WW III wi-1

by Ian Slater

  “He never got on the subway after all. He’s gone through Donhwamun Gate, so it’s either Changdok Palace or the Secret Garden.”

  A strong wind hit them full force in the alley, kicking up dust and litter, forcing the shorter, older agent to lower his head, the grit bothering his contacts. “In luck,” Chin growled sardonically. “The garden alone covers seventy-eight acres.” Candy wrappers and fallen ginkgo leaves, their small, polished green fans turning black under a dim pole light, swirled scratchily about the men’s feet. For a moment the older agent felt nostalgic for the Olympics of ‘88—then the city fathers had made sure there was no garbage to be seen anywhere on the city streets, like the cleaner cities of Germany, where Chin had once been stationed, attached to the ROK embassy in Bonn and trade legation in West Berlin.

  “Well, it’s just about curfew,” said the younger agent optimistically. “He isn’t going anywhere. Has to stay in there or risk being picked up the moment he leaves. And if he tries scaling the walls, we’ve got him!” Chin grunted, looking through the gate across at the pavilions of Changdok Palace, the home of the surviving royal family, and toward the lighted, wing-tipped roof of the pavilion by the Pandoji, the Korea-shaped pond, pathways radiating from it through maples, the wind moving through the trees like rushing water.

  Chin took a small walkie-talkie from the inside of his coat. “All units — we’re going to lose him over the wall, whoever he is, if we don’t surround the whole area immediately.”

  A voice crackled from somewhere on the other side of the gardens. “We’re cordoning it off now. You want us to send in the dogs?”

  Chin shook his head in disgust. “No — I want to keep him in there. Trap him, not panic him.” Retracting the walkie-talkie aerial, Chin turned to the vendor. “You sure he acted suspiciously? Could have been a young buck hurrying to the gardens to meet his girlfriend — keep her warm during the curfew?”

  “Yes,” said the vendor, “I’m sure. I’m telling you, it was nunchi.” He meant “eyemeasure”—beyond mere sight, a sixth sense. “And he didn’t know the price of the ants,” continued the vendor. “Everyone’s been reading about the fires down—”

  “All right,” cut in Chin gruffly. “Where do you live?”

  “In Chamshil.” It was the area of dozens of huge, look-alike cement high-rises clustered several miles south across the Han River near the Olympic village.

  “We’ll get a car for you,” Chin told him, pulling out the walkie-talkie’s aerial again.

  “Will you let me know what happens?” asked the vendor.

  “Yes. Certainly,” said Chin, giving the vendor his card and signing a “pass through” chit for the blackout drill and curfew.

  “Thanks for the tip,” said the younger agent. Soon another unmarked car quietly appeared at the far end of the alley.

  “There’s your ride,” said Chin.

  As the vendor walked away, five minutes before the onset of curfew and blackout, the younger agent tried to find out what his older colleague’s plan was without wanting to appear stupid. “He must know he’s being followed.”

  “Not necessarily,” answered Chin. “Unfamiliar with the subway maybe, mistimed it. Rather than get caught in the curfew — probably decided to hole up for a while, stay out of sight till the morning. Garden’s as good a place as any, and there’s a lot of pavilions — in case it rains. Which,” he said, looking skyward, “I think it will.”

  “I think we should go in and get him.”

  “And if he is an infiltrator, what will you find?” asked Chin.

  The young agent thought for a few seconds. “Maybe he won’t swallow it. While there’s life, there’s hope. Right? Look at Kim Shin Jo — came down to shoot Park, gets caught, and ends up with a nice suit and eating out. Peking duck. Some of the boys tell me that when he wanted, he even got to go to the Angel Cloud House, the kisaeng girls pampering and singing to him. Nice work if you can get it.”

  “Yes, well, this guy isn’t Kim Shin Jo,” said the older agent, pausing, unscrewing the top from a Dristan bottle and tilting his head back, his voice more strained. “If we rush, our boy might pop the pill. Then where are we?” He paused, snuffling back the nasal spray while screwing the lid back on. “Damn summer cold.” He turned to the younger agent. “But let’s say there’s a slight chance he doesn’t know he’s being followed, that he simply ran out of time. Maybe he remembered the curfew but not the blackout — after all, blackout only happens once a month. Might be doing what a lot of others do — just sitting it out. So while he’s still got light to see by, he heads north on Sejong to Yulgog — then straight to the garden before blackout begins.”

  “So?” asked the younger agent.

  “In the morning we follow him home. That’s what we want. Why grab him now if we can get the whole cell?”

  “You believe he doesn’t know we’re on to him?”

  “No,” answered Chin. “But it’s a possibility. Old Kim Shin Jo didn’t know those woodcutters were on to him either. Did he?”

  “You have a point.”

  The air raid sirens were reaching full volume and the lights were going out all over the city, huge skyscrapers that dwarfed the Secret Garden’s gnarled pines and tile fluted walls suddenly appearing twice as big and brutish in the moonlight. “You want some gum?” offered the younger agent.

  “Gives me gas,” said Chin, turning toward his younger colleague but unable to see him, the moon now enveloped by cloud. Even so, the younger man sensed the other tensing.

  “What is it?”

  “Unless,” began Chin, his voice dropping, “the garden is the meeting place and he has a set planted.”

  The younger agent heard his colleague take out the walkie-talkie, his voice in whispered tones requesting the RDF — radio direction finding — truck to move in to pick up any signals coming from the garden.

  “Ah,” said the young agent. “He’d be a fool to transmit from here. In the heart of Seoul!”

  “You remember Sorge?” asked Chin. “Germans’ top Communist agent in Japan — the best of them. Told Moscow Japan wouldn’t be attacking through Siberia, so the Russians were able to move a million fresh troops from Siberia to Stalingrad. Changed the war. You know where Sorge transmitted from, my young friend?”

  “You’re going to tell me. Right?”

  “Used to give parties for all the big shots in the Japanese military aboard his yacht in Tokyo Bay. He’d slip away from the party — transmit from the cabin right below them.”

  “He had balls then.”

  “You think we have a Communist with balls here?” asked the older man, snuffling the spray again. “Not what you’d expect, is it — transmitting right under our noses?”

  “No,” the young man conceded. “It isn’t.” After a few seconds he spoke again. “Shouldn’t you wait longer with that stuff?”

  “What?” asked the older agent.

  “Nose spray. It can screw up your sinuses if you take it too often.”

  “Whose nose is it?”

  Soon, in the darkness, they could hear the RDF truck rolling softly down the alley toward the entrance to the Secret Garden, crushing the ginkgo leaves blown down by the summer wind.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  In Washington it was morning, and the president, James R. Mayne, was about to go jogging along the Camp David trails for the TV crews to get their clips for the evening news. But there was a problem: the forest-green jogging suit, which would blend in well with the woods and was being insisted upon by the Secret Service, was objected to by the president’s press aide, Paul Trainor. Trainor was advising the president to wear the white jogging suit, which would stand out more in contrast with the woods. It was silly, and normally Jean, the first lady, would have settled it on the spot, but she was away campaigning for the president in the Northwest. In her absence the chief executive left media tactics to Trainor. The election was only eight weeks off, all polls showing the race would be a cliff-hanger. Mayne
was still getting high marks for what looked like another arms reduction treaty with the Soviets, but his challenger, Sen. J. D. Leyland from Texas, was batting well, too, with his promise to trim the “federal fat” from “overused, overabused” social programs so that he could in fact “reduce taxes” without weakening national defense.

  Mayne’s election platform was based on his cuts in defense spending, directly related, as his campaigners pointed out, to his much-lauded success in having kept the United States from becoming embroiled in “other people’s wars,” particularly in Central America. He had also been successful in keeping down the costs of maintaining U.S. bases throughout the world, such as the forty-two-thousand-man force in South Korea.

  Senator Leyland, on the other hand, was running on a platform charging that America was becoming “gravely weakened” by her cutbacks in defense and that the president’s nonintervention in the “wildcat” fires of Central America represented not so much a saving in America’s defense budget as a “bankruptcy” of national policy, which “ignores the demands of U.S. national security and global obligations.”

  “Mr. President!”

  It was Trainor, handing him The New York Times and Washington Post. “Latest polls, sir.” They confirmed it was still “neck and neck,” but increasingly the president’s “age factor,” sixty-one, against that of his challenger, fifty-one, was commanding more attention from the press.

  “Okay — I’ll wear the white suit,” the president told Trainor. He didn’t like playing the media game, but he knew it would be a heck of a lot easier getting things done for the country if he was reelected.

  After the photo opportunity in front of Aspen Lodge’s kidney-shaped pool, the president and Trainor headed out by limousine to Andrews for the long hop to California. On the way they saw a banner: “Reelect Mayne — the peace president.”

  “That,” said Trainor with conviction, “is what’s gonna beat the ass off Leyland! Seems a terrible thing to say, Mr. President, but in the long run, Vietnam may have turned out to be a blessing in disguise for this country.”

  “Well, Paul,” said the president, on the lookout for more groups of supporters, “you’re going to have to explain that one to me.”

  “I mean, Mr. President, that this country is going to think twice before they let the drum thumpers send our boys out to get slaughtered for a piece of real estate that means squat-all when you come right down to it.”

  A group of Leyland supporters flashed by, holding an enormously long banner reading, “Vote Leyland. And make America great again!”

  “That’s one hell of a drawn-out message,” said the president, glancing back. “Take you half an hour to read it.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Trainor. “Look great on TV, though. They’ll have to pan wide to get it all in. More exposure.”

  “By making America great again,” reflected the president,

  “I suppose they mean it’s time we bombed something. Flex American muscle?”

  “Something like that,” responded Trainor.

  “Well, if that’s what they want from me, they’re going to be sadly disappointed.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Before dawn, Independence Day, the pungent odor of breakfast kimchi and gasoline fumes filling their interiors, the riot buses, twenty of them, wound their way down through the early morning traffic and pollution to central Seoul, disgorging a squad here, a squad there, at various strategic positions throughout the city. Subway entrances in particular were favored by those retreating students hoping to grab a train out of the fray when the “riot ritual,” as the police call it, got too rough for them. And it would get that way soon enough in the exhausting and exhilarating business of baiting the police amid temperatures that AFKN, the U.S. Army radio network, predicted were going to climb well into the nineties with matching humidity, creating a fifty-fifty chance of late thunderstorms. But now it was still cool as the police quietly took up positions throughout an H-shaped grid running north-south through the city’s western sector down Sejong and Taepweong, and in the eastern sector running down Chang-Gyeong. Joining the two arms of the H were platoons stationed along Cheong Gye, the largest concentrations in the left half of the H around City Hall. Of the squads allocated to the protection of U.S. buildings, most were stationed outside the U.S. Chancery, as it, unlike the heavily fenced-in embassy, was immediately accessible from the street.

  “Maybe it’ll be too hot for them,” joked a platoon leader in one of the rear buses.

  “It’s too hot now,” replied one of those standing in the aisles. “This gear’s killing me.”

  There was a chorus of mock sympathy and a punching of shields.

  “You’ll have rest soon enough, Chun,” said the platoon leader. “Some student’ll put you on your ass.”

  “I’ll break his head first,” said Chun, lifting his truncheon.

  “You monster!” cried out another. “What if it’s a woman?”

  “Then I’ll stick it somewhere else,” Chun retorted.

  “Someone’ll have to show you where it is.”

  “I know where it is.” Chun was twenty-four, son of a janitor, and a policeman who hated university students with a passion. It wasn’t only the fact that he had come from a poor family and had missed out on the opportunity to go further than high school that made him feel so hostile toward the students — rather it was what he saw as their blatant hypocrisy. The same hooligans who would be throwing rocks and insults at him today would, in four years time, be executive trainees for Hyundai, Samsung, or some other giant chaebol while Chun would still be a policeman fighting a new generation of students shouting their obligatory anti-U.S. slogans. The latest were “Drive away the American bastards!” and “Down with the government!” banners scrawled in their own blood. Oh, some of them, the leaders, were genuine Communists, and Chun hated them the most for inciting the more gullible in the giant “reunification rallies,” thousands of students deafeningly applauded the Democratic Reunification Party’s belly-crawling overtures to Pyongyang. But Chun believed most of them were simply out for excitement under the pretense of it being serious political protest. It was a lark, a time to vent all the teenagers’ pent-up rage against parents forever pressuring them to Kongbu haera! — “Study! Study!” A chance to lash out at police, teachers — against all the Confucian-bred respect for authority.

  Chun filed out with the rest of his platoon near City Hall, but designated as a “flying wedge,” his platoon would not remain at any particular junction. Instead it would be on standby — ready to move quickly to reinforce weak spots in the H. Chun took great pride in knowing he was a member of the most experienced riot police in the world. Never mind all the “Cherry Berets”—the old “Olympic Police”—sliding headfirst down ropes like monkeys for the evening news crews, or the blue-denimed National Police; when the big battalions of protesters came out, when it went from bricks to Molotov cocktails, it was Chun and the other “Darth Vaders,” the black-helmeted riot police, who settled it. A squad of neatly turned out National Police passed by, their white helmets wonderful targets for any projectile. One of them waved. Chun nodded with stiff formality; the riot police remained aloof. Someone in Chun’s platoon said the Catholics and Protestants were coming out in support of the students.

  “So?” a rookie asked.

  “Protestants!” replied a corporal. “That’s how they got their name, right? Protest-tants. Means golchikkori—troublemakers!” As far as Chun was concerned, the Catholics were no better. And if it was true the Christians were going to get involved, it would be a long, hard day. Students might then win middle-class support. The worst possible combination.

  He heard a crackle of radio static; another three platoons, a hundred men in all, were being requested by the officer in charge of policing the square around Myongdong Cathedral. Catholic nuns were forming a human chain, swaying and singing hymns. Then there was a call from police HQ diverting two platoons to Yonsei University in the w
est. Less than a minute later an urgent plea came in from Korea University campus in the city’s northeast. This was unusual, the students normally favoring inner-city streets for their protests, where they could best be concentrated to gain maximum TV coverage and where if you ran out of paving stones, there were always construction sites — plenty of loose brick. Besides, the Molotov cocktails, made mostly with empty OB and Crown beer bottles, were much more effective against closely packed police in city streets than on open campuses. What was behind the new tactic? Chun wondered.

  A “most urgent” call came in for a “wedge” at the corner of Yulgog and Donhua about four blocks northeast of the U.S. Embassy.

  * * *

  The first shower of projectiles thudded against the bus’s thick window mesh as it passed Changdokkung Palace on the left. Chun could see the students, about two thousand, he guessed, overwhelming a hundred or so National Police, white helmets dotting the huge crowd as it swarmed about the entrance to the Secret Garden — a phalanx of placards demanding reunification. Soon the crowd of students, half already inside the gate, was expanding, contracting, and expanding again, at once controlled and uncontrollable, pushing and pulling, its waves surging through the gates, spilling into the gardens.

  “Beautiful!” said Chun. “Those bastards are bottled up inside by the wall. Perch in a pond.” He pulled out his club. “Boom! Boom!”

  “Chun!”

  “Sir?”

  “You’re on tear gas.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Chun, cursing under his breath. He badly wanted to use the stick. He broke open the short, wide-barreled gun and plopped in a canister of “pepper” gas, the most acrid, then snapped the gun shut. Next he tightened his gas mask and flipped down the steel mesh face guard. The platoon, now in its “Darth Vaders,” was ready.

  “Don’t be disappointed, Chun,” said a muffled voice. “Fire ‘em off quickly. Then you can go in with the butt.”