The Korean Woman

by John Altman

  At last, he’d gotten the tie just right. He gave it one final tug and then leaned back and looked at his son. Looked directly into his son’s eyes. Warmth and kindness spilling out of him like golden honey, filling his son’s brain, body, and soul. It happens to everybody eventually, Dad said, so in a way it isn’t so bad. But it’s still sad when it does happen, because then that person isn’t with you anymore. They’re with God in heaven. That’s where Grandma is. With Mom.

  Driving home from the funeral that afternoon, Dad had stopped at a traffic light. Moments passed. The light turned green, but Dad didn’t go. He was looking out his window, up at the sky, head tilted, as if trying to tune in some kind of signal. Trying to tune in Grandma, young Benjamin Bach thought, up there in heaven with Mom and God.

  Esther Yong’s abdomen had featured a scar in the shape of a fishhook. He once asked her about it. An appendectomy? A C-section? She had said she would tell him when she knew him better. But she never had.

  In the faded photograph of his grandfather, the eyes had burned. Even in sepia, even bleached with age, you could see the fire.

  Razzle Dazzle Bach, the Battling Tail Gunner.

  A hazy corkscrew led down. He spun along, not trying to slow his descent.

  He thought of the dusty gray garbage bags hulking on curbsides in lower Manhattan. They had contained powdered Formica and asbestos and polystyrene foam. And human skin and bones and eyes and lungs and fingernails. He had breathed it for twelve full hours before receiving the old-fashioned two-canister mask.

  The dust had taken two decades to finish its work, but all that time, his fate had been settled.

  He didn’t want to think about that. He wanted to think about the yellow flower, the touch of a woman, skin on skin. Sweet.

  Peace.

  The corkscrew steepened, leading into deeper darkness, and he rode down, down, and released a shuddering breath, without looking back.

  * * *

  Dalia began chest compressions. At some point, an EMT took her shoulder, drawing her away.

  She let McConnell help her stand. The director of the CIA appeared in the conference room doorway. He was handsome, with a full head of silver hair swept back from an aristocratic brow. He paused for a moment, lifting his chin, absorbing the scene, then came forward and took a knee beside his fallen officer.

  The EMT, now cutting away Bach’s shirt, blocked Dalia’s view of his torso. But she could see his face. Skin like cellophane, eyes half-lidded. For the first time, he struck her as handsome. He reminded her of someone. After a moment, she had it. He looked like Alexander the Great, as sculptured by Lysippus.

  Her gaze moved back to the on-screen helicopter feed. The searchlight had tracked Song Sun Young into a forest. She had abandoned the car. She was surrounded. Trapped. Finished.

  But Dalia’s chest felt tight, and as she watched, other windows on-screen began opening, the monitor filling with tense, strained faces.

  Sam was hailing the director. “Ten unauthorized launches,” he was saying. “Six minutes ago, at Minot. Flight path consistent with North Korea or Vladivostok. POTUS in transit to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center.”

  Ten unauthorized launches.

  Dalia looked at Bach again. That tranquility on his face. But beneath it, evoking Alexander, something cold. Brutal.

  The director was leaving Bach, joining the teleconference. Sam patched him in. Acronyms were flying. From the White House Situation Room, the vice president asked about DAL. From Cheyenne, a brigadier general explained that Minutemen maintained no uplink/downlink communication after launch. Already midcourse, the missiles were beyond comm reach. From J3, a square-jawed man in dress blues, handsome as a groom in a wedding catalog, suggested BMDS, Ballistic Missile Defense.

  Dalia felt dizzy. They used acronyms and tech-speak to gain distance, it seemed, to make themselves feel in control. To protect themselves from the ghastly truth. In this case, if she understood correctly, the truth that ten nuclear missiles were flying toward North Korea.

  She looked again at Bach. Remembering her feeling that something was being kept camouflaged. Some hazard right underfoot, all around. Her unconscious mind trying to tell her something. But she had not been able to hear.

  And now this. Ten missiles flying toward the Korean Peninsula.

  Somehow, Bach had done this.

  “Worth a shot,” CINC-NORAD was saying from Cheyenne. “GBI—Godspeed.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  North of Lake Togue, NY

  The doorbell rang.

  Sarah Carmichael looked up from her magazine. Her husband, watching TV, seemed as surprised by the bell as she was. “You expecting someone?” he asked.

  She shook her head, set down her copy of People, and went to see who it was.

  She didn’t recognize the young lady standing on their doorstep. Pale and shaken. Wearing clownish makeup—or was that blood? Grimacing a smile. Clutching her midsection in a way that seemed suspicious. If Sarah had seen a woman standing that way in a store, she would have thought the woman was shoplifting.

  And that sound … She had thought the helicopter rotors were coming from the television. But no. And behind them were sirens, far away but getting closer. Before Sarah could put the pieces together, the woman said, “I hit a deer.”

  “Oh, my goodness.”

  “May I use your phone?”

  “I …”

  But the woman had already pushed past her.

  Seven hundred miles above

  the Bering Sea

  Forty Raytheon Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicles rose like soaring sparks. As the Taurus launchers spent their solid fuel, gouts of flame faltered and died, and the boost vehicles began the long, dreamy tumble back to earth.

  The Minutemen III held course. Decoy balloons deployed: dozens of Mylar inflatables streaking forward at twenty times the speed of sound, without friction or gravity to slow them, presenting the Kill Vehicles with a tempting target.

  NMCC, lacking time to calculate a proper mission plan, had opted for quantity over quality. The forty interceptors represented the entire complement of GBIs based in Alaska, roughly halfway between the contiguous United States and North Korea. Thanks to a jury-rigged C2BMC patch between PAVE PAWS, SBIRS, and SBX, they were not flying entirely blind.

  A shining silver net drew tighter, closing.

  Minutemen and decoys alike exploded in showers of tumbling sparks. The ground-based interceptor system used a hit-to-kill approach, destroying targets with raw kinetic energy without detonating their payloads. W78 thermonuclear warheads tumbled back toward the frigid Bering Sea.

  In the blink of an eye, eight Minutemen went down.

  But two continued, driven by gimballed inertial guidance systems toward series of coordinates: latitude and longitude in degrees, minutes, and seconds, north-south and east-west.

  In fourteen minutes, they would reach those coordinates.

  North of Lake Togue, NY

  Song moved through a living room, past a man of about sixty watching the evening news from an easy chair, and into a bathroom.

  “This is your last warning. Freeze and put your hands on your head. We are authorized to use deadly force.”

  She wet a hand towel in the sink, then pressed it across her nose and mouth, moving back into the living room just in time to catch a shadow chasing across the wall: a man crossing outside the window, backlit by a searchlight.

  Glass splintered, tinkling. A huge windy gust swept through the first floor of the house—gas.

  The gas spread quickly. She let her knees buckle, holding her breath beneath the wet towel. Hiding the gun in the hollow beneath her. Playing up her weakness, her soft helpless underbelly, inviting assault. Make them reveal their position, their numbers.

  Two men wearing tactical gear and gas masks appeared from nowhe
re. She remembered the long-ago border guard beside the Tumen, five feet wide and ten feet tall. These giants were his brothers.

  The sixtyish man was choking, gasping, falling from his chair. The incursion team moved past him without concern, weapons raised, approaching Song.

  They could have shot her.

  They didn’t.

  She fired. One ducked behind the sofa. The other returned fire. A dullness took her left leg, turned it to dead weight.

  She ducked into the bathroom again, put her back to the wall beside the door. Pulse thudding hard in her temples. The gas beginning to dissipate already. With multiple windows broken, cross-ventilation would quickly disperse it.

  The wall behind her buckled—a battering ram.

  She snapped off a covering shot into the wall, encouraging the man or men out there to keep their distance. She fired again, again, again.

  On the shooting range at Heaven Lake, she had always felt quiet competence. She had been a good shot. The neat, orderly holes in the paper targets had testified to her competence. Here, by contrast, there was no order. There was only chaos. Burnt powder, tear gas, and the slaughterhouse smell of blood hung in the air.

  She left the bathroom. In the living room, a man lay facedown, twitching. Had she hit him? Was it the one who had been watching TV? She couldn’t tell. Her head thudded horribly—echoes of gunshots, her own thundering heartbeat.

  She was taking fire from a broken window. One, two, three shots, whizzing so close that her hair stirred. She felt cool, almost numb. Calmly she returned fire. She moved toward a kitchen, snapping off another round as she went.

  She stepped into the kitchen. A man in SWAT gear lay crumpled against a wall. She saw no wounds. Another man was looking at the injured one. He had taken off his mask, perhaps to speak to his friend. He turned to face Song and she shot him between the eyes.

  She shouldered open a back door and gulped clean air. She had lost the bag somewhere. Back in the car. The towel was gone, too. She ran toward the same woods she had just left. Trying to remember how many shots she had fired. She saw the carcass of the Jetta and veered away.

  Her eyes were watering. Her ears were ringing. Her left thigh was soaked with blood. The flesh was purplish and swollen, the blood dark. The leg folded out from under her. She face-planted into a bed of half-composted leaves.

  Shot. The thought was sludgy. She poked gently at her thigh. The wound was without feeling, but everything around it was aflame.

  She tried to stand. Couldn’t. Instead, she dragged herself up onto elbows and knee and hauled herself forward.

  She could not stifle a cry, but she kept going. Now she had lost the gun, too. Twigs and dirt and blood smeared her face. Fresh splinters of pain shot from hip to torso. Her lips crimped into a jagged line.

  Forward again. She heard thunder, breaking waves. The thunder was in her head. Barking dogs, helicopter rotors—those were real. Boots and paws blundering through woodland, twigs crackling.

  She planted her elbows and hitched forward again. The air was full of smoke. She could not draw a breath, could not fill her lungs.

  She collapsed. The smell of earth, rich and fertile, filled her nostrils. The smell of graves, of life, of death.

  She thought of her mother, face bulging and purple, eyes horror-struck. Reaching out a hand to her daughter, wanting human contact in her moment of extremis. But Song had been too horror-struck herself to take the hand. And now that she was in a similar position, there was no one to reach out to. There was only hot darkness, waves of dizziness, smells of blood and encroaching death.

  Death. The wages of sin. But she did not believe in sin. Or in fate. She believed in playing the hand you were dealt. Nothing else.

  Breaking waves. Barking dogs. Crackling branches. Pounding rotors. A rising tide of darkness.

  The tide went over her head. Then it lowered and she saw them all around her. Men with guns. Anonymous white shirts and blue jeans. Tactical gear and polished boots. Flashlights and crackling radios and the helicopter hovering overhead. A loudspeaker spitting static. Dogs straining against leashes. A closing circle.

  She put her head down. Dark spirals filled her vision.

  She closed her eyes. She released a breath.

  Finished, at last.

  It was a relief.

  Langley, VA

  “Eight takedowns.”

  Dalia felt a collective, tangible lifting of spirits. Better than expected. The ground-based interceptors, previously untested against ICBMs, worked after all.

  But it was not enough.

  For several seconds, silence reigned in the conference room. On-screen, two Minutemen continued toward their targets. The time code on the live feed ticked past 20:31.

  Then the brigadier general barked, “Monterey, you’re up.”

  The Sea of Japan

  Aboard the USS Monterey, the captain rubbed his chin. His wife made gentle fun of him when he rubbed his chin. Ahoy, ye matey, she said. During his last leave, he had grown a beard, which only encouraged her ribbing. Then when she caught him stroking his graying whiskers, she had laughed out loud and said, “You look like Ahab. Does that make me your white whale?”

  Now his wife was five thousand miles away, and he was regulation clean-shaven. If God was with him, his wife would learn what had happened here today, only on some peaceful night far in the future, when he told her the story in a low voice and then swore her to secrecy.

  Still rubbing his chin, he watched the two incoming missiles on the radar screen.

  Just six months ago, he would have felt despair. The AEGIS system had not been designed to handle ICBMs. But Block III Alphas had bigger boosters, higher and faster, than their predecessor. According to Raytheon, they could intercept the target exothermically, during midcourse flight, so that the debris fell harmlessly into the sea.

  Of course, Raytheon was in the business of selling missiles. Last year, the US government had paid them over twenty-five billion dollars. They would not talk themselves out of a sale.

  He felt, rather than heard, the MK-41 vertical launching systems thunk into ready position. He asked mildly, “Online?”

  “Online.” The weapons officer matched his mildness. “System enabled.”

  “Target range?”

  “One thousand miles.”

  “Special-auto.”

  The computer took over.

  A few seconds of deceptive silence followed. Then the entire six-hundred-foot length of the Monterey shuddered as the first Block III launched.

  “One away.” The weapons officer sounded almost bored.

  Another shudder. “Two away clean.”

  The captain’s gaze traveled around the bridge, across intent faces illuminated by glowing screens. C2BMC, with an assist from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, had patched together AEGIS, AN/TYP-2, SBX, SBIRS, and PAVE PAWS tracking data to give the USS Monterey a composite picture of the two missiles’ trajectories. But ballistic missile interception plans were notoriously tricky even with forewarning of targets, speed, and launch sites. An unexpected shot in a reverse direction, even with an abundance of off-board assistance …

  Another shudder. And another. “Three away. Four away.”

  That was all the Block IIIs.

  It would be their last chance. The Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense system based in Seongju under the control of the Thirty-Fifth Air Defense Artillery Brigade was intended only to intercept Hwasong-12s targeting US military interests in Busan and Kunsan. Its effective range was 125 miles. If the THAAD batteries had moved close enough to effectively protect Seoul, they would also have moved within range of North Korean artillery.

  The captain watched a monitor. Four pillars of gray smoke climbed. He remembered to breathe.

  * * *

  Four streaking meteors rose from the Sea of Jap
an where, thirteen hours ahead of the District of Columbia, chalky dawn had given way to blue morning.

  Two Minutemen coasted through space.

  The first Block III Alpha found its target, destroying the warhead with less than 130 megajoules of energy, creating an inferno of sparks and twisted metal without detonating the payload.

  The wreckage tumbled down into the atmosphere, then into the cold water below.

  The other three SM-3s missed, and continued out into the colder abyss of space.

  The single remaining Minuteman III coasted toward its target, less than four minutes away.

  Langley, VA

  Dalia watched on a real-time satellite map as the Minuteman III continued on its way.

  Unstoppable now.

  She set her jaw.

  She would remember this day, she thought, on her deathbed.

  Her eyes ticked from one window to the next. Sam was typing desperately, apparently running at top speed through North Korean websites and servers, trying to hamstring a counterattack. But he need miss only a single mobile launcher.

  On a link to the fortified bunker beneath the East Wing of the White House, the commander-in-chief of the United States had appeared. He was dictating a message to a White House fellow, reporting an accidental launch of LGM-30Gs. The cause of the launch had been determined and neutralized. Targets were contained within the borders of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Armed forces were not being placed on alert. There was no intention of hostility. There had been no declaration of war. The message would not go to North Korea, Dalia guessed. Pyongyang lacked early detection capability. By informing them of the launch, the president would risk triggering retaliation. Instead, it would go to Beijing and Moscow, who, with their satellites and Arctic sensors, had surely already detected the incoming Minutemen.