by Gregg Loomis
Commander Straton Swift was not a happy man as Lieutenants j.g. (junior grade) George Semitz and Sam Rodgers had already surmised. Senior officers did not normally summon junior grade officers to the rarified atmosphere of command headquarters.
They stood at attention in front of a long wooden desk that rumor attributed to the keel of the Federal frigate Merrimack, later known as the Confederate ironclad, Virginia, commanded by Lt. Catesby ap Roger Jones of the Confederate Navy on that March 9, 1862, when the first battle between ironclad ships took place in Hampton Roads, Virginia.
Lt. Jones was somehow related to Commander Swift, although that was unlikely to be the subject of the forthcoming conversation.
The Commander continued to study a pair of personnel files open on the historic desk before he acknowledged the other two men’s presence. His expression when he looked up was anything but encouraging.
“What were you two thinking, breaking into the home of a US citizen? You’re damn lucky this Reilly person didn’t press charges.”
Neither man moved his gaze from a spot about a foot above the commander’s head but it was clear Semitz was waiting for Rogers to speak and Rogers was waiting on Semitz.
“Well?” the Commander was getting impatient.
Semitz cut his eyes toward Rogers for an instant. “Sir! Your orders were to obtain the unknown object from Mr. Reilly. On 24 March, we endeavored to have him turn over the object on the grounds of patriotism and national security. He declined to do so. Obtaining it by extra-legal means was our only recourse. Sir!”
He risked glance at the two club chairs in front of the commander’s desk.
No chance Commander Swift was going to let these two fuck-ups sit. “Your only recourse at the risk of exposing this Office to prosecution, ridicule, and possible congressional investigation. A damn poor choice, Mr. Semitz.”
The realization his career with the Office of Naval Intelligence was balanced on the edge of what could be described in naval terms as the head--if not his career with the entire United States Navy as well--emboldened Semitz. “Sir! If Reilly won’t hand it over and we can’t steal it, how would the Commander proceed?”
Swift daggered a glare at the young lieutenant, trying to decide if he could read insubordination into the question. One thing was certain: He wasn’t going to put his own ass on the line suggesting a course of action that could come back and bite him in said ass. “Lieutenant, if you can’t find solutions to the problems you are assigned to solve, the Office has no need for you. Try the army.”
Mercifully for the two junior officers, there was a knock on the open door. “Sir?”
An enlisted man with the badge of chief petty officer on his sleeve stood in the doorway, sheet of paper in hand. “Admiral Puller told me to deliver this to you ASAP, Commander.”
Swift motioned him forward. “Thank you, Chief.”
Semitz and Rogers remained standing as the commander read, then reread the paper before putting it face down on the desk. “Talk about dumb-ass luck!”
“Sir?” The lieutenants asked in unison.
“You gentlemen are familiar with the Reconnaissance General Bureau?”
“One of the many North Korean spy agencies?” Rogers asked.
The commander nodded. “They usually busy themselves with infiltrating South Korea to stir up civil strife or conduct cyber attacks. This time, though, it looks like they’re after bigger game.” He held up the paper. “The TSA at Hartsfield Atlanta cameras caught Kwak Pum Ji disembarking a flight from Seoul day before yesterday.”
“Sir, you mean the guy we think is the spook-in-chief for the little toad with the bad haircut who runs North Korea?” Semitz asked.
“For once, Mr. Semitz, you are right on.”
“Wow! He’s vice chairman of their National Defense Commission. Pretty high up,” Rogers chimed in, delighted the subject had shifted. “First time I’ve heard of the Korean commies having an interest outside of Asia.”
“Either they’ve been better at keeping their activities more secret than we thought or something special has come up,” the commander speculated. “And just when this Reilly fellow acquires something that has the Ivans interested. I’m not a big believer in coincidence.”
“You suppose . . .?” Semitz began.
“I suppose you two get into your civvies and your asses back to Atlanta. You keep watch on Reilly. If brother Kwak shows, you take him into custody.”
“Sir, I don’t think the ONI has arrest powers,” Semitz observed.
“Dammit, Lieutenant, use what brains you have! Coordinate with the local ICE office. If it is Kwak, he entered on a South Korean passport and under a false name. Even if the immigration people can’t keep thousands of illegal Mexicans out of the country, maybe they can catch one Korean Commie with bogus papers. Surely someone down there can find a reason to detain him long enough to find out what the hell he’s doing here before shipping him back to North Korea. Better yet, South Korea. Those people don’t take kindly to someone forging one of their passports, particularly a North Korean.”
The two lieutenants spun on their heels as one, headed for the door.
“One more thing.”
They stopped, again pivoting toe and heel.
“Sir?” Semitz began.
“This man Reilly. Anything happens to him before we hash all this out and the two of you will be lucky to get jobs cleaning the men’s room at the Navy Club in Hungry Horse, Nevada, if they have one. I were you, I’d stick with him like he owes you a month’s pay. Understood?”
23.
5220 Buford Highway
Doraville, Georgia
Iron Bowl Korean Noodle Shop
Two Days Earlier
Along I-85 northeast of Atlanta, a number of municipalities are strung like beads on a string: Chamblee, Doraville, Duluth, and so on. Forty years ago, residents worked at the General Motors plant or any number of smaller enterprises. In the decades since, the demographics have changed. Vietnamese nail parlors have replaced old-fashioned barber shops, and Chinese groceries now occupy spaces vacated by more familiar national grocery chains. Korean restaurants shoulder those featuring Indian and Thai cuisine for space along the main corridor, the Buford Highway. Older strip centers bedecked with vacancy signs a few years ago now announce occupants not only in English but in symbols of languages foreign to the ear of natives of these parts. The various suburbs have seen an invasion from the Orient that has raised both property values and public-school achievement scores to some of the highest in the state.
Du-Ho considered himself as American as anyone although he had never quite gotten around to actually taking the citizenship exam despite heckling from his two children, now grown, who had been born here. He’d paid his taxes, supported his family, partly by paying both son and daughter less than minimum wage after school work here in the restaurant. He had never been in trouble and supplemented the scholarships of Ae-Cha and Bon-Hwa in law and med schools respectively.
Now Ae-Cha had been hired by a large New York law firm, and Bon-Hwa was with the orthopedic surgery department at nearby Emory University Hospital.
America had been good to Du-Ho, so good that Chung-Cha, his wife, was talking about moving from the modest three-bedroom ranch into one of those shiny steel and glass towers that seemed to disappear into the clouds. Worse, she almost daily reviewed multi-colored brochures of tours of France and Spain.
France and Spain? What would the son of rural peasants in North Korea’s rural Hamgyong Province know of such things? All he had known as an only child was constant hunger and working the rice paddies and meagre vegetable patches of his commune. And school where he learned of the danger the imperialist West presented to North Korea. Particularly the United States. But he never saw any westerners, only the weekly passing of trucks carrying poor souls to nearby Yodok prison camp.
One day a school chum showed him something that would change his life: A dozen or so American magazines. They couldn’
t read the English of course, but the pictures of sleek automobiles and spacious homes might as well have come from another planet. And the people. . . . No faces shrunken from hunger, fat babies, their parents’ smiles without gaps of missing teeth. Propaganda? Perhaps. But both the magazines and his friend disappeared from school only days later.
The Leader disapproved of western reading materials and his spies were everywhere.
Du-Ho resolved to see for himself this place where everyone was rich and no one seemed to go hungry.
His chance came sooner than he could have imagined. Within months, the northern half of Korea invaded the south. At first it was apparent the northern People’s Army of Korea was winning. Although the news continued to tout the superiority of Korean arms against the imperialist powers, the continuing lowering of the draft age and scarcity of food for the civilian population told a different story.
Eighteen months later, Du-Ho was conscripted at age thirteen. Although food was slightly more plentiful, the brutality of the officers was unbearable. In the midst of his first combat, Du-Ho deserted to the Americans where he served as translator and guide, a job done well enough to earn him preference in immigrating to the United States.
He was unsure exactly how he arrived in the Atlanta area other than hearing there was the beginnings of a Korean community there and the winters were far milder than those of Hamgyong Province.
As he became increasingly Americanized, Korea had faded in memory, the mental equivalent of an old sepia photograph. The closest reality of the country was his widowed mother to whom he sent money monthly. He was unsure if she, or the State, received it but continued through a sense more of duty than reality. Once or twice a year, he received a letter from her, written by a stranger since she had gone blind. Almost always the same: An acknowledgement of the generosity of a dutiful son and praise for a new ruler, this one The Glorious Leader, lines added, Du-Ho was certain, to get the letter past government censors. An occasional photograph was the only assurance he had she was still alive.
Today’s lunch was over. Customers, an even mix of Korean and native Americans, were headed back to work.
That was when Du-Ho noticed him: A Korean in a dark suit, white shirt and tie, probably the only person so dressed in the restaurant. From the look of it, the empty plates and dishes, he had lunched on dolsot bibimbap with kimichi and pork.
Du-Ho reached out to take the arm of a young waitress who had not been there long enough for him to immediately recall her name. “Who is that man, the one in the booth by the door?”
She shook her head, rattling dishes on the tray she carried. “I don’t know. He paid in cash--no credit card.”
Du-Ho watched as the man poured the last of ginseng tea from a small kettle. The suit, or at least the coat, was too big: sleeves covering part of the hands, shoulders almost comically wide and room in the waist that all but could have accommodated an additional occupant. The stranger looked up, nodded and gave a smile that was somehow more unnerving than pleasant. For reasons he could not have explained, Du-Ho felt uneasy.
Ridiculous! This was the United States of America, not North Korea. There was no reason to fear anyone here.
Du-Ho walked toward the booth by the door.
The man stood, extending his right arm supported by his left hand, the respectful manner of shaking hands in Korea. As they shook, he nodded his head, another sign of respect.
Motioning Du-Ho to a seat across from him, he said, “Du-Ho- ssi,” adding the respectful “shi” sound, “my pleasure to meet you.”
The English was definitely Korean-accented. North Korean.
Du-Ho nodded his respect, waiting for the stranger to introduce himself.
Instead, the man made a show of looking around the restaurant. “You have a very successful place.”
Du-Ho shook his head. It was considered prideful to accept praise without mild denial. “My family and I manage to make do.”
“And your family. A doctor for a son and an attorney for a daughter. You must be very proud.”
In Korea, inquiries about and discussion of one’s family demonstrated personal interest and was a common prelude to whatever business was to be discussed.
“They both worked very hard,” Du-Ho said noncommittally.
How did this stranger know so much about him and his family? More important, why?
And who was he? Not introducing himself bordered on rudeness.
There was a brief pause as the man reached into an inside coat pocket and silently slid a color photograph across the table.
Du-Ho instantly recognized his mother.
“She sends her greetings,” the stranger announced.
Du-Ho was fairly certain this man had not come all the way from Hamgyong Province to carry maternal greetings. “Who are you?”
Manners be damned.
The man shook his head. “Who I am does not matter. What does is that your mother has a favor to ask of you.”
He hadn’t come to convey a request from Du-Ho’s mother, either.
“And that is?”
Switching to Korean, the man told him.
Du-Ho was silent for a full thirty seconds. Then, also in Korean, “My mother would never suggest I commit a crime.”
Again, the unsettling smile. “That depends on what it might mean to her.”
The meaning was unspoken but clear: Du-Ho’s mother was hostage--or worse--to his committing what amounted to a burglary.
“Why me? I am far too old to be breaking into buildings and stealing things.”
“There will be no actual ‘breaking.’ You will be furnished with keys.”
“Still, why me?”
“Because a national of the Democratic People’s Republic cannot be involved.”
“I am a citizen of North Korea.”
The man across the table dismissed the idea with a sweep of a hand and expulsion of breath. “You long ago abandoned both your country and your mother. It is not the same.”
Still speaking Korean, Du-Ho put both elbows on the table, leaning across. “I will not commit a crime.”
The other man shrugged, pushing the photograph closer to Du-Ho. “I suggest you keep that. There may well not be another.”
Without another word, he slid out of the booth and reached for the door.
“Wait!” an anguished Du-Ho called.
24.
Peachtree Station
1688 Peachtree Road
Atlanta, Georgia
7:55 pm
Built in 1918 to serve as one of several neighborhood rail stops radiating from the main Southern Railroad terminal downtown, Brookwood, as it is locally known, is the last railroad station in Atlanta. Now operated by Amtrak, it was designed by local architect Neel Reid in the Italian Renaissance style that made him famous throughout the early twentieth century south. Its purpose was to make the railroad convenient for residents of what was then the suburbs, never to serve the hundreds if not thousands who used the much larger but no-longer extant downtown facility.
Paladin windows gaze out on the city’s busiest street. Inside, wooden benches, as old as the station and worn smooth by nearly a century of southern derrieres, can accommodate perhaps twenty-five people, a fraction of the passengers with a great deal more time and patience than the money required for airfare or who simply prefer not to be exposed to the indignity of having their possessions rifled while being groped. Or who are disinclined to undergo the scrutiny to which airline passengers are subjected if it can otherwise be avoided. They crowd into the small space to board one of the two daily trains, one southbound for New Orleans with intermediate stops, the other in the opposite direction for New York. Never mind both obvious and hidden inconveniences such as the lack of parking space or anywhere else to remove baggage from an automobile and the dearth of either elevator or escalator to the platform some fifty or so feet below the station.
Less visible but equally real are those problems one can expect when an arm of t
he octopus-like Federal government takes over what had been the province of private enterprise: Unpublished is the fact that reservations must be made ahead of time for checked baggage or the luggage will go on tomorrow’s train, arriving, if at all, a day after their owner, regardless of how much room the train’s baggage car may have available. No explanation is offered or given by the station’s staff who, instead, demonstrate the contempt for the American taxpayer endemic to some if not all Federal agencies, commissions, and bureaus. The location of the dining car (as distinguished from the club car) is a secret kept with all the fervor and skill of, say, the Central Intelligence Agency. There is a choice of only two directions on a moving train: forward or backward. But to inquire of a conductor, porter, or other employee is to elicit much the same expression and response as if one had requested the solution to Fermat’s Enigma.
So it was on that evening two days after his arrival in the city by international air that a short man in an ill-fitting suit and of obvious Asian linage wedged his way into the station, already jammed with a cross section of the American population so diverse as to please even the most vocal of those who make a living exploiting real or perceived acts of racial injustice.
The New York-bound train glided into the station a few minutes later, at 8:12. That was the destination on the ticket of the man in the suit. Being the only one in such formal attire might have drawn the attention of the conductor had he not been watching with some degree of entertainment the rise of an impossibly short skirt on a young lady as she lifted a leg to climb aboard.
Or perhaps not.
What was certain when agents of an unnamed federal entity boarded the train upon its arrival in Penn Station some thirty plus hours later, first class seat/sleeper D-4 showed no signs of human habitation. A woman across the aisle told investigators the seat had been empty when she had boarded in Washington, DC.
By that time, a man of Asian linage in an ill-fitting suit was already an hour into a trans-Pacific flight aboard a Korean Airline 777. He had spent the previous five plus hours on a similar aircraft operated by Delta between Charlotte and Los Angeles. His sole luggage appeared to be a very small box. Declining the offers of the flight crew to stow it for him, it would remain in his lap for the entire flight.
