Fires of War

by Larry Bond

Jiménez grinned. “He doesn’t know that.”

  “He’s not stupid,” said Thera.

  “I didn’t say he was. It’s leverage.”

  “You can’t lie to him like that.”

  Jiménez rolled his eyes.

  “You have to ask him about the pollution,” said Thera. “He’s worried about people dying.”

  “We’ll get to that,” said Jiménez.

  “When?”

  “This is a long process. I have to build up a rapport. You know? I’ve done this before.”

  “I’m just telling you what he’s concerned about.”

  “Don’t tell me my job, all right?” said Jiménez. “Just because you shook your bootie at him doesn’t mean you’re his friend, right?”

  Without thinking, Thera delivered a perfect roundhouse to Jiménez’s jaw. It caught him completely by surprise; he flew into the nearby bulkhead and tumbled to the deck.

  Rankin sprung over and grabbed her, dragging her outside. Thera, slightly stunned by the intensity of her own anger, didn’t resist.

  “All right, settle down,” Rankin told her. “Settle down.”

  “I don’t have to take that.”

  “Yeah.” Rankin didn’t like Jiménez either. “But easy. All right?”

  Jiménez, blood dripping from the side of his mouth, came to the door of the cabin.

  “What the fuck was that for?”

  “For being an asshole,” Thera told him.

  “Well you turned him. That’s all I meant.”

  “I didn’t turn him. I didn’t do anything. He came to me. He picked me at random.”

  “You were out of line,” Rankin told Jiménez.

  “Look, either you let me do my job, or get somebody else.”

  “You can do your job. Just don’t be a jerk about it.” Rankin looked at Thera, who looked like she was about to unload another haymaker. “Let’s get some air up top.”

  Regret mixed with anger as Thera walked down the corridor. They took a turn and found themselves on the hangar deck. Mechanics were looking over a Harrier Jumpjet a few yards away.

  “I’m sorry I hit him,” said Thera.

  “He deserved to be hit.”

  Thera felt her arms shaking. She was still wound up from the mission, too wound up.

  “Let’s go up and have a cigarette,” suggested Rankin. “If I can remember how the hell to get up there.”

  “It’s back through here,” she told him, leading the way.

  How had she become so attached to Ch’o, worried about him? She shouldn’t be. He was just . . . Well, he was just a defector with information that might be useful.

  When you were on a mission, you had to remember things were black and white, good and evil. She was on the good guys’ side. He was on the evil side. Even if he was useful, at the end of the day, he was still on the wrong team.

  Except she didn’t feel that way. She could see the other North Koreans like that, the ones who would have arrested her or shot her or whatever. The guard who’d smoked with her, the officious jerk in South Korea—they were all on the other team; she didn’t feel any sympathy for them. But the scientist was different.

  Why? Because he’d been nice to her?

  Because he was concerned about innocent people being harmed.

  “Look, maybe we should let Jiménez do his thing by himself,” said Rankin as they reached the fresh air. “We were just sitting there anyway. Like bumps on a log. We listen to what the shrink says, and if he thinks Ch’o’s cool, then we let Jiménez take it.”

  “You’re right,” said Thera abruptly. “I’d like to get the hell out of here anyway.”

  20

  DAEJEON, SOUTH KOREA

  “So, who do you think would use a bug like that?” Ferguson asked the professor.

  Wan scowled and turned it over.

  “Very new. Two years old, design,” said the spy buff. “Not government, though.”

  “Not American or not Korean?”

  “Neither. Wait.”

  Wan went to the side of his office and hit his computer mouse. His machine woke up, the screen flashing with a screensaver showing an old substitution code wheel. In less than a minute, he brought up a website that featured the bug in question.

  “Government would want to spend ten times as much,” laughed Wan, pointing at the price: five dollars.

  “Would the bug be ten times as good?”

  Wan smiled.

  Ferguson packed up his sat phone and electronic gear and left them in a small locker in a Seoul self-storage facility. From now until he returned, he would be only Ivan Manski.

  Not having his bug detector when he got back to his hotel wasn’t a real problem; it was easier to assume he was being bugged and act accordingly. But he was curious, and so he set about looking through the hotel room. It was a game in a way, seeing if he could figure things out the old-fashioned way, like a real spy would have done it.

  Like his dad would have done it.

  The bug that he’d removed from the TV set hadn’t been replaced. But there was a new one in the clock radio.

  A bit of an insult, really; the radio was probably the most obvious place to look, after the television and phone.

  And the lamp, where Ferguson found another.

  A third had been placed at the bottom of the small stuffed chair and two more in the bathroom, including one wired into the light fixture ($13.99 on the professor’s website).

  Ferguson gathered them all together, put them on the tile floor, then stomped them under his heel with a loud yell.

  Laughing, he went downstairs to the bar, where, still in character, he ordered a vodka before going out for dinner.

  There were two new bugs in the room when he came back.

  “Points for persistence,” he said in Russian before flushing them down the toilet.

  21

  ABOARD THE USS PELELIU, IN THE YELLOW SEA

  “Maybe we stop now,” said Tak Ch’o. He’d been talking for so long that his jaw hurt. “We stop.”

  “Yeah, that’s fine,” said Jimenez. “As good a place as any.” Jimenez glanced at the translator. “Start back in tomorrow morning?”

  “I want to know,” said Ch’o, “is the girl OK?”

  “Yeah, I told you, she’s fine,” said Jiménez.

  Reflexively, Ch’o started to nod, accepting what Jimenez said. He had heard such excuses many times in his days in North Korea, and always, he had nodded.

  Because he was afraid. Fear was the central fact of his life.

  No more. That was why he froze when he woke up here. The fear had been removed, and he was incapable of everything, even breathing, without it. But somehow, when he’d seen that the girl might be in danger, he had been reborn.

  That was who he wanted to be, who he was now: a man who could help others by acting, not by being afraid and paralyzed.

  “The girl,” said Ch’o firmly. “I will see her now.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes. I want to talk to her alone. And tomorrow, tomorrow we will speak of more important things.”

  “Well, now, listen, Doc, we have plenty of things to talk about,” said Jiménez.

  “We will talk about what I want to talk about tomorrow,” insisted Ch’o.

  “All right,” said Jiménez, still clearly reluctant. “Sure. Whatever you want.”

  “Let the girl come to the cabin.”

  “She’s got to decide that for herself, but I’ll tell her.”

  Thera spent the afternoon hanging around her cabin, reading a mystery the last occupant had left behind. Attempting to keep contact with the ship’s crew and marines to a minimum—and still in a dark mood because of her confrontation with Jimenez—she had a sailor bring her dinner. She flipped on the closed-circuit entertainment channel while she ate and began watching a sentimental tear-jerker about a kid looking for his father in the Alaskan wilderness. She guessed the ending five minutes into the picture—the boy’s real father h
ad disguised himself as the guide for the journey—but still felt her eyes welling up at the very end when the guide, fatally wounded on the trek, revealed himself after saving the boy’s life.

  Movie over, Thera fiddled halfheartedly with a computer game that was connected to the television set. Finally she flipped on the TV and began watching the Alaskan wilderness movie a second time.

  Father and son were just about to be attacked by a Kodiak bear when Rankin knocked at the side of her door.

  “Come on in,” she said.

  Rankin did so. Jiménez followed.

  “Busy?” asked Rankin.

  “Bored.”

  Thera flipped off the TV She glared at Jimenez, daring him to apologize. He didn’t.

  “I was wondering,” said Jiménez, “if maybe you’d come see Dr. Ch’o.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s worried something happened to you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. The shrink says he’s fine, a little, you know, culture shock. And maybe he’s protective of you or something along those lines.”

  “Maybe he likes people who aren’t jerks.”

  “Look, you’re the one who hit me,” said Jiménez. “My jaw still hurts.”

  “You’re lucky I hit you there,” said Thera. “Would it kill you to say you’re sorry?”

  “Would it kill you?” answered Jiménez.

  “If I did anything to apologize for, I would.”

  They glared at each other, neither willing to give up any ground.

  “Why don’t you go talk to the scientist?” Rankin told her. “Just show him you’re OK.”

  “I have no problem with that,” said Thera, getting up.

  “Hey,” said Jiménez, following her out of the stateroom.

  “Yeah?”

  “Look, I’m not a total jerk, all right?”

  “You have a way to go to prove that.”

  “I jumped to the wrong conclusion. You’re pretty, and that’s the way it works with a lot of guys I deal with. I just jumped to the wrong conclusion. OK?”

  “I’ll let you know what happens,” she said, turning toward Ch’o’s cabin. Never before had being called pretty sounded like such an insult.

  I brought this to many people’s attention. Personally, I took it to General Namgung. Personally. I had worked with him on many special projects, most recently four or five months ago, engineering special shielding for air transport of waste. He understood the hazards, but would he act? He did not act. This is a great shame to our country. Many people will die.”

  Ch’o stopped and looked up at Thera.

  “You understand what I am saying?” he asked.

  “Of course. But you should tell Jimenez this.”

  “I will. But you . . . you understand, don’t you?”

  Thera nodded.

  “Maybe you could write this down,” suggested Ch’o. “To keep a record.”

  “I can get Jiménez.”

  The scientist shook his head. “I’d rather talk to you now.”

  “All right. Let me get a pad and a recorder. Is that OK?”

  “That would be very good.”

  Four years of college, and I’m back to being a secretary, she thought, leaving the cabin.

  22

  DAEJEON, SOUTH KOREA

  Mr. Li had described the trip to North Korea as if it were a junket, but he hadn’t done it justice.

  Ferguson went down to the lobby a few minutes before noon, just in time to see a white passenger van pull up to the curb. A young woman dressed in a short, skin-tight yellow skirt hopped from the back and strode toward him, asking in English if he was the Russian businessman Ivan Manski.

  “At your service,” said Ferguson.

  “Your bag, I take.”

  “Is fine,” said Ferguson, laying on his heaviest Russian accent. “We go now?”

  “We go, yes.” She led him to the minibus, then stowed his bag in the back.

  “Mr. Manski, we are pleased to have you,” she said in a way that suggested any number of double entendres. “We can get you something, yes?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Vodka?”

  “A little vodka maybe,” said Ferguson.

  She slipped back to a refrigerator chest at the rear of the van and took out a bottle of Zyr, an expensive vodka made in Russia, though the company was actually owned by an American.

  “Straight,” Ferguson told her. “Just ice.”

  “Ice? You are not a purist?”

  “It’s still early,” said Ferguson, taking the glass and admiring the scenery.

  A few minutes later they entered a residential area of single-family homes and pulled into a private driveway. A short man in a gray suit was waiting. He left his bag for the young woman and climbed into the van. Ferguson introduced himself as Manski, giving him a card and examining the newcomer’s. The man was an electronics salesman interested in opening his own factory up north in one of the special zones set aside for foreign endeavors near the capital. When the door closed and the van was underway, he told the woman that it was too early to drink, but since the other guest had already started, he would have a Scotch to keep him company.

  The ritual was repeated four more times as the van made the rounds picking up its passengers. Everyone had a drink. And caviar. And a number of other treats Ferguson couldn’t identify by sight or taste.

  When all of the passengers had been picked up, the driver got on the highway toward Seoul. About five miles south of the capital, they were met by a pair of police cars. Lights flashing, the police escorted them to Gimpo, the airport to the west of Seoul generally used by domestic flights. There a private 727, already half-filled with other guests of Park, waited to take them north.

  Ferguson circulated as much as he could among the other passengers. All were male, and all had relatively important positions in their respective companies, though none were as wealthy as Park.

  Nor did any seem likely buyers for the goods an arms dealer specialized in. Ferguson chatted up the virtues of his supposed company’s instruments just long enough to bore each listener, establishing his credentials before changing the subject to the trip or to the problems of doing business in the North or to Park himself.

  The billionaire wasn’t traveling with the rest of the party. He had already boarded a two-engined jet aircraft similar to a 737. Built by the Korea Commercial Aircraft Development Company as a demonstrator a few years before, the plane had the latest technology, from super-efficient engines to a glass cockpit. It rivaled anything made in America or Europe, but because the company had no track record—and because it was primarily a Korean effort—other Asian countries did not place any orders, and the firm switched its efforts to spare parts.

  Park, of course, had been the major investor.

  “The Americans were the ones most interested in the aircraft,” explained Ha Song, who sat next to Ferguson on the 727. Mr. Ha worked for an investment group with interests in cable television but had represented some aeronautics firms around the time of the project. “This was genuinely a surprise, since usually they look down on us as little brothers.”

  “A very Americanski attitude,” said Ferg.

  “Your government would have done very well to have formed a partnership.”

  “Undoubtedly,” said Ferguson. “But I don’t represent the government.”

  “Many good engineers in Russia.”

  “The best,” said Ferguson. “Except for Korea.”

  Mr. Ha’s face shaded slightly. Without prompting, he began telling him the story of his ancestors, ethnic Chinese who had been in Korea for several hundred years.

  “Before the Japanese came to our country, my family had many, many shops,” said Ha.

  “Did they take them away?”

  “Not at first, but, during the bad time, what we know as World War II, that was very trouble-matic.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Many Korean peoples, same story,
” said Ha. “Japanese very evil.”

  “Good in business.”

  Ha made a face. “Their money not worth it. Very evil.”

  “It’s too bad,” said Ferguson.

  “Russia have war with Japan, too: 1904.” Ha was referring to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, which was fought partly over Korea as well as Manchuria.

  “Dah,” said Ferguson. “And we get butts kicked.”

  Ha took a moment to translate the slang, then they both started to laugh.

  A line of North Korean officials met them inside the terminal at P’yŏngyang. Ferguson bumped along with the others, nodding and smiling, nodding again. There was no passport check. If the bags were inspected, it was done by whoever had retrieved them; they were collected and sent on to their destination without being reunited with their owners.

  As Ferguson was about three-fourths of the way through the receiving line, a short man approached him and asked in Russian if he was Mr. Manski.

  “Dah,” said Ferguson. “I am Manski.”

  “I am Mr. Chonjin,” said the man. “I will interpret for you.”

  Chonjin’s accent was so unusual that it took Ferguson a few seconds to untangle what he said.

  “Your accent . . . Where do you come from?” Ferguson asked.

  Chonjin said that, while he was Korean, he had spent much of his life in Vladivostok, a city on the coast of the Sea of Japan where he had been a member of the North Korean Trade Group. Ferguson assumed this meant that he had been a spy there, for surely he was a spy now, assigned to stay close to one of the more dubious members of Mr. Park’s party.

  He had the face of a pug—a pushed-in nose, large drooping eyes, a sad-sack mouth—but he was amiable enough, smiling and laughing as they worked their way through the rest of the officials gathered in the hall.

  “All hope to do business very soon,” said Chonjin as they reached the end. “We are the new China. Better.”

  “Of course,” said Ferguson.

  “You would like to open a factory here?”

  “I keep an open mind.”

  The visitors were herded upstairs for a brief welcoming speech by an official Chonjin said was the local mayor. When the talk was over—“Better Than China” seemed to be the theme of the day—they were treated to a reception table at the far end of the large room. A half hour later, the entourage was escorted outside to waiting buses. A school band, heavy on the tubas but otherwise remarkably tuneful, serenaded them as they walked the few feet to the vehicles.