixteen months earlier. In the equatorial heat, and working with nothing more than shovels and brooms, the crew removed enough sand to distinguish the eastern half of the seven-thousand-foot runway from the surrounding beach.
Weeks later a few generators were brought in, along with food, water, and a great bladder capable of holding three thousand gallons of fuel. The hangar was tidied up—although no effort was made to replace the door—and a tiny squad of men took up guard. While the improvements were largely unremarkable, the soldiers’ arrival might have provided the first clue that something unconventional was in the works: the guards, notwithstanding their ragged appearance and casual manner, had been handpicked from the best Special Forces units in the Korean People’s Army.
Three months after the activity began, the first flight arrived. The aircraft was a Y-5A, a Chinese variant of the Russian AN-2 Colt. The type had been in use since 1947, a testament to its ruggedness and reliability. A single-engine biplane, the Colt was small and ungainly compared to its more modern turbine-driven brethren. Yet what it lacked in sleekness it more than made up for with unique flight characteristics. Chief among them, owing to its dual wing configuration and high lift devices, was that the airplane had no stall speed listed in its operating manual. Approach speeds of thirty miles an hour were easily achievable, meaning that with a decent headwind, the Colt needed no more landing surface than a good-sized residential driveway.
The particular aircraft that made the deliveries to Friendship Cay was a study in contrast. On appearances it looked a shambles. Oil dribbled back from the engine cowling like legs in a glass of high-alcohol wine, and the few readable exterior markings were as generic as a brown paper wrapper. The paint job was frightful, chipped and pitted, particularly on the leading edges, giving the impression the aircraft had perhaps flown through a sandblaster—very near the truth, in fact, an effect that had taken a team of technicians hours to craft. A closer inspection would reveal something else altogether: the aircraft was maintained to the very highest standards, and the crew, like the attendant guards, had been handpicked, the best of the best of the North Korean air force.
The Colt arrived on that first day from the north, and perhaps a bit east, a weary traveler appearing like an apparition from the distant nothingness of the northern sea. In subsequent visits there were minor variations in the arrival track. More constant were the orchestrations that took place after the Colt landed.
On five separate occasions the transport taxied into the doorless hangar. The moment the engine shut down, a small forklift wheeled up to the modified cargo door and removed one small but heavy cargo container. The containers, each the size of a microwave oven, were deposited at the very back of the hangar and covered with a tarp. The aircraft was then partially refueled from the storage bladder—enough to reach Hainan Island with a minimal reserve—and the Colt departed again without respite.
The longest the drill ever took was eighteen minutes. The record was twelve. Including taxi time, the interval spent on the ground never exceeded twenty-two minutes. Had anyone ever bothered to audit the aircraft’s flight plan—and no one did—they would be hard-pressed to prove that the Colt’s scheduled journey to Hainan had been interrupted by a brief excursion to Friendship Cay. And so the pattern had run for over a year.
Today, however, things were different.
Park’s message set off a flurry of activity. To begin, the Colt was already in place, sitting empty in the hangar. She had recently been fitted with auxiliary fuel tanks, and both were topped off. The original five containers were no longer present. A team of technicians had recently arrived by boat—a beaten coastal cargo vessel that anchored in the lagoon—and transferred the containers to the vessel. After three days, like a second-rate magic trick, they returned with one slightly larger and heavier shipping cask.
On Park’s order, it was this container that was put aboard the Colt and carefully strapped down. In terms of volume, the auxiliary tanks and shipping container fit easily into the boxy cargo bay. Their combined weight was another matter, nearing—in truth, perhaps exceeding—the aircraft’s 4,700-pound load limitation. The pilots noted this discrepancy with due concern, and took care in precisely where the cargo was situated—a center of gravity had to be maintained that would not upset the airplane’s flight characteristics. It was the kind of procedural cloud that might ground a flight on any other day. Here, however, given their mission and projected route, the pilots felt little duty toward regulatory compliance. Indeed, they’d long ago lost count of how many laws they were about to break.
After one last check of the weather via a satellite phone, the pilots cranked the engine. The trade wind was predictable as ever, favoring a northerly takeoff. The laden Colt taxied to the end of the runway, pirouetted into the wind, and used half the available concrete during its takeoff roll—easily the most it had needed since beginning its sojourns to Friendship Cay. The little airplane lumbered upward, made a slight eastward turn, and set out steady and true into a forgiving midday sky.
FIFTY
Slaton woke shortly before ten that morning, strobes of morning light straining through the wintering evergreen canopy. The fog of sleep cleared quickly from his head, accelerated by the aches of the previous night. He checked the laceration on his leg, saw no further bleeding. His left hand ached with certain movements, but seemed functional. He started the car, turned on the heater, and set out toward the main road.
T
he township of Rosenheim appeared in his windscreen less than an hour later. He discarded the Renault in a parking area outside a busy IKEA store. A bus took him farther into town, depositing him, quite literally, in the spired shadows of the churches of St. Nikolaus and Holy Spirit.
Slaton stood for a time on the sidewalk, contemplating his next move and trying to tamp down his rising impatience. The streets were modestly busy, normal people going about their normal lives. He ignored the strains from his neglected stomach, instead settling his eyes on the church. It was a dominating bit of architecture, two white stone towers topped by mismatched onion spires.
The front doors of the cathedral stood invitingly open.
He found himself drawn inside. He stepped through the entrance and regarded the great inner hall. His gaze lifted naturally to the tall columns and an arched ceiling with intricate gold inlays. Transcendent as it all was, in the end he found his attention falling to the stonework at the base of it all—he’d performed repair work on many such foundations across Europe and the Mediterranean.
Slaton had never been particularly religious. As a boy he’d been put through the motions. Visits to temple, a barely remembered bar mitzvah. In more recent years he’d found little time for faith. To Davy, he and Christine talked about God as they might a much-loved but little-seen grandparent. Someone good and giving, but ever at a distance. He supposed he believed obliquely in God, if such a thing was possible. If not belief, then at least hope. So many years spent as an assassin seemed another obstacle to faith, and the last two days had dug that hole deeper. No manner of repentance or atonement could undo what he had done. Yet here he was, standing in a church, doing what the casually faithful had done as long as there had been religion: calling on God when you needed Him.
