Jeno had been vague, and Pak, after he'd heard my account, hadn't gone beyond saying I should make the contact but not get myself killed in the process. I didn't think either of those explanations would be edifying.
"When a general asks a question, a general expects an answer. You must have learned that somewhere along the way. If it will do any good, I can repeat myself. This facility is off-limits. Very, strictly, completely, totally off-limits."
"That's why it was selected, one presumes."
"I'd be jeopardizing my men, not to mention myself, if I let someone visit here for purposes I didn't understand and that were never adequately explained. I'm not interested in what you presume. What do you know?"
"The contents of that note weren't enough?" I thought I felt one of the winds Pak had warned me about starting to blow across the open ground.
"That note isn't your business."
I didn't have any instructions or explanations on how to keep this going any further than I'd taken it. All I could say was what popped into my head. "Maybe no one need know about the visitor or the visit."
He shook his head. "Don't be a fool, Inspector. My men are loyal, but only up to a point. People can't simply materialize inside this compound. You and your visitor will have to go through the gate, past the guards. Even if they let you in, word will leak out quickly. Do you think the guard with the dull eyes doesn't see everything around him? People check and double-check. The political officers come through and ask questions. On occasion, the field telephones even work all the way out here." If there was a straight "no" in there, I didn't hear it.
"What if we came up with a story?"
"We?"
"General, this is important. Think of it as a hinge. A door won't open without a hinge." It wasn't a bad image, considering I had no idea what we were talking about.
"You're one of O Chang-yun's grandsons, aren't you?" If he had hit me on the back of the head, I wouldn't have been more surprised. It didn't come out of nowhere, though. We'd never met, he didn't know I was coming to visit, but somehow he had that piece of information, and he must have been waiting the whole time for the right moment to slip it in.
"Yes," I said simply. It wouldn't have done any good to ask him how he knew.
Now it was his turn to remain silent. He stared at me, but I wouldn't have called it a dumb stare.
It was now or never. "Show me around; we can talk."
"You inherited his guts, but not his brains. Alright, we'll walk. You talk, I'll listen." He straightened his tunic and patted his pistol. "And I'd better like what I hear."
We passed through an inner fence line. There wasn't any guard at the gate, but a soldier stood a few meters away with his back to us, looking out across the fields with binoculars. He didn't turn around to salute, though he must have heard the crack as I broke the ice that had formed over the puddles on the path. I saw him twist the focus wheel; it was obvious he couldn't see a thing.
"This is where the simpler components were assembled." The general had decided that he would do the talking after all. Maybe he'd had time to digest what was in the note. "Most of the important work was done underground, inside those hills"-he waved in the direction of the first line of mountains that rose a few hundred meters away-"but some of it was done above ground, in these buildings. Don't ask me why. I don't plan these things. I don't construct them, either."
We walked another fifty or sixty meters over broken ground, littered with debris. The general pointed at a building several stories high, with all but a few windows broken. It was hard to imagine how that could happen. Who would break windows on such a secure site? "The place is unseated, and the roof leaks," he said. "In summer, the humidity drips from the walls. Anything copper has been stripped out; everything metal is rusting; all the wood has already rotted." We stepped through a door hanging from one hinge into a huge, dark room. He knocked on the wood. "Is this the sort of door you meant?"
I could smell acid and mold. A control panel sat against one wall-the covers on the gauges were cracked and water had seeped in, though it didn't much matter because the dials had fallen off. "They're frozen, as you can see, but there is nothing to worry about. The gauges have nothing to record." He led the way into a narrow, low-roofed, U-shaped passageway that led into another room, probably fifteen meters high and nearly twice as long, with two half-dismantled storage tanks lying on their sides.
"Is there another way out of this room?" I looked around. Sometimes I get nervous for no reason in dark, unfamiliar places.
"Only through those hatches on the floor."
"Leading where?"
"These were the waste tanks used for the chemicals that treated certain components. At the bottom of each tank is one of those discharge hatches."
"Big enough for a person?"
"A person? Not normally, they're pretty narrow. It would have to be a very skinny person." He shrugged. "Not normally, but these days, yes." I hadn't expected irony from him. "You need to see anything else?"
I followed him outside.
"That pair of buildings, over there." We had crossed a small field down to a point near the river. "They look interesting. Why are they so close to the water?"
The general shrugged. "Good for discharging chemicals, I guess."
"What's in front of the shorter one? From here I'd say it looks like a band saw."
"It will look the same when you get closer, because that's what it is."
"To cut metal?"
"No, to cut wood. You'd be surprised what went into these missiles."
Missiles, he said. What else did I expect?
We turned a corner and walked down a path lined with shivering, mangy poplars. Most of them were less than two meters tall, and more than a few of them had been stripped of most of their branches. "This may be the closest thing to a forest in the province. These trees would be gone in a day if I opened the gates. As it is, I have to make sure none of my men accidentally knocks one over. Because after that, they will accidentally sell the wood on the outside."
We came to another pair of buildings on either side of the path, both four stories high. They were joined by a trestle bridge that looked like it had been used to move small, narrow carts between the upper floors. Scattered on the ground in front of us were rusted steel beams.
"These were the assembly buildings. The one on the right is a complete wreck. When I got here last year, it was already in this state."
"And the other one?"
"Only a partial wreck."
"Does anything still function here?"
"That's not my concern. If it's inside the fence line, I guard it."
"I suppose the vegetables are worth something." I walked over to a small plot that showed signs of having been cultivated a few months ago. The rows were uneven and the soil was rocky. "I don't think they got much of a harvest, though."
"Did you need to see anything else? Or have we exhausted your curiosity?" The general stopped to retrieve something from under one of the steel bars. He held it up for me to see. "Cigarette butt."
"I recognize the species."
"My men don't smoke these."
"Cigarettes?"
"Not these." He sniffed it. "French. Agitates."
"If you say so. I never smoked a French cigarette, so I'll take your word for it." I'd also never run across a cigarette butt that still smelled after sitting most of the winter in the snow, but there was no use pointing that out to a general. Besides, what a French cigarette was doing in his compound was his business.
He put the cigarette butt in his pocket and then reached for his pistol. "I'm going to escort you back to the hut, Inspector. It will look better if we don't seem to have become fast friends."
"Have we?"
"Put it this way: When you finally walk out of here, my men should not see you again."
Back in the hut, the general pulled off his gloves and threw them on the table. The last portion of food was gone.