WW III

including the fact that at each of 124th Unit’s eight guerrilla bases in the North, there were three hundred volunteers.

This meant that since 1968, over two thousand North Korean agents were being prepared at any one time for further infiltration, agitation, and sabotage against the Americans and the South, that every day at least one agent was crossing the DMZ.

* * *

It wasn’t that the North Korean agent in the Myongdong area this evening before Independence Day had been badly trained. On the contrary, he had received high commendation from his base commander in Kaesong. Not only did he know the military dispositions, weapons, and insignia of all South Korean and American units, especially those along the eighteen and a half miles of the 155-mile-long DMZ guarded by elements of the U.S. Second Infantry Division, but in addition, before being sent south, he had been carefully instructed in those local habits and customs that can so often trip up an agent. He was made well aware, for example, of the new words and phrases creeping into the language. He was told to remember that even though South Korean men, like their North Korean counterparts, expected total obedience from their womenfolk, in the South one should no longer use the word sikmo, calling a maid a maid, but kajongbu—”homemaker” or “home manager”; in much the same way, his NKA instructor told him, as garbage collectors in America insisted on being called “sanitation engineers.” And the agent knew about the red ants. Savored by most Koreans, especially by those from the South, the insects were collected from their favorite habitat in the hills around Pusan and trucked to Seoul on the 270-mile highway that ran almost the entire length of South Korea. Once in Seoul, the ants, like so much other produce, were auctioned off to the highest bidders among the street vendors, who in turn sold them to shoppers off the fashionable Myongdong.

What better way for an agent to indulge his weakness for the delicacy that he could ill afford in the North and at the same time reinforce his cover as a genuine South Korean? Approaching the pushcart, he realized he had only forty-five minutes to get back to his safe, cheap yogwan, or “inn,” two miles from the city center, before the start of the midnight curfew and air raid drill. Still, he would have ample time if he used the subway. The misunderstanding that was about to occur was largely due to the fact that the agent, having only just slipped across the Han River near Kumchon fifteen miles northwest of Seoul the previous night, had been so busy avoiding ROK patrols and settling into the yogwan that he hadn’t yet had a chance to sit down and read a newspaper. This meant he’d missed the two-paragraph story in most of the dailies, except the Korea Times, which didn’t publish on a Monday, about the brush fires in the hills around Pusan, fires that had killed off large numbers of ant colonies. Reduced supply meant higher prices. Unaware of the sharp increase in price, the agent gave the vendor a ten-thousand-won bill, about ten dollars, for an eight-ounce jar. The vendor waited politely, the glass of red ants the customer asked for now costing twice the usual amount. His customer waited, expecting the jar of ants and at least two thousand won in change. Then he realized he hadn’t given the vendor enough. “Olmayo?”—”How much?”

“Ee-man”—”Twenty thousand.” The customer dug deep into his jeans pockets, joking weakly that it would wipe out his subway fare. The vendor, though annoyed, did not show it and got a good look at the man, remembering the posters, as common as theater billboards throughout the city: “If you see a stranger who does not know the exact price of things, or spends a lot of money and hasn’t got a job, or calls you tongmu, which means ‘comrade’ or ‘friend’—grab him! He is a spy.”

Well, he mightn’t be, thought the vendor. Then again… The vendor had lost both parents when the NKA had invaded in 1950.

“Sorry,” apologized the customer. “I haven’t got enough.”

“That’s all right,” replied the vendor, already starting to pack up his stall with the speed and deftness of long experience. “I’ll still have some of these left tomorrow — or another consignment will come in.”

“Thanks,” said the man, taking his leave.

The vendor turned off the carbide lamp, quickly asked a colleague to watch his cart, and followed the would- be customer out onto Sejongro’s sixteen-lane-wide avenue, where he saw the man walking north, drawing level with the huge statue of Admiral Yi. The admiral, in ancient armor, left arm akimbo, right hand gripping his enormous battle sword, had also been vigilant in his time, the vendor recalled, alert to foreign invaders, defeating the great Japanese invasion fleet of 1597.

The vendor, however, while full of the spirit of Admiral Yi, couldn’t see the yellow light of a police station, let alone a policeman. Where were they when you needed one? — always sniffing around when they wanted free samples from the cart. The only official in sight, her smart blue U.S. Navy-style cap barely visible amid the Hyundais and the noisy red and white buses roaring past, was an immaculately dressed and beautiful woman traffic director, her white gloves moving with the suppleness of doves in flight. But the vendor knew by the time he weaved his way through the river of oncoming vehicles and reached her, the man might disappear. Seeing a taxi sign above the crowd, the vendor dashed out to flag it down. But it was brown, only for military personnel, so he had to wait a second until he saw a green cab approaching. Barging ahead of others in line, he jumped into the backseat, glimpsing the yellow-uniformed woman driver as a blur, quickly instructing her to have her dispatcher alert the nearest police cruiser to meet up with them. To the vendor’s alarm, he heard the flag drop and the meter ticking.

“What are you doing that for?” he asked. “This is a public duty.”

“So?” She shrugged. “Someone has to pay.” He was astonished, but she was very young, and he knew that the horrors of the Korean War, so vivid in his childhood memory, must be nothing more than dead history to her generation.

For an anxious moment he thought they’d lost the stranger as they turned right into Yulgog Street, heading east near Changdok Palace and the zoo, but the young woman told the vendor to relax. She still had the man in view and was going to pass him, just in case he suspected he was being followed.

“How could he know?” asked the vendor. “With so many people about?”

“If he’s an infiltrator, he’ll have been trained in such things.”

After a few more minutes, amid the usual honking and insults to various ancestors, a beaten-up, off-white Sinji sedan drew alongside the green cab — two KCIA agents, the one driving telling the cabbie they’d take over, the other asking the vendor to point out the stranger in the crowd. Suddenly the man disappeared into an alley off the Sejong a hundred yards behind them. Without hesitation the vendor told the cabbie to stop, got out, and headed back toward the alley, the agents swearing, pulling sharply into a no-parking zone and following suit. It was now 11:45—fifteen minutes to blackout.

Five minutes later, at the end of the alley as the air raid sirens began their wailing, the two KCIA agents caught up with the vendor, who was now gasping, out of breath. “We’re in luck,” said the younger of the two.

“How d’you mean?” asked Chin Sung, his older colleague, a shorter man in his midfifties.

“He never got on the subway after all. He’s gone through Donhwamun Gate, so it’s either Changdok Palace or the Secret Garden.”

A strong wind hit them full force in the alley, kicking up dust and litter, forcing the shorter, older agent to lower his head, the grit bothering his contacts. “In luck,” Chin growled sardonically. “The garden alone covers seventy-eight acres.” Candy wrappers and fallen ginkgo leaves, their small, polished green fans turning black under a dim pole light, swirled scratchily about the men’s feet. For a moment the older agent felt nostalgic for the Olympics of ‘88—then the city fathers had made sure there was no garbage to be seen anywhere on the city streets, like the cleaner cities of Germany, where Chin had once been stationed, attached to the ROK embassy in Bonn and trade legation in West Berlin.

“Well, it’s just about curfew,” said the younger agent optimistically. “He isn’t going anywhere. Has to stay in there or risk being picked up the moment he leaves. And if he tries scaling the walls, we’ve got him!” Chin grunted, looking through the gate across at the pavilions of Changdok Palace, the home of the surviving royal family, and toward the lighted, wing-tipped roof of the pavilion by the Pandoji, the Korea-shaped pond, pathways radiating from it through maples, the wind moving through the trees like rushing water.

Chin took a small walkie-talkie from the inside of his coat. “All units — we’re going to lose him over the wall, whoever he is, if we don’t surround the whole area immediately.”

A voice crackled from somewhere on the other side of the gardens. “We’re cordoning it off now. You want us to send in the dogs?”

Chin shook his head in disgust. “No — I want to keep him in there. Trap him, not panic him.” Retracting the