Ballistic Force Read online

  Oh motioned for his driver to stop the vehicle and he watched as two of the soldiers jerked the woman to her feet. Blood flowed freely from where she’d slit her wrists with the sharp-edged tool she’d been using to cut open the poppy bulbs. Apparently the soldiers hadn’t gotten to her in time, because she hung limply in their arms until, disgusted, they finally dropped her back to the ground.

  The other workers shrank back as one of the soldiers shouted at them while pointing at the body. Oh could hear the officer demanding to know why no one had stopped the woman or at least notified the guards the moment she’d turned the blade on herself. When none of the workers responded, the man barked a command to his fellow soldiers, who promptly raised their carbines and fired. Three workers reeled from the impact of the gunfire and pitched forward, disappearing from view amid the poppies. The others let out an involuntary cry, then quickly fell silent when the rifles were turned on them.

  Oh knew this was an all-too-frequent occurrence here in Changchon. The laborers were all interred prisoners at the nearby rehabilitation center, and because it was common knowledge that assignation to the camp was the equivalent of a life prison sentence, all too many workers had taken advantage of the tools they were provided with and opted to commit suicide rather than suffer through an extended incarceration. Those who ran the camp had made it clear that anyone who stood by and allowed a fellow worker to take his or her life would face execution, but obviously the deterrent wasn’t working.

  Oh had no stake in the struggling venture, which was run under the aegis of the Ministry of Security, but when Lieutenant Corporal Yulim Zhi-Weon, the camp’s supervising officer, wandered over to exchange a few words, the general couldn’t help offering an opinion.

  “Maybe you need to run things more like in Chongjin and the northern collectives,” he suggested. “Use schoolchildren to do the harvesting.”

  “And where do we get the schoolchildren from?” Yulim retorted. “Ship them in from Kaesong? I don’t think so.”

  “There has to be a better way.”

  Yulim glanced at the fields, where soldiers where dragging away the slain workers, then turned back to Oh and shrugged. “There are always more prisoners,” he said. “One way or another, we’ll make our quota.”

  “That’s what our Great Leader would like to hear,” Oh responded.

  Yulim changed the subject. “You’ve been away the past few months,” he told Oh.

  “My services were needed in Pyongyang,” the general replied.

  “There has been a lot of activity inside the mountain,” Yulim reported. “Not to mention all the late-night shipments. At least four times a week.”

  Oh nodded. “That’s what I’m here to check up on.” The general didn’t bother explaining that the bulk of his time at the North Korean capital had been spent choreographing the clandestine deliveries Yulim had just mentioned. And even though the facilities Oh had come to inspect were located directly adjacent to the concentration camp, what went on inside the mountain was classified and Yulim lacked the necessary security clearance to be brought inside the loop. The lieutenant corporal could pry all he wanted, but he wouldn’t be getting any answers from Oh.

  The men were interrupted when a dilapidated army truck suddenly appeared out of the foliage twenty yards to Oh’s right. The truck had arrived at the site by way of another of the dirt roads leading up into the mountains. The rear bed was covered by a canvas shell, but Yulim had apparently been expecting the vehicle and knew what kind of cargo it was carrying.

  “Speaking of more prisoners,” he said.

  Once the truck came to a stop, officers immediately encircled the vehicle. The rear tailgate was lowered and, one by one, more than a dozen men and women climbed down to the ground and were herded into a single file. Half of them wore peasant rags and had the emaciated look of farm laborers. The others, however, were far better dressed, and a man, woman and a girl in her midteens looked to be part Japanese. Since most of the repatriates had long since been weeded out of the general populace, Oh suspected they were from the south. Spies, perhaps.

  Yulim’s attention had been drawn to the Japanese-Koreans, as well, and he seemed particularly focused on the young woman, who had long black hair and striking features. And, unlike the majority of prisoners her age, she showed no signs of starvation and had at least the semblance of a full figure.

  “What do we have here?” Yulim murmured, a smile creeping across his face. By the time he turned back to Oh, the smile had bloomed into a wide grin. “Forgive me, General, but it would appear I have some inspecting of my own to attend to.”

  “I think you have more in mind than ‘inspection,’” Oh countered.

  “Perhaps,” Yulim said.

  The lieutenant corporal snapped off a quick salute and moved off toward the new prisoners. Oh had no interest in watching the other officer act out on his lechery, so he signaled his driver and they continued along the road, leaving the poppy fields behind.

  After another ten minutes of unrelieved jostling, the jeep reached flatland and soon came to the base of a large gorge cordoned off by three concentric rows of tall cyclone fences, each topped with razor-edged lengths of barbed wire. Prior to its fortification for use as the Changchon Rehabilitation Center, the compound and its honeycomb network of mountain tunnels had served as one of North Korea’s primary mining centers, yielding untold tons of coal, iron ore and magnesite. Most of the mine shafts had been long played out, but chain gangs made up of prisoners capable of more strenuous work than the poppy fields offered were sent daily into the mountain bowels with shovels and pickaxes to seek out new veins or to fill their carts with chiseled leavings.

  Once Oh’s jeep had passed through the security checkpoint at the main entrance, the general rode past the crude barracks and the work yard where inmates sifted through the latest haul from the mines. Beyond the yard there were at least a dozen visible openings bored into the base of the nearby mountain. Oh was taken to the most heavily guarded of the openings. There, he climbed out of the vehicle and rubbed his lower back as he left his driver behind and made his way past the sentries, barely acknowledging their salutes.

  A well-lit passageway, paved and large enough for a semi-truck to pass through, led him fifty yards deep into the mountain before giving way to a large subterranean bunker the size of an airplane hangar. Unseen generators powered banks of overhead lights that bathed the chamber in a glow so bright that Oh had to squint. Portions of the surrounding walls consisted of bare rock, but for the most part the enclosure—floors, walls and ceiling—was lined with a four-foot-thick layer of reinforced concrete. The far wall had been partitioned off with a row of prefabricated offices and laboratories, and to the general’s right was a two-story housing facility every bit as full of amenities as the concentration camp barracks were deprived. Oh had stayed in one of the officers’ quarters a few months earlier when he’d overseen the initial construction of the bunker facilities, and it heartened him to know there would be a warm bed waiting for him once he’d completed his inspection.

  Oh strode to his left, bootheels clomping loudly on the concrete, until he reached the chamber’s storage area. There, concealed inside thick, cylindrical metal canisters mounted to large, seven-axle transporters, were six Taepo Dong-4 intercontinental ballistic missiles. The missiles, three generations removed from the two-stage, Scud-derived, Taepo Dong-1 that North Korea had lobbed into the Sea of Japan back in 1998, had been originally manufactured a hundred miles to the north at the army’s R&D facilities in Sin’gye. Once built and deemed operative, the ICBMs had been dismantled and, over the course of the past three months, using circuitous routes and staggered delivery schedules, Oh had seen to it that the armament had been transferred, one by one, to Changchon. The final missile had arrived two days earlier and reassembly had been completed only a few hours before the general’s arrival.

  Oh was looking over the missiles when he was joined by Major Jin Choon-Yei, a short, lean ca
reer army officer in his early sixties. Jin, a long-time colleague of Oh’s, had taken charge of operations at Changchon when the general had been called back to Pyongyang, and the major had supervised the site’s transformation into the primary hiding place for North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. Prisoners at the concentration camp, along with Lieutenant Corporal Yulim and the camp’s security force, had been kept in the dark about the nature of the facility and construction had been carried out by military inductees and trusted private contractors.

  “Things are coming along nicely, yes?” Jin remarked after the men exchanged greetings.

  Oh nodded. “So far, so good. What about the warheads?”

  “Over here.”

  Jin led Oh past the missiles to a garage-size steel vault imbedded in the mountainside. The door to the vault was closed and guarded by a pair of sentries who stood as rigid as statues, diverting their gazes from the two officers.

  “We have four warheads ready for deployment,” Jin told the general, pointing past the sentries at the safe. “The others, as you know, are en route from Yongbyon and Pyongyang.”

  Oh nodded. “The next shipment should arrive by tomorrow morning, with the others to follow soon after.”

  “We’ll be ready for them,” Jin assured the general.

  “Good,” Oh said. “There’ve been no problems, then? No setbacks?”

  “None,” Jin said. “The closest thing we have to a problem is some crumbling of the bedrock where we didn’t encase it in concrete. It’s very minor, though.”

  The major pointed, dragging Oh’s attention to the area where the warhead vault was imbedded into the raw cavern walls. Small heaps of fallen rubble had accumulated on the ground at the base of the vault and Oh could see faint stress fissures in the nearby rock.

  “Keep that monitored,” Oh suggested. “If the fissures widen, I’ll have someone brought in to see if we need to fortify the rock.”

  “It probably wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Jin conceded.

  Oh made a mental note to call the KPA’s Corps of Engineers regarding the matter, then quickly turned his thoughts to other matters.

  “Now, then,” he said, “what about the launch site?”

  “I just spoke to your nephew and he says things are coming along,” Jin reported. “And the access tunnels are close to merging, as well.”

  “Already?” Oh was pleasantly surprised. He’d made a point not to pry into his nephew’s handling of construction at the missile base, and it appeared now that his faith in the younger man’s talents had paid off.

  “Here,” Jin said, leading Oh away from the site, “let me show you.”

  Jin’s office was located in the first of the prefab rooms situated along the far wall. Once they’d entered the room, the major directed Oh’s attention to a bulletin board mounted on an easel across from his desk. Tacked to the board was a topographical map of South Pyongyang Province, which was bordered to the west by the Yellow Sea and to the south by the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas. Two thick lines drawn with a marking pen snaked through the Changchon Mountain Range. The longer line, stretching for nearly seven miles, wound its way south from the facility. The second line was far shorter, barely a quarter-mile long, reaching northward from Kijongdong, a controversial North Korean installation located just north of the DMZ. A barely discernible gap marked where the two lines would eventually intersect.

  “We’ve been working around the clock in both tunnels,” Jin told Oh. “If all goes well, by morning the tunnels will have connected. Once that happens, it will only be a matter of widening a few stretches and clearing away debris, then we can haul the missiles and warheads to the launch site.”

  Oh smiled faintly. From the sound of it, they would achieve launch capacity within a week, well ahead of even the most optimistic projections made a few months ago. Kim Jong-il would be pleased.

  “I’ll check the tunnels in the morning,” the general told Jin. “In the meantime, I’m exhausted.”

  “Your room’s the way you left it,” Jin assured him.

  “Good,” Oh said. “Before I retire, though, I was wondering. My back has been acting up and I forgot my medication. If you could help me out…”

  The major smiled indulgently and went to his desk, unlocking one of the side doors. He removed a vial and handed it to the general. “This should take care of the pain and help you sleep.”

  There was no label on the vial, but Oh knew the capsules were filled with doses of morphine, a byproduct of the rehabilitation center’s heroin operations. Oh thanked Jin and quickly helped himself to one of the capsules. He was about to excuse himself so that he could get to his quarters before the morphine kicked in when Jin broadsided him with a pointed query.

  “Forgive me for bringing this up, General,” the major said. “I know things seem to be going well, but I’ve been hearing certain rumors about the missiles. About how well they might perform.”

  Oh’s smile faded as quickly as it had appeared. He turned to Jin, eyes flashing with irritation.

  “What rumors?” he demanded.

  Jin blanched. He took an involuntary step backward and stiffened.

  “Forgive me,” he repeated. “It wasn’t my place to bring this up.”

  “What rumors?” Oh pressed.

  Jin hesitated, then said, “What I’ve heard is that these missiles are based on designs first drawn up by the Project Kanggye Team. The team that defected.”

  Oh struggled to maintain his composure. The mass defection of all five nuclear weapons specialists comprising the Kanggye Nuclear Research and Development Team had supposedly been kept under tight wraps ever since it had been carried out two years ago. The crew, which had devised the means by which to nearly double both the range and accuracy of the Taepo Dongs, had been replaced by other physicists and military scientists who’d discovered that several members of the original team had tampered with their work data prior to defecting. The need to scrutinize every scrap of data to try to rectify errors had effectively derailed the missile program for the better part of fourteen months, and there was still concern that the replacement team had failed to contend with all the problems the defectors had created. And because there was no way to test the Taepo Dongs without attracting the attention of the outside world, the odds of failed launchings or errant trajectories were far greater than hoped for. The ranking brass had done its best to downplay the risks while fast-tracking production of the ICBMs, but in the back of everyone’s mind, including Oh’s, was the concern that a glitch planted by one of the defectors would avoid discovery and prove the undoing of the whole enterprise.

  Oh saw no point in trying to deny the rumors. Instead he tried to alleviate the major’s concerns.

  “We’ve had teams at work tracking down the defectors,” the general explained. “Once we have them in custody, hopefully they can be convinced to come back and verify whether the missiles can be successfully fired.”

  “A wise move,” Jin responded. “But aren’t the defectors all still in America?”

  “For now they are,” Oh said. “And for a while they did a good job of hiding from us. But now we know where they are. At least, most of them. Even as we speak, we are moving in to seize as many of them as we can in one fell swoop. With a little persuasion, I’m sure they’ll tell us where we can find the others, as well.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Canoga Park, California

  Dr. Yong-Im Hyunsook was two steps inside his house when he realized something was wrong. Normally the security alarm would start bleeping faintly the moment he opened the front door, reminding him that he had thirty seconds to deactivate the system. When he failed to hear the warning bleeps, Yong-Im’s first thought was that he had forgotten to turn the system on when he’d left the house. But when he stared past the entryway and saw that the sliding-glass door in the living room was partially open, a wave of panic swept over him. He recoiled and turned back toward the front door, but before he could make it outsid
e, there was a blur of motion to his left and the next thing he knew someone had grabbed him from behind. In involuntary cry spilled from his lips as he was jerked backward with so much force that he lost his balance and tumbled to the floor, bounding past the entryway tiles to the carpet that blanketed the living room.

  He was still down when his attacker strode over and kicked him sharply in the ribs. He groaned in pain and instinctively began to pull himself into a ball. A second kick glanced off his shoulder and caught the side of his head. Through the sudden ringing in his ears he could hear someone sliding closed the door leading to the backyard.

  “Don’t hurt me,” the defector pleaded, covering his face with his hands to ward off another anticipated kick. “Just take whatever you want and leave!”

  But the intruders weren’t going anywhere. Across the room, whoever had closed the door turned on the living-room television and raised the volume. Yong-Im’s attacker, meanwhile, grabbed him by the shirt collar and began to drag him across the carpet. The collar tightened around the scientist’s neck and cut off his breathing. He gasped and waved his arms futilely, trying to break the other man’s chokehold.

  It was only when Yong-Im was on the verge of passing out that Hong Sung-nam eased his grip and gave the other man a final shove before stepping back. Ok-Hwa Zung moved away from the television set and joined him. The younger man had his gun out and was fitting the barrel with a sound suppressor.

  Hong, meanwhile, took a small ceramic ashtray off the nearby coffee table and nonchalantly stuffed it into a stray sock he’d taken from Yong-Im’s bedroom.

  “We can’t take what we want because we weren’t able to find it,” he told the cowering scientist. “Maybe you can help us out, Dr. Yong-Im.”

  Yong-Im froze in place, his horror escalating with the sudden realization that these weren’t mere burglars. That they’d called him by his real name could only mean one thing: they were either from the North Korean secret police or REDI, the dreaded Research Department for External Intelligence. It didn’t matter which entity they represented. Now that they’d found him, Yong-Im knew that he was a dead man. Still, there was a part of him that grasped at the false hope that he could somehow avoid the inevitable.