by Unknown
'Not least because we don't have a vaccine for it,' said Campbell.
'Has there been a theft of smallpox as well?' asked the Prime Minister.
'Not that we have heard of,' said Campbell, glancing across to Colchester. 'But we're checking.'
'And who took it?' asked Nolan calmly.
'Officially we don't know,' said Colchester, constantly ensuring that he and Campbell were speaking with one voice. Nolan was familiar with Colchester's ability to transform his character like a chameleon and he detected a change now of Colchester using the refuge of civil service anonymity to push forward a political position. He was a Whitehall civil servant with enormous power and flair who skilfully projected an image of a man of absolute ordinariness.
'Officially,' began Nolan. 'What the hell does that mean?'
Campbell had his eyes down, sorting the photographs.
'Tell the Prime Minister,' said Colchester.
'North Korea,' said Campbell, looking up, then leaving the photographs and springing to his feet. 'I do not have the evidence, sir, but my contacts are good, and I would forfeit my job on it.'
'The source of Lazaro's information is highly, highly classified, Prime Minister,' said Colchester calmly.
Nolan turned to Campbell. 'What is your source?' he demanded.
Campbell gripped his hands together, powerfully enough to show the whites of his knuckles, suddenly showing the emotions of his part-Latin heritage. 'I said I would forfeit my job. My job is my life, sir. I would not be here if I did not think that this agent had gone to North Korea.'
'I asked you what your evidence is?' said Nolan.
Campbell deferred to Colchester.
'As I said, the information is--' began Colchester.
'Damn you, Charles,' exploded Nolan, 'if you want me to look at this stuff and then make an argument to Jim West - because I damn well know this is why you've produced Campbell - I need to know the source. I need to know that it's true. If you feel you can't tell me, then we'll do it through the appropriate channels, and if it gets lost in the bureaucracy, so be it.'
'It is - or was - President Asif Latif Khan of Pakistan.'
Nolan stared blankly at Colchester and then in disbelief at Campbell. Outside was the whine of an electric milk float. With each driver personally screened, it was still allowed within the secure area of Downing Street. Nolan got to his feet, walked across to the window, looked down at the clatter of bottles on the doorstep, turned back inside the room, glanced at the photographs laid out on the table, then looked at Campbell. 'Khan?' he asked, showing part irritation and part sarcasm. 'The now dead President of Pakistan?'
'Khan, as you know, was deputy head of the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency before going into politics,' explained Colchester. 'Lazaro worked closely with him during the War on Terror.'
'He told you that North Korean agents had walked into a secure Australian laboratory, killed two scientists and stolen this agent?'
'He told me more than that,' said Campbell, sinking to his knees again by the coffee table, and pulling two photographs from the middle of the pile.
'Show me, then,' said Nolan, sitting down and putting on his spectacles.
Campbell handed Nolan a picture, labelled with a caption describing it as an unidentified guest at a cocktail reception in New York. The subject wore a lounge suit, badly cut, with a tie too tightly knotted and creating wrinkles on his shirt collar. He had no drink and was caught with both hands clasped behind his back and a ripple of boredom on his face.
The second picture was of the same man, but it revealed much more. He was short, but stocky and strong, with truculent features, and dressed in the uniform of a four-star general. He was with a dozen other dignitaries. The date on the caption was 15 April 2003. The setting looked like an official celebration in Pyongyang. It might have been that particular split second with the camera, or the resulting image might have been etched into the subject's character. His arms were stretched out to the edge of the rail of a balcony and his whole presence dwarfed the lost expression on the face of the then North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, who stood next to him. The general's long fingers were wrapped around the rail into a fist. His eyes were fixed straight ahead in an expression of awesome determination, not of a man who had inherited power, but of a man intent on gaining it. He was by far the most charismatic figure among them.
'This man's name is Park Ho,' said Campbell. He looked at Nolan with an unflinching expression of certainty. 'He ordered the theft of the IL-4. He fired the missile at Yokata. He believes it is better that North Korea be destroyed and go down fighting, than to surrender to unification with South Korea. He is the mastermind behind North Korea's missile programme. He now has power, and his finger, Prime Minister, is literally on the button.'
'He has power?' queried Nolan. 'You mean he has just taken power.'
'That's right,' said Campbell, nodding.
The Prime Minister glanced over to Colchester. 'Is he right, Charles?'
'I fear he is,' said Colchester.
There was a knock at the door and Joan Nolan poked her head round. She was much loved by the British for being matronly, unstuffy, down to earth and the one person who could keep their brilliant, but sometimes erratic, Prime Minister in check.
'There's a queue of supplicants waiting to see you, Stuart, and none dares knock on the door to see what you're up to.'
Nolan looked at his watch. The meeting had overrun by fifteen minutes and he would need another fifteen to end it. 'Give them tea, champagne if they need it. I'll be with them by seven-thirty.'
'And which do you want, tea or champagne?' she asked, stepping back to leave her husband in peace.
'Nothing, thanks,' said Nolan, without consulting Colchester or Campbell. Joan would have to boil the kettle or indeed uncork the bottle herself. Downing Street must have been the only official residence of a head of government where the Prime Minister and his wife did their own washing up.
Colchester glanced across to check they were alone again, leant back and put his arm over the back of the sofa. 'Stuart, Lazaro has an idea, which might shed some light on events.'
Nolan raised his eyebrows. 'With your permission, sir,' said Campbell, 'I would like to go to Brunei. As far as we know, your training camps there are operational and unaffected by the coup d'etat. Rioting after Khan's death, I can understand. But it takes time to plan a coup d'etat. There are too many coincidences running around. If we can get some sodium pentothal into one of those rebellious Bruneian colonels, we might learn a hell of a lot more than we do now.'
Nolan rolled his pen along the desk top, then burst out laughing, shaking his head in disbelief. 'I have a feeling you and I are going to get on very well indeed,' he said, glancing across to Colchester. 'And you, Charles, would you be prepared to forfeit your job, if you're wrong?'
'My years release me from that decision,' said Colchester with a slight smile.
'Then with your agreement, as my chief intelligence adviser, I will track down Jim West.'
'I understand he's in the White House situation room. Yokata will keep him up all night.'
As he dialled, a genuine smile spread across his face. Despite his considerable political skills, Nolan was a soldier at heart, feeling best when he was planning a military operation. He waited impatiently for the connection and whispered to Colchester: 'Tell the mob outside, I'll be another half an hour. And get a bloody map of Brunei up here.'
In Washington it was past two in the morning. But three minutes after his call to the White House, the British Prime Minister was patched through to the US President, interrupting the long session he was having with his principals.
'Jim, I'll be brief,' said Nolan. 'There's been a military takeover in North Korea. I understand that we could be dealing with the most dangerous enemy we have faced since Hitler.'
****
IV Corps Command, North Korea*
Park Ho, aged sixty-four, brushed his hand along the cold metal
of a T-62 Soviet-made battle tank. He saluted the commander who was standing upright in the turret, goggles high on his forehead, eyes clear and staring straight ahead of him down the tunnel. The commander snapped back a salute.
Park was five inches short of six foot, as muscular and wiry as he was small. He prided himself on achieving power from the lowest of the military ranks. His father, a corporal, had at first enthralled him with his stories of the battles of the Korean War, then had vanished, leaving him in a crumpled city living through a day he never wanted to experience again. Grief and fear became hostile emotions, and he never married because of them. Instead he clawed his way to the top of the military establishment. He joined the elite Bureau of Reconnaissance unit. He trained personal bodyguards for the leaders of Cuba, Cambodia and several African countries. He led the infiltration of commandos into South Korea itself, and later served as a diplomat at the UN and in Vienna as an arms control negotiator. On the long, cold North Korean winter evenings, he had taught himself English, Russian and Chinese, and after the collapse of Soviet communism, he had written papers for the nation's founder, the Great Leader Kim Il-sung, as to how North Korea's juche ideology of self-reliance could be modernized for the twenty-first century.
As he inspected the line of tanks, Park remained in awe of the dedication of his people, precisely because he had come from among them. He had won his present status by distancing himself from the political elite who inherited influence and office without having to prove merit.
While they had become soft on too much satellite television, French brandy, German Mercedes and white-skinned prostitutes, Park had been with the troops, whether far north on the Chinese border or as he was here, now, deep underground, metres from South Korea on the Military Demarcation Line.
Today, the men whom Park despised were being held under house arrest in a compound just north of Pyongyang, and the man who would soon declare himself president allowed himself a rare and faint smile.
Dozens of tanks, fuelled, equipped and armed, were lined up in row after row in a huge, staggered complex of tunnels which ran the length of the ceasefire line with South Korea.
In the layer above them were squadrons of fighter aircraft in hangars hewn into rock. The runways on which they were to take off were also underground. The first the enemy would see of an aircraft was when the wheels left the ground and it was airborne. Huge artillery guns skilfully hidden in undergrowth and rock, designed to deceive analysts of imagery from satellites and unmanned surveillance aircraft, could pulverize the South Korean capital Seoul, only thirty miles away. Commanders of military hovercraft armed with devastating rapid-fire cannon and heavy machine guns waited for the order to attack. The thick rubber air cushions were kept half-inflated to carry human waves of men across the water on to enemy territory. Far below ground, on the third level down, thousands of men lived on rotation, as if on an aircraft carrier, to be infiltrated through tunnels which would bring them up to attack behind enemy lines.
Park walked the full length of the first line of tanks, his hand held in a steady salute. Men returning his salute allowed themselves no expression of emotion. He couldn't tell if he was welcome as their new leader. But he sensed an air of gratitude. There was an atmosphere of war in the tunnels. For more than fifty years, North Korean soldiers had been on a daily footing for war. Finally, the man who would deliver it to them had arrived.
At the end of the tunnel, under tarpaulins, were stacks of artillery and tank shells, filled with a lethal mixture of napalm and explosives. These were to be used on American and South Korean troops right on the border. Park wanted every American dead within an hour of the attack being launched. They might have absorbed casualties in Iraq, but 37,000 dead American soldiers on the Korean peninsula would collapse that nation's will entirely.
The doors of the lift at the end were open for him. It carried him up to a covered area above ground. The drone of a helicopter became louder, and Park watched as it landed on a quadrant 'H' sign. On this clear, cold day, at this precise time, a satellite camera would be overhead, the lens operating at 0.25 metre resolution and picking up his grainy image as he broke cover and walked to the aircraft. Analysts at the National Security Agency would examine radio traffic from the helicopter. Park made sure the pilot mentioned his name in transmissions because he needed the Americans to know who he was and where he was going.
The ageing Soviet MI-24 took him quickly away from the demarcation line. As it gained altitude, Park looked down on the rows of blue huts, where the ceasefire agreement had been signed in 1953. He saw the flash of the sun in the lens of a camera on the south side of the line. Just to the north he looked proudly down on the massive North Korean flag hanging from the highest mast in the world and the neat huts of the farmers dotted around at its base.
The nose of the helicopter dipped. It shuddered in light turbulence as the pilot turned it north and took his bearings from the six-lane highway to Pyongyang. Below, ginseng and cabbage fields nestled between mountains under which his tanks and aircraft waited.
As the helicopter settled into the short flight, Park reflected on his ugly battles with the heir and anointed successor of the Great Leader, Kim Il-sung, which had now finally been won. Slice by slice, his country had been sliding towards Americanization. Soon it would have become another East Germany, wretched, defeated and swallowed up. Park had been determined that whatever the future held for his great nation it would not be that.
Up ahead on the curve of the horizon he saw the outskirts of his beloved Pyongyang. It was truly one of the most beautiful and ordered cities in the world. He asked the pilot to fly lower and follow the Taedong River which glistened pure blue in the sunlight. Once across the Yanggok railway bridge, the monuments of his nation were laid out before him: the skilfully sculptured statues of the Great Leader, Kim Il-sung, who had liberated the nation from the Japanese and founded the juche philosophy of self-reliance that had made North Korea so powerful; Kim Il-sung's magnificent mausoleum, adorned with fresh flowers laid every day by his citizens; the Pyongyang Grand Theatre set just back from the west river bank; the Korean Central History Museum which told of the struggle to retain independence and ward off American aggression; the Children's Palace, where the most perfect little human beings performed with absolute precision; the Tower of Juche, 150 metres high, decorated with 230 granite and gemstone blocks sent by admiring leaders from all over the world, and from the top a symbolically flaming torch stretching another 20 metres into the sky.
The pilot turned the helicopter west, flying over the Victorious Fatherland Liberation Museum, then headed due north again over West Pyongyang railway station and Chongsan Park. The aircraft climbed and settled into the final stage of its journey.
While the United States championed the rights of the individual, North Korea championed the rights of the community. Both were at extreme ends of ideology, yet while North Korea was poor, Park had never seen the shame, humiliation and desperation on the streets and in the villages of his country as he had witnessed in America. When travelling abroad, he had sipped vintage cognac at an embassy dinner in Paris, listened to the duet from the Pearl Fishers at the Royal Opera House in London, inspected the Mercedes factory in Dusseldorf. Each time, he had promised that one day he would return Korea to its greatness.
Empires rose and empires fell, and Park Ho would be remembered as the man who defeated American power.
Outside Pyongyang, the pilot took the helicopter up, heading further and further into the highest mountains in the country. A brilliant panorama of forests and hillsides covered in snow, of tumbling waterfalls and icicles and mountain passes with deep-blue winter lakes stretched ahead.
*****
Just before landing, Park instructed the pilot to make another radio transmission stating clearly their coordinates. He wanted the United States to know his destination. Officially, it was known as the Kanggye No. 26 General Plant. But this was a huge underground military facility, which even
a nuclear bomb could never harm. The helicopter turned into the breeze and the pilot set it down. Park, in full military fatigues, stepped out and stood, head unbowed, by the whirring rotor blades.
A general in charge of the plant led the greeting party of scientists and technicians, dressed in the neatly laundered grey tunics of the Korean Workers' Party or the clear white of a laboratory coat. These were the men and women who had brought Park so close to achieving his ambition.
Park stepped into a lift. On the descent it stopped twice in security airlocks before delivering him to the control room from where he would conduct the war. The room was packed with people, lined up in formation, amid work stations and surrounded by walls of computerized screens. As Park stepped on to the platform, a huge picture of Kim Il-sung appeared, wrapped around the whole wall.
Park bowed at the image and cheers echoed round the room. He left through a side door into a small empty room, where he took off his uniform and held up his arms while he was dressed in an insulated suit, breathing apparatus and a radio and earpiece in the helmet. He stepped into a glass antechamber. On the other side he was met by men, also in protective clothing. Row after row of single ultraviolet bulbs stretched back as far as he could see. They provided the only light in the laboratory.