Rings of Fire

by Gregory Shepherd

  “I thought you said someone found it already.”

  “He did. But he won’t say where it is. Until he’s reunited with his son.”

  Patrick numbly disengaged from the conversation as Nahm continued with his account of the miner.

  Outside of Kaesong, North Korea

  Four years earlier

  May 1, 2017

  A man in his early thirties walked with his wife and very young son into the forest just outside of Kaesong near the DMZ. It was the day of the Glorious Triumvirate Celebration in Pyongyang, a day commemorating the ineffable magnificence of Kim Il-sung, his son Kim Jong-il, and the current Brilliant Commander, Kim Jong-un. A national holiday had been declared, and citizens all across the country were exhorted to watch the celebration on large screen televisions set up in public places. Chief Engineer Ahn Mun-yin had lied his way out of attending the broadcast in Kaesong by telling his work unit supervisor that his young son was feared to have contracted tuberculosis and needed to be kept quarantined. He knew someone else who had successfully used the same lie to escape that year’s dreaded February 16 commemoration of Kim Jong-il’s birthday.

  So with a spring in their steps, the young Ahn family made their way to the father’s workplace, which was only accessible across a high and steep ravine. He carried the boy on his back and led his wife by the hand. She hated heights and kept her eyes closed when they reached a short but particularly treacherous part of the trail where he guided her steps. When they arrived at their destination, they were rewarded by a glorious spring day shining over one of the loveliest parts of the country.

  The plan was to enjoy a picnic at the waterfall that ran above the cave where Ahn had been exploring for new seams of coal. He had recently found several tiny diamonds in the cave in the course of his prospecting, and he hoped to find one large enough today to have fashioned into a ring for his wife. The little boy carried a plastic pail and shovel, the mother a lunch basket, and the father a headlamp. His tools were already in the cave. A half-hour’s walk later, they reached their destination, and the wife spread out blankets. The boy began digging in the dirt with his plastic shovel, and his mother asked him what he hoped to find.

  “Gold, Omma¸ for you and Appa!” Ahn smiled as his wife wrapped the boy in her arms. “We don’t need gold or anything else, as long as we have you, Dae-ho!”

  Ahn then told his wife he would be gone just a short while, keeping secret that he would be searching for a diamond suitable for this woman he loved so much.

  As he entered the cave, he savored the cool mustiness and the silence that echoed his footfalls. Half an hour later, he dug his hammer into the cave wall a quarter mile below the surface, and his headlamp picked up a yellow glint. At first, he thought it was his eyes conjuring up kaleidoscopic shapes as they became accustomed to the dark. He rubbed his eyes, but the glint remained, so he began chipping away steadily at the rockface until he was finally able to use his hands to pull out a large section of rubble. As he did so, the yellow glint expanded. He opened the tool bag he had carried in, took out his X-ray fluorescence analyzer, and aimed it at the seam, just to be sure it was really gold. But the list of elements in addition to gold that appeared on the readout screen of the XRF analyzer sent a shiver up his spine. He then pointed the device all around the rocky matrix containing the gold and confirmed his suspicion. He had stumbled upon a huge concentration of all seventeen rare earth elements in one place. But how extensive was the deposit?

  Half an hour later of aiming the XRF at the rockface all through the mineshaft, it was clear that the deposit extended far into the cave, possibly for miles. He would need to return to the surface and call this in right away, but so absorbed had he been in his task that his brain hadn’t even registered the distant thunder of a flood pulse.

  Meanwhile, his wife sat topside with her son drinking the cold barley tea she had prepared and waiting for her husband to reappear at the cave entrance. She began to worry. Down below, the sound of rushing water got louder, and Ahn finally realized the danger he was in. He hurriedly made for the cave entrance a quarter mile above as the rumble of floodwaters grew in intensity, like a freight train hurtling through a tunnel. Carefully threading his way through a mineshaft partially blocked by a rockslide set off by the flooding, it took him a full hour to reach the surface, the entire cave shaking as if by an earthquake. He was only fifteen yards from the cave entrance when an enormous torrent of white water spewed from the cave ceiling, and he barely dodged tons of falling rock and debris. Within seconds, his exit from the cave was almost completely blocked. He could see daylight, but there was no way he could get out without help, so he checked for a signal on his cellphone. He was picking up one bar, but it flickered in and out of reception.

  He repeatedly tried calling his wife, but there was no answer, so he yelled toward the cave entrance over and over but again heard nothing. Sensing that something had gone wrong with her husband in the cave, the wife had hurried back forty minutes earlier in the direction of Kaesong to try to get help. As the late afternoon light outside faded, Ahn decided to see if his phone signal would carry to Pyongyang, and he dialed a number.

  Pyongyang

  “Rising Tide! Rising Tide! Rising Tide!”

  The ecstatic chant resounded throughout Pyongyang on the day of the overthrow of the Kim Jong-un regime. Shopkeepers, barbers, factory workers—people from every walk of life shouted themselves hoarse long into the night as they realized that a yoke had finally been removed from their necks. Thousands had dutifully arrived in the capital that morning, expecting the usual depressing celebration of socialism, but by the end of the day, the people had risen up and thrown off their shackles.

  By the time Chief Mining Engineer Ahn phoned from the cave in which he was trapped, the Rising Tide revolution was in full swing, and government activity had quickly come to a halt in the capital as the state security apparatus collapsed. Pihl Do-yun, the mining engineer’s supervisor in the People’s General Industry Group, breathlessly picked up the phone when a call came in.

  “Yes, what is it?” Pihl shouted excitedly into the phone.

  “Comrade Pihl, can you hear me? This is Chief Engineer Ahn Mun-yin at a mine down south. I’m trapped in the cave and need help. Can you call someone from your end to come help?”

  “I can’t, Comrade Ahn, Pyongyang is…” Pihl’s next words were garbled, and Ahn could not make them out. He shouted into his phone. Maybe Comrade Pihl just needed some more motivation to send help.

  “But I think I’ve just made an important discovery. Tons and tons of rare earth, the kind we’ve been looking for…”

  “There’s been trouble here, Comrade Ahn, the Brilliant Commander has gone into hiding, and the streets are filled with people. Someone said the government has collapsed. I can’t do anything right now, I’m very sorry. Where did you say you made this discovery? I’ll make a note of it, but then I have to get the hell out of here. Are you there, Ahn? Comrade Ahn, are you there?”

  But Comrade Ahn had ended the call. It had finally happened. The rumors had been true about the Rising Tide group going to Pyongyang for a mass demonstration, and now it looked as though the demonstration had turned into a full-scale overthrow. Ahn was jubilant and depressed at the same time. It would take him hours to tunnel out of the cave, and he still couldn’t reach his wife by phone. He shouted for her over and over. Still nothing. Finally, after sitting on the ground frantically going over his options, he turned on his headlamp and began digging his way out of the cave. The next morning when he finally emerged, he went straight home. There was no sign of his wife or son.

  CHAPTER 45

  Patrick and Yumi, along with a sleepy-eyed Dae-ho, took the early morning Japan Air flight to Seoul and were met by an official who drove them from Kimpo Airport to the Seoul Government Complex in the capital’s Jongno District. There they were photographed and fingerprinted for
their extraordinary travel visas that would enable them to freely cross the DMZ. Once in North Korea proper, they would meet President Nahm Myung-dae, who would be personally escorting them to the village of Darang-ri, where Chief Mining Engineer Ahn lived alone. His wife had gone missing on the day that Ahn was trapped in the cave. She was presumed dead, probably from a fall down the ravine that led to the cave. Dae-ho was found wandering in the forest alone and starving, and was sent to the children’s shelter that Patrick and Yumi worked at. Patrick had already sent Nahm a photo of the boy, and Ahn had confirmed he was his son.

  When Patrick came home on the day he had spoken by phone to Nahm, Yumi could tell that something was gravely amiss, not only because he was supposed to be staying in Tokyo, but from the morose look on his face. Her anxiety turned to devastation when Patrick broke the news that the boy’s father had been found. A welter of conflicting emotions ran like an electric charge through them both. On the one hand, they were of course happy for Dae-ho that he would be reunited with his father. On the other, they had grown so attached to the boy that they were heartsick.

  As they drove up to the DMZ, the boy hummed to himself, the first time they had ever heard him do that. He seemed to sense that he was going home. Patrick and Yumi sat looking out the window in dispirited silence. As promised, Nahm met them on the north side of the DMZ. His beaming smile at seeing his old friend from the revolution vanished as he noted Patrick’s and Yumi’s misery. After perfunctory small talk, they got into his government car, and Nahm’s driver took them along the Reunification Highway past the city of Kaesong. Patrick was able to pick out landmarks from his several motorcycle trips back and forth to Pyongyang when he was rescuing Yumi from Senghori Prison.

  When they came to a maple tree by the side of the highway that had been struck by lightning, the driver slowed down and began negotiating an unimproved road up into the surrounding mountains. Soon they came upon a village: Darang-ri. Along the way Dae-ho had become increasingly animated, and when he saw the first building of the village, he let out a loud “Haaa” sound and began pointing at every new building that came into sight. Finally, the moment Patrick and Yumi had dreaded the most was upon them. A man in his mid-thirties was walking toward them with a searching look on his face.

  “Appa! Appa!” Dae-ho called out. Patrick held a sobbing Yumi in his arms. The boy jumped out of the car and into his father’s arms. He began babbling nonstop to his father, the first time Patrick and Yumi had heard him speak. Now they finally understood the boy’s upward inflection when he said “Appa?” and “Omma?” He was not asking them if they were his parents. He was asking where his real parents were.

  After they had had a small lunch that the villagers brought out for them, Dae-ho’s father formally thanked Patrick and Yumi for looking after his boy for the past four years, then huddled to one side with Nahm, Dae-ho watching his father the whole time, as if afraid he might lose him again. After a short discussion with Nahm, the father reached out two fingers, and Dae-ho jumped up, ran over, and took them in his hand. He looked back at Patrick and Yumi and waved with a beaming smile on his face as his father led him out of the building and down the street. Patrick and Yumi watched silently as they disappeared from view. Yumi squeezed the amulet she had lain on Dae-ho’s pillow in Kamakura. It was all she had left to remember him by.

  After allowing them some time together to process what had just happened, Nahm came up to Patrick and Yumi and thanked them again for seeing the boy through the worst of his malnutrition. Then he excused himself. He needed to meet with the boy’s father again about the location of the discovery he had made in the cave.

  Patrick needed to return to the Olympics right away, and Yumi wanted to distance herself as soon as possible from what she had just experienced. They left on the return flight to Tokyo late that afternoon.

  ___________________

  After just a few hours’ sleep at home, Patrick rode his motorcycle to the Olympic Stadium at 3 a.m., the Shuto Expressway dimly lit by a perfectly sliced half-moon that hid timidly behind a scrim of cloud. The lights of the metropolis on the horizon had the soft glow of a thousand Tibetan butter lamps. The whole ride up to Tokyo, he was consumed by the look of hollowing grief on Yumi’s face when they returned from North Korea and saw Dae-ho’s empty bed, as though the fabric of her universe had been rent from top to bottom. When Patrick had to leave, she insisted that she had cried most of the pain away, but he knew it was a brave front for the loss that had devastated her. He forced her image from his mind, and opened the bike up to over a hundred miles per hour, making use for the first time of the red gumball flashing light he had been issued for the duration of the Games.

  Pulling into the stadium, he parked his bike in his underground spot and went into his office for a quick cup of coffee. On the way out again, he checked his face in the mirror, and the eyes that looked back at him were stitched with raggedy crimson threads of fatigue. When he rubbed them, he saw a paisley design. Then it was time for his usual walkaround, both to check for anyone or anything that looked out of place and to keep his mind occupied so that he didn’t start wondering what Dae-ho was doing at that very moment. The last event the previous evening had finished at 10 p.m., and now preparations were being made for the start of the marathon and the Closing Ceremony that would follow it. As he swiveled his head up and down and side to side, searching for anything amiss in the stadium, he was struck anew at the refined elegance of the structure and the ingenuity of its architect, who had seamlessly blended form and function on such a magnificent scale. And its stated goal of oneness with nature was accentuated by the mother hawk that flew up to the rafters every dawn with fresh fish from the nearby lake for its hatchlings.

  All around him as he walked, the stadium buzzed with the muted activity of people who knew exactly what they needed to do. No one waved or called out as they usually did during his walkarounds. Time was tight with the 7 a.m. start of the marathon only a few hours away. He stopped briefly to look at a dozen or so gracile runners from around the world warming up already, and he knew that he would never in a million years have been anywhere close to their level. Even the runners coming in a half hour after the winner today would be sprinting at the end of twenty-six miles. He chuckled as he thought of Indiana Jones’s adage, “It’s not the years, honey—it’s the mileage,” and knew that Indy was wrong. After the age of forty, it was the years and the mileage. He sighed and turned toward his office.

  ___________________

  At 6 a.m., he sat drinking coffee with Kirsten, Tyler, and Kaga, while Phibbs napped off a hangover in a chair and Choy sat at his computer in the adjoining room, sipping ginseng tea. Tyler was on his third cup, and his leg jumped up and down like the needle of a sewing machine. Kirsten made no attempt to hide her irritation. Everyone’s sensibilities were sharpened to a razor’s edge.

  “Can you please stop?” she said. Tyler looked at her uncomprehendingly.

  “Your leg is bouncing. It’s driving me nuts.”

  “Whoa, sorry,” Tyler said in a wounded voice.

  Patrick said, “I think we’re all a bit on edge from lack of sleep.”

  “Especially at zero stupid thirty in the morning,” Phibbs grunted with his eyes closed and his chin on his chest. For Patrick, the maddening unpredictability of the attacks along with the hurried trip to North Korea had stolen from him any restful sleep for several nights running. The others were no less physically exhausted, but Patrick had the added emotional drain of seeing the look on Yumi’s face when he brought her home to a house that was missing one of its key members.

  While they waited to go outside into the stadium proper, they talked about the attacks and how they should prepare for this, the final day of the Olympics.

  “I don’t think we can prepare,” said Phibbs, his head still on his chest. “We can’t expect anything predictable from whoever’s been doing this. All the previous attacks have
been random.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Kaga said. “You know the old story about the elephant and the blind men? One thinks the tail is the elephant, another the trunk, and so on. The point is, it’s all about perspective. We need to stand back, open our eyes, and see the whole elephant.”

  Kirsten said, “You’re right, Minoru.” Her foot had fallen asleep, and she got up and started pacing to restore circulation to her legs. “Patrick, can you see any pattern in the Miyamoto texts you’ve gotten, the whole elephant, as it were?”

  “No, I’ve been trying to do that for weeks,” Patrick said glumly. “The only pattern I can see is that each attack has been an escalation of the previous ones. First the shooting here at the stadium, then the Yasukuni, Budokan and Tokyo Tower attacks, then the Novichok attack on the subway, then the Yoyogi Gym attack, then the Blue Sluice Gate attack. Each one was potentially more lethal than the last, but that doesn’t really give any indication as to what the next target will be.”

  Kirsten stopped in her tracks, her brow furrowed and her eyes focused down on something inward.

  Patrick waved his hand in front of her eyes. “Hello? Calling Kirsten? You still with us?”

  Kirsten said nothing but opened the web browser on her phone. She typed in a search word: Warden.

  CHAPTER 46

  Olympic stadium

  Office of Security

  “Five rings!” Kirsten said excitedly as she held up her phone.

  “But I told you already, the whole Miyamoto Musashi thing is a nonstarter,” Patrick said, irritation in his voice. “Pung or whoever else is just jerking my chain.”

  “No, I’m talking about Warden’s Five Rings!”

  “What the hell is that?” Tyler asked.

  “John Warden was a U.S. Air Force colonel, and he came up with this system of five graduated attacks designed to completely incapacitate an enemy.” She began reading off her phone: “Here, listen to this, ‘Each level of a system, or “ring,” is considered one of the enemy’s centers of gravity. There are five such rings.’ The first of Warden’s Five Rings is ‘fielded military,’ and we can think of that as the two security chiefs who were assassinated on the Olympic field and then the attacks on the SDF and Yasukuni Shrine.”