Massive television screens mounted on the sides of buildings throughout the city played news programmes about the killings through the night, interspersed with the first breaking news about Japan's nuclear test, the sinking of the Peleliu, and the escalating fear of war in East Asia. In a carefully balanced diplomatic act, South Korea condemned the Japanese nuclear test, regretted the sinking of the Peleliu, but urged restraint on all sides. In a private exchange it called on China to condemn North Korea's terrorist campaign in the South. American and South Korean troops guarding the Demilitarized Zone were issued with new body armour. Troops at the heavily fortified Fort Boniface some way back from the DMZ were put on the highest alert.
Just before dawn tens of thousands of North Korean students and trade unionists, in a well-organized demonstration, were chanting across the dividing line of the row of huts on the Panmunjon truce village. Waving flags, they demanded immediate unification with the South. North Korean generals gathered on the balcony of a meeting house only metres from the demarcation line. Just over a kilometre away loudspeakers rigged to a 160 metre high flagpole, the tallest in the world, broadcast anti-American propaganda. The slogans hailed the ideals of the Juche philosophy created by the Communist dictator Kim Il-Sung, who was installed by Stalin after the Second World War and ruled until his death in 1994. In 1950 he invaded the South, and with Chinese help produced a military stalemate with the Americans and Allied forces which was still in place today. Juche meant self-reliance and this philosophy had cut North Koreans off from the rest of the world for more than fifty years. They were controlled as no other people had been before and were told they lived in a paradise. Kim became the Great Leader, a godlike figure, many of whose people were so ignorant that they were not aware that a man had landed on the moon. He bequeathed the mantle of leadership to his erratic and spoilt son, Kim Jong-Il, and it was his message which was now bloodying the streets of South Korea. As a microcosm of the facade of North Korea, the village around the flagpole was uninhabited, although lights in the empty apartment buildings automatically turned on and off in an attempt to trick South Korean peasants into believing in the crumbling regime across the line.
A North Korean armoured personnel carrier drove into the DMZ, blatantly breaking the truce agreement which banned all weapons from the area. American and South Korean troops held their fire. 500 kilometres to the south, outside the port of Pusan, a South Korean merchant ship hit a newly laid North Korean mine and sank. The crew were rescued. Police sealed off universities in the main South Korean cities and arrested students suspected of supporting reunification with the North. For years the security forces had claimed that North Korean agents were infiltrating the universities. Today, stunned by events, no one came forward to mount the usual protests.
In an announcement, the South Korean government claimed that China had condemned North Korea, but there was no confirmation of this from Beijing. The details of the exchanges between the two governments only emerged later, when the complex role that China had played became apparent. During the first two days of the conflict, Seoul's Ambassador to Beijing was told only that China considered chaos on the Korean peninsula an internal affair and that it was friends to both countries. Under no circumstances would it interfere.
Two South Korean Tologorae and four Cosmos class mini-submarines which had left their base on Cheju Island, 60 kilometres south of the peninsula, were now in position in three groups in waters off both the east and west North Korean coasts. Each group was escorted by a larger Chang Bogo Type 209/1200 general-purpose attack submarine. The vessels were built in the Daewoo shipyard based on a German design and several of the thirty-three crewmembers had gone to Germany for training. Like their counterparts in the North, the small submarines were used for coastal infiltration, except these had never been in real action before. Now their mission was to destroy the bases for the North Korean mini-submarines at Cha-ho, Ma Yangdo, and Song Jon Tando, on the east coast, and the smaller base of Sagon-ni on the west coast.
At the first crisis cabinet meeting since the attacks began the American-educated South Korean President Kim Hong-Koo asked bluntly whom his colleagues thought China supported: even the South Koreans, steeped in the shadow-puppetry and nuances of East Asian political life, could not read the signals from Beijing.
`Our policy has always been unification by peaceful means and when the time is right,' said the president. `We have never wanted a German model. The humiliation and loss of face for the North is not suited to our East Asian style of politics. The cost would also be prohibitive. It would damage our economic expansion at a time when our manufacturing base is beginning to compete head-on with the Japanese in the global market. Yet it seems the North is intent on wrecking the status quo. I would like to assume that it has not been encouraged by Beijing. If I am right in thinking that Chinese troops and weapons would not be used against us, it would be impossible for them to win. I would also like to assume that whatever their nuclear capability, either the detonation or the delivery system will not work. I would lastly like to assume that there are people working with Kim Jong-Il who have a degree of common sense.'
`You are assuming a lot, Mr President,' interjected the Defence Minister.
`Yes, I am,' the President replied. `But if I don't, the two Koreas will sink very quickly into an apocalyptic bloodbath of destruction far greater than loss of face and unification. The most immediate task, gentlemen, is to neutralize the special forces troops now operating here and ensure they cannot strike again. We have to believe that if we do the South will not be subject to nuclear attack.'
The last time the President spoke to Makoto Katayama, the Japanese Ambassador, was on Monday evening, when the two had met at the National Gallery. The meeting had not gone well. Katayama wanted to press him for a decision on military intervention in the South China Sea and the President was not prepared to give it. Now Katayama had been summoned to explain why Japan had detonated a 50 kiloton nuclear warhead in the Ogasarawas.
Ambassador Katayama was shown in. He was tall for a Japanese, nearly 2 metres, and he looked older than his fifty-four years. His hair was thinning and he had a gentle stoop which lent a slightly scholarly air to his appearance. Katayama's posting in Washington was near its end. He would be returning to Tokyo in the late spring to take up the position of Administrative Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs at the Gaimusho (Foreign Ministry). It was the most senior job a fast-track official in the Gaimusho like him could aspire to. It would place him at the head of foreign policy development in Japan and it crowned a glittering career which had begun more than thirty years before with a first-class honours degree from the law school of Tokyo University.