The office of Deputy Director Kim Hwan was on the second floor, down the hall from the office of Director Yung-Hoon. Right now, the former police chief was having dinner in the fourth-floor caf6 with friendly contacts in the press to try to find out what they knew. Hwan and Yung-Hoon had very different but complementary methods of working: Yung-Hoon’s philosophy was that people had every answer investigators needed, as long as the proper people were asked the proper questions. Hwan believed that, intentionally or not, people lied- that facts were best learned through scientific means. Each admitted that the other’s approach was perfectly valid, though Hwan didn’t have the stomach for the smiles and chatter Yung-Hoon’s work required. Back when he’d been a smoker, his attention span for bullshit was roughly an unfiltered Camel; now it was less.
His small desk stacked with papers and files, Hwan was studying the report that had just come in from the lab. He skipped the Professor’s analyses of “hybridized sp-orbitals” and “direction of electronegativity”-details not required by the KCIA but by the courts, if the evidence were ever used in trial-and went right to the summary:
Analysis of the explosives reveals them to be standard North Korean plastique: composition typical of production facility in Sonchon.
There are no fingerprints on the water bottle. There should at least have been partial fingerprints of a store clerk. We conclude that the bottle was wiped clean. The traces of saliva found in the drops of water that remained are unremarkable.
The soil particles themselves tell us nothing. The principal components, sandstone and bauxite, are common throughout the peninsula and cannot be used to locate the point of origin.
However, a toxicology study reveals concentrated traces of sublimation of the salt NaCl (Na+ from the base NaOH, Cl-from the acid HCL). This is commonly found in petroleum products from the Great Khingan Range of Inner Mongolia, including diesel fuel used by mechanized forces of the DPRK. The concentration of 1:100 NaCl in the soil seems strongly to preclude the possibility that particles blew from the North. Computer simulation suggests that such a ratio would have been 1:5,000.
Hwan let his head flop back on the chair. He let the cooling waves from the ceiling fan wash over his face.
“So we have bombers who were in the North. How could they not be North Korean?” He was beginning to think that there was only one way to find out for certain, though he was reluctant to play a card as important as that.
As he reread the summary, the intercom beeped.
“Sir, this is Sgt. Jin at the desk. There’s a gentleman who wishes to see the officer in charge of the Palace bombing.”
“Does he say why?”
“He says he saw them, sir. Saw the men who ran from the sound truck.”
“Keep him there,” Hwan said as he leapt to his feet and tightened his tie. “I’ll be right there.”
THIRTY
Tuesday, 8:05 A.M., Op-Center
Bob Herbert and Matt Stoll both watched in shocked silence as the photos from the NRO came up on Stoll’s monitor.
“I’ll be diddled,” Herbert said. “They are out of their freaking minds.”
The photographs of Pyongyang showed tanks and armored vehicles rolling from the city, with antiaircraft artillery being moved into the surrounding countryside.
“These bastards are preparing for war!” Herbert said. “Have NRO look at the DMZ. Let’s see what’s happening there.”
He snapped up the phone on the armrest of his wheel-chair. “Bugs-put me through to the chief.”
Hood came on at once. “What’ve you got, Bob?”
“A job for you-rewriting the Options Paper. We’ve got at least three mechanized brigades moving south from the North Korean capital, and at least… I count one, two, three … four AA guns ringing the southern perimeter.”
There was a long silence. “Get me the hard copy and keep monitoring the situation. Has Matty found anything yet?”
“No.”
There was another long silence. “Call Andrews and ask them to get us firsthand recon from the East Korea Bay west to Chungsan Bay every two hours.”
“You want flyovers?”
“Mike and a Striker team are headed over. If the computers go down again and we lose our uplink, I don’t want them going in blind.”
“Gotcha,” Herbert said. “Tell me, chief. You still think those bastards don’t want war?”
“The White House or DPRK?”
Herbert swore. “Dee-Perk. We didn’t start this-”
“No, we didn’t. But I still think that North Korea doesn’t want war. They’re deploying because they assume we will. The problem is, the President can’t appear soft and he won’t blink. Will they?”
Saying he’d report back as soon as he had any information, Herbert muttered under his breath about Hood’s suspicious nature. Just because he was a politician’s politician when he was Mayor, consulting every adviser and poll, didn’t mean that everyone was. He did not believe that this President would put American youths at risk to enhance his image as a tough guy. If he didn’t blink, it was for the same reason that Ronald Reagan sent Tripoli a high-explosive wake-up call when Libyans bombed a bar in Berlin. You hurt us, we’re going to draw blood. He wished that policy were standard operating procedure, instead of hollow chest pounding at the United Nations. He still wished that someone would pay back the Moslem terrorists who cost him the use of his legs in 1983.
Ringing his assistant, Herbert asked to be put through to General McIntosh at Andrews.
The plane was a Dassault Mirage 2000, built under contract by the French government and designed as an interceptor. But it had quickly proven itself to be one of the most versatile planes in the air, formidable in both close-support and low-altitude attack missions as well as aerial reconnaissance. In its latter capacity, the fifty-foot-long two-seater was able to fly at speeds of up to Mach 2.2 at fifty-nine thousand feet; it could achieve both just under five minutes from brake-release. The U.S. Air Force had purchased six of the planes for use in Europe and the Far East, partly to cement military ties with France and partly because the jet was state-of-the-art.
The jet roared into the night sky from the U.S. air base in Osaka. Planes coming toward the North from the South had to fly higher and were easier to pick up on radar; planes coming from Japan could fly in low over the sea and be in and over North Korea before the military could respond.
The Mirage reached the eastern coast of North Korea fifteen minutes after takeoff; as its M53-2 turbofan engine kicked it into a nearly vertical climb, Recon Officer Margolin seated behind the pilot began snapping photographs. She was using a Leika with a 500x telephoto lens, modified for night vision.
The officer had been briefed on what to watch for: troop movements and activity around the nuclear power plants and chemical storage sites. Anything similar to what the NRO spy satellite had seen around the capital.
What she saw as the Mirage passed Pyongyang and swept southwest over the bay and toward the Yellow Sea astounded her. She told the pilot to forget the sweep back for a second look: they raced toward the thirty-eighth parallel, and as soon as they were across, Margolin broke radio silence to talk to the mission commander.
THIRTY-ONE
Tuesday, 10:10 P.M, Seoul
For several minutes, Gregory Donald stood in the doorway of the small base chapel, unable to move. He looked at the plain pine coffin, unable to see inside, unwilling to do so until he was ready.
He had just gotten off the phone with her father, who admitted that he had become concerned when Soonji hadn’t called him. He knew she’d been going to the celebration, and whenever there had been a problem, anyplace she went, she’d always phoned to say she was all right. She hadn’t done that today. And when there was no answer at home and no record of her at any hospital, he’d feared the worst.
Kim Yong Nam took it the way he took everything that upset him: by withdrawing. Immediately after hearing about Soonji’s death and Donald’s plans for a funeral in America, he had hung up without uttering a word of thanks, sorrow, or condolence. Donald had never held Kim’s manner against him, and he hadn’t expected a word or two-welcome though they would have been. Everyone had their own way of dealing with grief, and Kim’s was to shut it in, others out.
Breathing deeply, he forced himself to think back to the way he had last seen her-not as his wife, not as Soonji, but as a torn figure cradled lifelessly in his arms. He prepared himself, told himself that the mortician’s art was one of suggestion, transforming the dead into the vision of peace and red-cheeked health-but not ever re-creating life as we remembered it. Yet it would be more, he knew, than death as he remembered it. More than that broken and bloodied flesh he held-