Star of the North

by D. B. John

  The house door creaked open and then a key rattled in the gate. It opened ajar, and then wide. “Ajumma,” Curly said, surprised. She was holding up an oil lamp that cast a pale light. The yellow headscarf was still tied around her head, covering her curls. Before she could say another word something in the way Mrs. Moon looked at her caused the young woman’s expression to change. It was not an expression of bewilderment or guilt, but rather of recognition, an acceptance of a long-expected moment. In that expression all Mrs. Moon’s fears were confirmed.

  Curly stepped to one side to let her into the house.

  Dinner was bubbling on the hob. The room was spotless, with only a few sticks of furniture, and the Father-Son portraits on the wall. Curly’s daughter, Sun-i was seated on a mat on the floor unwrapping a package by the light of a candle. The spine of a pocketbook could be seen behind a tear in the brown paper.

  “Bibles,” Mrs. Moon murmured.

  Curly closed the door and leaned against it, her head lowered.

  Without raising her voice above a whisper Mrs. Moon said, “What are you mixed up in?”

  Curly looked up then and spoke with a quiet defiance.

  “We read verses of the book aloud … in our church.”

  Mrs. Moon felt a tingling on her scalp. That was a word she hadn’t heard spoken in a long time.

  Curly’s breathing became shallow. “Eight of us. We change the location each time, meeting in different houses, but there are others, ajumma, in Hamhung, Chongjin, even in Pyongyang, worshipping in secret. They read verses copied by hand on tiny pieces of paper. Through God’s grace, I know some of the Bibles will reach them.”

  A chill passed over Mrs. Moon. Even hearing this information could get her executed.

  “Where are they coming from … these Bibles?”

  Curly continued to look at her. Her eyes glistened slightly, containing the emotions behind them. “From missionaries over the river … I meet them in Changbai … They give me a few each time I visit.”

  Mrs. Moon felt the ball of fear inside her finally hatch and spread throughout her gut. She said quietly, “Those missionaries are placing you in terrible danger. Do you know what the Bowibu do to anyone who’s met Christians in China?”

  “God protects Koreans in China. He will protect me here.”

  A fissure in time opened in Mrs. Moon’s mind. The long-ago voices of her parents, reading from a book in a shuttered room, and singing quietly.

  She said, more urgently now, “The Bowibu are closing in on you. Sergeant Jang told me this morning they’ve arrested people found with copies on them. They see everything. They’ll find you.”

  Curly’s composure vanished, as if a mask had been thrown off. A look of ecstasy and terror twisted across her face, and for one instant Mrs. Moon thought she was mad.

  “If I’m caught, I’ll die, and I am willing to die …” Her voice was trembling. “Just thinking of it comforts me and gives me the strength to suffer this place, just as He suffered. He suffered so that we may live …”

  Mrs. Moon’s mind was a riot of fragmented memory and confusion. “The Great Leader?”

  “No, ajumma.” Curly bared her teeth in a bitter smile. Her voice became louder and ill controlled. “Not him. He tried to replace God with himself in our hearts. He tried to make us love him instead of Christ—”

  Mrs. Moon held a hand up to Curly’s face to silence her, conscious of neighbors’ ears, alert and listening in the dark, quiet houses. In the silence her own breathing was labored.

  “And Sun-i?” Mrs. Moon whispered, pointing at the girl sitting on the floor. “Do you want her to die, too, in a labor camp? Because that’s what will happen if you’re caught.”

  The animation drained from Curly’s face. Her defiance had burned out and she looked sad and exhausted. She began to weep.

  “No,” she said through her tears. “Of course I don’t want that.”

  The girl got up from the floor and hugged her mother.

  Mrs. Moon said, “Listen to me. You must both cross into China tonight. Get help from your missionaries and never come back.”

  Mother and daughter turned to look at each other, an odd look of destiny in their eyes.

  “You don’t have time to think about it,” Mrs. Moon urged. She opened the window shutter ajar and peered out, but could see nothing beyond the corrugated iron fence and the dark yard. The street was quiet.

  It took no time to pack. They had so little to carry. Curly spent a few minutes in her yard digging at the hard ground to retrieve a buried pot where she’d hidden Chinese yuan, and they were almost ready leave.

  “Leave the Bibles,” Mrs. Moon said, “I will destroy—” She checked herself. “I will distribute them.”

  Curly was trembling now and Sun-i kept looking fearfully at her mother. The implications of what they were about to do were starting to sink in.

  “Take this,” Mrs. Moon said, giving Curly a thick wad of money in mixed currencies from her money belt. “In case you have to bribe a border guard you don’t know.”

  Curly took the money distractedly.

  “It’s best if we leave separately,” Mrs. Moon said. “A group will look suspicious.”

  Curly extinguished the stove and the oil lamp, and the candle. She opened the front door ajar and listened. The freezing night flowed into the house. The only sound was the rushing of the river beneath the ice. Not a breeze stirred the trees. Above the roofs of the houses the stars shone like ice crystals. The air was so cold it burned their throats, so mother and daughter pulled scarves up around their faces.

  Sun-i went first, creeping across the yard to the wooden gate in the corrugated iron fence. There was just enough starlight to see her. She unlocked it slowly, slipped through, and closed the gate behind her.

  They waited two minutes and then it was Curly’s turn. She bowed to Mrs. Moon and gave her the keys to the house. “When I’ve reached the missionaries I’ll send a message to you with one of the smugglers.”

  Mrs. Moon heard herself say, “God be with you.”

  Keeping the house door ajar she watched Curly cross the yard and slowly pull the gate.

  The gate flew wide open, a large dog barked, and light blazed into the yard from the street.

  A man’s voice shouted. A violent, blurred movement, and Curly cried out.

  Mrs. Moon leapt back into the house and slammed the door.

  She had caught only a glimpse of what was outside in the street, enough to know that the catastrophe was complete. Bowibu, four or five of them, in long dark coats. A police dog. Gloved hands holding Sun-i and smothering her face to stop her making a sound.

  14

  CIA Headquarters

  1000 Colonial Farm Road

  Langley, Virginia

  The recruits of Class H were in high spirits as they boarded the bus for DC, the start of a full week’s leave from the Farm for Thanksgiving, their first break since training began a month ago. Jenna waved them off, saying she had errands to run in Williamsburg. In fact Fisk had ordered her to attend a top-secret briefing at Langley, where a senior South Korean intelligence officer was visiting from Seoul.

  He was a dapper forty-year-old in a Dior suit who spoke English with a Californian accent. “Call me Mike,” he said, smiling at his hosts like a celebrity. Present in the room were several senior analysts, including Simms, and five uniformed and heavily ribboned military types from the Pentagon. Jenna sat on Fisk’s right.

  Their attention was being directed to an image on a wall-mounted screen. It depicted the Unha-3 rocket part retrieved by the US Navy from the Philippine Sea.

  “We’re seeing here the nose cap and third-stage section,” a young analyst said, pointing with a cursor, “large enough to carry a two-hundred-kilo payload—the right weight for a tactical nuclear warhead. The altitude it reached indicates a missile range of five thousand kilometers. The heat shield reentered the atmosphere intact. Gentlemen—and lady—this was a highly successful test.
The North Koreans don’t know that, of course, because we retrieved the evidence from the sea before they did, but the clock is ticking. We know they’re building two more, and let us be in no doubt. We are the target.”

  He sat down and South Korean Special Agent Mike Chang took over.

  “They’ve got the rocket science,” he said, beaming his smile and winking at Jenna. “What they haven’t figured out is the warhead—and this is the most valuable piece of intelligence we have. The CIA may have no assets on the ground inside the North, but my agency does. My sources are all reporting the same thing: the regime is stuck at second base when it comes to building a nuke small enough to arm a missile. It could be two, five, ten years before they’ve got that kind of technology.”

  “I don’t get it,” said one of the generals, a jowly man with a gravelly voice. “Why are they spending millions of dollars testing rockets if they’ve got nothing to arm them with?”

  “It’s bluff,” Simms said, folding his arms. “The launch timing was no accident—just a few weeks before that North Korean delegation arrived in New York yesterday? You can bet your ass they’ll use this to blackmail us for a ton of aid …”

  Jenna turned her eyes to the windows, thinking. Acres of parking lots, and beyond them, chestnut and beech woods as far as the eye could see, the hills of Virginia turning amber, red, gold.

  We’re missing something.

  She was thinking of all the spysat imagery she’d been browsing for the last few days. Most of it had been discarded by the squints because it showed nothing of military interest. But the North Koreans were masters of subterfuge and concealment … Some of Kim’s homes were rumored to be entirely subterranean, with entrances along tunnels many miles long. If they were able to hide something in a place where no spy on the ground could learn a thing about it, where no squint would look for it, maybe they did have something to arm their rockets. But where … ?

  She tried to think in the mindset of the regime. A weapon could only truly be hidden … in an information black hole.

  And that’s when it came to her. It felt as if an ice cube had slid down her spine.

  “My sources learned one other curious detail,” Special Agent Mike Chang said. “Kim Jong-il himself was present at the Tonghae site to attend the launch, in the company of his youngest son and successor. No cameras, no propaganda. A secret visit …” Jenna’s eyes opened wide.

  When the briefing adjourned for a short break she took Fisk’s elbow and guided him toward the windows, away from the others, who were standing about with cups of coffee, talking in groups.

  She angled her head away from the room and kept her voice low. “They can weaponize their rockets. I believe Mike Chang’s intelligence is wrong.”

  Fisk turned to look at the horizon, his brow perturbed, as if she’d spoken some fear he’d long held.

  Her voice was a frantic whisper. “A sophisticated multimillion-dollar missile test? Kim and his heir both present? They must have something … A warhead developed in secret, somewhere opaque to Mike Chang’s spies.”

  “Where?” Fisk turned to her. “We’ve got every eye in the sky watching the damned place.”

  “A black site. One of the places the squints never look at … Charles, I need clearance to request spysat sweeps of certain coordinates.”

  He gave a bemused grimace and turned back to the window. “That’s a request way outside a trainee’s pay scale …”

  She looked across the room. Simms stood talking in his monotone to the jowly general. “I’ll need access to the spysat control room in the lower level …”

  “Let me get this straight …” Simms had rather a small head, Jenna thought, which, with the girth of his midriff, put her in mind of a bowling pin. She couldn’t read his expression—the glow from the screens reflected in his glasses, making two blank ovals on his face—but his voice held a faint and unmistakable sarcasm. “You want to tweak the orbit of a spectral imaging spysat to get a better look at … a prison?”

  All the squints had turned to listen.

  She said coolly, “Camp 22 is thirty-one miles long by twenty-five miles wide, roughly an area the size of Los Angeles. More than enough room to hide a weapons program.”

  “There’s nothing there. It’s a mining camp.”

  “Which makes it impenetrable, except by satellite. And the imaging is incomplete.”

  He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Why that camp, Marianne Lee? Why not all of them?”

  Jenna knew it was only a hunch, but it was backed by the strong currency of her knowledge. Defectors, former prisoners, had testified in detail about the internal workings of every one of those hells—except one. Camp 22, in the country’s remote northeast, was a place from which no prisoner had ever been freed. No prisoner had ever escaped.

  At 06:51 Korea Standard Time, spectral imaging spysat KX-4B, in geosynchronous orbit over the Sea of Japan, adjusted its trajectory. The view from two hundred kilometers up revealed a blue-amber dawn rippling westward, turning the beaches of Wonsan to a peel of gold. For a few moments Jenna was lost to its beauty. Then her programmed coordinates locked on, and the photographs began beaming into her folder. She took a deep breath.

  Her first sight of it turned her stomach cold. Enclosed by high, forested mountains and dark side-valleys was a vast area of ash and shadow. In the universe of the gulag, Camp 22 was a black hole, off-limits to all outsiders. The little that was known about it came from the evidence of two former guards who had defected ten years ago. What they had described was almost a country in its own right. Two classes of citizen: guard and slave. Fifty thousand starving prisoners toiling in mines and farms. Guards on a permanent war footing, permitted to beat and kill at will. A total control camp. A zone of no return.

  She closed her eyes for a moment and imagined herself as an academic again. Be methodical, objective. Be rational … and stay calm. But as she zoomed in she did not feel very calm.

  She started just outside the southernmost gates, seeing the railroad that carried coal out of the camp. A long trench formed a mantrap bristling with metal spikes. Alongside that: an electrified fence and a no-man’s-land littered with electrocuted rats. She moved her finger on the touchpad, and her view passed over the fence and into the camp. Watchtower, machine-gun nest, administration office. The sun had barely risen. Everything was in a deep shadow cast by the mountains. A few guards patrolling with dogs. No sign of any prisoners. A vast roll call yard, the size of ten soccer fields, empty. Smoke rising everywhere from fissures and holes—coal fires raging deep below ground, perhaps. She kept moving. Cesspool, train station, coal wagons, crematoria. A ball of flame like a bright-orange chrysanthemum. Smelting works, factory, prisoner villages … Tiny huts were arranged in neat grids, like city blocks. She zoomed out. They stretched for miles across the black terrain, thousands of them. Keep moving … internal prison, garbage pond, execution site, graves, graves, graves … prisoners. Vast columns of them, like armies, marching to work under armed guard, some heading toward the black fields, some winding between conical heaps of coal slag toward the pitheads of the mines. One column was half erased by the drifting smoke. It was a vision of inferno, a pit of damnation painted by Bosch. By now she had forgotten the object of her search.

  She heard movement behind her. The last squint in the room was zipping up his padded coat. It was the end of the working day.

  She said to him, “Can I configure this to live feed?”

  He came over to her screen. “Sure, but the picture won’t be sharp.” He leaned over and tapped in an instruction. “Jesus … what are you looking at?”

  Now the columns were moving in real time. More shuffle than march, a legion of the living dead, clothed in filthy gray rags. The guards at their side swung long batons as they walked. The image was much fuzzier. Among the adults were children with large heads, stumbling listlessly; others prisoners were white haired. All of them dragged or limped. A guard lunged into the column, baton
raised, and the prisoners flowed around whoever had fallen, like a river around a rock. When the column had finally passed, Jenna saw what looked like a small cloth sack left lying on the cinder road. She reverted to photographic, and got an HD close-up. Half curled on its side, a bundle of rag and bone, was the emaciated body of a young girl. Her china-white face was part obscured, her hair splayed behind her. Jenna felt the thin membrane that separated her objectivity from horror finally break. She put her hand to her mouth.

  The squint behind her seemed to be holding his breath, and Jenna understood now why these places were seldom studied by his colleagues. It exposed them to the stress of being a witness. They risked seeing things they could never forget.

  Ever since she’d returned from Geneva with the knowledge that Soo-min had not drowned, she’d caught herself many times trying to project her twin into the here-and-now, the present. But when she did so it was always the eighteen-year-old Soo-min that she saw. She imagined she felt Soo-min’s presence again, the genetic link that bound them, but it was thin and faint, like the light from an ancient star. If her mind reached out in search for Soo-min’s living, present self, her sister’s face appeared blurred, shadowed, as if she were behind frosted glass … or smoke. A terrible fear now gripped Jenna’s heart. Had this been Soo-min’s fate? A place like this?

  It was almost midnight on her watch when she finally found it, in a dark, narrow side valley in the camp’s northern extreme. She knew it was what she’d been looking for. It stood out like a space ship, and she guessed they’d not yet had a chance to camouflage it or cover it. A railroad track carried building materials to its entrance, and in front of the entrance was … an orchard? The rows resembled fruit trees, though surely no fruit grew there. By now she was so drained and numbed by the horrors of the camp that her momentous discovery seemed a mere detail.