James Barrington - Foxbat

18th September 2003

Pyongyang, North Korea

‘Can we accomplish this?’

The question was uttered softly, barely above a sibilant whisper, by the short man sitting in a large padded chair at the head, but it fell across the long conference table like a sudden dark shadow on a sunny day. There was no response from any of the six men sitting near him along the sides of the table, all wearing almost identical light-coloured Mao-style jackets. Instead they swivelled slightly in their seats to stare at an eighth man in a chair set apart at the other end.

He was slightly younger than the others but, despite the similarity in dress, his physical separation from them marked him out as a supplicant. For a few moments he didn’t reply, but stared down at the papers laid out on the table in front of him.

‘We have a very narrow window of opportunity,’ he said eventually, ‘but the crucial factor is that we will only get this one chance. If the Americans do succeed in perfecting the new technology they have announced, we will never be able to risk such a venture again.’

‘That was not the question I asked you, Pak Je-San. Kindly confine yourself to matters of fact. I myself will decide on strategy.’

Pak flushed slightly. ‘I’m sorry, sir. Yes, I believe we can achieve this.’

‘Pak is, I suggest, being over-optimistic, and he seems strangely ill-informed about certain aspects of our technological development.’ The speaker – Kim Yong-Su – was sitting right next to the man at the head of the table. ‘In particular, he appears to be unaware that our nuclear devices are at present much too large to comprise the payload of the Taep’o-dong 2 missile. So how, then, does he intend to make our demands sound credible to the Americans?’

Seven impassive faces stared down the length of the table.

‘We do not need to mount a weapon on a missile,’ Pak Je-San explained quickly. ‘We only need to convince the Americans that we have the ability to do so. Securing their belief in that will be sufficient for our purposes.’

‘And how do you propose to achieve this?’ Kim demanded. ‘Simply telling them so will not be enough. And, as you appear to be planning some kind of deception operation, don’t forget their satellites are overflying us constantly. Their technical intelligence specialists will be scrutinizing all the images they obtain.’

‘I’m counting on that, Comrade Kim,’ Pak replied.

‘Explain,’ hissed the man at the head of the table.

That didn’t take long. Pak had rehearsed his presentation more than a dozen times, and had pared it down to the bare minimum necessary to explain precisely what his scheme entailed.

When he’d finished, Kim Yong-Su was the first to speak. ‘If I understand you correctly, Pak, you propose to spend several million dollars and use almost all of our plutonium supplies to achieve this… this conjuring trick you’ve devised.’

‘But if it works,’ Pak replied, ‘I believe it would be well worth it.’

‘I agree.’ Again the words were barely more than a whisper.

‘But there’s another aspect you seem to have forgotten.’ Kim Yong-Su wasn’t prepared to let Pak Je-San off the hook so easily. The younger man was the head of Central Committee Bureau 39, the North Korean government department responsible for coordinating the production of hard drugs within the country, and also the associated smuggling network. But his background was military, and he’d reached the rank of tab-ryong – full colonel in the army – before being transferred to Bureau 39.

‘Suppose this scheme of yours actually works,’ Kim said. ‘Suppose you do manage to make the Americans believe what you want them to. How do you think they’ll react?’

‘They’ll probably try to apply diplomatic pressure, and if that doesn’t work they might consider a military option.’

‘I don’t think the words “might consider” are accurate in this situation, Pak. They have ICBMs in silos all over America that can easily reach this country. They have cruise missiles on their warships and submarines that can carry out what they call surgical strikes. They have aircraft based on Guam that could carpet-bomb the entire peninsula. They could destroy all of our missile pads before we could launch a single weapon.’

Pak had expected opposition to his plan, but he hadn’t anticipated the direction from which it was coming. He’d thought his biggest job would be convincing the leader himself: yet that individual had seemed to favour the plan from the first, whereas now Kim Yong-Su appeared most opposed to it.

Kim was the Deputy General Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea and Deputy Chairman of the DPRK National Defence Commission – effectively second-in-command of the whole country – and a man who quite literally held the power of life and death over almost every citizen of North Korea. Pak had once witnessed him use that power, and the experience had frightened him all the more for the quiet, casual, almost indifferent manner Kim had adopted for its implementation.

‘I think the Americans would tread carefully, Comrade Kim, for several reasons,’ Pak suggested. ‘If convinced by our demonstration, they will hesitate to attack us directly for fear of retaliation. They are cowards underneath, and the possibility that we could visit upon America a level of devastation far worse than they inflicted on Iraq might be enough to deter them. If we can thus eliminate American support, our armed forces could easily crush and obliterate the armies of South Korea on the battlefield, but it probably wouldn’t ever come to that.

‘We know – more importantly, they know – that we can flatten Seoul using conventional munitions fired from weapons we already have in place. Almost half the population of the South live in and around the capital city. I believe the threat of a massive bombardment causing huge loss of life, plus our ability to deploy chemical and biological weapons, would soon convince Seoul that opposition is futile – especially with no American cavalry riding to the rescue.’

Pak was pleased with this analogy, and was sure it would appeal to the leader, who was known to have a fondness for old-style American movies.

‘And what about their bombers and missiles if the Americans decide not to react as you expect?’

‘The bombers would be more of a problem,’ Pak conceded, ‘since our Air Force does not currently possess modern air-superiority fighters. But we do have adequate surface-to-air missile systems to defend our principal sites, and I don’t think they would attempt a first strike using nuclear weapons, for fear of offending our Chinese friends. But I have another suggestion that might address your concerns on both counts. And I also have a proposal that would permanently remove any possibility of Seoul interfering with our plan.’

All seven men listened attentively as Pak outlined the second part of the strategy he’d spent the last month devising. When he finished speaking, even Kim Yong-Su seemed stunned, so Pak wondered if he’d overreached himself. But the man heading the table appeared unfazed by the sheer enormity of Pak’s suggested course of action. Instead, he seemed concerned only with the details of the scheme.

‘You’ve proposed a tight schedule, Pak. Can you guarantee your agents would manage to obtain the assets you require by the time we’d need to make our final decision? And what about the funding?’