False Flag

by Jack Slater

  False Flag

  Jason Trapp - Book 2

  Jack Slater

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  1

  Labor Camp 15

  Yoduk, North Korea

  January 12th, 1981

  The body swung from a noose, the slow creaking of the rope competing with the cawing of carrion birds. They had picked the flesh off his bones, starting the moment he was dead. They took his eyes first. Soft, defenseless. There was little left of them now except a bloody hole. A pit, where life used to be.

  The little boy stared at the corpse with no visible emotion. He was used to death. At just seven years old, he had seen more of it than most people would in their entire lives. He watched as a crow landed on the man’s frozen shoulder and began pecking at his pitted cheeks. The bird tore off a lump of frozen flesh no bigger than a thumbnail.

  The boy crouched. His belly was distended with hunger. Although he did not know it, at that very moment television commercials in America were collecting donations for the child victims of an Ethiopian famine. Those children looked very much like him. Except their hunger was an accident. His was man-made. The regime had condemned his family to death. And death would take every one of them. Not fast. But with agonizing slowness, with hunger clawing at their minds every day, until the darkness embraced them.

  But if the boy could just catch that crow, he could eat for a week.

  He would have to tear the flesh from its bones, and swallow it raw. He didn’t dare light a fire. The smoke would attract other prisoners—bigger, more violent men, and they would take everything he had. Even women would tear the food from his fingers without a second thought.

  Camp 15 was no place for kindness. It was kill, or be killed. Eat when you got the chance, or starve to death.

  The boy didn’t know what the man’s crime had been. Probably nothing. In Camp 15, life was cheap. It was the place where the North Korean regime sent its political prisoners. Not just those who dared to criticize the state, but two generations of their family as well. The Supreme Leader had decreed that every trace of disloyalty needed to be wiped from the face of the earth.

  In the distance, a gunshot echoed around the mountainous hills that surrounded the concentration camp. It was a common sound. Perhaps an execution, but more likely a guard having fun. There was little to do up here in the mountains. No television. No radio. Just endless work for the prisoners, and cruelty to occupy those who guarded them.

  The sound of the gunshot startled the crow, and it leapt into the air, beating its wings furiously, until it was little more than a dark speck in the frozen sky. The boy let out a little whimper of defeat.

  A tear leaped from his right eye. It froze almost instantly as it came into contact with the bitter cold of a North Korean winter. He leapt up and beat the air with frustration. For a few seconds, he had been able to forget the hunger gnawing at his belly. But now it was back, and the realization that there would be no food today redoubled the pain in his gut.

  “Why am I here?” he whimpered. “What did I do?”

  Guards competed with each other in this place to demonstrate their brutality. The boy was no stranger to their attentions. His body was marked with bruises that never healed, due to the lack of nutrition in his diet. His back was carved with thick, deep ridges—the result of a whipping when he was just four years old. His crime was stealing a crust of bread.

  Now a new sound filled the mountain pass.

  The boy’s mind filtered out the usual cries of pain and despair and hopelessness, the sounds of violence and hunger that filled the enormous camp. Even gunshots barely registered in his brain anymore.

  But this was different. It was the sound of machinery. Trucks. Most likely, it heralded the arrival of new prisoners.

  Fresh meat.

  The boy took off running, moving as fast as his emaciated frame would allow. He darted through alleyways between the tightly packed wooden huts in which the prisoners lived. Shortcuts that no guards knew about. But the children of the camp did. They were places to hide, places to catch a moment’s peace. Places to store stolen food and valuables.

  The arrival of new prisoners meant that the boy had a brief opportunity. They would be cityfolk, most likely. The security forces tended to ignore ordinary peasants, thinking them little more than animals—no more capable of independent thought than a mule or an ox. But city people were different. They had wealth, of a kind. Not money, or gold, but something far, far more valuable in a place like Camp 15.

  Food.

  Perhaps real, white rice, of a kind that the boy could barely remember having eaten. He couldn’t recall much about life before his imprisonment. After all, he was only seven, and he had lived in this place for years, fed on a thin gruel of grain porridge, day after day, year after year. The only protein in his diet was the occasional maggot, wood louse or cockroach.

  And if not food, then maybe the new arrivals would have cigarettes, or something else that he could steal and barter. Like all the children who survived in this place, at just seven years old the boy was an accomplished pickpocket. He knew how to move without being noticed, not just between the wooden huts of the camp, but within crowds.

  He exited the row of huts he had been running through, and slowed. He didn’t dare be seen by a guard. They would ask him where he was going, why he wasn’t working, and he didn’t have a good answer. They would beat him. Again. And not just him, but his mother too. She was pregnant.

  The whore.

  The thought of his mother filled the little boy with rage. How could she be pregnant? They had too little food as it was. He hated her. Hated the little boy or girl growing inside her, too, for stealing what was rightfully his. He was the man of the family, now his father was dead. What right did she have to take food from his mouth?

  No. The little boy resolved that whatever he managed to steal today, he would not share it.

  It wasn’t always like that, a thought at the back of his mind reminded him. You shared. Your mother is only looking out for you.

  But then the red mist of anger descended on the boy’s vision. It was his mother’s fault he was in this place at all. She was the criminal, but he was the one getting punished.<
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  Ahead of him, several trucks came to a halt, with a Jeep at the front of the small procession. They were painted in army green. Soldiers packed the first of the trucks, and terrified, frozen prisoners the last three.

  “Get out!” a guard screamed.

  His bayonet was fixed to his rifle. The boy knew what was about to happen. He had seen this story play out dozens of times over his short life.

  The prisoners shuffled out of the truck, and the boy dropped to his knees, pretending to be searching the ground for insects. Lifting frozen stones and searching fruitlessly underneath. All the prisoners did this. It was the only way they had to survive. Even rats couldn’t live long in a place like this.

  The women could sell their bodies for food. It wasn’t a choice, but then, the guards didn’t want to screw dying women, so they fed the whores better than some. The little boy was condemned to die. So they didn’t bother with him.

  “Traitors, step out of the trucks and form lines!” a guard shouted, through an antiquated wooden megaphone. It was painted red with patriotic slogans. All eyes turned to it, and the boy made his move, stealing between the new arrivals, fingers brushing against pockets and bags as he moved, unseen.

  “Boy,” a cold voice said from above him. “What is your name?”

  The little boy froze.

  Surely the voice wasn’t speaking to him? He had been so careful. The guards never saw him. But this man had. The boy knew it. And he knew it was over. There was no stealing in Camp 15. At least, not officially. Thieves lost their hands. Without their hands, they could not work. If they did not work, they didn’t even receive the meager rations the other prisoners did.

  So the little boy was dead already. He kept his gaze fixed on the ground.

  “I asked your name,” the cold voice repeated. “Answer me.”

  The boy looked up. The man’s face looking down at him was hard and pitted from a case of childhood chickenpox. He was dressed in an olive green army uniform, his shoulders decorated with four parallel red lines, and two silver stars. The boy didn’t know what that meant, but he knew the man was powerful. He was well fed. His shoulders were broad, his eyes a cold black.

  “I am Kim Youp-Min, sir.”

  “You were stealing, Kim.”

  The boy, Kim, nodded. His head felt heavy, his limbs slow. He knew better than to lie to the army officer. A quick death would be better. Perhaps a bullet from the pistol at the man’s hip. Or hanging, like the man swinging in the wind. Anything was better than the cell.

  Kim had seen it. It was little more than a few feet high, with freezing water up to waist height. There was no food. Once you went in, a prisoner would stand until exhaustion overcame him, then fall into the water. The body will not let you drown without a fight. And so you stand again. And exhaustion takes you again. And you drown. And you stand. It is a horrible way to go.

  “Yes. I was hungry.”

  “You were good at it,” the voice said, sounding almost impressed, Kim thought. “How long have you been in this place?”

  Kim shrugged. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the darkness in the man’s eyes. “I don’t know. Most of my life.”

  “And you are still alive,” the officer said. “You must be good at stealing.”

  Kim did not reply to that loaded question. He looked up at the officer with untrusting eyes. In his world, adults were to be feared, not loved. Yet in a way, his silence was a form of defiance.

  “Do you have a family, Kim?”

  The boy nodded. “A mother,” he said.

  “Do you love her?”

  Kim shrugged. Did he?

  Honestly, he did not know. Perhaps there had been a time when he did. Before the camp. Before the cruelty, and the hunger, and the whippings and the death. But Kim could barely remember the world outside the barbed-wire topped fences that surrounded Camp 15. Those memories he did have were so faint they might not even have been real.

  The uniformed man smiled coldly, as if he understood more about Kim’s response than perhaps the boy even did himself. He knelt down, resting one knee on the hard-packed ground.

  “Are you hungry, Kim?”

  The young boy nodded warily.

  He was always hungry. With his belly distended from lack of food, the hunger pains never left. They never dulled. The brain screamed an incessant warning that he was on a path toward an early grave. Not that the young boy understood the mechanics of his peril. There was no schooling in Camp 15, and even if there were, he was too young.

  “What would you give not to be?” the man asked, fixing dark eyes on Kim’s own. “I can make it so that you are never hungry again. So you’re never cold again. Give you everything you have ever wanted.”

  The boy studied the nameless officer for a long time, the wind whistling in the background, carrying the sounds of trudging, wailing prisoners. He knew they would learn to be quiet soon enough. Even when inflicting their beatings, the guards didn’t like their charges to make a sound.

  But this man was different. His shoulders were broad, unlike even the best-fed of the guards. His skin had a life to it unlike anyone in this camp. He clearly did not know hunger, or suffering. And that was something the boy had yearned for his entire life.

  Was it a trap? Was this man going to kill him? And if that was his plan — was it so bad? It would put an end to his hunger. To his pain.

  He nodded. “Anything. I’ll do anything.”

  The officer stood up and snapped his fingers at the nearest guard. “You,” he spat with cold derision. “Bring the boy’s mother to me.”

  The guard took off at a run, his worn boots slapping against the frozen ground. Kim watched him until he disappeared past the first row of wooden huts. Dozens of pairs of eyes were trained on him, though they pretended not to be.

  Even the guards were curious.

  This went against everything Kim knew. The best, the only, way to stay safe in this place was to remain unnoticed. To blend into the background. And yet now he had made himself the center of attention. All for a pack of stolen cigarettes, or a crust of bread.

  Moments later, the guard returned with a colleague, dragging Kim’s mother by her greasy, tangled hair. Strangely, Kim felt nothing for her. No worry. No fear. He had an opportunity to get out of this place—whether a quick death, or with this strange army officer.

  And whatever the man asked, he would give it.

  “Kneel,” the officer ordered coldly.

  Kim’s mother did as she was told. Her eyes were dull in her gaunt face, yet a tear leaked from her exhausted eye. She had given everything for her child, and to simply survive, but what mother could live knowing that her offspring was in such peril?

  The officer turned to Kim. He pulled a revolver from a holster on his waist, spun the cylinder and removed all but two of the bullets. He motioned at another soldier, wearing a similar uniform to his own. Kim didn’t know the man’s rank, but he knew that he, too, was well fed.

  Strong.

  “If you do something for me, boy, I will take you with me. You will have everything I promised.”

  “What do you want?” the boy whispered. He thought he knew. His stomach clenched, and for the first time in his young life, he didn’t know whether it was from hunger or fear.

  The officer ignored him. He extended his arm, aiming the weapon at the sad broken woman in front of him, broken by fear and hunger and pain. She wept silently, but knew better than to beg.

  And he fired.

  Two sounds split the mountainous landscape. The report of the weapon, and a scream. Kim’s mother fell to the ground, blood spouting from her shoulder. It gushed, thick and dark, and soaked the frozen ground.

  Kim froze.

  His limbs were ice, and not just from the biting winter wind. His mother’s wails cut through the sound of prison life like a knife. They tore at his ears, made him want to scream with frustration.

  “Shut up!” he yelled. “Just shut up!”

  His
mother fell silent, shocked out of her pain by the venom in the little boy’s voice. Next to him, the army officer smiled coldly. “Good,” he said.

  And then he handed the little boy the revolver, with one bullet left. The mother’s eyes locked onto her son’s. Tears streamed down her cheeks, carving rivulets through weeks of accumulated dirt.

  The officer gestured at Kim’s mother coldly. “Now it’s your turn,” he said.

  Kim knew that the offer was simple. If he pulled the trigger, he could leave this awful place today. If not, he would die. Perhaps not today, or even tomorrow—but death was inevitable in this place. He did not know what the world was like beyond the barbed wire fences which surrounded Camp 15. But Kim knew it could not be worse than this.

  The smartly dressed, well-fed army officer was offering him a way out.

  Still, his finger trembled where it grazed the trigger. The weapon felt heavier than it had any right to—not simply because the boy was weak from lack of food, but due to the weight a decision of this magnitude would have on any grown man’s soul, let alone a boy of seven. There would be no turning back.

  “Do it,” the officer growled, gesturing at one of his men for the man’s pistol. He leveled the weapon at Kim’s forehead. And then, with devastating slowness, he moved his aim to Kim’s mother. “Or I will.”