North Korean Blowup

by Chet Cunningham

  “No ma’am, just when the situation calls for it. The police will want to talk to him, charge him with a few things and find out who shot his buddy here.” He hadn’t told them he was a SEAL, just that he was a hospital corpsman and wanted to help.

  “His vital signs are high but not critical,” another nurse said. “At least he’s not bleeding out on us internally.”

  The wound on the black man’s chest was a slightly pink button on the black skin. Almost no bleeding. The round hadn’t gone out his back so it was still inside somewhere and would have to come out. Foster knew that much.

  “Get that gun toting hoodlum out to the back door,” Dr. Claremont said. “That’s where the ambulance and the police always come. Undo his feet and walk him out there.”

  “Yes, sir,” Foster said. He cut the tape with a glistening sharp pocket knife and hoisted the gunman to his feet. He was still woozy, or he was faking it.

  Foster pushed him toward the door and then down the hall. He edged up close to him. “Look, asshole, you try to get away, and I’ll kill you. You dig that?”

  The tall black man’s eyes went wide for a moment, and then the sneer came back.

  “You something of a big tough man with my hands tied, motherfuck.”

  “I took you out when you had that Glock in my face. Remember? Now shut up and maybe the cops won’t rough you up on the way to county jail.”

  The ambulance came then, three paramedics and a driver. They looked at the victim and put him on a gurney, kept the saline and antibiotic drip going and wheeled him out to the ambulance. Then they took his vitals again monitored the saline, and checked his breathing as the door closed.

  Two minutes later a police car eased to a stop near the back door and two Arlington cops got out. They talked to the doctor and then put the gunman in the back seat of the patrol car.

  Foster had picked up the fallen Glock by the barrel and offered it to the officers.

  “You disarmed the man I hear,” the officer said.

  “Seemed like a good thing to do at the time.”

  “Understand you’re military.”

  “Navy hospital corpsman second class. We get arms training and some karate moves.”

  “And some street fighting. Good thing. We know this tall kid. He’s Long John Garrison, only seventeen but looks older. Been looking for him on a gang shooting. This was probably a payback and they hit the wrong man. He held you hostage for a time?”

  “That’s right, all of us.”

  “So we’ve got him on kidnapping. I’ll need your name and address so we can call you for testimony if he gets to trial.”

  Foster gave him the street address of the Langley headquarters.

  “Thanks, Foster, that was a good piece of work. Here’s my card. Call me if you need anything around here. This is a damn tough neighborhood. Somebody could have been hurt bad in there. We’ll put his pistola with the other evidence we have on him.” He waved and left.

  Nelson went back to the front desk and looked at the room full of people waiting. He knew the feeling. Before he could get started, one of the nurses came out.

  “Nelson, I’m so proud of you. Do you realize you probably saved somebody’s life today?”

  Her name tag said Shirley Shannon, and he remembered her as always having a friendly smile and greeting.

  “Shirley, just doing my job.”

  Her face lit up as she smiled again. Light blue eyes, a soft creamy complexion with high cheek bones and bushels of wavy blonde hair down across her shoulders.

  “No, Nelson, it was much more than that. The staff has decided that we should take you out to dinner tonight to thank you. I’m the only one who isn’t tied up. So I’m in charge of the celebration. We’ll go right after we clear out all the patients about eight, probably. Now promise me that you won’t run off and stand me up.”

  “Dinner?” He lifted his brows. This was unexpected. He’d almost got up nerve enough twice to ask her out. Now this. “Well, I’ll have to check with the admiral and my social secretary, but I think I’m free.”

  She laughed at that. “Good. Now any serious problems out here?” She was back in her business mode. He looked over the papers and found one man who was wheezing and short on breath. They put him in exam room one and then he triaged the rest of the paper. It was easier that way than telling the people why they had to wait. Twice or three times he looked at the front door, but no tall black kid with a big gun came storming in. They worked until almost nine p.m. before the last patient was sent on her way.

  Shirley came out wearing a blue dress and a light jacket.

  “I’ve never seen you in anything but your whites,” Nelson said. At once he regretted it. “What a pretty dress.” Sounded like a dope. But she smiled.

  “Hey, I’m not only a nurse, you know. I’m a female of the opposite sex, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  He closed his eyes and nodded. “Yeah, I noticed. Your car or mine?”

  Shirley drove. She had picked out a mid-level restaurant where they didn’t have linen on the tables and there were women waitresses and the dinners were from eight to ten dollars. His kind of place to eat.

  They ordered and then she rested her chin on her hands and watched him. “Nelson Foster. You’ve been volunteering at the clinic now for over six months and we know almost nothing about you. Give man, tell me about yourself. Oh, me first. My name is Shirley Shannon, and I wanted to be a doctor, but I couldn’t memorize all that stuff you have to have down cold, so I went for nursing instead. I have my nursing degree. I grew up in the Midwest and came to Washington to be in the middle of things. I’ve been a nurse now for two years and I’m twenty three years old.” She sipped the ice water and reached out and touched his hand.

  “That’s my pedigree. Now, Mr. Foster, hospital corpsman second class, it’s your turn.”

  He took a deep breath. He wasn’t used to women who were so forward and revealing. He seldom talked about himself. This time he was trapped.

  “Okay, I’m twenty four, a hospital corpsman with the Navy, which you know. I’m stationed here in town and I grew up in Oregon. I always wanted to be a doctor, but I couldn’t afford to go to college, let alone med school, so I signed up with the navy and did the next best thing, getting into corpsman school. I figure two more years and I should have saved enough to start college and then if I can hack the science and the memory thing, I’ll try for med school. I live on the base and get some leaves from time to time, so I come here to learn all I can. That’s about it.”

  “What about the combat stuff? I mean I dated an army ranger who couldn’t do what you did to Long John today. You whacked that gun out of his hand and decked him with a punch before he knew you were there and then kicked him right into dreamland.”

  “We have weapons training and hand to hand combat in our Navy boot camp.”

  She held up one hand. “Okay, okay. I should know enough not to pry. I don’t want the FBI to drop in and see me and charge me with spying or something.”

  The salad came and they worked on it. Nelson was pleased. He didn’t date much, and there were no wild tales of strong drink and loose women in his war stories. He was a medic and worked here in the clinic and went on missions with the President’s Platoon. That took up all of his time.

  Later he found out Shirley sang in a church choir, had a brother and two sisters, and her parents were still living in the old home place in Iowa. They talked and he found himself telling her things about his growing up he’d never told another person. He felt comfortable with her. She insisted on paying for the meal. She said the staff had all chipped in. Then they drove him back to the clinic to pick up his car, a four year old Honda.

  Before he got out she caught his arm and pulled him over to her side of the front seat. She didn’t say anything, just pulled him closer and closer until their lips met in a light, polite kiss.

  “There, now my evening is complete. I can go back to my apartment and listen to my roomm
ate’s Elvis Presley records. Oh, I forgot to tell you about Elvis and me.”

  He laughed at that and slid out of the car. He went around to her window and leaned in and kissed her again.

  “Now my evening is complete, too. I’ll see you at the clinic tomorrow.”

  He watched her drive away and couldn’t remember a time when he felt so at peace, so happy, so contented. He didn’t question it; he just got in his car and headed back to the Farm.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sunan, North Korea

  Dr. Kim Suk Sung sat in the study of his home twenty miles north of the capital, P’yongyang, and studied the blue prints on his desk. His three story home was considered to be a luxurious mansion by the people in this modest sized town. It had four bedrooms, a real kitchen, living room, a large family room, servant’s quarters, a garage, a large patio, and a garden. It had been built by an industrialist twenty years ago who later had fallen out of favor with the government.

  Dr. Sung had been detained by the government ten years ago when he was in Korea from the United States to visit his ancestral family. The leaders had given him a choice. He could either head up the project to create nuclear weapons for North Korea, or he could watch while his two daughters, his wife and the rest of his extended family were beheaded, one by one right in front of him.

  The former professor of nuclear physics at MIT was a realist. He knew if he didn’t help the North Koreans, they would trap someone else to do it, and he and the twelve members of his extended North Korean family would lie in unmarked graves. He decided to stay and wrangled a suitable home for his family cost free.

  He had started the program, but had slowed the process as much as he could. When things didn’t go right in the experimental labs and then in the actual construction of the weapons, one of his brothers would be hauled into police headquarters on some trivial charge, where often beaten, and sent home barely able to walk. It happened three times and the last beating almost killed his brother Ho. Dr. Sung learned not to slow the process too much.

  He stood from his swivel chair and stretched. He needed a good fast game of badminton to relax. He was a slender man with the hint of a pot belly but tough and fit for a man of 48. His hair was thinning, had a touch of gray, and recently he had taken to wearing a beard and moustache. He kept the whiskers trimmed to a quarter inch to give him a neat but bearded look. He took off reading glasses and polished them, then sat back at his desk. He rubbed his knee. It still pained him a month after he injured it in a badminton game when he crashed into his partner.

  Now North Korea had the bomb, two of them to be exact, with four more in the assembly stages. The outside world did know this for sure, but suspected that it must be true. His next job was to redesign the bombs so they were smaller, like the Americans have. That would take a great deal of time, talented engineers and much money. None of the drawbacks were a problem for the power hungry North Koreans. Kim Jong Il himself, the Communist state dictator, had toured the plant and congratulated Dr. Sung on his magnificent work for the North Korean people.

  Dr. Sung knew what the cost was, and that thousands of people in the countryside were dying from starvation every year. The money spent on the bombs should be going to buy food. There was nothing he could do about it.

  Dr. Sung’s sport was badminton. There were courts and contests and tournaments in P’yongyang every few months. He played often and was respected in his age group of forty to fifty. He became friends with many of the nation’s premier players. Then one day one of the top men players talked to him as they took a short walk after a tournament. His name was Roh Rhee; he was 23, and single.

  “Dr. Sung. I’m on the national team going to a tournament in Los Angeles, California in two weeks. I feel safe talking to you like this. You don’t know but I’ve been planning to defect as soon as I could get on a trip out of the country. I know you come from the United States. If there are any messages I can take out for you, I’ll be glad to do so. Nothing written down.”

  Dr. Sung thought about it day and night for a week, then after a practice session on another walk he talked to the young man again.

  “After you get free of the team in Los Angeles, go to the FBI office there, and tell them you are defecting and that you have an important message about the nuclear program in North Korea. Tell them I can pinpoint the manufacturing facility, the storage areas where the two finished bombs are hidden, and other places where vital components are stored. In order to do this, I’m asking that the United States take me and my extended family of twelve out of the country. If we all don’t go, and I do, my family will be killed as soon as I’m discovered missing. Tell the Americans that they won’t be able to communicate with me, but that I can be ready within six hours any time that a rescue team shows up at my door.”

  “You are taking a terrible chance, Dr. Sung.”

  “It will be worth it if there’s the possibility that America can destroy the work I have been forced to do here.”

  In Los Angeles, California the slender young North Korean sat in the comfortable surroundings of the Agent in Charge of the Los Angeles FBI office. Clarence Benjamin stared at the Korean with a slight frown. He’d been around the block a time or two but this one seemed almost too good to be true. If it were. He walked to the window that looked out over the city.

  “You tell an interesting story, young man. Your English is good, in some ways better than mine. My problem is this. How can I believe that you simply dropped in off the street with such a remarkable offer? You must know that the United States has long worried about the North Koreans and their potential for a nuclear capacity. We’ve studied the time tables and figure that they have had enough time to produce weapons.”

  “Dr. Sung said they have two bombs finished and four more being made.”

  “And he knows exactly where they are hidden and where the manufacturing plant is for the new ones?”

  “Yes, he designed the whole program from the first day. He handled all of the engineering work and the building the bombs from the start.”

  “You say you want diplomatic immunity?”

  “Yes, please. I’ve waited five years for a chance to get away. I have cousins here in Los Angeles who left South Korea years ago.”

  “I’ll send you over to Immigration to get the paper work started. Then tomorrow morning you and I will take an airplane to Washington D.C. My boss, the director, and some men from the CIA and other agencies want to talk to you.”

  “I have only five dollars the team gave me. Will that buy a ticket to Washington?”

  Benjamin grinned. He almost laughed. It was the first relief he’d had all day. “Mr. Rhee, my department will take care of your ticket and your hotel tonight here and then in Washington. You’ll have to answer a lot of questions. Can you do that? We know that Dr. Sung has been in North Korea for ten years. We were fearful of what the people there have made him do.”

  “They will kill his family right in front of him one at a time if he does not cooperate. Dr. Sung is a smart man, but he wants to come home. He was born here.”

  “Yes, we know all about Dr. Sung. You said he wants his whole extended family of twelve to be taken out when he is rescued?”

  “Yes. He said if any of them stay and he escapes, any of his family still there will be killed.”

  “Figures. Mr. Rhee. My assistant will take you to Immigration and get you started there. Then he’ll take you to a hotel and stay with you until the flight leaves tomorrow morning. We’ll be protecting you, not keeping you in jail.”

  Rhee nodded. “I understand. The badminton team manager would love to kill me himself if he could find me. He will be fired from his post for losing a team member, and probably not able to find any other work.”

  In Washington, D.C. CIA Director J. Bartholomew Riggs tapped his pen on the pad of paper in front of him on the big round table. Across from him FBI Director Lance Malcolm frowned.

  “Mr. Rhee, why should we believe you. This is
almost too good to be true.”

  “I do not lie, sir. Dr. Sung wants to come out. He will reward you with vital information. It seems simple to me.”

  “What do you get out of it?” Admiral Marshal Harding asked.

  “My freedom.”

  “What about Dr. Sung?” Riggs asked.

  “Freedom and back home for him and his family.”

  “Your English is extremely good, Mr. Rhee. Where did you learn to speak it so well?

  “In special school. They were going to send me to the demilitarized zone to listen to American radio and translate everything I heard into Korean. Then I won four badminton tournaments and they put me on the national team.”

  “How do we know they did not teach you English so you could fake your badminton playing and come here with the single purpose of being a spy for North Korea?”

  “I play badminton. I’m good at it, one of the top three singles players in my country. That is all I know. I was not trained as a spy. I don’t know the first thing about how to spy.”

  “Are you a good player?” FBI Director Malcolm asked.

  Rho Rhee smiled for the first time. “Yes. I will give you eighteen points and beat you twenty one to eighteen.”

  Admiral Harding chuckled. “He got you there Malcolm. In fact he could spot you twenty points and beat you. Gentlemen, I buy it. I’ll make my report to the president. You can debrief this young man all you want, but don’t get nasty with him. He’s the real McCoy. I’ll want to talk to him more about the area where Dr. Sung lives, how best to get around in the country, how far it is from Korea Bay. He said the town where Sung lives is twenty miles north of the capital. Can’t be too far to the wet. If you’ll excuse me, I’m late for my talk with the president.”

  The CIA Farm, Virginia

  Hunter worked the President’s Platoon hard that morning. The first phase was a quick twenty mile march followed by live firing on a hill that they scaled and then went down the far side. The summer sun beat down on them and Hunter figured it had to be eighty-five out there in the boonies on the Farm.