The Poksu Conspiracy (Post Cold War Political Thriller Book 2)

by Chester D. Campbell

  "No, Captain." Comrade Yoon's voice was labored. "I have sent nothing to anyone. These old eyes are much too weak for reading or writing. Perhaps it was Comrade Chung Woo-keun. I understand he is still around, and in somewhat better shape. Chung was in the group our Great Leader took to Vladivostok. I was injured and left behind."

  The "Great Leader," of course, was Kim Il-sung. The late Kim Il-sung. Comrade Chung was the last name on Yun's list. He had to be the old guerilla who had provided Dr. Lee with the crucial information on the Young Tiger and the Poksu group. Chung's home should be his next stop, Yun thought, but he wasn't particularly interested in having a North Korean watchdog along for the interview. It was time to get back to the hotel now anyway.

  As they drove back into Pyongyang, Kim inquired, "What kind of material did your friend Dr. Lee receive from here?"

  "I don't know. He just told me it had been lost and asked me to see if it could be replaced." Let him report that back to his boss, Yun thought. That should be confusing enough. He saw no reason why anyone up here would have any knowledge or interest in his conspiracy case, but he presumed they still suffered from the same old paranoia that the dictator Kim had fostered for so many years.

  "I can take you to find Comrade Chung Woo-keun in the morning," Kim offered.

  "I may be tied up at the meetings," Yun alibied. "I'll call Mr. So's office if I get free." He had no intention of calling So, however. He would have to find another way of locating what he took to be the last of the partisans.

  As it happened, help was not far away. When he arrived back at the hotel, he encountered a jovial Superintendent Pak, the officer in charge of the police contingent. Normally a steely-eyed taskmaster, Pak had mellowed since the assignment became relatively free of pressure. He knew Yun by reputation and had been told that the Captain was pursuing a criminal investigation and would not be actively participating in the security activities.

  "I hope you found what you came after, Captain," he said.

  Yun shrugged his shoulders. "I found who I needed to look for. I only wish I had someone who could take me to see him. I think my escort today was a member of the secret police."

  "I just might be able to help you," Pak said. "I had time to do a little looking myself. I found an uncle I'd never seen. My father went south just before the Civil War, but his brother got trapped by the fighting. He was able to make the best of a bad situation. I'm having dinner tonight at his son's house. I'll ask my cousin if he would take you to see your man."

  At around the same time, a message was being decoded in Seoul. It was rushed to the office of the DRAGON's handler. It said:

  "Captain Yun visiting World War II communist guerrillas. Looking for missing material sent to a Dr. Lee in Seoul."

  The message meant nothing to the intelligence officer, except that the DRAGON had carried out his assignment with his usual efficiency. He passed the information on to the superior who had requested surveillance of the policeman. The superior officer promptly placed a call to the treasurer of an import/export firm in the Kowloon section of Hong Kong. When the soft-spoken Chinese identified himself, the intelligence man advised that he had a message for "Typhoon." It was three words: "Emergency contact Hermit."

  From the import/export firm, a similar call went out to the manager of a Hong Kong-side bar. He left the message on the answering machine of a "family girl" (local jargon for call-girls) in the Wanchai district.

  Not long afterward, the illusive man code-named "Typhoon" placed a call from a safe phone to his employer in Seoul known as "Hermit." He received a new assignment, along with appropriate instructions for locating and identifying the target. Returning home, he opened a safe hidden beneath the floor and removed the necessary passports and documents, plus a supply of cash in various currencies, then headed for Kai Tak Airport.

  Falls Church, Virginia

  Chapter 48

  Burke took an extended lunch hour on Friday and dropped by the hospital to visit Lori and the twins. As he was walking down the polished tile corridor toward her room, he noticed three large potted plants sitting by her door. That's a hell of a way to deliver flowers, he thought. Why didn't they take them in the room for her? As he reached the doorway, he realized why. It looked like a greenhouse in there.

  He stuck his head inside and saw Lori sitting on the edge of the bed, looking radiant in a new pink gown. Her dark hair was pulled back and tied with a matching bow. She was surrounded everywhere by cut flower arrangements and live plants.

  "Is this a florist's showroom or what?" he said, a look of disbelief on his face.

  "Come on in if you aren't allergic to greenery. Can you believe this?"

  As he pushed his way through the floral menagerie, he glanced at the cards that hung from the baskets and pots, their sizes and shapes as varied as their content. Most were from an assortment of airlines, bus companies, tour packagers and hotel chains.

  "I never saw anything like it," he said. "What'll you do if they bring any more?"

  "Heavens. This isn't all of it. I've already sent a ton to other patients."

  He shook his head, then leaned down and kissed her.

  She held him tightly in a long, fervent embrace. "I'm glad you're home," she whispered. "I've missed you."

  "Ditto," he said. "I haven't been hugged like that since I don't know when. Really didn't think a day-old mother would have it in her."

  "I feel more like a day-old milking machine," she said. Her smile was tempered with a touch of weariness. "You never saw two such thirsty little characters."

  Burke came back with a non sequitur that, nevertheless, seemed somehow appropriate. "Babies in Korea eat rice. As a matter of fact, everybody in Korea eats rice. Huge pots full. I had enough rice to last me a couple of lifetimes, but Jerry loved it. I guess the food reminded him of back home when he was a youngster. He was like a kid in a candy store."

  A look of pride brightened her eyes. "My husband the Korea expert. When is it you go off hob-nobbing with the President?"

  "In the morning. Would you believe he's sending a helicopter for us?"

  "Why not? I'll wager you know more about what's going on over there than anybody on his staff."

  Probably so, thought Burke. But he hoped to know a lot more as soon as Captain Yun returned from Pyongyang and talked to Jerry Chan.

  "When can we take you and the kids home?" he asked, changing the subject. HANGOVER was getting too hot to even allude to except in the proper setting.

  "Chloe said Sunday, if everything's still going as well as now."

  None too soon, Burke thought. He was anxious to get everybody settled down to a comfortable routine. Living out of a hotel room for six weeks had been an irksome chore. Intelligence people were not supposed to be creatures of habit, but he relished the opportunity to get back to the familiarity of home.

  Later that afternoon, he turned up another disturbing piece of the Poksu puzzle and set out to try and fit it into place. Following up on Will Arnold's tale of the employees who had shifted their allegiance to Korea, Burke had arranged through General Thatcher for inquiries at the two Department of Energy nuclear weapons laboratories, Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos. The answer came back much quicker than he had dared hope. Administrative wheels that normally turned in a leisurely fashion evidently began to spin furiously when a White House request appeared. According to the report, no less than half a dozen Korean-American scientists, including one of the key designers of the B61 warhead, had resigned over the past year. It was impossible to find out immediately if all of them had gone to Korea. As he moved the pieces of the puzzle about in his mind, he got the impression of a shifting creature with lots of elusive arms pointing in different directions. He had a feeling he might soon find himself wrestling an octopus.

  When he got home that evening, he went straight to his rolltop desk and poked around in the pigeonholes for the business card Dr. Kim Vickers had given him. As he pulled it out, a slip of paper tumbled out with it,
the note Will Arnold had left for him about the book on hackers. He looked at it for a moment, then laid Dr. Vickers' card beside it. He stared. Both contained the same San Francisco post office box number.

  According to Will's note, the author advertising for expert hackers to interview listed his name as "K. Vee." Was that a curruption of the initials for Kim Vickers? Vickers had not impressed him as a man who would be writing a book on computer hackers. What was going on here? Vickers had told him that he provided employment counselling for graduates of the scholarship program. It was beginning to appear that he had been recruiting Korean-American students for key jobs in defense industries, then exporting them to Korea to bolster a nuclear weapons project called Pok Su. What relation could computer hackers have to that? One possibility immediately came to mind.

  He called Will. "I just ran across that note you left for me when I was in San Francisco."

  "Oh, yeah. The address for the writer of the hacker book."

  "I was wondering," Burke said. "Could a hacker break into a computer at a nuclear weapons lab or a missile manufacturer?"

  "Hmm. That's a good question. An unclassified computer, maybe. Classified computers at the nuclear labs are not physically connected to the outside world. Some defense contractors may have them linked to external networks, but they would be heavily protected with codes and passwords."

  "What if somebody had access to the codes and passwords, like from a recently resigned employee?"

  "Now you're really speculating. He could certainly break in from a terminal inside the operation." After a thoughtful pause, Will added, "From outside? Not from our company. I've built every kind of barrier known to man. As far as the others are concerned, I couldn't swear. But I'd have to guess it's quite possible. I might even go so far as to say quite probable."

  Captain Yun had just finished breakfast and now scanned the sky as he waited in front of his hotel for Superintendent Pak's cousin. Pyongyang had missed the snow that blanketed Seoul two days before, but the clouds now hung over the city in heavy folds of gray, as if awaiting a signal to dump their frozen contents on a weary populace. In a town where life itself was struggle enough, they didn't need another complication.

  Pak Oh-san soon arrived in his small, dusty car and rolled down the window next to the curb. "Are you Captain Yun?"

  The Captain nodded and opened the door. "Here's where I need to go, he said, handing over the note with Chung Woo-keun's address on it. Pak studied it briefly, then lurched off into the morning gloom. Yun wasn't sure of the stocky man's ability behind the wheel, but he got the distinct impression that Pak had graduated from the Seoul School of Taxicab Driving.

  With little more than an occasional hint of color, the city's skyline resembled a sepiatone print. They passed huge, stark, unimaginative government buildings and heroic-size monuments ranging from statues of socialist ideals to a sixty-foot bronze likeness of Kim Il-sung with arm outstretched, melancholy reminders of a system that had inevitably failed. Only the broken base remained of one monument that had been toppled by an angry mob intent on demonstrating their true feelings toward the slain dictator. As the car approached an endless vista of high-rise apartment clones, Yun turned to the driver.

  "Have there been many changes around here since the Presidential Palace explosion?"

  "You may have noticed a few people smiling," Pak said in a droll voice. "That's new."

  "Are the secret police still around?"

  "Oh, yes. The State Political Security Department is still in buisness, but even some of them smile now. They act as if they had been doers of good deeds for the past forty years."

  Yun thought of Kim Chi-yon, his escort from yesterday, and his effusive greeting. "I haven't seen very many cars," the Captain said. "You must be lucky to have one."

  "Around here, luck is a five-letter word called 'Party.' I've been a member for years. Not that I believed in what it did or stood for, but because it offered the only possibility for getting ahead. If there was any luck involved, it was that my father happened to be a brilliant chemist. He invented some processes necessary for our industrial growth. So rather than blacklist him because his brother had fled south, they 'rehabilitated' him and allowed him to join the Party."

  "That paved the way for you?"

  "Right, I'm an administrator in the Pyongyang Public Security Bureau. We're under the Ministry of Public Security. 'The mighty weapon of the proletarian dictatorship of the Party' is how one minister described it. The reason I'm free this morning, I have to make an inspection at a suburban police station. Fortunately, it's on the same side of town as your man."

  Yun found Pak's position an interesting one. One that might make him privvy to a little insider information. "Did the security people ever determine who was to blame for the bombing last September?"

  "Somebody is always assigned the blame in a society like this. It may not be the correct party, but they'll blame everything on somebody. In this case, it was determined that the explosive had been planted inside a Ming vase sent by the Chinese government."

  "Did they blame the Chinese?"

  "Not the government. A vice premier of the People's Republic was killed as he presented the vase. He wasn't a person they would have sacrificed. Anyway, China had more to gain with Kim alive. So they blamed it on a dissident Chinese faction. Some people still believe the regime in Seoul was behind it."

  "Really? I'm afraid they give us more credit than we deserve," said Captain Yun.

  "There was no way to prove it," said Pak. "They found enough fragments to indicate the bomb was set off by a radio-controlled detonator. But not big enough pieces to tell where it came from. It was the way the Kwak government moved so quickly with a unification plan that made people suspicious. It appeared they had everything set and were just waiting for the bomb to go off."

  Yun shrugged. "Every government for the past forty years has had some kind of plan ready to implement unification. I'm not saying we wouldn't have been delighted to plant a bomb under old Kim. I just can't believe we had the resources to pull it off."

  For the moment, he dismissed the thought as Pak carried on a tour guide's commentary while they traveled to the far side of Pyongyang. Chung's home was in a somewhat better section than the one Yun had visited the previous day. The house was large enough to accommodate the old soldier along with his son and family, including a wife and three children. He had been closer to his partisan commander than Yoon Kwang-su and had retired from a decent government job.

  Pak let Captain Yun out of the car and said he would make his police station inspection and be back in two hours.

  Yun found the former guerrilla a garrulous old man with a high forehead, close-cropped gray hair and the acid tongue of a dogmatic village elder. He wore a white wool vest and smoked a long-stemmed pipe, which he used occasionally to emphasize his points.

  "Yes, sir," he said forcefully enough to leave no doubt, "I'm the fellow who sent that information to your Dr. Lee. What do you want to know about it?"

  As Captain Yun soon learned, Chung had kept silent until after Kim Il-sung's death for very good reasons. Had he exposed the man in the south earlier, the former Young Tiger Lee would likely have come back with details that contradicted the story Kim had stuck to all these years. Details that would have diminished the lofty role in the war the North Korean leader had claimed for himself. That would have led to a very unhappy and unforgiving dictator whose reputation for ruthlessness would have assured the end of Chung Wu-keun. Kim had long since eliminated most of those who might pose a threat by their knowledge of that early chapter in his career as a Marxist.

  After more than two hours of listening to Chung's fascinating tale, Yun Yu-sop knew with virtual certainty the identity of the so-called Young Tiger. Chung had learned about the Poksu guerilla band after the war and had concluded, based on dates, locations and descriptions, particularly identities of the two killed by the Japanese at Taejon, that it was undoubtedly the group of four men Le
e had led back across the Yalu River in 1941. And for the clincher, Yun possessed the name of Lee's friend, who Chung had just recently discovered was currently living in Thailand. It took the Captain a good fifteen minutes of his most persuasive manner to pry the old guerilla loose from a dark, brittle photograph of a group of partisans that included Young Tiger Lee and his compatriot, Ahn Wi-jong. Chung had sent all of his other photographs to Dr. Lee. They had been taken, of course, along with the manuscript, by the historian's murderer.

  Captain Yun had been so engrossed in the colorful old partisan's descriptions that he hadn't bothered to take note of what was occurring outside the house. When Pak returned, he stepped through the door to find himself facing a sea of white, with roofs, streets, cars, everything covered by a good three inches of snow. The large crystalline flakes continued to swirl down in a massive shower that left visibility reduced to hardly fifty meters.

  This was the first big snowfall of the winter in Pyongyang, and the speed with which it accumulated caught everyone by surprise. The street and highway maintenance crews, whose responsibility included snow removal, were among the victims of the current confusion and disorganization in government, a situation that had brought calamity to a city once regarded as one of the best managed in Asia. Traffic throughout Pyongyang, sparse though it was, slowed almost to a halt. Pak did his best. When one artery would appear hopelessly clogged, he would spin around and try another. Nevertheless, they spent what seemed an agonizing half an afternoon standing in lines of stalled vehicles. It was nearly four by the time they reached Yun's hotel.

  He shielded the envelope with the old photograph beneath his heavy coat as he stepped gingerly through the crusty layer of snow, which now came halfway up the calf of his leg. No one had bothered to shovel off the sidewalk in front of the hotel. He wondered if the bewildered authorities simply hadn't found time to decide whose responsibility it was.