Arab without thinking,
As soon as the car came to a halt Arnold Morgan was out, walking back to Harry and the other agent. His instructions were terse. Get ahold of the camera in the backseat of my car, and then start taking pictures of Kathy and me. Use the telephoto lens, get the guys nice and close.”
“Yes, sir.”
There were probably 30 yards between the two groups, and Harry did his job admirably. The Arabs seemed to notice that the other visitors’ camera was aimed their way, because they quickly looked away. But not quickly enough. Harry had them all clearly, except for one whom he only managed to catch from the side and back. But in one way or the other, all four of them were now sharply recorded in Kathy’s digital.
“Could you by any chance tell me what all that was about?” asked Kathy as they began the drive back around the southern headland and on to the airport.
“Well, I don’t think those people were really tourists,” replied the Admiral. “No wives, no girlfriends. Very serious. Kinda got the impression they had a purpose. You know, stopping and taking a lot of pictures of the cliff.”
“Well, they could have been compiling a book. Great Atlantic coastlines,” said Kathy. “Or scouting out a location for a movie. Or working for the Canary Islands tourist board, preparing a new brochure. Or working for a hotel or development corporation, looking at new sights with amazing ocean views, anything. After all, we were standing right on the top of one of the great volcano ranges in the world…”
“Yeah. I know,” he replied. “And I don’t think anyone’s thinking of building much up there, not with the Cumbre Vieja rumbling away beneath our feet. Fast way to lose your hotel, right?
“I don’t know,” he mused, slowly. “I just had a feeling about those guys…how they kept showing up. And now I got a little record of ’em. And I just might ask young Ramshawe to have a shot at identifying ’em.”
“Can he do that?”
“Not if they are entirely obscure. But you never know…”
“I’ll tell you one thing, though,” said Kathy. “If that whole western side of the ridge suddenly collapsed into the ocean, that sure would make a major splash.”
“Wouldn’t it?” answered the Admiral. “The mother of all splashes.”
2
They were just north of the seaport city of Wonsan, and the Chinese-built off-road military juggernaut was rumbling up the strangely deserted road. To the right stretched a long expanse of jagged coastline guarded from the great rollers off the Sea of Japan only by a few tiny islands that could be seen in the distance.
This was rugged country, the “highway” cleaving its way north for 200 miles, into the extreme northeast where China, North Korea, and Russia converge, some 80 miles south of Vladivostok.
The Hamas General in the front passenger seat was accompanied by his personal bodyguard, brother-in-law, and veteran Hamas major, Ahmed Sabah, who sat quietly in the rear seat cradling a fully primed AK-47. The General stared through the windshield without speaking. The language was just too damned strange, the people too odd, the country too foreign for any attempt at social chat with the Korean Army driver.
Ravi Rashood was numb with boredom. Here in what might be the world’s most secretive country, a police- state throwback to the dark ages of communism, he felt so out of place, so utterly estranged from anything he had ever known, that he was at a loss for perspective. He looked over at the driver, whose uniform was without military insignia save for a small metal badge showing a portrait of the “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong-il, presumed insane by most of the Western world, but a God-like presence to the residents of North Korea. A red rim surrounded the driver’s badge, signifying his military rank.
His father, the late Kim il-Sung, was believed to be the Greatest Leader Ever in the history of the world, including the likes of Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Washington, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Mao, Gandhi, and Churchill. North Korean children had to learn a hymn to Kim, and sing it daily, “The Greatest Genius the World Has Ever Known.” Huge portraits of him littered cities, towns, villages, and parks. His words were still regarded as the Will of Heaven.
Kim’s fat little son, Kim Jong-il, quickly matched his father’s near immortality, and loudspeakers proclaimed his undisputed family Greatness on the streets, in cities and towns throughout the land. Undisputed, that is, unless you didn’t mind jail or even execution. The twenty-first-century regime of Kim Jong-il did not tolerate dissent in any form whatsoever. Which at least simplified the issue—
The Army truck driver was a true and faithful representative of a terrorized population. And behind his enigmatic half-smile there was the zombified blank expression of a people whose morale had been shattered, whose self-respect was gone, and whose only chance of survival was to toe the line and worship the earthly god Kim — always making certain there was a large portrait of him in the house, ready for inspection, as laid down by the law.
North Korea was an Orwellian nightmare, forever on the borders of outright famine, with hundreds of thousands already dead of malnutrition. This was Russia in winter a half-century ago, Stalinesque in its procedures. And still the populace thronged the streets, cheering the Dear Leader, as the tubby little monster drove past, the living Tsar of one of the worst-run sovereign nations since the Dark Ages. And every day, all day, and all night, if you were listening, the Government of Kim Jong-il broadcasted the “true knowledge” that this country was intrinsically, ethnically superior to any other.
General Ravi was appalled by North Korea. And he really hated doing business with them. But in his game, there were very few places to do business at all. For part of his job made him an international arms dealer, and one of a rare breed: a nuclear arms dealer, an arena near-silent, clandestine, and illegal, in which hardly anyone admitted wanting to buy, and certainly no one admitted wanting to sell.
Aside from a somewhat seedy part of Bosnia, North Korea was very nearly the only game in town. This dastardly, friendless little pariah of a state, trapped between China, Russia, and Japan, had been making the components for nuclear weapons for many, many years, and cared not a jot for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
For years, since back in 1974, when they first joined the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Korea had been a clear and obvious problem to the West, constantly trying to produce plutonium, endlessly trying to produce SCUD missiles for sale to the Middle East.
But in 1985, against everyone’s most optimistic forecasts, Kim il-Sung signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), promising not to produce a bomb, and to open all nuclear sites to inspection.
That same year, the North Koreans started to build a 200 MWt reactor that could produce enough plutonium to make seven to ten bombs a year. Separately that same year they started to build a large plant to process plutonium into weapon-ready form.
Twelve months later, they had a 30 MWt reactor on line, producing plutonium. In 1987, they missed the first eighteen-month deadline for international inspection. A few months later, they delivered one hundred SCUD-B missiles to Iran.
For the next two years, they refused inspections and continued to build reactors, which would create plutonium. They consistently sold SCUD missiles to Syria and Iran.
By 1992, the IAEA concluded the latest nuclear declarations by North Korea — some 90 grams of plutonium! — were fraudulent, and demanded access to Yongbyon, the ultrasecretive underground nuclear plant that lies 50 miles north of the capital city of Pyongyang. They did not get it.
A year later, both China and Russia had cut off all aid to the Republic of North Korea. And the U.S. demanded
