The First Horseman

by John Case

  And as that happened, the moment expanded. Suddenly, Kang knew where he was – which was just where he seemed to be: on the ridge above Tasi-ko. And then he remembered:

  they’re killing everyone.

  The boulder beside him was spitting stones as 9mm slugs slapped into it. Even so, Kang didn’t move. His eyes were in the distance, ignoring the soldiers as they ran toward him, staring instead at the cratered wasteland that lay, smoking, in the headlights of the trucks. Tasi-ko was gone.

  The realization frightened him even more than the guns, frightened him in a way that he had never felt before. Because this was a fear that had no point of origin or focus. It came from within and without at the same time. It was terror, pure and oceanic, and it radiated from him like heat from a fire.

  Jolted, Kang turned and began to run, scrambling up the hillside from rock to rock, moving from one shadow to another. Behind him, his pursuers gave ground as they moved deeper into the cold, dark, and unfamiliar hills, swinging their flashlights in great, useless arcs. Soon it was obvious that they had no idea which way he’d gone and that, in fact, they were beginning to worry about their own whereabouts.

  Still, Kang kept moving. Far from feeling the usual clumsiness of his wooden leg, he covered the ground with immaculate economy, invisible as a shadow in the night. And though his lungs were on fire and his quadriceps were drained, he moved higher and higher into the mountains until the soldiers’ voices dwindled to nothing and the bulldozers fell silent.

  After four or five hours in the freezing cold, his shirt was soaked with sweat and his stump was a bloody mess. His fingers were frozen, his skull was fractured, and his face was a blister. The parts of him that didn’t hurt were dead. It was as simple as that.

  But he kept on moving, and eventually he found a sort of track that led downhill. Following it, he emerged from the mountains just as the night grayed toward dawn. Finding himself beside the Victory Road, he followed the highway without thinking or caring where it went. The truth was: he had nowhere to go and, clearly, he was dying. The likelihood was that whatever energy he had left would soon disappear. He’d sit down for a rest, and that would be that. If he was lucky, there would be a tree, and he could lean back against it . . . close his eyes . . . and just let go.

  He looked forward to dying that way, like an old monk, dreaming the world. Indeed, the image lifted his spirits and, as he walked beside the road, he kept his eyes open for the perfect tree. The death-tree. His tree.

  But it was nowhere to be found. Morning molted into afternoon, the air warmed and, step by step, the day dissolved into evening. Night fell, the temperature dropped, and still Kang kept walking.

  So it went for a second day, and then a third. Instinctively, and without thinking, Kang trudged toward the one place he knew as well as the environs of Tasi-ko. This was Korea’s Demilitarized Zone. A closely watched no-man’s-land that runs for more than a hundred miles, stretching from the Yellow Sea to the Sea of Japan, the DMZ was at once a nature preserve and a killing floor. Honeycombed with tunnels and bristling with land mines, it was a ribbon of green in a sea of mud and ice – tranquil, forested, and dangerous. Gateway to the Vampire South.

  Perhaps he would find his tree there.

  2

  FLASH

  TEXT OF TELEGRAM 98 SEOUL 008070

  SECRET

  INFO CIAE-04 DODE-01 INR-02

  PAGE 01

  FROM AMERICAN EMBASSY SEOUL

  TO CIA LANGLEYVA IMMEDIATE 8030

  DIA WASHDC PRIORITY

  TAGS: PINS, CHIEF, N.ASIA/ROK

  SUBJ: (K) DEFECTION – KANG YONG-PU

  REF: SEOUL

  1. SECRET ENTIRE TEXT.

  2. ROK ANSP REPORTS US/ROK FORCES DETAINED DPRK-CIT KANG YONG-PU ON 01–29–98 AT 0400. KANG CLAIMS ENTRY DMZ SAME NITE VIA ‘INFILTRATION TUBE’ APPROX 27 MILES WEST OF SEHYON-NI.

  3. KANG DISABLED VET AND ‘MEDICAL WORKER’. SAYS DEFECTION FOLLOWED MILITARY INCIDENT TASI-KO.

  4. ANSP ASSIGNS ZERO-RELIABILITY TO KANG’S CLAIM. SOURCE ‘VELOCIPEDE’ (PYONGYANG) REPORTS NO MILITARY ACTIVITY IN II CORPS.

  5. KANG CONSIDERED ‘UNSTABLE.’ DEFECTION OPPORTUNISTIC.

  6. ACTION: NO ACTION RECOMMENDED. (SUBJECT TO BE RESETTLED FOLLOWING DEBRIEFING RE TRANSIT OF DMZ.)

  TAYLOR FITCH LOOSENED the tie at his throat, leaned back in his chair and, with a sigh, read the cable for the third time that afternoon. A former newspaper reporter (well, okay, even if it was a cover, he’d still written stories), he grimaced at the use of unexplained acronyms. How many people knew that the ANSP was ‘the South Korean CIA’ – the so-called Agency for National Security Planning? How many people could tell you that DPRK stood for Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (a.k.a. the Commies)?

  The answer was: hardly anyone, that’s who. And Fitch wasn’t talking about the public. He was talking about the Agency.

  The CIA man rubbed his jaw and wondered idly if he ought to dye his beard. He’d had it since college, and it was going gray, like the hair at his temples. He didn’t like it. In fact, he hated it (though not, he had to admit, as much as he hated the recent expansion of his waistline). Maybe he should join a club. Maybe – Maybe he should pay attention to what he was supposed to be doing. He could lose fifty pounds, and the cable would still be there. He had to do something with it,

  Like . . . file it. Just get it off his desk and punch out. It wasn’t as if what’s-his-name was part of anyone’s inner circle. He wasn’t a member of the People’s Assembly – not even close. In fact, unless the station in Seoul had completely fucked up, this guy Kang wasn’t even a member of the Korean Workers Party. All he was, was some kind of nurse – and a rural one at that.

  Tasi-ko. Where the fuck . . .?

  Fitch swiveled in his chair and looked up at the large map on the wall behind him. It was an ordnance map of North Korea, with an alphabetized list of cities, towns, and villages at the bottom. Next to each entry was a set of coordinates, giving the longitude and latitude in degrees, minutes, and seconds.

  The map itself was rooted in the DMZ – a thick green line that ran east to west, following the 38th Parallel. North of the line, little red pins marked the whereabouts of DPRK infantry and artillery units, while naval stations and airfields were flagged with blue and white thumbtacks.

  Tasi-ko was in the K-7 sector. That was II Corps, in the foothills of the Diamond Mountains, about eighty miles north of the DMZ. Middle of nowhere. Except . . .

  Something had happened there. Or maybe not. The source in Pyongyang didn’t know of any ‘incident,’ and neither did Fitch. But that didn’t mean much. North Korea was a mysterious place. Lots of things happened that didn’t get reported inside or outside of the country. So the only thing you could really say was that this guy Kang had taken his life in his hands to defect. And while it was possible that famine had driven him to do it, why would he lie about it? Why would he manufacture some kind of ‘incident’ when all he had to say was, ‘I was hungry’?

  So maybe something had happened. But what? The cable didn’t offer a clue, and Fitch thought he knew why: Seoul hadn’t asked – because Seoul was lazy.

  It was supposed to be an elite posting, but the reality was that, half the time, the station took what the Koreans gave them, typed it up, and sent it back to Langley. They didn’t process it. They didn’t question it. They just passed it on, and adjourned to the nearest whorehouse.

  Fitch muttered to himself and turned back to his desk. Pulling his keyboard closer, he drafted a cable that, stripped of its headers, read:

  WHAT ‘INCIDENT’?

  Then he hit the Encryption button in his word-processing program, printed the results, and sent it on its way to Seoul over the big, red fax phone that sat, like a bust of Nathan Hale, on a pedestal next to the window.

  The decoded reply was on his desk in the morning. According to MOTOWN (which was the way ‘Seoul’ liked to refer to itself), Kang claimed that Tasi-ko had been completely destroye
d about ten days earlier: This, he said, was accomplished by what sounded like a fuel-air explosive dropped on the village a few hours after it had been cordoned off by soldiers. There were no survivors other than Kang, and the village itself had been bulldozed into the ground. Nothing remained.

  SOURCE CLAIMS TASI-KO SITE OF EPIDEMIC STARTED BY (UNIDENTIFIED) SPANISH WOMAN. CLAIMS DPRK ACTION FOLLOWED INSPECTION BY SENIOR PHYSICIAN, PYONGYANG INSTITUTE FOR INFECTIOUS DISEASES.

  What Spanish woman? Fitch thought. There aren’t any Spanish women in North Korea. Or, if there are, there’s about as many as there are banjos in Timor. And anyway, how would they know who started it?

  The message ended with a short disclaimer in which MOTOWN emphasized that it had no way of verifying the story – which, it reminded him, was on offer from a source that could in no way be considered reliable.

  They were right, of course, and Fitch had to admit, this guy Kang was looking crazier and crazier. Still . . . it wouldn’t hurt to make a couple of calls. Because you never knew. You just never knew,

  What he needed was pictures, pictures of Tasi-ko (or what was left of it). And there were a couple of places that just might have them,

  The first was the National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO. This was the $6 billion a year CIA ‘subsidiary’ that specialized in high resolution photographs taken by spy satellites. Unfortunately, the NRO required that every request for imagery had to be cleared by the Agency’s liaison office – which meant that the requester needed to provide a crypto unique to one of the Agency’s Special Access Programs.

  In this case, though, there wasn’t any program, and hence no crypto. Fitch was simply following a hunch, and the liaison office frowned on that.

  Fortunately, the Pentagon was more cooperative than the NRO, and Fitch felt sure that he could get what he needed from the National Imagery & Mapping Agency. This was the military’s sole provider of space-based imagery, and in many ways its archive was more comprehensive than the NRO’s. While the latter concentrated on ultrasensitive targets such as troop deployments and nuclear reactors, NIMA’s mission was a lot broader.

  In addition to an array of conventional military assignments, NIMA was tasked with the massive responsibility of mapping the world – the entire world – in three dimensions, while at the same time keeping track of shifting coastlines, changes in climate, and agricultural developments on every continent.

  It was with this last responsibility in mind that Fitch contacted the liaison officer at NIMA and told her what he was looking for: ‘Pix.’

  ‘Well, you’ve come to the right place. What kind of “pix”?’

  ‘North Korea.’

  The woman made a noncommittal sound, a sort of half grunt smothered by a moue.

  ‘Is that a yes?’

  ‘Well, that depends. It’s a big place.’

  Fitch spun round in his chair and searched the map’s index for Tasi-ko. ‘I’ve got the coordinates right here.’

  ‘Give ’em to me.’

  He did.

  ‘Do you have a time frame?’

  ‘Yeah. In fact, I have two. I need something that was taken in the past week, and something a month or so earlier.’

  ‘Before and after,’ the woman said.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Well . . . I’ll see what I can find, but if it’s in the boonies – what sort of resolution do you need?’

  ‘That’s the good news,’ Fitch said. ‘Nothing much. Terrain shots, is all. So long as I can tell the difference between a parking lot and a rice paddy.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ the woman said, perking up. ‘I don’t think that should be a problem. Though if you want to know the truth, I think you could probably get what you want off the Internet.’

  ‘I’m not on the Internet,’ Fitch said.

  ‘Well, you should be!’

  ‘Not really: if I was, they’d have to kill me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s a security thing. None of the computers here are hooked up to phones.’

  ‘Well, just in case: we’re at dubba-ya dubba-ya dubba-ya dot nima dot com.’ There was a pause. ‘Did you get that?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Fitch replied. ‘I got it. But until I get hooked up, y’know, it’s moot.’

  The photos arrived late that same afternoon, hand-delivered by a Pentagon courier just as Fitch was putting on his coat to go home. Standing in the doorway, he pried open the envelope and removed a pair of 11 × 14 images. The first was a false-color Landsat photo that covered a ninety-second arc – about three kilometers in width. It showed a cluster of what appeared to be concrete huts, surrounded by fallow fields in the foothills of the Diamond Mountains. A notation on the back gave the time, the date, and the coordinates:

  13:07:23Z

  1–13–97

  38º41′16″N, 126º54′08″E

  The second picture was black and white, and bore a stamp on the back, indicating that it was the product of an Air Force reconnaissance program whose cryptonym had been blacked out. The photo was dated January 28, 1998, and gave the same coordinates as the first picture. And though the arc was different – only thirty degrees – the image itself was in no way ambiguous.

  It showed a field. With snow all around.

  Fitch’s heart beat faster as his eyes moved from one photo to the other and back again. He checked the coordinates a second time, but there wasn’t any need to do that, really. The same two-lane road that ran through the village in the Landsat picture ran through the ‘parking lot’ as well. Jesus, he thought, it’s like a magic trick. Now you see it, now you don’t.

  And though he knew what the pictures represented – a massacre – he also knew that because he was the first to notice it, he’d get a lot of credit. A medal, maybe, or at least a commendation. Which was why, standing there in the doorway to his office, with the certainty of so much death in his hands, a small grin lifted the corners of his mouth.

  It took almost forty-eight hours to obtain a copy of Kang’s interview, and when it arrived, the text was still in Korean: twenty-six pages of hangul, accompanied by a knee-jerk apology from MOTOWN (whose translators were said to be ‘all backed up’). Fitch had hoped to hand out translations to everyone in (what he had to admit was the somewhat pretentiously named) ‘Tasi-ko Working Group.’ But since that wasn’t possible, he settled instead for inviting Harry Inoue. A Japanese-American, Harry was fluent in Korean and four other languages as well.

  The group consisted of five people. In addition to Fitch and Inoue, there was Janine Wasserman, a veteran case officer who’d just returned to headquarters from a tour of duty in Seoul; Allen Voorhis, a gifted analyst who’d spent most of his career at the National Photo Interpretation Center; and Dr. George Karalekis, a physician in the Directorate of Science & Technology.

  Fitch welcomed each of them to the little conference room that he’d reserved that Friday morning, and handed out copies of the pictures he’d received from NIMA. Then he asked Harry Inoue how soon he could get the debriefing translated.

  ‘That depends,’ Inoue said. ‘Can I take it home?’ Fitch shook his head, and the linguist shrugged. ‘Tuesday, then.’

  ‘Okay,’ Fitch replied. ‘Meanwhile, why don’t you take a look at it? See what it says.’

  Inoue nodded and began reading.

  When everyone had taken a seat, Fitch explained why they were there. He told them how a medical worker named Kang had crossed the DMZ at night, bringing with him a story that might have been unbelievable – if the photographs in front of them hadn’t confirmed it. For some reason, the North Korean Army had used what sounded like fuel-air explosives to destroy an entire village. And a friendly one at that. If a thirty-year-old census could be relied on, more than a hundred people had been killed.

  ‘I don’t see any bodies,’ Voorhis said, peering at the photographs through the bottom of his bifocals. ‘All I see is a lot of rubble.’

  Fitch nodded. ‘You’re right,’ he sai
d. ‘Kang could be wrong. Someone else might have gotten away.’

  ‘Maybe they all did,’ Wasserman suggested.

  Fitch looked at her. She was a tall, heavy woman in her late thirties, with a gravelly voice and piercing blue eyes. She was dressed, ever so elegantly, in what Fitch supposed were designer clothes. (Someone said she had a lot of her own money, and that she was related to the Guggenheims, or maybe it was the Rothschilds. Old money, in any case, and lots of it.) ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

  Wasserman shrugged. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time the North Koreans relocated people. And it wouldn’t be the first time they staged something, either.’

  Fitch thought about it, then said, ‘Good point. Maybe they moved them. Maybe they want the site for something else.’ He paused. ‘But that’s not what Kang says. And Kang’s our only source.’

  Karalekis broke in with the obvious question: ‘Well, now that you mention it, what does Mr. Kang says? What was the motive for all this destruction?’

  Fitch turned to Inoue and raised his eyebrows.

  Inoue cleared his throat and leaned forward, keeping his eyes on the report in front of him. ‘He says – and I’m paraphrasing – that the village was in the midst of an epidemic. A lot of people were dying.’

  ‘Doe he tell us what they were dying of?’ Karalekis asked.

  Inoue shook his head and turned a page. ‘No. He says he’d never seen anything like it. Fevers of a hundred and six. Gangrenous genitalia.’ He looked questioningly at Karalekis, whose face betrayed nothing.

  Inoue turned another page. ‘Projectile vomiting, explosive hemorrhaging – mouth, nose, eyes . . . good lord, listen to this! Some of them turned blue. “Bright blue.”’

  Karalekis nodded, as much to himself as anyone else.

  ‘That doesn’t surprise you?’ Inoue asked. ‘People turning blue?’

  Karalekis shrugged. ‘It happens. It’s called “cyanosis.”’