"I'm sure." He glanced at his watch, estimating the F-15's remaining flight time. "I can make it. I'll meet you at the loading gate."
"That would be very nice. I love you," she said, and terminated the connection.
Washington, DC
The waiting area at the terminal gate was crowded with family, friends and associates who had come to see off those boarding the Los Angeles flight. There was standing room only, and little of that. Meiko was surrounded by a cacophony of conversations in many languages.
Galt navigated his way through the condensed mass of humanity toward her. He wore an open-neck white shirt, a navy blue sports jacket and pressed slacks with black shoes. He felt mildly ill-at-ease wearing the uniform of a civilian. He only ever felt like he was in uniform when he was not wearing a soldier's uniform. There was a black leather travel bag over his shoulder and he toted his laptop computer.
"How are you doing, Meiko?"
She was dressed for travel, wearing a modest, belted black dress, set off by a string of white pearls, with matching purse and shoes.
She was studying his eyes. "I'm having second thoughts."
"About what?"
"About us. About how smart I was to tell you that I loved you over the phone, the way I did."
"Meiko, come on, you're under stress."
"That's what I meant. That's something neither one of us has ever said to the other before, Trev. I told myself that between the two of us, I would not be the first one to say it. Is that stupid?"
He touched her arm. "Meiko, relax. We've got a lot of flight time ahead of us. I don't have to accompany you, if that's what you'd prefer."
"I don't know what my preference is." She continued to study him, almost dispassionately. "Are you coming with me because you care, or are you using my family tragedy to further your own objectives?"
"You want to know the truth?" he said. "I've been asking myself that. I'm sorry, Meiko. I won't go with you."
"That's not what I want, either. You wouldn't be undertaking an action like this on your own, without official sanction, if you thought that the government was doing its best to locate and rescue your wife and the crew."
Galt blinked. He glanced around. No one seemed to have overheard her.
"What do you know about that?"
She held his gaze. "Your expression right now tells me everything I need to know, Major."
"Does it?"
"Don't worry. We don't have to talk about it. I don't know anything, except that there is an information blackout. And here you are, wanting to be a good friend and accompany me home, coincidentally to that hemisphere, for the funeral of my father."
"I'm sorry, Meiko. Please accept my condolences. And call me when you get back, if you want to." He started to turn, to leave.
She arrested his movement with a touch of her fingertips on his arm. "You may not believe this," she said, "but right now I don't want to know anything classified about your shuttle or your wife or anything else. It's enough that I understand the depth of feeling you still have for the woman who is still your wife. You're initiating some sort of personal effort of your own, and with a missing NASA space shuttle involved, that means you're risking everything."
A lull had fallen over many of the surrounding conversations when a pair of airline employees assumed their positions to either side of the boarding door.
He pitched his voice low. "I'm making this up as I go along, but you're right. It's the right thing for me to do, because I do have a chance of accomplishing something." He grimaced. "And yes, you're right. I was going to use your family's situation as an excuse."
She considered this, gazing into his eyes. "You're risking your life and your career for Kate and the lives of the other crewmembers? I'm not sorry that I told you I love you. You are a brave and noble man."
He avoided her gaze. "Aw, shucks."
"I want to help. You may accompany me to Tokyo. Use me as a cover for whatever you intend to do."
"I do want to be there for you."
"You shall be. But first, tell me, Trev. I have to know. Are you still in love with her?"
"No." He bent an arm and scratched the back of his shaggy head, frowning, searching for the right words.
"Not in love. But I do love her, if that means caring about her. I was going to wait until she got back before I told her about us. I figured it could wait, since she and I were already separated when you and I met. That shuttle flight has been the only thing in her life. I didn't want her distracted while she was on mission."
"Was on mission?" Meiko repeated, studying him with her probing gaze. "The shuttle has come back to earth," she surmised, "only no one knows about it. It went down somewhere in Asia."
He glanced around. Again, no one seemed to have overheard. Her voice was pitched low, and those in the boarding area were engrossed in their own conversations and farewells. An airline employee swung open the boarding door, while another lowered the thin rope that had barred the entrance leading to the plane.
Galt watched this as he spoke to her. "Meiko, I can't talk about that."
"All right," she said reasonably. "Let's just talk about Kate, then. What were you going to tell her when she got back from outer space?"
"I'm going to tell her that there is no doubt in my mind that I want a divorce."
"But Trev, you and I were going to talk before either one of us did anything drastic."
"Isn't that what we're doing now?"
Her eyes clouded. "I could certainly use a loving friend at my side."
People around them began funneling toward the gate. He reached into a pocket and produced a boarding pass. "I've got the seat next to yours."
The trace of a smile touched her lips and a sparkle flashed in her eyes. "You are the most incredible man, Trev Galt. How did you manage that, this close to boarding?"
He clasped her hand in his free hand, giving hers a gentle squeeze. "Let's just call it the power of the White House perk," he said, "and hope that the corporate exec who got bumped to the next flight won't raise too much of a stink."
There were 143 passengers aboard the Tokyo-bound Concorde SST jet out of LAX. Galt was among the more industrious, alternating work at his laptop with hourly five-minute breaks to lean his head against the cushion of his seat, resting his eyes. He and Meiko barely spoke during the long flight, except for small talk at mealtime. Meiko lost herself in a thick paperback tome of American political commentary.
Galt reflected that, had he been aboard this lengthy a flight in the past, he would ordinarily have been working on a stiff drink within minutes of takeoff. He thought about the roughing-up he'd given the NASA scientist in Houston. The ends justified the means. And Eliot Fraley would go to his grave knowing Galt as a heinous brute capable of torture and the murder of a sick woman. And yet here Galt was, wearing his civilian uniform, flying in style and polite society. Seated across the aisle from him was a beautiful, sophisticated woman who loved him. But Meiko had never seen the side of him that Eliot Fraley saw. Galt had come to understand that the knowledge that such a brute existed within him was much of the reason why he had sought the anesthesia for the soul and mind that liquor had provided him. But he hadn't taken a drink in months, and he intended to never have another drink of alcohol.
Concerning the women in his life, well, he had braved bullets and faced death, but if he feared anything it was his own heart. Was there a man alive who was any different? Dear, earnest Meiko, for all her world-class journalism credentials, could never begin to imagine the side of him that he'd unleashed on that weasel, Fraley. With Kate, he'd done what he could to cope with the miscarriages and career shifts, but the love they'd shared still went south. So why bother heading down that same road for heartache with someone else? The problem, of course, was that his heart had already been taken by (or given to?) the woman he'd been sharing his off-time with, including bedtime. Galt was not promiscuous, not a man who could make love with a woman unless he had real feelings
for her. He wasn't a casual sex kind of guy. Which is why he felt guilty about exploiting Meiko's family tragedy for his own agenda . . . precisely as she'd accused him of doing. She'd agreed to participate but her understanding, and the forgiveness this implied, did nothing to ease his guilt. But hell, he told himself, he had to think pragmatically. He was on a mission, even if it was his own, and the expediency of using this trip was inarguable. Accompanying Meiko to Japan provided him with the perfect cover.
He closed down that stream of thought. He focused on the mission. Would it take until tomorrow before Fleming and the president realized that he had skipped town?
Throughout the flight, he monitored, via his laptop's ongoing download, the multiple satellite intel flowing into the Pentagon's intelligence fusion center concerning the continuing Chinese and North Korean military troop movements along their shared border. As the laptop automatically sorted, processed and filed this data, Galt likewise mentally processed what he was learning into the context of what he already knew.
North Korea's first Communist leader, Kim Il Sung, had seized power with help from the Soviet Union and China in 1945. His dream of uniting the Koreas by force led North Korea to its war with America, the "forgotten" war that had resulted in the death of 520,000 North Koreans, 415,000 South Koreans and 34,000 Americans after the United States pitched in to defend the democratic South from the Communist aggressors of the North. The present-day stalemate of this divided country had existed ever since. Erosion of North Korea's tightly controlled society was exacerbated with the end of the Cold War, when the North's Soviet support evaporated. The Chinese became increasingly irritated with North Korea's unwillingness to consider the economic reforms that Beijing was adopting. Kim's death in the 1990s had created a sudden and critical leadership crisis that further deepened the country's formidable economic troubles. This led to civil unrest, a phenomenon previously unheard of in North Korea.
In the wake of the terrorist attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center, after the military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. had expanded its war on terrorism in a number of ways: sending special forces to the Philippines, increasing military surveillance in Somalia, training special forces on the ground in Yemen and branding North Korea a "terrorist state" for its support of terrorist actions in South Korea, and against American interests in that part of the world: "a regime," in the words of the then-president, "arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction." America had served notice that it had no intention of permitting dangerous regimes to develop weapons of mass destruction that were intended for use against America or its allies. In other words, America reserved the right to take pre-emptive action. With regard to the Korean situation, from the West's point of view, the best-case scenario was that eventually the "Bamboo Curtain" separating North and South Korea would collapse peacefully, with the two Koreas then unifying along the German post-Cold War model. However, on the diplomatic front, leverage was limited. Since North Korea was one of the most isolated countries in the world, America had no diplomatic linkage with its government. The current administration was hoping that China and Japan might be persuaded to wield influence.
The "glue" holding together this famine-ravaged society of 22 million was Kim's son, Kim Jong Il. The elder Kim had mentored his son to succeed him. Nearing sixty; the son was among the world's most shadowy figures. As head of his country's armed forces, Kim was described as running the day-to-day machinery of his government, but he altogether lacked his father's charisma and authority. It was the conclusion of intel psyche analysts from more than one agency, whose job it was to profile international leaders who were strategically important to American policy-making, that the guy was nuttier than a pecan pie. One piece of evidence that he lived in a cocoon of his own delusions was his by-any-standard abominable hairstyles, usually an awkwardly-sculpted coif, unflattering in the extreme. The reason for this was that, rather than flying in the best hairstylists from the salons of Paris or New York as he could easily have afforded to do, this leader of a nation with nuclear capabilities, narcissistically fixated on his appearance, instead chose to have his hair done by male political prisoners dragged up from the interrogation cells if they professed any ability whatsoever to cut hair. Such claims often proved to be nothing more than desperate ploys to stay alive, and many a "former barber" went to the firing squad primarily for the crime of having given his president a bad haircut. Kim's sexual preference was said to be for young men and boys, and so he was able to pander to his vanity while being supplied with a steady stream of young men and boys willing to do anything to survive, including servicing his private predilections. The only downside for Kim was that some hair days were better than others. This then was the "playboy" dictator of North Korea: head of a government riddled with corruption from the local commune level to Kim Jong Il's private chambers, where he preened in pampered decadence while the famine worsened critically with each passing year despite international aid from nations, including the United States.
Without a paramount leader, North Korea was effectively a headless beast and, as such, represented a far greater potential threat to America than ever before.
Chapter Thirteen
Pyongyang, North Korea
Kim Jong Il was getting a haircut in his private office, located on the top floor of the central government building. The office walls were a drab gray, barren except for a single photograph of Kim and his father standing formally side-by-side at some long-forgotten occasion of state. A metal desk, behind which Kim sat, matched the walls. The day itself was gray. Rain clouds gathered beyond the single window. Kim was overweight and pudgy. His complexion had an unhealthy pallor. His thinning hair was coifed in a pompadour.
The young man in prisoner garb administering the haircut was a slim-hipped teenager with girlish good looks: pouty lips and a delicate build. The youth held a comb in one hand, hair-clippers in the other, and was cautiously snipping near Kim's sideburns. Occasionally he would stop snipping and stand back to allow his hands to stop shaking. Having known enough to volunteer to his interrogators downstairs that he was proficient in cutting hair, he must surely have also known of the fate of so many "former barbers" before him. The prisoner clearly understood that his life depended on the haircut he was administering.
Kim, not wearing his thick eyeglasses, had to squint at the pair of men standing before him. His hair was tended to on a daily basis, often during work hours. "We find ourselves at an impasse," he said. "The Americans will not relent in their insistence that they be allowed access to Hamgyong Province, where they say their shuttle has gone down. Their position is that they are entitled to search for their precious shuttle. They cite our inability to secure our own borders against the Chinese in that region."
"The Americans are entitled to nothing." General Yang was nearing seventy. He had been a young lieutenant in the war against the Americans fifty years ago, and was presently supreme commander of the North Korean military. His aged body was in good condition, but at the moment he shivered as if with chills. "They have consistently pursued a policy against us. It is my considered opinion, sir, that the Americans' encroachment of our borders be considered an act of war."
The man beside him, General Tog, the military's second-in-command, was generations younger than Yang, but his eyes burned with the same conviction. "The military stands ready to defend our nation. The launch of missiles at U.S. positions along the DMZ awaits your approval, sir."
"I understand." Kim nodded. "But not yet, gentlemen, not yet." His lips curled into the semblance of a smile. "We hold in our hand the potential of turning this to our considerable advantage." He winced as the hair-clippers nipped too closely to his scalp. The prisoner ceased snipping, an expression of terror on his face. Kim touched his scalp, satisfied himself that there was no wound and snapped his fingers peevishly, gesturing for the prisoner to continue, which he did. Kim continued, to the men before him, "If our military were to find the shuttle first, w
e could use that to negotiate more economic aid from the Americans as a show of their gratitude . . . after our scientists have helped themselves to whatever they choose aboard the shuttle. With this much at stake, the Americans will not quibble. Need I remind you, gentlemen, that the famine relief provided by America lines our pockets?"
Yang's posture grew ramrod straight. "It makes my blood run as ice to think of them invading our soil."
"I concur," said Kim." T'hat is why pressure must be exerted on our troops in the region. Do you suppose the Americans suspect us of culpability in this matter?"
"Unfortunately," said Tog, "it's too soon to tell. I do believe that, if that were the case, they would first approach us privately with such an accusation, and demand their shuttle be returned. This they have not done."
"And we have no idea where that shuttle is?" Kim's tone was petulant.
"A Colonel Sung is our regional commander in Hamgyong Province," said Yang, "where the shuttle is believed to have gone down. Colonel Sung reports that he has been directing a search of his sector since dawn, thus far with no positive results."
"Colonel Sung is a most competent officer," said Yang, "and he is ruthless. He has been made to understand the grave urgency of this. A space shuttle has crashed in his sector. Someone will have seen something, and they will divulge what they know to him. I assure you, sir, we will see results."
"Enough," said Kim."The mirror and my glasses." He was speaking to the prisoner, and holding each hand out, palm up. "I now wish to see the results of this haircut."
The prisoner obeyed. His trembling intensified, and he repeatedly licked his lips, awaiting the verdict on his work . . . reprieve, or execution.
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