The Korean Woman

by John Altman

  Remembering it now, she felt a faint glow of pleasure. The white sand had looked impossibly pristine, the turquoise waters impossibly clear. And the handsome man sitting beside her, green eyes shining even after the long, tiring flight, had been now and forevermore hers. In the hotel that night, he had planted kisses in the hollow of his bride’s throat. He had put his hands on her breasts and paused for a moment to savor her breathlessness. He had laid her gently back on the bed …

  “My husband.” Rosemary raised her chin defiantly. “He’s passed.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “What’s yours?”

  “Expecting any visitors today?”

  Rosemary shook her head.

  “Caretaker? Housekeeper? Landlord?”

  “I said no.”

  The intruder looked at her impassively. For a moment, Rosemary had the feeling the gun might snap up, no warning, and shoot her once, right between the eyes. Take that, you dirty rat! After which Rocky would surely reward the criminal by walking over and giving her a warm, wet lick.

  Instead, the woman said, “Sit tight.”

  On her way out of the kitchen she took the phone.

  * * *

  Song hooked aside a corner of curtain. Another lovely summer day. Across the street, a little boy on a tricycle accompanied his mother down the sidewalk. The neighbor had put the spade away and gone inside. Out of sight but within earshot, a Mister Softee truck played its endless jingle.

  Letting go of the curtain, she envisioned the layout of the surrounding streets and yards. She might need to get out in a hurry.

  If they came, they would use multiple incursion teams. They would cover every side of the house and would enter simultaneously through front and back doors, maybe the garage, too. They would use battering rams and Halligans. Maybe tear gas. Maybe concussion grenades … maybe snipers.

  She made a more thorough search of the first floor, with the dog following eagerly behind. The walls were decorated with crosses and saints. The living room contained a TV and tchotchke-lined shelves. The small dining room featured a sideboard and buffet table. A ghost of old urine haunted the tiny bathroom. The sink backsplash was frescoed with mildew, and the dish of canned dog food on the bathroom floor looked crusty. The old woman had told the truth. This house didn’t see a lot of visitors. No one cleaned; no one looked after the woman and the dog.

  The bathroom window was too small to climb through, but it would be easy enough to get a grenade through. Or gas.

  Behind that drywall would be an outside wall of solid stone. But behind this one—she touched the wallboard experimentally—was the garage. No stone, just gypsum drywall and maybe some thin veneered paneling. Exert enough force and she could break through between the studs. That might be her best emergency escape route.

  The dog came into the bathroom, nuzzling her thigh. Song scratched him behind one ear. His tail thumped. She eased out of the room, pulling the door behind her and shutting him in.

  Back in the living room, she set phone and gun on the TV. Then she paused, listening. From the kitchen came the laboring hum of the refrigerator. The old woman remained eerily silent. In the garage, she had looked to be on the verge of a heart attack. Maybe Mother Nature had done Song’s dirty work for her.

  She moved to the kitchen doorway. The woman slumped in the chair, glaring back at her, very much alive.

  Song retreated again to the living room.

  She could not let down her guard while the old woman lived.

  She had no other options. She needed rest.

  But it had to be quiet.

  Silently, she unhooked a curtain drawstring from its eye. Winding the cord around her right hand, she returned to the kitchen.

  The woman’s rheumy eyes tracked Song as she took down a water glass from a cabinet. She crossed to the sink. Out of her captive’s line of sight, she set the glass noiselessly onto the countertop.

  In the last instant, the old woman sensed something. She started to turn. But too slow. Song dropped the cord neatly around the throat, drew it tight, and threw her weight back.

  The woman staggered to her feet. The chair skidded with a chalkboard squeal and tipped over. In the bathroom, the dog started barking.

  The woman was surprisingly powerful. Before Song knew it, they had done a lumbering dance across the kitchen floor. The flimsy back door shuddered as they slammed against it. The old woman’s glasses came loose, dangled for a moment from one ear, and fell to the tile floor.

  Song held on tight. In the glass door of the microwave oven, she saw a nightmarish profile: eyes bulging, cheeks flushing, mouth gaping, trying to get in enough air to scream. A thin whistle, nothing more, came from the old woman’s lungs.

  Tangled together, they fell onto the floor. Song kept pulling, her hands turning bloodless white as the woman’s face went blue. Still she pulled. Now she could hear whimpering interspersed with the dog’s barks. Song’s own hoarse panting seemed strangely loud.

  Abruptly, the woman stiffened. The bulging eye in profile two inches away glazed over. Her struggles ceased.

  Song kept up the pressure for another full minute, just to be sure.

  At last, she released the cord. Sweating, the muscles of her forearms aflame, she unwound the drawstring and massaged her hands until blood flow returned. She didn’t have the strength to stand up yet, so she sat on the floor beside the old woman.

  The dog had fallen quiet. No neighbors showed up. No phone rang. No gas grenade came through a window.

  Song made herself stand. Her hip throbbed. She looked at the dead woman on the floor. She couldn’t just leave her here.

  Grabbing the body by the armpits, Song dragged it to the hall closet. In death, the old woman seemed to have doubled her weight.

  The closet smelled strongly of mothballs. It was jammed with coats and jackets, umbrellas, and unmatched gloves. Song shoved aside a laundry basket filled with shoes and folded the heavy body beneath the coats, then leaned against the door until the lock clicked.

  She went back to the living room and got the gun, then paused, looking at the television set. She might find a news report that made some sense of the article she had glimpsed in East Quogue.

  Later.

  She went upstairs. The second floor was tiny: one bedroom, one closet, one minuscule guest room. The master bed was a queen, the frilly quilt thick with dog hair. More crosses and a Mother Mary hung on the walls. A framed scriptural quote above a dresser: There is no authority except from God. Do what is good, and you will receive his approval.

  Song’s brow crimped. Back home, of course, religion was forbidden. But she had studied Christianity at Heaven Lake. She had wanted to pass as an upper-class South Korean, which meant passing as Christian—an artifact from days when the church was the center of political resistance against Japan. She had not been able to see the appeal. How could you make yourself believe a fairy tale, no matter how comforting?

  On the other hand, what besides a fairy tale could you call the stories she had once half believed about the Supreme Leader’s magnificence?

  At length, her gaze moved on. Curtains were open. A sparrow hopped along a tree limb outside. She closed the curtains, then lowered herself onto the creaky mattress. An Android smartphone sat within reach on a night table. She blew dust off the display, tried the power switch. Either the phone was broken or the battery was dead.

  She returned the phone to the nightstand, then listened. Except for the distant thrum of the refrigerator, the house was quiet. Even the Mister Softee jingle outside had moved on.

  She would not allow herself to doze, but she would rest, relax, recharge.

  Her sneakers were still wet. But she had to be ready to move fast, so they stayed on.

  She did the math. An alert would have gone out the instant she fled the café. They would have calc
ulated the fastest she could travel. Say it would take them a quarter hour to set up roadblocks. So twenty miles, give or take, in any direction. Once the perimeter was established, they would squeeze. That involved mustering a lot of manpower. A circle forty miles in diameter encompassed a lot of doors to knock on. But it was only a matter of time.

  Sometime today, more likely than not. She remembered the helicopter flying overhead.

  She heard her own breathing become deep and even. Don’t sleep.

  She might take the Jetta in the driveway. She had seen a key on a rack in the kitchen. Try to bull her way through a checkpoint. A slim chance was better than none.

  She yawned. Don’t sleep, she warned again.

  The slumber was deep, dark velvet. She did not dream.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Langley, VA

  Watching the screen, Bach smiled grimly. Song Sun Young was like a weed that could survive anywhere.

  But still no message from Minot.

  The mind wanted to run worst-case scenarios. His man had lost his nerve. Or been caught in the act. Or, worst of all, turned himself in.

  Bach massaged his temples. He drew and released a long, even breath. His man would come through. And the woman would stay free long enough to justify continued use of Luna.

  He slipped away to his office, composed another intel report for the deputy director of operations, then lay down on the couch. Holding the phone against his chest in case a message came in, he closed his eyes.

  He sank quickly into dimness populated by flickering shadows.

  * * *

  Woody Whitlock drank with concentration.

  Even as Benjamin Bach had turned teetotaler—his postdiagnosis regime replaced alcohol, sugar, and salt with cardio, mindfulness, and yoga—Woody Whitlock, feeling the pressures of his job, had leaned in the other direction. He was drinking single-malt scotch. Bach had a seltzer with lime and bitters.

  At the far end of the bar, an attractive thirtysomething woman in a white halter top was flirting with a man in a tight blue shirt. Closer to hand, a skinny, morose-looking man flipped through the laminated pictures of chicken wings and pot stickers while the bartender broke up a block of ice in a cooler.

  Whitlock wore a faint, preoccupied frown. Bach tried to gauge his friend’s line of thought. They had just spent eight solid hours reviewing silo technology that was woefully out of date even by the relaxed standards of the Ninety-First Missile Wing. And, of course, funding to bring it up to snuff was nowhere in sight. Everybody wanted to invest in the fastest, best new aircraft and the fastest, best new naval vessels. Modernizing land-based relics from the Reagan era just wasn’t good box office. And so Global Strike Command, responsible for the Air Force component of US nuclear armament, was stuck using thirty-year-old technology.

  Or maybe Whitlock was thinking about the fat little madman. Just this afternoon, Pyongyang had announced a successful test of an H-bomb that could be miniaturized and attached to a Hwasong-15 ICBM. If even half of it was true, it was distressing. Even more distressingly, the work had apparently been accomplished at a site somewhere off the CIA’s radar. Luna Moth was valuable only if it could be brought to bear.

  After letting Whitlock get some whiskey inside him, Bach said, “Talk to me, Goose.” In his experience, everyone from the Air Force responded to the quote. They all wanted to be in Top Gun.

  Whitlock smiled without amusement and moved his broad shoulders carelessly. His all-American good looks seemed a little frayed tonight. “I’m thinking …”

  Bach waited.

  “Hate to say it.”

  “Say it.”

  “Maybe you ought to go back.”

  “Back?”

  “Amatulli doesn’t inspire confidence.”

  Gina Amatulli, the officer warming Bach’s seat in Seoul while he focused his attention here in Washington.

  “Not Gina’s fault.” Bach toyed absently with his swizzle stick. “Blame Bureau One-Twenty-One. They’re sneaky.”

  Whitlock snorted. “She thinks strictly inside the box. Not like you, Ben.”

  It was not entirely untrue. But Whitlock’s generous assessment of Bach was born also of personal affection. Over the past eight months, they had grown close. Getting close to Whitlock had been the main reason Bach proposed his GSC cybersecurity task force in the first place. To run it, he had created a restricted-access compartment administered under his own authority. He reported his findings to no one, and no record of the task force existed on any agency server.

  He and Woody Whitlock worked late, sometimes until midnight, poring over GSC and NMCC systems. They visited sites around the country, often on weekends, doing snap inspections. They blew off steam in the Pentagon Athletic Center’s weight room and Olympic-size pool. They broke bread together. Once, Whitlock’s wife and daughter had joined them. Afterward, Whitlock had reported that his wife wanted to set Bach up with a friend of hers, to which Bach graciously begged off, but not without expressing gratitude.

  To unwind after marathon sessions they sometimes came here, to this Doubletree far enough from Pentagon City to afford some privacy. One night last month, sitting on these very two barstools, Bach had finally shared his diagnosis. He had spoken of his father, of the old man’s pride in his restaurant. He had described his own experience at Ground Zero—medieval, biblical. By the end of that night, the bond between them was ironclad. In Woody Whitlock’s eyes, Benjamin Bach was nothing less than a genuine American hero.

  Bach had sworn Whitlock to secrecy. Terminally ill CIA officers and top-tier TS/SCIOP-ESI clearance did not go hand in hand. Whitlock had nodded solemnly, promising to take Bach’s secret to the grave.

  Bach paused, still trying to read his friend’s mood, before continuing.

  Whitlock was depressed. They all were. There was no longer any denying, or even downplaying, the threat posed by the Hermit Kingdom. In recent months, awareness had spread from the subbasement labyrinth of the NMCC to op-ed pages and cable news pundits. Every American now knew about the thousands of North Korean artillery pieces lining the world’s most heavily armed border, about the TELs, mobile launchers that would frustrate efforts to eradicate the nuke program by force, about the fat little madman’s stockpile of chemical and biological weapons.

  Anxiety tingled Bach’s scalp and the back of his neck. He might never get a better opening, and he was living on borrowed time. Eight months had passed since the doctor refused to give him a timeline for the cancer’s progression. He had undertaken no treatment except the change in diet and exercise.

  “Not Gina’s fault,” he said again. “It’s the Gordian knot. Even if they promise complete denuclearization, there’s no way to hold them to it. A single underground facility, a single TEL hidden in a cave …”

  At the other end of the bar, the woman in the white halter top whistled through her teeth at something the chubby man had said.

  This was it. The deep dive. Bach reminded himself that he had nothing left to lose. “But Alexander solved the Gordian knot. By thinking, as you say, outside the box—sliced it in half with one stroke of his sword.”

  Whitlock gave a not entirely sober grunt.

  Bach’s eyes held soft focus on the sweating glass of seltzer before him. “It could be done.” He spoke calmly and evenly. “All at once, full-out. Yongbyon, Pyongsan, Pakchon, and Cheonma-San. Yongjo-ri, Sunchon, Taechon, and Punggye-ri.” He rapped the bar hard enough to make his glass shake. “Bam. All at once.”

  “Fire and fury.” Whitlock’s tone was ironic.

  Pyongyang would manage one final destructive spasm, of course—the fat little madman’s last temper tantrum. South Korea would soak up the brunt of it. But then it would be over. The first strike of American Tomahawk missiles would knock out the sea-based leg of the North Korean defense triad. Hit Uiju and Changjin, and they would have no working H5
bombers left with which to retaliate by air. That left the TELs. And that was where an accurate intelligence picture—such as that afforded by Luna Moth—became priceless.

  Of course, that afternoon’s revelation of sites unknown to Luna complicated things. But the Norks would still be limited to whatever they managed in their first desperate counterpunch. Then, at last, the nepotistic regime, the nuclear production infrastructure, the devices and warheads themselves, the associated delivery vehicles, the mining and enrichment facilities—all would be gone. And at last, Americans would be able to sleep soundly at night. Or relatively so.

  “Dream a little dream,” said Whitlock.

  Bach scooted his stool a tiny inch closer to his friend. “Everybody and his uncle wants Luna computer time. But under the right circumstances, I go to the front of the line. I’m still Seoul station chief. I’m still in charge of left-of-launch.”

  Whitlock looked at him shrewdly. Eyes glassy, slightly parted lips connected with a silver cord of saliva. If the man didn’t take it easy with the whiskey, his days in J3 were numbered.

  “I’m not just talking about using Luna to find targets.” Bach kept his tone moderately light. “Tomahawks go when they receive a short burst of computer code. They don’t care who sent it. They don’t care if it’s authorized or not. They’re machines.” Every system vulnerable, as Wyoming had proved. Every system built to be used. “You see where I’m going?”