foreign affairs, but he did know how to play the bureaucracy game. The Korean situation involved everything from foreign policy and military strategy to questions of international trade and domestic politics. And all of that made the President’s national security adviser the logical choice to head up an interagency group on South Korea. That gave Putnam power, because only the designated chairman of an interagency group had the right to present the group’s final report to the President.
“Okay, Blake, I’m sure you’ve got work to do, so I won’t keep you any longer.” Putnam’s eyes flicked over to the clock again. “Besides, I’ve got an important meeting right now.”
Fowler stood, took his folder off Putnam’s desk, and walked to the door. He opened it, but Putnam’s voice stopped him with his hand still on the knob. “By the way, Blake, try not come in looking like a refugee all the time. I expect my senior staff to set the right tone for this shop, all right?”
Fowler didn’t say anything. He just fought down the urge to go back and kick his boss in the nuts and went out — brushing past the man waiting in Putnam’s outer office. Behind him, he heard Putnam trying out his best “one of the guys” tone of voice: “Hey, Jer! Good to see you! Come right on in.”
CHAPTER 4
In the Shadows
The “Internationale” sounded odd to Colonel Sergei Ivanovitch Borodin. Its harsh, blaring refrain rebounded off the concrete-reinforced granite walls of the hangar — echoes chasing one another with nowhere to go. After a while Borodin swore he could have closed his eyes and heard the same series of notes three times over.
It was distracting, and he didn’t need the distraction. There were too many things he needed to watch carefully, too many things to remember. This mission was as much a diplomatic gesture as it was a military assignment. Of itself that held no great concern for Borodin. He’d served the State in a similar capacity across half the globe. But this place was so — he searched for the right word — so confined, so suffocating. Nothing at all like the vast, open deserts beyond Tripoli or the rolling grasslands around Harare.
This feeling of walking a tightrope over a deep pit had first come over him as he’d waited to fly out of Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport.
“Be careful, Sergei. Be watchful.” General Petrov, deputy commander in chief for air combat training, had whispered in his ear as they stood together looking out the departure lounge window into the late-night darkness. The old man had chuckled at Borodin’s alarmed expression, but his words had been blunt — a rare thing for the short, stout, white-haired friend of his father.
“These North Koreans are slant-eyes, yes, Sergei. But they are clever slant-eyes. They’ve played us off against the Chinese for decades, and only now does it seem that we’re pulling them into our nets. “But” — the old man had waggled a finger in his face — ”only just. They could easily slip outside. We can’t afford that, Sergei Ivanovitch. You understand? So you must not offend them. You must not disparage this personality cult nonsense — this godhead — they’ve built up around the old man Kim and his son.”
Petrov had dropped his voice and laid an arm around Borodin’s shoulders. “So, a word to the wise, eh? Walk softly in North Korea, there are powerful eyes watching. Politburo eyes, Sergei. You don’t want to count trees or dig for gold, you understand? Walk soft.”
Borodin shivered slightly as he remembered those last words. This might well be the season of glasnost, but the icy forests of Siberia and the man-killing mines of the Kolyma were still there — they’d just been pushed into the shadows a bit.
His memory moved on, through the long, high-altitude journey eastward across the Soviet Union, then lower above the rugged peaks of the Taeback Mountains, and finally south across the narrow plains toward Pyongyang. Into this cavernous hangar carved out of a mountainside east of the capital.
The “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong-Il, son of North Korea’s absolute ruler, had met the plane personally. No surprises there. Neither Borodin nor his political officer, Major Yepishev, had expected the Great Leader himself, Kim Il-Sung, to make an appearance. According to both the GRU and the KGB, the old man’s health was increasingly fragile, and they’d arrived on a hard, gray day, heavy with cold rain driven by the wind.
There wasn’t much trace of the rotten weather in here, though, Borodin thought, surveying the high-vaulted hangar that held not only his Ilyushin airliner, an Il-18, but also several other, smaller transports, a reviewing stand, and a uniformed crowd of North Korean dignitaries. The size of the place made a mockery of perspective and dwarfed its human occupants — stretching for several hundred meters from tunnels cut deeper into the rock out to a set of thickly armored main hangar doors. Lighting, ventilation, and fire suppression systems turned the ceiling into a nightmarish tangle of shafts, cabling, and piping.
The Soviet colonel couldn’t even begin to imagine the amount of labor it had taken to carve all of this out of solid rock. It surpassed even the massive engineering works carried out by his own country’s Civil Defense Force. He cast a sidelong glance at the row of impassive Korean faces on either side of him. What was going on inside those heads?
The silence alerted him. The band had stopped playing, and now Kim Jong-Il stood ready to speak at the podium.
Borodin found the man’s appearance unsettling. On the surface the “Dear Leader” seemed soft, pudgy — a stark contrast to the colonel, who’d always prided himself on his trim, flat stomach and narrow, high-cheeked features. But the eyes, the eyes were dangerous — cold and hard behind those thick glasses. They were eyes that suited a man who now controlled his nation’s entire internal security and military apparatus.
Kim’s voice was soft, commanding attention by necessity more than by bluster. “Socialist brothers, we welcome your presence here. We hope that your gracious visit will permit a useful exchange of information between our two great peoples …”
“Exchange.” Now there was an amusing word, Borodin thought. He and his men — some of the Soviet Union’s top pilots and aircraft mechanics — were a training team. Their very presence here chipped away at Kim Il-Sung’s so-called self-reliance doctrine.
It was all a nice little ballet. His team had to maintain the fiction that they were here to examine North Korean air tactics, and not just to show the Koreans how to fly the shiny new toys they’d been shipped from the Soviet Union. North Korean air tactics, what nonsense. These people thought the MiG-21 was a first-line aircraft.
At the same time, his briefings at the Defense and Foreign ministries in Moscow had emphasized how much the Soviet Union needed Kim Il-Sung’s friendship and cooperation. The colonel knew that Kim’s dynastic communism was anathema to his superiors, but the North Koreans were at least nominal socialists, and they were opposed to the West. More importantly, the country occupied a crucial geostrategic position — it was the fulcrum between the Soviet Union, China, and Japan.
The “fulcrum.” The word described the Kremlin’s view of North Korea with precision. The Politburo saw it as the vital agent through which force could be exerted against either the Chinese or the Japanese. Borodin smiled inwardly despite his concerns. Considering his mission here, that was even a clever word play, one worthy of
And if his country didn’t help Kim, the Chinese would be only too happy to oblige. That was something his country could not risk.
Borodin knew that firsthand. He had been stationed in the Far East early in his career. You couldn’t fly out of Vladivostok and remain unaware of the Chinese threat.
Their planes were old, antique relics for the most part. Their tanks and artillery were laughable by modern standards. And their men were underequipped. But there were so many of them and they were close to the Trans- Siberian Railway, the lifeline between European Russia and its Far Eastern possessions.
Everyone knew that the Chinese were just waiting for the right moment to stab the motherland in the back. Hadn’t those yellow-skinned, “pseudo-communists” spent years sucking up to the West, begging for technology and trade? Didn’t they insist on setting an independent, often anti-Soviet, foreign policy?
Yes, Borodin thought, the Politburo was wise to worry about North Korea’s leanings. The State didn’t need any more enemies in this part of the world — it needed friends and allies. Puppets. It was vital to give North Korea’s
