But nothing much was going on in the pit, so she began scanning to the south; the small city of Chongju was here, a few kilometers from the site itself, and she always liked to take a look at the train station and the freight storage lots nearby to see if it looked like there was any new industrial or commercial activity anywhere in the town that might relate to the mine.
This morning she saw something immediately. That’s odd, she said to herself. Sixteen rectangles were lined up in a parking lot next to the one low and squat hotel near the train station. She never would have noticed the anomaly in the middle of the town if not for the fact she’d spent something in the neighborhood of two hundred hours looking at images of Chongju a year earlier, and her mind was programmed to burn images into it — she knew the layout of the town even now — certainly not every building, as there were hundreds, but the main clusters of development. These rectangles hadn’t been there even last month. She would pull up the older images to double-check, but she was too sure of herself and too curious to do that now.
She knew what the rectangles were, because they were a common sight at mines and construction locations. They were portable buildings, like those used for temporary site offices or modular temp housing. Laid out as they were here, in neat rows lined up alongside the one hotel in the city and the train station, she knew this was housing brought in by the government for nonresident workers.
She could tell these were housing structures also because she saw a cluster of small outbuildings around an open-pit fire, and recognized it as a crude food-preparation facility.
Sixteen temporary buildings like these could house, Annette knew, a hundred fifty or more workers. But workers for what? There were a few factories in Chongju, but nothing that large. The only heavy industry around here was the mine.
She scanned back up to the mine. There was no major operation going on there, neither digging on the mine nor construction on other structures around it. She looked all over the city again, hunting for any signs that some new building or massive new statue of the Dae Wonsu was going up. When that turned up nothing, she scanned the roads around the town, and then the railroad tracks, trying her best to find any new project that would employ one hundred fifty workers.
It took her an hour to do this, but at the end of that hour, she had nothing to show for it.
But Annette Brawley had learned to be dogged and driven in the Army, and she had learned the nuances of her craft in intelligence school. She knew she was onto something, so she kept at it.
In a country like North Korea, where a lot of military activity takes place underground to stay hidden from satellites, she began to suspect she had uncovered something to do with the missile industry. The Sohae Satellite Launching Station was on a small peninsula jutting out into Korea Bay just twenty-five miles to the southwest; just maybe there was an underground secret project going on all the way over here.
It didn’t track with anything she knew about how the North Koreans operated, but she decided she’d talk to her colleagues in her analytical group who spent their days fixated on Sohae and get their take on it.
She was just about to break for lunch, a little frustrated that she felt like she’d wasted two hours on a futile hunt, when a thought occurred to her. There was a hydroelectric dam west of the Chongju mine, probably no more than ten minutes’ drive on the paved roads in the area. It was an hour away from where the temp housing was located, but still she wondered if perhaps the guest workers were doing some refurbishing on the dam there.
She had to pull away from the enlarged image on her monitor to find the general area of the dam, and then she zoomed back in. She scanned along the dam, looked for any sign work was going on, but again she found nothing.
Shit. It was the last large structure in the area she could recall.
Without thinking she moved the image around to the left and the right, tracing around the banks of the reservoir created by the hydroelectric dam. There was a tiny village of square buildings on the north bank of the reservoir, and then she panned left to the west bank, on the far side of the water from the dam.
She stopped panning and leaned her face halfway to her monitor.
“What the hell is that?”
A series of long metal roofs ran on either side of some sort of raised track. On the eastern side of the roofs were a series of circular structures. Annette thought they looked like some sort of tanks. She counted twenty-six individual structures in the entire complex, and several vehicles were parked nearby.
“No… freakin’… way.”
She thought she knew what she was looking at, but to be certain she spun in her chair to the monitor on her right, typed something in a Google search, and then pulled up an image. This was the LAMP site in Malaysia. LAMP stood for Lynas Advanced Materials Plant; it was a rare earth mineral refinery owned by the Australian mining company Lynas.
She looked back to the location near the reservoir in the mountains of North Korea.
And then back to LAMP.
The two sites were virtually identical.
“What are you doing out there in the middle of nowhere?” she asked aloud.
She typed something on her keyboard and her third monitor displayed schematics of a typical rare earth refinery. Within a minute she had identified the round tanks as part of a rare earth oxide separation unit.
That confirmed it for her. North Korea was back in the rare earth mining game, and in a big way. They were cutting the Chinese out, even from the processing stage of the equation.
That would require high-tech equipment and massive amounts of expertise and skilled labor.
And Annette didn’t think for one second that the North Koreans were doing this on their own.
Annette Brawley had worked through lunch, running down to one of the two cafeterias in the atrium only to grab a banana and a bag of animal crackers. She ate while she worked, compiling her astonishing findings and creating a quick but impactful PowerPoint presentation.
In Army intelligence her main weapon had been the PowerPoint slide show. It garnered a lot of insults from the soldiers devoted to combat operations, and rightly so, she admitted. She wasn’t a shooter or a door kicker, she was an intel geek. But even though the door kickers she presented her slide shows to sometimes rolled their eyes, she took solace in the fact she’d done her best, and her best had helped the troops in harm’s way.
Annette’s superior at NGA was a Marine colonel named Mike Peters. He was younger than Annette by a few years and she found him roguishly handsome, and even though sometimes she felt he deferred unfairly to her colleagues in the armed services at the expense of his civilian employees, he did seem to appreciate Annette for her hard work and the lack of drama she brought to the workplace as compared with some of her younger colleagues, both in uniform and out.
She rapped on the door to his office at three-thirty in the afternoon. She’d checked his online agenda and saw he had a half-hour till his next appointment.
Peters looked up from his paperwork. “Hey, Brawley. What’s up?”
“I’ve got something good. You have ten minutes?”
“Got more than that. There’s a meeting on five at sixteen hundred, but I’m yours till then.”
If only, she thought.
She pulled up her PowerPoint on his computer and sent it to a monitor on the far wall of his office. They went through it together over the next ten minutes; she showed her boss the temporary housing in Chongju near the hotel, new cars parked throughout the town, and then finally the processing plant near the dam north of Chongju.