Scimitar SL-2 (2004) Read online

  “I can’t really help you there, my darling,” said Kathy. “They never even bothered to leave a copy of their tour plan in the car—”

  “Goddamned towelh—” growled the Admiral, but in a gesture of deference to his wife, he checked himself, swallowing the rest of his exclamation.

  Two minutes later, the other Mercedes took off, driving swiftly south. And when Pedro finally began to head back south himself, they spotted the other Mercedes up ahead, parked again, its occupants still photographing fiercely, both with cinecameras and stills.

  “Pull over, Pedro,” said the Admiral. “Let’s take another look at the view. Park as close to the other car as you can without crowding ’em.”

  Sure enough, the photographers had found another prime spot. There was a slight crescent shape to the bay, winding away towards the north, and it offered a spectacular vista from one of the highest points on the western coast.

  Arnold didn’t really think much of it. It was simply that his job was so deeply engrained in his personality and mind. By sea, the Admiral was paranoid about submarines and on land, since 9/11, he was unable to look at an Arab without thinking, Goddamned terrorist. Of course many other operatives in U.S. Intelligence thought much the same, but being Arnold, he had to act upon it in some fashion.

  As soon as the car came to a halt Arnold Morgan was out, walking back to Harry and the other agent. His instructions were terse. Get ahold of the camera in the backseat of my car, and then start taking pictures of Kathy and me. Use the telephoto lens, get the guys nice and close.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  There were probably 30 yards between the two groups, and Harry did his job admirably. The Arabs seemed to notice that the other visitors’ camera was aimed their way, because they quickly looked away. But not quickly enough. Harry had them all clearly, except for one whom he only managed to catch from the side and back. But in one way or the other, all four of them were now sharply recorded in Kathy’s digital.

  “Could you by any chance tell me what all that was about?” asked Kathy as they began the drive back around the southern headland and on to the airport.

  “Well, I don’t think those people were really tourists,” replied the Admiral. “No wives, no girlfriends. Very serious. Kinda got the impression they had a purpose. You know, stopping and taking a lot of pictures of the cliff.”

  “Well, they could have been compiling a book. Great Atlantic coastlines,” said Kathy. “Or scouting out a location for a movie. Or working for the Canary Islands tourist board, preparing a new brochure. Or working for a hotel or development corporation, looking at new sights with amazing ocean views, anything. After all, we were standing right on the top of one of the great volcano ranges in the world…”

  “Yeah. I know,” he replied. “And I don’t think anyone’s thinking of building much up there, not with the Cumbre Vieja rumbling away beneath our feet. Fast way to lose your hotel, right?

  “I don’t know,” he mused, slowly. “I just had a feeling about those guys…how they kept showing up. And now I got a little record of ’em. And I just might ask young Ramshawe to have a shot at identifying ’em.”

  “Can he do that?”

  “Not if they are entirely obscure. But you never know…”

  “I’ll tell you one thing, though,” said Kathy. “If that whole western side of the ridge suddenly collapsed into the ocean, that sure would make a major splash.”

  “Wouldn’t it?” answered the Admiral. “The mother of all splashes.”

  2

  1500, Wednesday, May 27, 2009

  East Coast Highway, North Korea.

  THEY WERE JUST NORTH of the seaport city of Wonsan, and the Chinese-built off-road military juggernaut was rumbling up the strangely deserted road. To the right stretched a long expanse of jagged coastline guarded from the great rollers off the Sea of Japan only by a few tiny islands that could be seen in the distance.

  This was rugged country, the “highway” cleaving its way north for 200 miles, into the extreme northeast where China, North Korea, and Russia converge, some 80 miles south of Vladivostok.

  The Hamas General in the front passenger seat was accompanied by his personal bodyguard, brother-in-law, and veteran Hamas major, Ahmed Sabah, who sat quietly in the rear seat cradling a fully primed AK-47. The General stared through the windshield without speaking. The language was just too damned strange, the people too odd, the country too foreign for any attempt at social chat with the Korean Army driver.

  Ravi Rashood was numb with boredom. Here in what might be the world’s most secretive country, a police-state throwback to the dark ages of communism, he felt so out of place, so utterly estranged from anything he had ever known, that he was at a loss for perspective. He looked over at the driver, whose uniform was without military insignia save for a small metal badge showing a portrait of the “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong-il, presumed insane by most of the Western world, but a God-like presence to the residents of North Korea. A red rim surrounded the driver’s badge, signifying his military rank.

  His father, the late Kim il-Sung, was believed to be the Greatest Leader Ever in the history of the world, including the likes of Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Washington, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Mao, Gandhi, and Churchill. North Korean children had to learn a hymn to Kim, and sing it daily, “The Greatest Genius the World Has Ever Known.” Huge portraits of him littered cities, towns, villages, and parks. His words were still regarded as the Will of Heaven.

  Kim’s fat little son, Kim Jong-il, quickly matched his father’s near immortality, and loudspeakers proclaimed his undisputed family Greatness on the streets, in cities and towns throughout the land. Undisputed, that is, unless you didn’t mind jail or even execution. The twenty-first-century regime of Kim Jong-il did not tolerate dissent in any form whatsoever. Which at least simplified the issue—Love the Dear Leader or else…

  The Army truck driver was a true and faithful representative of a terrorized population. And behind his enigmatic half-smile there was the zombified blank expression of a people whose morale had been shattered, whose self-respect was gone, and whose only chance of survival was to toe the line and worship the earthly god Kim—always making certain there was a large portrait of him in the house, ready for inspection, as laid down by the law.

  North Korea was an Orwellian nightmare, forever on the borders of outright famine, with hundreds of thousands already dead of malnutrition. This was Russia in winter a half-century ago, Stalinesque in its procedures. And still the populace thronged the streets, cheering the Dear Leader, as the tubby little monster drove past, the living Tsar of one of the worst-run sovereign nations since the Dark Ages. And every day, all day, and all night, if you were listening, the Government of Kim Jong-il broadcasted the “true knowledge” that this country was intrinsically, ethnically superior to any other.

  General Ravi was appalled by North Korea. And he really hated doing business with them. But in his game, there were very few places to do business at all. For part of his job made him an international arms dealer, and one of a rare breed: a nuclear arms dealer, an arena near-silent, clandestine, and illegal, in which hardly anyone admitted wanting to buy, and certainly no one admitted wanting to sell.

  Aside from a somewhat seedy part of Bosnia, North Korea was very nearly the only game in town. This dastardly, friendless little pariah of a state, trapped between China, Russia, and Japan, had been making the components for nuclear weapons for many, many years, and cared not a jot for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

  For years, since back in 1974, when they first joined the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Korea had been a clear and obvious problem to the West, constantly trying to produce plutonium, endlessly trying to produce SCUD missiles for sale to the Middle East.

  But in 1985, against everyone’s most optimistic forecasts, Kim il-Sung signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), promising not to produce a bomb, and to open all nuclear sites
to inspection.

  That same year, the North Koreans started to build a 200 MWt reactor that could produce enough plutonium to make seven to ten bombs a year. Separately that same year they started to build a large plant to process plutonium into weapon-ready form.

  Twelve months later, they had a 30 MWt reactor on line, producing plutonium. In 1987, they missed the first eighteen-month deadline for international inspection. A few months later, they delivered one hundred SCUD-B missiles to Iran.

  For the next two years, they refused inspections and continued to build reactors, which would create plutonium. They consistently sold SCUD missiles to Syria and Iran.

  By 1992, the IAEA concluded the latest nuclear declarations by North Korea—some 90 grams of plutonium!—were fraudulent, and demanded access to Yongbyon, the ultrasecretive underground nuclear plant that lies 50 miles north of the capital city of Pyongyang. They did not get it.

  A year later, both China and Russia had cut off all aid to the Republic of North Korea. And the U.S. demanded that Kim il-Sung come clean and show his nuclear hand like everyone else. North Korea immediately barred all IAEA inspectors, and threatened to drop out of the NPT altogether.

  Finally in mid-1994, North Korea quit the IAEA. President Clinton, ever eager for compromise, agreed that the U.S. would provide North Korea with two light-water reactors and 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil per annum, if only the new Dear Leader, the hideous Kim Jong-il, would rejoin the IAEA and the NPT, and “normalize economic relations” between North Korea and the United States.

  It would end up costing the U.S. taxpayer $20 million to $30 million per year, and they called it the “Agreed Framework.”

  In 1995, less than one year after the Clinton deal, the head of the CIA, John Deutch, estimated that North Korea’s new Nodong-1 missile would be deployed within a year, and that the North Koreans were continuing under the most secretive circumstances to work on nuclear, chemical, and biological warheads. The constant warnings of the U.S. Intelligence community were essentially ignored by the Administration.

  By the spring of 1997, the situation had deteriorated. It was obvious that Kim Jong-il was producing plutonium.

  Evidence was building. A defector, a high-ranking North Korean General, fled to China and published an essay confirming that his former country did have nuclear weapons that could be used against South Korea and Japan. The brilliant U.S. satellite QuickBird picked up sensational pictures of heavy activity in the sprawling Yongbyon nuclear facility, much of which is located underground. The warnings of a new defector, Choon Sun Lee, a senior official in North Korea’s giant military infrastructure, of top-secret underground plutonium production and weapons development were almost certainly correct.

  In June 1998, Kim Jong-il’s government declared it would continue to develop and export nuclear-capable missiles. The U.S. Intelligence community, almost beside itself with concern, issued warning after warning that North Korea had built a huge underground facility that may be either a nuclear reactor or reprocessing plant, and a report from Bill Richardson’s Department of Energy claimed evidence that North Korea was undoubtedly working on uranium-enrichment techniques—which meant, broadly, turning that lethal substance into weapons-grade nuclear explosives.

  Four months later, the National Security Agency (NSA) in Fort Meade, headed by the aggressive Admiral Arnold Morgan, practically bellowed down the phone to the President that North Korea had between 25 and 30 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium, enough to make several nuclear warheads.

  By the year 2002, things were on their way from moderate to diabolical. It was now clear that Kim Jong-il had already produced a formidable arsenal of SCUD missiles for sale to anyone who needed them.

  The writings of Choon Sun Lee came rushing back to haunt everyone involved. Choon had sworn that the great Mount of Chun-Ma had been hollowed out to house a secret uranium processing plant. He described a massive tunnel, extending more than a mile into the mountain, opening into underground facilities housed in chambers carved out of the rock. In one of them there was a plant to turn uranium ore into yellowcake, the first step towards enriching it into weapons-grade material.

  U.S. Intelligence considered Choon’s observations to be too detailed to be false, and it all stacked up accurately with their own satellite observations of the existence of vast, mysterious excavations, twenty-two of them, in the mountains of North Korea. If you believed Choon, the West was staring quite literally at a nuclear empire operational under the reign of Kim Jong-il.

  And Choon was by no means finished. He described every aspect of the ore’s removal by truck and helicopter to an underground facility in a hidden valley. A third major defector came forward, announcing in 2002 that the great mountain of Kwanmo-bong, 270 miles to the northwest of Pyongyang—and at almost 8,000 feet the second highest peak in the country—had been hollowed out by an army of thousands, at night, sandbag by sandbag, to house yet another secret nuclear plant.

  Everything erupted into an icy standoff in December 2002. The Americans located a Korean freighter near Socotra Island off the coast of Yemen and requested a nearby warship from the Spanish Navy to apprehend it. A few hours later, the Spaniards fired several broadsides over the ship’s bows, forcing it to stop, and then boarded. The So-San, which flew no flag, contained fifteen SCUD missiles, large as life, carefully hidden under a cargo of 40,000 sacks of North Korean cement. There were, in addition, fifteen conventional warheads, twenty-three tanks of nitric acid (rocket propellant), and eighty-five drums of unspecified chemical. Kim’s men had finally been caught red-handed.

  But before the U.S. could roar its disapproval, North Korea announced it would immediately restart the nuclear reactors at Yongbyon and resume operations producing electricity. A total lie. They’d never ceased operations, and what the reactors really produced was plutonium—plutonium for nuclear warheads. Kim seemed to think he could best operate his country’s economy by becoming an illegal nuclear arms dealer, selling weapons-grade plutonium, medium-and short-range missiles, and warheads. It was hard to imagine a more antagonistic marketing plan, deliberately designed to infuriate the Americans, especially a Republican Administration that was essentially fed up to the back teeth with rogue states and uncooperative, pain-in-the-ass foreigners.

  The international inspectors now claimed they were unable to continue monitoring the North Korean facility. And Kim Jong-il expelled them all within a few more days.

  As the first decade of the twenty-first century wore on, the reactors at Yongbyon continued to harvest plutonium, and reports arrived daily at Fort Meade that the big cog in the Korean nuclear wheel had undoubtedly become the great mountain of Kwanmo-bong in the remote northeast, only 25 miles from the Chinese border.

  It was to this hidden underground plant that General Ravi Rashood was now headed. Deep inside that mountain, he hoped, was the one weapon that would drive the hated Americans out of the Middle East forever.

  He did not even pretend to understand the Oriental mind. All he knew was that North Korea had a reputation for on-time, no-questions-asked delivery. Their product was not cheap, in fact everything carried a risk premium, bumping up the price to compensate the Koreans for any unhappy circumstances that might befall them as a result of their manufacturing policies.

  Very few people from the outside world had been permitted to see the North Korean nuclear facilities, certainly not inside the enormous mountain caverns that housed the plant. But the Hamas General, whom the Koreans swiftly identified as a major customer, had insisted on stringent terms for his acceptance of the product.

  Yes, he would accept the ex-factory terms. As soon as his order left the plant, it became the property, and its journey to a seaport the responsibility, of Hamas. The Koreans would accept no liability for accident.

  General Ravi assumed this meant that if the whole lot accidentally disappeared somewhere on the highway, the Koreans were still owed the money. He told them he would agree only if he and his men watch
ed and supervised the loading, and traveled with the product trans–North Korea to the waiting ship. In the end he accepted that there would be just one Korean driver for the 300-mile journey to the western seaport of Nampo.

  He had been told that North Korea, which is about the size of the state of Mississippi, had a population of 24 million, half of whom lived in Pyongyang. But even after driving halfway across the country, miles upon miles through a deserted, rugged landscape, he had no idea where the others lived. Only occasionally were there small fishing villages clustered to his right, on the shores of the Sea of Japan.

  Ravi had been allowed no insights or prior knowledge before entering the country. There were no photographs or promotional handouts demonstrating the excellence of Korean manufacturing. He was just given a map of the country showing the main towns and roads, and a driver to take him to the factory inside Kwanmo-bong.

  The only other facts the General knew about North Korea were military—that this ridiculous, backward Third World outcast owned the third largest army in the world, with 1.2 million men under arms (as opposed to 650,000 in South Korea). One quarter of Korea’s GDP was spent annually on their Armed Forces and yet their Navy was very modest, their air force large but mostly obsolete.