Those few men and women outside braving the heat were sober and serious in dress and in demeanor. Only the required pin or button bearing Kim Il-Sung’s portrait added any touch of bright color to their garb. Despite the glaring sun, they moved briskly from place to place, careful never to show undue curiosity and never to seem idle. The Democratic People’s Republic was a workers’ state and its people were expected to work. There were reeducation and labor camps aplenty for those who could not or would not learn that.
The nerve center of this sterile, humorless city sat at the end of a wide, empty avenue — a towering edifice of gray stone and grayer concrete, more a fortress than an office building. Squads of fully armed security troops stood at rigid attention to either side of the main entrance. They seemed antlike below sixty-meter-high banners bearing the likenesses of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il.
Inside, the thousands of clerks, petty Party functionaries, and uniformed security officers who inhabited the complex moved quietly about their daily routines. Telephones were answered, documents were typed, reports were filed — all in an unearthly hush. There were good reasons for that. Open displays of emotion were regarded as unproductive and suspect, and supposed friends could easily become bitter rivals, always on the prowl for an indiscretion, a traitorous whisper, or the slightest sign of disloyalty to the State and its Great Leader. Silence was often the key to survival in the echoing, labyrinthine corridors of the headquarters of the Korean Workers Party.
Only one man of all those thousands could speak freely and without fear.
Kim Jong-Il, the son of North Korea’s supreme ruler, glowered at the thin, gray-haired army officer standing rigidly at attention before him. Light from a small desktop lamp bounced off Kim’s thick, black-frame glasses and highlighted small droplets of sweat beading the officer’s forehead.
“I hold you personally responsible for this fiasco,” Kim continued, pausing to emphasize each damning word. “Your stupidity led you to stockpile important equipment in the tunnel too soon. Your incompetence allowed the imperialists to find it. And your cowardice allowed them to seize it.”
The man started to gabble something, but Kim cut him off. “Silence!” He wiped a trace of spittle off his lips. “You have failed the State and endangered our historic plan. I will not listen to your excuses.”
He leaned forward over his desk. “You came into this room as a colonel, comrade. You will leave it as a lieutenant. A lieutenant in charge of a penal platoon.”
Kim smiled thinly as the officer’s face crumpled. He had just destroyed a thirty-year career. “You are dismissed. Now get out of my sight.”
He watched silently as his bodyguards led the man out of his office. Truly, no drug could possibly match the exhilaration that swept through him whenever he used his power as the Great Leader’s son and designated heir.
But slowly, very slowly, the exhilaration slipped away, replaced by a growing sense of frustration. The tunnel the Americans had stumbled across was only one of many that were being dug at his orders, but its discovery would make them more alert, more careful. As a result, work on the other tunnels would have to be stopped — at least until the Americans and their South Korean puppets had again been lulled into a false sense of security. Kim Jong-Il could feel his carefully laid plans slipping once more into the distant future, and that was something he was unwilling to contemplate. He had always been impatient.
History was slipping away from him — out of his grasp. Every passing day made the South stronger militarily and economically. Every day increased the growing gap between the two halves of Korea. Every day brought with it the chance that his father might die without securing Kim’s succession to the leadership.
Kim gripped the arms of his chair. He knew only too well that there were many in North Korea’s government who would cast him aside if they could. Some were jealous of his power. Some called themselves “true communists” and claimed they opposed a dynastic succession. Others held grudges for imagined wrongs.
But so long as Kim Il-Sung lived, his son’s enemies were powerless to move against him. More than forty years of absolute rule had enabled the elder Kim to build a nation shaped in his own image and governed by his slightest whim. Kim Jong-Il knew that kind of power could not be inherited, it could only be earned — forged over time his enemies would not give him, or forged in the fires of a war, a common struggle against the hated American enemy.
His own enemies inside the government had already tried to move against him once. Kim felt a small chill as he remembered the bomb planted aboard his father’s personal train. A bomb planted by officers loyal to General Oh Chin-U, the then defense minister and leader of the pro-Chinese faction inside North Korea. The assassination attempt had failed, and the known conspirators were either filling unmarked graves outside Pyongyang or slaving away in special camps. Its aftershocks, however, were still rippling through the Party, the Army, and the Foreign Ministry.
Kim Jong-Il smiled thinly to himself. Not all the effects had been bad. He’d used China’s suspected involvement in the bomb plot to persuade his father to side more closely with the Soviets. That had been an essential move. Only the Soviets had the kind of advanced weapons the People’s Army needed to match the Americans and their Southern puppets. But Kim held no illusions about the motives of his Russian backers — they didn’t believe in charity. They believed in power.
And every high-tech weapons system the Soviet Union gave or sold the North increased its hold over Pyongyang. At some point it would be too late to go back. He and his father would have sold their precious self- reliance for radar-guided missiles, modern battle tanks, and advanced submarines.
Kim Jong-Il shook his head. He knew the risks well. After all, what was life but a succession of risks — some greater and some smaller? Better to view the game as a race. A race between Soviet domination and military strength. A race between his plans for the war that would secure his position and an assassin’s bullet or his father’s failing health.
And now one incompetent officer had threatened all the preparations for that war. The fool. He should have had the man shot. Kim twisted uncomfortably in his chair.
There had to be something he could use to distract the attention of the imperialists. Something that would cause trouble for their lackeys in Seoul. Something that would drive a wedge between them.
He picked up his phone and started calling for files. He would work until he found what he was looking for.
It was well past dawn before he found it.
Kang Hyun-chan sat carefully in the high-backed leather chair, bald head erect and deep black eyes fixed rigidly on an unseen point in space. The long, curiously effeminate fingers of his age-spotted hands rested unmoving on gray, peasant-style cotton trousers. Beneath his fingertips Kang could feel the damning evidence of his seventy years — his stick-thin, withered legs. Legs that had once been strong and wiry enough to carry him up and down Manchuria’s rugged hills during his days as an anti-Japanese guerrilla. He smiled wryly. He’d fought for the Party all his adult life, first as a soldier, then as a spy, and finally, as a master of spies. And none of that mattered. Not now. Not here.
He had been ushered into this immaculately furnished office by an unsmiling bodyguard, ordered to sit down, and left waiting for nearly half an hour. He could hear water running in the small, adjoining washroom.
Kang recognized the game that was being played. He’d played it often enough himself during forty-odd years of service as a member of the Central Committee’s Research Department. The silence, the uncertainty, the long, gnawing wait. All designed to unnerve the subordinate on whom disfavor had fallen, or was about to fall.
His predecessor as director of the Southern Operations Section must have had a similar meeting before he’d been “retired” to special work farm. For a moment Kang felt a surge of anger at the unfairness of it all. His predecessor had blundered badly, and his blunders had embarrassed the State. But he had done nothing wrong. He’d heard the rumors of Kim’s rage over the tunnel catastrophe, but that wasn’t in his area of responsibility. Why this meeting then?
With difficulty he pushed the anger away. It wouldn’t help him in the next few minutes, and it might make things worse. Kang had always been something of a fatalist. The position he’d attained carried great rewards, and with great rewards came commensurate risks. It was the way of things, and no amount of carping or whining would change it.
“My dear Kang, how good it is to see you! And looking so well!” Kim Jong-Il, the plump, cherub-faced son of the Great Leader, Kim Il-Sung, bustled out of the washroom smiling from ear to ear.
