by Martha Twine
Next morning, Nasim waved me over to speak to him.
‘We have to get on with the underground developments,’ he said. ‘We should build a mining area, below ground, where exploration for mineral extraction could begin. We have some mining engineers arriving next week.’
‘I will carry out a preliminary review of the area,’ I said. ‘Where would you like me to start?’
‘Right at the back of the camp, at the very top,’ said Nasim.
I withdrew my view to the beautiful mountain area above the camp. The lake shone in the sun. Our camp was covered by a canopy of trees, so nothing was visible from above. I went through the forest, and selected a place suitable for a clearing. We needed an entrance to the underground facilities, and there would have to be an electromagnetic shield over it to ensure that it still looked like a canopy of trees from above. As I removed the trees and levelled the ground, I noticed a strange looking rock, cut at ninety degrees into the hillside.
‘That has to be man-made,’ I thought.
I ran my hands over the rock, and found what seemed to be a huge door, which opened outwards. I opened the door and looked down into a deep pit below. There was what looked like an enormous piece of metal, shining with a bright white light, red embers were glowing all over it. I could see North Korean workers pushing wheelbarrows to and fro all over the site.
‘What is going on here?’ I asked myself. ‘It looks as if the North Koreans have already got a mine down here, and maybe they are smelting iron ore.’
I went down into the mine, which curved round under the mountain. The iron-smelting plant, if that is what it was, came to a halt, outside two huge metal doors. I went through, and found a completely different industrial plant in operation. It looked as if chunks of rock were being ground into a white powder. There was a chemical process, where the powder was treated in some way, and then another set of huge doors with windows in. I looked through the doors, and gasped. I recognised the machinery in this part. It was a vast centrifuge plant, used to enrich uranium. Workers wore protective clothing, and masks. There was no doubt about it. Our camp was located over a uranium enrichment plant, and there was no way that our plans for mineral extraction could run in parallel with that. So that was why the prison camp was so secretive and remote. It was a cover for North Korea’s nuclear activities. It didn’t make much difference whether the nuclear fuel was being produced for civil or military purposes. We just couldn’t carry out our own mineral extraction processes so close to all that.
I returned to the camp with a heavy heart. Nasim saw my face. He offered me a chair next to him.
‘What have you found?’ he asked.
As I described what I had seen, Nasim’s face also fell. He put his hand over his eyes for a minute. Then he looked up at me.
‘We have to vacate the camp,’ he said. ‘We must pull the troops out of here. I cannot discuss it on the phone. Can you go to our friend Suleiman, in country X, who negotiated the contract with North Korea, and let him know what has happened? If he thinks we should quit, can you ask him if he is willing to take the troops?’
‘I’ll be back,’ I said.
It was easy to locate Suleiman, he was sitting at his desk in his office. I materialised in my black robe and hood. He looked up and smiled, offering me a seat.
‘Has Nasim sent you?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘There is a matter that could not be discussed on the phone.’
The potentate laughed.
‘But of course, that is to be expected. After all, we are talking about North Korea.’
I told him what had happened, and he did not seem particularly phased.
‘You can bring the troops here to me,’ he said.
‘Please, can you show me exactly where?’ I asked. ‘There are rather a lot of them, and I wouldn’t want to make a mistake.’
‘Come with me,’ said Suleiman.
We went in his incredible maroon sports car. As he drove through his estate, servants saluted and bowed when he passed. He waved and smiled to them all, as if hailing old friends. We drove through a pleasantly landscaped wood, eventually emerging by what could have been a huge football pitch.
‘This is the place,’ he said.
I thanked him, and left immediately. When I got back to the camp, Nasim had already organised the troops. They were packed and ready to go. Nasim had spoken to Our Group, and offered to transport them as well. Some accepted, but many of them opted to stay in North Korea. It emerged that they had been carrying out their own secret diplomacy from their headquarters in the Seychelles. They had planned to subvert all the plans for the camp, and were working with the North Korea prison guards, against the project. They were also in league with the local mafia, and had been involved in the attempted break-in the previous night.
The leaving party assembled together, in the centre of the camp, and, when Nasim gave the signal, I lifted them all on to Suleiman’s football pitch. There were smiles of relief all round when they arrived, and Suleiman arranged for everyone to be taken care of and transported to whichever country they wished. I shook hands with Nasim, and said goodbye.
Then I raced back to the camp, and picked up all the North Korean prisoners. I went straight to South Korea, and asked if the prisoners could be received as asylum seekers, as they had been imprisoned and tortured by the North Koreans. The South Koreans agreed, and opened a reception centre for the prisoners. I looked in two or three times in the following week, and was pleased to see that all of them were being properly cared for, including the very elderly people that I had got to know during this crazy interlude. At least one good thing had come out of it. The prisoners had been rescued.
Shortly afterwards, we heard that Al-Qaida had stopped funding Our Group, and had put a price on the head of each Our Group employee, because they had tried to subvert the North Korea project.
Some months later, the media was full of stories about how North Korea had staged its sixth nuclear test blast at its Punggye-ri base. US monitors measured a powerful 6.3 magnitude earthquake near the testing site, estimated to be up to ten times more powerful than the device dropped on Hiroshima with an aftershock possibly caused by a rock cave-in. Chinese experts feared that another blast could ‘blow the roof’ off the mountain at its base. The mountain, believed to be above the underground chambers where North Korea staged the tests, was the same one that I had seen above our prison camp site.
THE SINISTER CITY
After the North Korea debacle, I was thinking over what could have made Our Group go over to the North Korean side, when everything would have been in their favour if they had stuck with Al-Qaida. I was also puzzled about the fact that one group of Arab terrorists, who wore white robes with black headbands and black coats were affiliated to the Al-Qaida group, while a different group of Arabs found mainly in Malaysia, wore pink and blue pastels headbands and coats, and were enemies of Al-Qaida.
I found that the pastel Arab group were behind an American firm which offered wi-fi security technology for cranial implants used by the US mafia and the IRA. Secretly, the American firm was hacking into all the cranial implants, and the pastel-clad Arabs were dictating counter-instructions to their enemies through their implants. I had caught some of the pastel Arabs doing this, and presented them to the US mafia. The pastel Arabs had confessed, and the US mafia had started using shielding devices on their heads. But I suspected that Our Group had also been subverted. Apart from child super-soldiers, only senior ranks used cranial implant prostheses to keep in touch with their high-up VIPS.
Recently, I had tracked the high-up VIPS to their headquarters in the Seychelles.
The Seychelles hide-out was a desert island dream. Warm sunny weather, glorious private beaches, large yachts for drug traffickers, and mansions with roof terraces that were laid out like gardens, with views across the bays. Black and Asian servants served meals to the top brass of Our Group on the roof terraces. But the quality of these top brass
was anything but top-notch. They were just the usual bandits, traffickers, and mercenaries. So how did they get to those high positions, and who was behind them, I wondered.
I drew my mind away from the earth and looked down on our beautiful blue planet, trying to discover a low-frequency source. There was a strange brown frequency somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean, near a small French territory called Amsterdam Island. Far below the ocean floor there was a man-made construction, in the architectural style of twentieth-century brutalism – square concrete, with square windows looking out on to artificial yellow lights in the rock. Inside were a series of large open-plan offices on several floors, with old-fashioned computers on the desks. The walls were painted a dull orange colour. Each desk had a transparent glass viewing facility, and men were sitting at the desks in white shirts, with brown ties and brown trousers from the 1950s, staring into their viewers.
On the floor below were some meeting rooms. There were twenty men in dark brown fifties suits sitting in one of the rooms. Their leader announced that it was lunch time, and they got up to leave. I stopped three of them, appearing before them in my dark coat and hood.
‘What is this place?’ I asked.
‘We work here,’ replied one of them.
He seemed to accept that I had the right to be there. The men had the demeanour of people who take orders from others.
‘What is your job?’, I asked.
‘We view what goes on up above, and report matters of interest to our superiors,’ said another.
‘Where are your superiors?’ I asked.
The man pointed to huge transparent corridor, outside the building, which looked as if it was encased in glass.
‘They are in our main offices. You can reach them by monorail.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
I went and stood on the platform. I heard a noise like the wind blowing through a rocky glen, and a gleaming blue metro-style train appeared. It was suspended from a rail above it, apparently by some magnetic force. The glass doors opened, and I got in. As we took off, it felt as if we were moving at hypersonic speeds, and yet, inside the train, it was peaceful and quiet. In less than a minute the train arrived in a station. It was lit partly by artificial light and partly by natural light from the exit points, where stairs led to the outside world. On the other side of the station were two metallic lifts. The door of one of them opened, and a man in a brown suit got out. I went in, and studied the floor buttons. It looked as if the top brass lived in the penthouse suite, so I pressed the top button.
Half-way up, the lift stopped, and a man dressed as waiter got in, pushing a large trolley covered with delicious looking sea-food and fish dishes. We both got out at the penthouse level. As I looked to my left I could see a large dining room, with many tables, lavishly laid for a banquet, and next to it, a spacious roof terrace. Opposite the lift, there were two tall glass doors, leading to a very large meeting room, with a huge oval table. There was a high-up meeting in progress. Thirty fit-looking senior men with grey hair were sitting at the table. They wore suits of an unusual silver cloth, their lapels embroidered with a platinum coloured edge. There was something menacing about them, as if they would be dangerous to approach.
I went out on to the roof terrace, and looked out. There was a high grey metal arch, reaching across the road and up the hill. On the opposite side of the road was some kind of futuristic multi-storey car-park. A dark shiny limousine with smoked windows drove slowly past. Then I heard a loud noise. An aircraft was passing low, obviously near an airport. With my mind, I entered the aircraft. I was expecting an ultra-modern interior, but it was surprisingly low-tec. The walls were lined with the sort of beige plastic that went out in the fifties’. Two air hostesses, dressed in uniforms like ice-cream sales girls from fifties’ cinemas, were serving boiled sweets to the few passengers sitting in the plane.
The aircraft landed, and the passengers walked down the aircraft steps and onto the tarmac. There was a large metal shed like a bus shelter, with a man collecting tickets at the gate. The people passed through the gate, and some walked down the road. A few women were sitting on seats around the bus shelter. A bus arrived, and the women got on. I decided to follow one of them. She pressed the bell half a mile further down the road, got out of the bus, and walked round the corner into a residential cul-de-sac. There was a row of bungalows, with red tiled roofs. They should have looked homely and welcoming, but there was a sense of desolation about them, as if no-one lived there.
The woman went in through the door of one of them. Inside was a staircase leading down to a lighted corridor, with rows of doors. The woman walked along the corridor, until she came to her door. She unlocked it, and I saw another set of descending stairs, leading into her one-room home. The bungalows at ground level were just for show. The people lived two floors down, underground.
Opposite the bungalows was a large park, with a wood of enormously tall chestnut trees, with huge conker cases lying on the ground. I planted myself at the top of one of the trees, and looked out over the forested area. The sky was grey, and it felt cold. I could see the city, with its silver metallic architecture. There was a strikingly tall spire coming out of the highest building, and on the top of it, what looked like a circular metal tube with two spokes crossing in the middle. I hardly had time to take in the view, as at that moment I was nearly hit by a stone.
‘There she is,’ cried a voice. ‘I nearly got her!’
‘Try again,’ said another.
I quickly descended to ground level. A group of casually dressed men in their early twenties were walking away from me. An older man, in dull grey clothes, challenged me.
‘Why are you here?’ he said, ‘It is not permitted to walk above ground.’
‘I am a visitor,’ I said. ‘If it is not permitted to walk above ground, how come you are allowed to?’
The man smiled, taking in the situation.
‘You must be from the other Earth outside,’ he said. ‘Here, poor quality people with no educational ability can only live in the lower residential levels. But those who prove themselves worthy are permitted to live above ground.’
The man looked complacently at himself and his departing friends.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I will leave you to your world.’
I reviewed what I had found: an undersea base where people were spying on our world, connected by a hypersonic link to somewhere that looked very much like our earth. There appeared to be a repressive regime that condemned its people to an underground existence, while some fat cats were living it up in the penthouse. Their preference for fifties clothes and décor was puzzling, especially as the limousine I had seen looked contemporary. And why were there ‘pretend’ houses, with people living below them?
There was something strange about all the people I had met. It was hard to define, but they were not like Earth people. They looked the same, but there was a lack of questioning about them. They came over as bland and brutal at the same time. What was missing? There was a lack of individuality and personal expression. It occurred to me that, perhaps, these people were not able to create new things for themselves. That could explain why they had a spy base looking at what we were doing. Maybe they just wanted to copy us, and maybe the last time they checked up on our buildings and clothing was in the 1950s.
But how did these people fit in with our world? Were they in some parallel reality? I was unsure, but what I had discovered so far made me think that these people might represent some kind of threat to us, especially as, despite their preference for fifties retro stuff, they clearly had advanced technologies.
I decided to report my suspicions to the Authorities. But who should I approach? After some thought I decided to approach MI5, but I only knew one man from that organisation, who had attended a meeting with the governor of a large British prison in the Midlands. On that occasion, the prison office governor had asked me to bring in some ‘faser’ weapons used by the IRA and Our Group, and
I had delivered them to several people, including the British Military, and a lady in Special Services.
I had reservation about the MI5 official, as he did not seem to be up to speed on the threat from electromagnetic terrorism, although his organisation certainly was. He worked in Whitehall, and, in my view, was more of a ‘pen-pusher’ than an operations type. Perhaps Special Services would be better. I tuned in on the Special Service lady, and appeared in front of her desk. She was a little surprised, as she was eating her sandwiches at the time.
‘Oh, hello!’ I said. ‘Do you remember me? I sent you some fasers once.’
‘Oh!’ said the lady, whose name was Madelaine.
She raised her voice.
‘Bertram,’ she shouted, ‘I think this one’s for you’.
A man’s head appeared round the door of the adjoining meeting room. Now it was my turn to be surprised. It was the Whitehall pen-pusher whom I had just maligned in my thoughts.
‘Oh yes, come in please,’ he said, not looking very pleased.
I went into the meeting room and sat opposite him. There was an adjoining room at the other end, and the door was ajar. Looking through, I could see some men and women in military uniform operating technical equipment. One of them was operating a glass viewer similar to those used by Our Group. I saw myself in the viewer. I guessed she was checking me out.
Bertram beckoned to a plain clothes Special Services lady and she came and sat next to me, staring rather closely at my forehead. I smiled and waved back.
‘Well, what have you got?’ Bertram addressed the woman in military uniform who had been scanning me.
‘She’s clear,’ said the woman.
Bertram looked at me disdainfully. He leaned back in his chair.
‘Honestly!’ I thought to myself. ‘Talk about a pansy resting on its laurels’.
I had inadvertently made a pejorative reference to the cap badge worn by the Territorial Army’s respected Intelligence Corps. At that moment, the military woman in the room next door gave a giggle and covered her mouth. Then, in a loud whisper, she said to her male colleague, ‘She thinks he’s a Reservist.’