by Martha Twine
I requested an audience with the head of the training event, who held the rank of Commander. He was of Arab ethnicity, from North Africa, a thin, quiet man, called Nasim. He agreed to meet me, a little cautiously.
‘You know that I am teleporting Our Group terrorists to North Korea?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ said Nasim.
‘I told the North Korean prison manager that I was interested in buying the prison camp site, and running it as a commercial concern,’ I said. ‘Of course, I could not do that by myself, but the project might be attractive to people within Al-Qaida, and if the North Koreans agreed to the proposal, I wondered if your people might consider providing security for the camp, as armed guards.’
‘How so?’ asked Nasim.
‘It’s a massive site,’ I said. ‘Hundreds of square miles, big enough to hold another Al-Qaida base like the one in Algeria, and it would need at least two thousand visible guards on the surface, to protect the perimeter. Underground, to protect Al-Qaida’s business interests, you would need another two thousand initially. You see, mineral extraction could be part of the deal.’
Nasim began to look interested.
‘But the proposal would have to be at country level,’ I continued. ‘A country which has friendly relations with North Korea would have to make the proposal, through their diplomats.’
‘I think I know of a suitable country,’ said Nasim. ‘But leave it with me, I must consult several parties. It would not be easy, but North Korea offers many opportunities. If such a project went ahead, could I count on your continued support for the first year?’
‘Certainly,’ I said.
I did not tell Nasim about my plan to rescue the North Korean prisoners, and give them food and medical attention, so that they could live safe and well in their prison compound.
Nasim came back to me the next day.
‘We have provisional backing from the parties concerned,’ he said, ‘but we need evidence of North Korea’s interest first.’
‘I will look into it,’ I said.
I went back to the North Korean prison camp, and found the leader of the prison guards.
‘Representatives of country X would be ready to meet with you to underwrite the project, if you would like to name a place and a contact,’ I said.
The prison camp leader got on the phone and spent some time in discussion with his senior officer. Then he made another phone call. Finally, he turned to me smiling.
‘We prefer to hold the meeting in Hong Kong. If country X would like to make contact with our embassy there, a date and time can be agreed.’
I passed the message to Nasim, and later that day, he returned.
‘It can be done,’ he said, ‘but I need your help. I have to be the other side of the world within an hour. You can do that, I think.’
‘Do you have a photo of the man you want to meet?’ I asked.
Nasim produced his smartphone, and called up the picture of a man in Arab robes.
‘OK, let’s go,’ I said.
I encased Nasim in a transparent tube and pulsed the tube with golden light, to help counter the effects of jet lag which accompany long distance teleportation. Then I teleported Nasim into the presence of the man in the photograph, and set him down carefully, supporting him discreetly, to make sure that he did not fall over on arrival.
The two men greeted each other warmly, and the Arab potentate, who I will call Suleiman, led Nasim into a meeting room where a number of men were waiting to meet him. I waited outside. Well, actually I was doing some washing and cooking, but I kept an eye out for what was going on. An hour and several phone calls later, the men emerged.
Suleiman came towards me.
‘We need to be in our Hong Kong office today,’ he said. ‘Can you transport us all? I have a photograph.’
‘Of course,’ I said, looking at the photograph.
It was a picture of a senior Arab diplomat sitting at his office desk. I gathered the group into a circle and teleported them into the presence of this man. He had several staff with him, waiting to greet the party. Then I said goodbye to Nasim.
‘Do you need to be taken back to the UK?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Nasim. ‘I can go by plane.’
‘Good luck,’ I said, and I left.
Two hours later, I got a message from the South of England Islamic State group that the purchase had gone through, and that a depot had been allocated for all supplies, including weapons and food. I made contact with Nasim’s Aide de Camp, and started teleporting Islamic State volunteer troops to the North Korea prison site. These guys had volunteered to become anonymous security guards for the moment, as neither Al-Qaida nor Islamic State could be mentioned in North Korea.
There were many things to organise – tents and mattresses, rice bags, large containers of biscuits, so that there was something for people to eat if no other food could be provided, laundry basics and soap and mirrors so that the troops could shave. I transported them all to the prison camp site, and waited for the new prison camp manager and Nasim, who were staying in a hotel in the village, to arrive and take possession of the site.
The site manager, an urbane man in his fifties called Haroun, of part French, part Algerian extraction, arrived in a black limousine, accompanied by Nasim. They had a military escort, a truck load of North Korean soldiers followed behind the car. When Nasim arrived, the Islamic State soldiers all stood to attention. Nasim saluted them, and told them to gather round. Then, standing on a large wooden pallet, he introduced Haroun, and gave the troops a pep-talk about their new duties. He divided the men into three groups, day shift, night shift, and general day support.
The handover had been accomplished. The North Koreans retreated to an adjoining prison camp site, and left Haroun in charge. At last my moment had come. I raced to the prison huts to rescue the prisoners.
The huts were too low to stand up in, and so dark that you could hardly see what was going on in there, which was just as well, as I was not ready for the horror of what was inside. There were skeletal bodies tied in sitting positions by ropes, like battery chickens. I was not sure if they were alive or dead. Quickly, I went from hut to hut, untying everyone. Then I created small plastic water bottles, with ‘designer water’ that I had pepped up to provide all the basic nutrients for life, took the tops off the bottles and handed them in to each hut. Leaving the hut doors open, so that light and air could come in, I stood back to see what would happen.
‘How could they move at all, after being tied up like that for such a long time?’ I wondered.
I visualised golden light over each hut, as this seemed to help restore bodies that had been damaged in an electromagnetic environment. It was all I could think to do. After about five minutes, a skeletal arm reached out of one of the huts, and placed some empty bottles on the grass. Then a tiny little old woman crawled out, dragging herself along by her arm. She had no hair, but there was a light in her eyes, and a look of hope on her face. She found a place on the grass and lay there.
Gradually, more men and women crawled out of the huts. Not all of them did. Some of them were dead. I decided to give the survivors a thin gruel made from rice, with rice grains in it, as it seemed unlikely they could take much more than that. The new kitchen staff began cooking bowls of rice for all the troops, and for the ‘Our Group’ prisoners I had dumped there before. They all lined up and got their rice. Then I created hundreds more of the special water bottles, and piled them up for people to help themselves. I placed large baskets of biscuits around the prison camp site, and refilled them when they emptied.
The Our Group prisoners were invited to volunteer to work around the camp. Teams of women took over the cooking and laundry work. There was a clear stream flowing from a lake above the camp, and people were using it for drinking and washing. This was not ideal, but at least it was a start. Next day, some bulldozers arrived and a team of builders from Russia started to create a sewage system, with pipes leading all
the way down the hill.
Nasim caught my eye, and beckoned me over to what had become the military part of the camp.
‘We need to build underground now,’ he said. ‘Can you do that?’
I had never tried to do this, but it seemed logical that if I could create things by visualising them, I could construct underground areas for living in.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘But I need you to tell me exactly what you want things to look like, as my idea might not be the same as yours’.
‘I’m not too worried about that,’ said Nasim. ‘Just create an underground space where the troops can sleep securely, with entrances that can be guarded.’
I stepped back and set about hollowing out an underground living area, using a high intensity laser. The underground site looked a bit like a huge crypt, with arched ceilings and pillars to support the roof. Then I levelled the floor, and provided a sand and aggregate underlay, pouring concrete on top. I put down two hundred mattresses on rubber bases, modelling it on what I had seen in British Army surplus shops. Finally, I piled up hundreds of dark grey blankets, as the site was already becoming cool at night.
I created a series of large tents for the Our Group men and boys, and a separate tent area for women workers, all with bedding and blankets. Pretty soon we had a proper camp site going, with two hot meals a day cooked in the kitchen by the women, and lunch portions delivered under contract from a local firm. I added more and more Our Group and IRA prisoners, whenever they attacked me. Everything seemed to be going reasonably well.
But things weren’t all that they seemed to be. One night, I caught two North Korea prison guards diving into a prison hut and punching and kicking an old man, who died shortly afterwards.
‘Why did you do that?’ I asked.
‘It is my job to do that,’ said one of them. ‘You’ve taken away my prisoners, and I can’t do my job without them.’
I was so disgusted that I executed them both, and hung their bodies in the air so that everyone could see them. This was not diplomatic, but I didn’t feel diplomatic about it. Soon a delegation of North Koreans arrived at the gate, and asked for an explanation of what had happened. Fortunately, I had ready a United Nations report on atrocities in North Korea prison camps, which quoted their leader as saying that prisoners were kept in humane, comfortable, conditions. I pointed out that the two prison camp guards had clearly broken their own country’s laws and acted contrary to the wishes of their leader.
There was a silence, and the North Koreans withdrew. An hour later, a young Russian man on a bicycle asked for admittance to the camp site. He took out a poster with large black letters on it in North Korean, and nailed it to a tree.
‘What does it say’, I asked the man.
‘It says that the men who died were punished for breaking Government laws’, said the Russian. ‘I have instructions to post these notices in every prison camp in this area.’
‘Good,’ I thought.
But Haroun, the site manager, did not agree.
‘Please try not to kill them,’ he said. ‘You’re making my job more difficult.’
I got the message, but it was impossible for me not to notice that the North Korean prison guards were climbing into the camp at night and stealing sacks of rice. I did not arrest them, but I reported their activities, and Nasim redoubled the troops on night duty. Then I caught a man dressed as an Islamic Imam, wearing a long black robe and black hat, entering through one of the many underground tunnels already dug by the North Koreans, and going round the camp, begging for money from the troops.
Then, one day, Nasim asked to speak to me. He kept his voice low.
‘We are expecting trouble tonight. I need a hundred more troops urgently. Can you help?’
‘OK,’ I said.
Given that all the troops had to be volunteers, this was not an easy task to achieve at short notice. Quite often, the cadets, fresh from their training, wanted to prove themselves in battle, and looked down on security guard duties. I went up above the earth’s atmosphere, and surveyed Europe and Africa, trying to sense the frequency of suitable troops. I found them in underground hideouts in Algeria, Ireland, France, Austria and Morocco.
All the men agreed to be imported into the camp, where they were equipped for work on the night shift. Nasim addressed the new recruits, explaining the likely threats, and procedures for dealing with them.
‘If you get into a confrontation,’ said Nasim, ‘fire over their heads; but be careful not to hit them.’
Just before the night shift started, one of the men asked,
‘If we’ve got to be discreet about our positions, how do we draw attention to any problems? We can’t shout out to each other.’
‘You will have to use lights,’ said Nasim.
We hadn’t got any lights of course, so I created a huge basket full of high-powered LED torches, and the troops took one each. Then they set out around the perimeter of the camp, along the boundary that faced towards the village. At around midnight, some young men could be seen making their way up the road towards the camp border gate. They had a North Korean prison guard with them. When he got to the gate, he showed his pass and asked to be let in. The guards on the gate had only arrived that day, and were a little worried about what to do. They waved their lights towards their colleagues further up the hill, but they did not see them. At that moment, a silver sports car arrived, and a man with shoulder length black hair, wearing a fur and leather coat, got out. He looked like a Russian.
‘What is the meaning of this?’ he demanded, ‘Why can’t we go in?’
He gave a nod to some of the young men, and they began to scale the barbed wire fence, putting cloth down, to cover the spikes. At the same time, the North Korean prison guard tried to push past the troops. One of the troops fired two shots into the air. A moment later, five experienced troops came running down the hill from the other side of the camp gate, and took control. They pointed their guns, and ordered them all out.
The intruders withdrew. As they left, the man in the fur could be heard saying, ‘I suppose we’ll have to try a different prison camp next time.’
I guessed that he was from the Russian Mafia, who played a part in the North Korean underworld.
As the men turned the corner of the road, one of the young men rushed up to the camp border, and scaled the first fence. There was a second fence with barbed wire on top, and, as he tried to climb it, one of the troops further up the hill shot him in the arm. The young man managed to climb back over the fence, before lying on the ground, clutching his arm. A car sped up and took him away.
I went to find Nasim. He already knew what had happened.
‘They won’t go to the Authorities,’ he said. ‘North Korea has strict punishments for law-breakers.’
‘I will go and see if I can help,’ I said.
Calling up the young man’s picture in my mind, I looked to see where he was. The young man was lying in bed. His mother was by his side, crying. An older man was trying to get the bullet out of the young man’s arm with a knife, but it wouldn’t come. The young man was screaming. I quickly anaesthetized the wound with an electromagnetic field, and, using suction, eased the bullet out of the wound. The older man bound the arm with a bandage, and he and the boy’s mother discussed what to do.
‘He will need stiches,’ said the man.
‘I know someone. Let me call him,’ said the mother.
She looked on her mobile and found a number. After a short conversation, she looked up, relieved.
‘He will come within an hour,’ she said. She clearly felt more secure about calling a doctor, now that the bullet had been removed.
I directed a golden light towards the young man again, and he breathed a long sigh. Then he went to sleep.
After that things went more smoothly in the camp for a while. There was no more trouble from the Mafia, and the North Koran prison guards kept their distance. I was pleased to see that the elderly prisoners that had survive
d were beginning to put on weight. They could now eat two modest meals a day, and spent their time resting against the wall of the old kitchen building. They hardly talked, but they looked content. I had converted the punishment huts into proper rooms with bunk beds, and checked on the prisoners several times a day.
Then, one day, I noticed that one of the old women prisoners was missing. I asked where she was, but none of the prisoners said anything. I tuned into her picture in my mind and found her in the next prison camp down from ours, which was still run by the North Korea prison guards. The Russian man from the village who provided us with our mid-day meal was there, serving the same meal to the prison guards. Three children aged about seven years old were running around laughing and playing.
The old woman was lying on her back, completely passive. Suddenly the Russian man said a word to his kids, and they ran over to the woman and started pinching her hard all over. The North Korean prison guards pointed at them, laughing. The old woman just lay there, unresisting. She was long past being able to do anything about it.
I snatched her up and took her back to our camp, using all the electromagnetic aids I could muster. She recovered, and in a couple of days, was back with the others, leaning against the kitchen wall. I spoke to the kitchen staff, and explained that the well-being of the old prisoners was key to the future of the camp, and was our justification for being there. They took it to heart, and were very good at looking out for the prisoners.
I made the women kitchen staff some special cream pashminas in appreciation of their work. The kitchen staff loved them and wore them immediately, but when the Russian catering service arrived for the mid-day meal, the man took a look at them, and said something to one of them women. She immediately took off her stole and gave it to him, and he gave her some coins. I noticed that he had produced far more food than our camp would need. I followed him down to the next camp, and sure enough, he was selling the food to the North Korean prison guards. I guess we had to expect this sort of thing, in such a poor country, where even basic food was scarce.