Ballistic Force

CHAPTER THREE

Canoga Park, California

It was a little past eight in the morning when Hong Sung-nam pulled his rental van to a stop halfway down the block from Dr. Yong-Im Hyunsook’s one-story tract home. He’d planned on arriving sooner but had gotten hung up in traffic. It had also taken longer than expected to apply the slap-on decals that would make the van appear as if it were part of the local cable company’s truck fleet. Hong was dressed in a plain navy-blue outfit that closely matched the uniforms worn by the company’s field workers. He’d picked up the outfit at a secondhand store in Koreatown the previous afternoon. It was missing the Trident Cable logo, but Hong doubted anyone would notice. If anything, he was more concerned about the short sleeves, which barely covered the freshly inked Killboys tattoo on his right bicep. There was also the matter of the name tag sewn above the right pocket of his shirt. There weren’t many Koreans named Norm.

As he waited inside the van, Hong saw an overweight, middle-aged man in a peach-colored sweat suit jogging his way on the sidewalk. The hit man quickly grabbed the clipboard on the seat beside him and glanced down at it, scribbling gibberish as he waited for the jogger to pass. Moments later, however, he was startled by a rapping on the passenger-side window. Hong looked up and saw the older man gesturing for him to roll down the window. Hong tensed, then leaned over and cranked the handle, lowering the window a few inches.

“What’s up?” the jogger said. “They told me on the phone it’d be a couple days before they could get somebody out here.”

Hong thought quickly and responded, “Change in schedule.” His English was fluent but bore a heavy Korean accent.

“Decent.” The jogger pointed back the way he’d come. “Only thing is, you’re at the wrong end of the block. I’m the last house on the right—22421.”

Hong glanced at his clipboard, pretending to look over his work orders for the day. “I have three calls on this block,” he told the man. “You’re on the list.”

“Perfect,” the jogger said. “With any luck, I’ll be able to catch the ball game tonight, right?”

“Right,” Hong said.

The older man stepped back from the van and resumed his jogging. Relieved, Hong tossed the clipboard onto the seat and glanced behind him.

Crouched in back of the van was a twenty-year-old Korean-American wearing an outfit similar to Hong’s. Ok-Hwa Zung was a new initiate into the Killboys. His older brother was already a gang member, and this day Ok-Hwa hoped to come at least one step closer to earning his stripes. As such, he was nervous with anticipation. Looking out through the van’s rear windows, he watched the jogger turn the corner, then lowered the 9 mm pistol he’d just yanked from the waistband of his slacks.

“I hope he doesn’t cause us any problems,” Ok-Hwa murmured.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Hong told him. “We’ll be finished with our business and out of here before he realizes he’s not getting any service today.”

“And when that happens he’ll call the cable company,” the younger man countered. “They’ll figure out we were impostors.”

“We have no control over that,” Hong said. “Besides, by then we’ll be halfway to Nevada.”

“If nothing goes wrong,” Ok-Hwa said.

“Nothing will go wrong,” Hong assured him. “Now put the gun away and stop worrying.”

The younger man fell silent. Hong turned his attention back to Dr. Yong-Im’s house. They were in an older neighborhood on the western fringe of the San Fernando Valley, an hour’s drive north of the Killboys’ Koreatown headquarters. Large shade trees lined the parkways and over the years their roots had buckled the sidewalks, requiring asphalt patches to keep people from tripping over the raised edges. A few of the yards were well-kept, but most had balding lawns riddled with weeds and surrounded by scraggly, overgrown plants. Hong knew that by U.S. standards this was a lower middle-class neighborhood, but compared to conditions back in North Korea, these people were living in the lap of luxury. And yet they were still concerned about such frivolous things as cable reception. Back home, Hong’s people were lucky if they even had a television capable of picking up state-sponsored broadcasts on the only available channel. Ball game? Back home the only thing to watch was propaganda speeches and reruns of the previous year’s victory parades down the streets of Pyongyang.

Hong’s envy was surpassed only by his hatred for Americans, which had intensified during his surveillance of the neighborhood the past few days. He’d had his fill of the self-satisfied way these people went about their business, oblivious to hardships endured by the rest of the world. If he had his way, instead of a panel van he’d be here in a tank, blasting rounds into these homes and then picking off the residents with a machine gun when they rushed outside in fear. That would show them.

At half-past eight, Dr. Yong-Im, a short, balding man in his early fifties, emerged from his house and picked up the copy of the morning paper lying in the driveway. He took the paper with him as he got into his Camry sedan and backed out into the street, then headed away from Hong’s van toward the far end of the block. If he stayed true to his routine, Yong-Im would soon be at the local Starbucks coffee shop, where he’d spend the next hour nursing a latte as he worked his way through the paper. Hong figured that would be all the time he and Ok-Hwa would need.

“Let’s go,” Hong told his colleague.

Hong grabbed the clipboard and a tool kit, then the two men got out of the van. An unseen dog yapped a few times at them from one of the neighboring backyards, but they reached Yong-Im’s house without any further run-ins. On the remote chance that anyone might be watching from inside one of the nearby homes, Hong and Ok-Hwa lingered a few moments in the driveway, dividing their attention between the clipboard and the roofline of the house. Hong made it appear that he was trying to track down the cable junction box, then led Ok-Hwa through a side gate to the backyard. There, tall cinder-block walls covered with creeping fig blocked their view of the adjacent yards and, by the same token, insured that no one could see them as they carried out their assignment.

Ok-Hwa had been tapped for the mission because of his experience as a electrician’s assistant, and he put that experience to quick work, pinpointing the home’s security system and then tracking the wiring to an outside circuit box. Once he’d shut down the system, he signaled Hong, who proceeded to use a locksmith’s pick on the sliding-glass door that led to Dr. Yong-Im’s family room. It took him all of thirty seconds to trip the lock and slide the door open.

Yong-Im lived alone, and inside Hong was relieved to see that the place was sparsely furnished. That would make things easier.

“I’ll start in here and work my way to the kitchen,” Hong told Ok-Hwa. “You take the den and the bedrooms. You know what to look for.”

Ok-Hwa nodded. “If he’s lucky, we’ll find it. Otherwise…” The younger Korean grinned malevolently and dragged an index finger across his throat.

Hong corrected Ok-Hwa. “If we don’t find what we’re looking for, the good doctor will only wish he were dead.”

CHAPTER FOUR

South Kangwon-do Province, North Korea

General Oh Chol of the Korean People’s Army grumbled under his breath as the military jeep carrying him through the mountains bounded over yet another deep rut in the narrow dirt road. His lower back was aching, and he’d forgotten to bring along his pain medication. There was a part of him that wished he’d forgone security considerations and taken a helicopter from Kaesong. It would have been faster and a hell of a lot more comfortable, but he understood the need for caution.

After all these years and all the setbacks, things were finally falling to place for Kim Jong-il’s regime, and there was no sense in taking unnecessary risks. Oh knew the U.S. and her allies had spy satellites combing the entire country for signs of suspicious activity, and the sight of a chopper setting down on this supposedly uninhabited side of the Changchon Mountains would be sure to raise a red flag. Traveling by ground was by far the safer course, and Oh figured he could endure a little discomfort for the cause. Besides, once he reached the installation, he figured he’d be able to get his hands on something for the pain.

While the other side of the mountain range overlooked the demilitarized zone and was overrun with heavily armed military posts, here on the north face there was little sign of civilization other than the dirt road, one of several that threaded its way through the rolling terrain. A few bald escarpments and promontories poked up through surrounding vegetation, but otherwise the mountains were so pristinely verdant that global conservation groups were lobbying to have the area declared a wildlife sanctuary. Oh knew there was little chance of that ever happening. After all, why should Kim Jong-il give a damn about a handful of endangered species when the hillsides could be converted to poppy fields?

After another twenty minutes on the road, Oh came upon an area that had already undergone such a transformation. Under the vigilant eye of several dozen armed soldiers, more than a hundred laborers were busy at work on a twenty-acre parcel that just this past spring had been clear-cut and replanted with poppies. The crop was well along and the workers were going from plant to plant, cutting into the podlike bulbs and then scraping the resinous ooze into small containers. Once accumulated into cargo vats, the raw opium would be transported cross-country to government-run pharmaceutical plants in Chongjin and processed into heroin for distribution abroad. Changchon presently contributed only a fraction of the opium grown in the northern provinces, but if things went well here in the trial area, more tracts would be carved out of the local mountainside. The way Oh had heard it, inside of three years, Changchon could be matching the output of all the collective farms combined, doubling the country’s heroin trade and helping to further subsidize Kim Jong-il’s military ambitions.

There were two obstacles to the Changchon enterprise. The first, climatic conditions, was beyond the regime’s control. Poppies thrived best in a warmer terrain with better soil than what the mountains here provided. But the feeling was that by cultivating more and more land, quantity could offset the inferior quality of North Korean heroin compared to that harvested in more favorable environments such as Afghanistan and Myanmar.

The second problem involved the work force, and as Oh’s jeep carried him along the periphery of the poppy fields, he was given a vivid demonstration. Twenty yards to his left there was a sudden flurry of activity. Seven carbine-toting soldiers broke from their positions at the edge of the fields and stormed through the waist-high plants to where one of the workers, a woman in her early sixties, had just slumped to the ground.

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 career 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.