Fascione’s jaw tightened. For a moment, he looked his age. “We may be facing the most dangerous situation on the Korean Peninsula since the last war.” He stood up. “Only this time, those sons of bitches in Pyongyang have nukes. So we have to get this right.”
Pavel Ramonovich Telitsyn read the morning worldwide intelligence summary with great interest and concern. Initial reports indicated that something very wrong had occurred in North Korea, but they contained almost nothing beyond vague references to fighting on the outskirts of the capital, and the complete lack of national level broadcasting. He sighed. It was useless. As the Asian Department chief for Directorate S of the Foreign Intelligence Service, he knew his superiors were going to be demanding more. And soon.
He was right.
Deputy Director Alexei Fedorovich Malikov arrived in Telitsyn’s office fifteen minutes later. He looked agitated and worried.
“Good morning, sir,” greeted Telitsyn. “Please, sit down. May I offer you a cup of fresh tea?”
“You may,” Malikov nodded, glowering. “I could use something fit to drink. That lukewarm bilge water they serve in the main conference room is hardly satisfying.”
Telitsyn fought down a laugh. His superior’s naval past tended to slip out whenever he was annoyed. “I take it the morning staff meeting was more arduous than normal,” Telitsyn observed.
“That, my dear Pavel, would be a gross understatement.”
“North Korea?”
“Of course!” Malikov snapped. “What else could it be?” The deputy director took the tea offered him by the younger man. He sighed. “I’m sure you saw that pathetic report from our embassy in Pyongyang?”
“Yes, sir,” Telitsyn replied. Shrugging, he added, “It was lacking in depth and specifics.”
“Polite, Pavel. Very polite. It was a worthless piece of shit!” Malikov said bluntly. “We need reliable information on exactly what the devil is happening there. The president and the premier are deeply concerned. Which means the director is seriously disturbed, and that means I’m greatly troubled. Which means you should be practically pissing in your pants.”
Telitsyn waited patiently. The deputy director might be bad-tempered, especially after a night spent reliving old memories with former shipmates and a bottle of vodka apiece, but he was no fool.
“Very well,” Malikov said finally. He eyed his subordinate. “Do you still have that pet North Korean on a leash?”
“Cho Ho-jin? Yes, he is still operational,” Telitsyn answered hesitantly. He was not sure he liked where this was going. Cho was one of his best deep-cover agents — an agent Telitysn had groomed ever since the renegade North Korean stumbled into Vladivostok as a starving teenager more than twenty years before. Ruthless, cunning, and highly intelligent, Cho was too useful to risk lightly.
“Well?”
“He’s done very good work for us recently,” Telitsyn said. “His reports on those new North Korean missile silos near the frontier were most informative—”
“And you don’t want me or some other damned bureaucratic fool interfering with him, eh?”
There was no way to answer that question honestly, Telitsyn knew. Not and keep his post.
Malikov nodded, as though he’d read his subordinate’s mind. “Unfortunately, your wishes do not count in this matter, Pavel Ramonovich. Nor do mine, frankly. Our masters want accurate answers from inside North Korea. Our task is to supply those answers. Understand?”
Slowly, reluctantly, Telitsyn nodded.
“Good! Then contact this agent of yours. Tell him to get his skinny yellow ass to Pyongyang and find out what the hell is going on.”
Chapter 3 — Plunge
Chris Sawyer kept the CNN news channel on while he worked, although he’d muted the sound as soon as he was sure the anchors weren’t saying anything new. The satellite photo the networks were all showing didn’t need much in the way of explanation.
What had once been a building the size of a city block was now a huge mound of broken concrete and twisted steel. Any disaster on that scale would have made the news. But what had all the news anchors and talking heads in a lather was that this building had been identified as part of the massive Korean Workers’ Party office complex in Pyongyang, North Korea.
With all of the DPRK’s official media off the air, speculation that had first focused on sinkholes or shoddy construction was now shifting quickly to more ominous and sinister causes for the apparent implosion. Before he’d hit the mute button, they were also zeroing in on the possible significance of this catastrophe, as it occurred on August 15.
As the CIA’s senior analyst for North Korea, Sawyer knew the talking heads were right. That pile of rubble had been the Party Banquet Hall, used for formal dinners and celebrations by the North’s ruling political and military elite. And August 15, Liberation Day, was a national day of celebration set aside for parades, pomp, and parties to commemorate the end of Japan’s decades-long occupation of Korea.
He also knew a few other things he fervently hoped would not appear on CNN or the other channels. Leak investigations were always hell. And the last thing he needed right now was to have his team wired up to polygraph machines and cross-examined.
He stared again at the image of the ruined building plastered across the screen.
A network of tunnels ran under Pyongyang, connecting Kim Jong-un’s offices and residence with other official buildings. Extending for dozens of miles, it included escape routes out of the city and a lavishly appointed underground bunker, a refuge against air attack. Many of the tunnels had been bored through solid rock to a depth of three hundred meters, and they were wide enough for cars and other vehicles to use. In peacetime, they provided passage for Kim and other members of the regime to move about in secrecy and safety.
The fact that these tunnels existed was public knowledge, but Sawyer and his people, by piecing together overhead imagery, defector reports, and other information, believed they had about two-thirds of the network mapped. If the US ever went to war with North Korea, the air force would suddenly find a few dozen new targets added to its bombing list: innocuous-looking buildings or subway stations that were the entrances and exits to Kim’s secret labyrinth.
And one of those tunnels ran right under the Korean Workers’ Party office complex. From defector reports, Sawyer and his team knew that the banquet hall itself ran deep underground, with multiple basements filled with kitchens, storage areas, and air raid shelters. Analysts also believed that a set of internal high-speed elevators connected the building with the deeper tunnel system. It was an obvious destination for Kim’s private transportation system.
So what had caused a massive steel-and-concrete structure to collapse in a matter of seconds?
Sawyer was convinced that it had to be a bomb — a very big one. He’d had weapon effects experts from the agency examine all the available images, both the commercial ones shown by the networks and the more detailed photos taken by US spy satellites. Their reports showed that the lowest point in the rubble matched the estimated location of those elevators. They also argued that only an explosion that completely destroyed some of the hidden underground basements could account for so much damage to the banquet hall itself.