Dawkins shivered and sneezed into the sleeve of his dirty gray lab tunic. His nose started running.
The first stage of the Unha-3 used a Nodong engine similar to those deployed on the Pakistani Ghauri-I and Iranian Shahab-3 missiles. It borrowed from the design of the Scud missile engine, but was at least 140 percent larger and featured more finely calibrated nozzles and combustors. Dawkins knew that the Nodong had originally been designed by the Soviets. He was also aware that a man who looked Russian, and who Dawkins suspected was a rocket engineer, appeared to be working in another part of this same underground complex.
He had seen the man once, by mistake apparently, when he emerged from the bathroom with his watchers and assistants while Dawkins was being escorted to his room. They had exchanged quick looks.
The second stage of the Unha-3 was almost identical in design to the old Soviet R-27 ballistic missile deployed in Soviet nuclear subs during the Cold War.
Without even considering the third stage, which was the part Dawkins was charged with working on, he realized three things: One, he was almost certainly in North Korea. Two, he probably knew more about the progress of the North Korean missile program than anyone in Western intelligence. And, three, the North Koreans were close to developing an intercontinental ballistic missile that was capable of hitting the continental United States.
His job was to provide the gyro-stabilized platform (GSP), missile guidance set control (MGSC), and amplifier assembly that would direct the warhead to within feet of its target. The GSP, which was the platform that needed the most work, acted to measure acceleration and velocity and maintain proper flight control. It was stabilized by dual-axis, free-rotor gyros whose rotors were supported on self-generated gas bearings. One gyro helped to stabilize pitch and roll, and the second provided azimuth stabilization.
Dawkins knew all the details of this particular GSP system based on his work on a host of U.S. military rocket systems for UTC Aerospace. He was therefore able to identify the challenges immediately. In this case, this meant generating and regulating the proper gas cushions so the gyros would operate properly during startup.
If he accomplished this, he knew he would be giving the North Koreans the ability to hit targets more than five thousand miles away with pinpoint accuracy. It’s something he absolutely didn’t want to do. But he also desperately wanted to get out of North Korea alive. This was the conundrum that confronted him now as he stood in the cold lab looking at the GSP on the table in front of him. It resembled a large stainless-steel ball with two bands encircling it at perpendicular angles. Each band housed a torque motor and a digital resolver.
Somehow the supposedly backward North Koreans had chosen the perfect engineer for the task. How they had managed to identify Dawkins and snatch him so easily gave him pause. Clearly, these weren’t the bumbling fools spoofed in Western movies and comic books. They were dangerous, ingenious men who also ran very active uranium and plutonium enrichment programs, and therefore in Dawkins’s mind probably had sufficient amounts of weaponized uranium and plutonium to create numerous nuclear weapons.
Dawkins had read published reports about the North Korean nuclear program. He also understood that one of the most difficult challenges in building an ICBM capable of delivering a nuclear weapon was reducing the size of the warhead so it could fit over the guidance system and atop the Unha-3 rocket. He wondered if they had other engineers, like the one he had seen in the hallway, engaged in that task as well.
Of course, there was the Russian. One of Dawkins’s assistants, Pak Ju, referred to him as Dr. Soderov, formerly employed by the Makeev Design Bureau in Moscow, and boasted that Soderov had volunteered to help the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea without remuneration. Whether this was the scientist’s real name, and whether he had worked at the Makeev Design Bureau or not, was impossible for Dawkins to tell.
Clearly there had been a large amount of outside input. In Dawkins’s opinion, the North Korean engineers and technicians he had met weren’t capable of bringing the program to the advanced state it was in now. He concluded this based on the knowledge and capabilities of the North Koreans he’d met, particularly his two assistants-Pak Ju and Yi-Thaek, both of whom spoke some English and were veterans of the program.
Pak Ju was the older and more experienced of the two-a guarded, slow-moving, heavyset man in his late fifties with tiny slits for eyes that he hid behind yellow-tinted, black-rimmed glasses. Yi, Pak Ju’s subordinate in age and rank, had trained as a mathematician. He had a more agreeable manner, stuttered when he spoke, and was thinner, slightly taller, and balding. Dawkins’s third assistant was a guard or minder named Kwon, who stood about five eight, was thickly muscled, and rarely spoke. At least two of these three men accompanied Dawkins everywhere, including to the bathroom.
At the end of each workday Kwon would lock the lab and the three of them would walk him down the hallway, down a flight of stairs and along another dank hall to his quarters, where Sung would be waiting. She prepared his meals, washed his clothes, and attended to his other needs. At night after he fell asleep, she’d leave quietly and lock the door behind her. She returned promptly every morning at seven to help him dress and serve him breakfast.
It was a strange, simple routine, but one that he adjusted to relatively easily. At the end of the first week, Sung dressed in him in a suit-black and badly made-shirt, and hooded parka.
“Think about you family,” Sung whispered before she turned off the electric space heater and pointed outside.
“My family? What do you mean by that?”
Kwon stood waiting in the hallway. The two North Koreans led him to a large freight elevator that lifted them to ground level. It was the first time Dawkins had seen the entrance to the underground complex, which looked unimpressive-a twenty-foot-high concrete structure with large metal doors hidden in a grove of tall pine trees. The air outside was thin and freezing cold. The sun shone weakly through a thick layer of gray clouds.
He sneezed again, and his legs and head felt heavy as he walked beside Sung along a dirt path that ended at what appeared to be a very large body of water with islands in the distance shrouded in mist. Ice covered the rocks along the shore.
As he shivered, he remembered that today was Karen’s ninth birthday. After muttering a prayer to her under his breath, he sighed. He wanted her to be proud of him, and sensed that whatever he did or didn’t do here would greatly affect her future.
“Very peaceful, Mr. Dawkin,” Sung said, lingering at his side. He had asked her to call him James.
“In the spring and fall the cranes come. They are sacred.”
“Sacred? Are you sure you’re using the correct word?”
“A thousand of cranes appeared when our Supreme Leader’s father died four years ago. They tried to carry him to heaven, but the people cried and despaired so much that the Supreme Leader’s father returned.”
Dawkins assumed she was talking about Kim Jong-il, who had died of a heart attack in December 2011. “Where is he now?” he asked.
“Living in special palace in Pyongyang.”
“Do people see him?”
She didn’t answer. He wanted to believe that Sung was a sensible woman, but this kind of talk troubled him. Changing the subject, he said, “I assume we’re on an island. Is that correct?”
Sung turned slightly to glance back at Kwon. When she saw that Kwon wasn’t looking, she nodded. It was a very slight gesture of independence, he thought.