Puzzled, Kary answered, “Yes, Colonel, as my orderly.” It was the standard story that avoided lengthy explanations. Cho was more intrigued than confused by Gyo’s behavior, although he still felt a little edgy around ROK intelligence types.
“Then we’d like to ask him a few more questions about ‘Private Chun.’ You may remain, if you like.”
Kary did, and for several minutes the two intelligence officers quizzed Cho about how he’d first noticed the impersonator, and exactly what had led him to suspect the man wasn’t really a private.
Cho did his best to keep his answers short and specific. The sooner the interview was over and they were done, the better. That also matched his persona as a noncom being questioned by two intelligence officers. But he could tell Kary was curious. Finally, she couldn’t stand it.
“Please tell me what you’ve found out. Whoever Chun really is, he’s a resident of the camp, so he’s also my responsibility,” she argued.
Lieutenant Hak could only look to the colonel, who shrugged. “That’s true enough. You’ll find out through channels eventually. His real name is Ga Seung-ho. He’s a civilian, and an expert in ballistic missiles. He was being escorted by three Light Infantry special forces soldiers from a safe house near Pyongyang to somewhere in the north, probably in the area the regime holdouts are occupying.”
Cho was surprised, but managed to remain silent. Kary looked over at her “orderly” and said, “Well done, Sergeant!”
“We’d barely started to question Ga when he broke down completely. He told us who he really was, where he’d been hiding, about the special operators that were escorting him north, everything. The vehicle they were riding in was attacked from the air, and his escorts were killed or wounded. He was on the road for about two days after that before our scouts collected him.”
Ban added, “The uniform was his escorts’ idea, to make him less conspicuous. He wants nothing to do with the Kim faction or any other part of the DPRK. He tried to pass himself off as a regular soldier because he was afraid of being imprisoned and tortured by our intelligence people. Once he understood we weren’t going to put him on the rack, he was willing to tell us everything he knew.”
“Except where he was headed,” the colonel interrupted. “The only person who knew their final destination was the officer in charge of the escort detail, and he was killed in the air attack. Not that Ga wanted to go there. He immediately headed south, and surrendered to the first ROK soldiers he could find.”
The colonel was almost jovial. “We’ve already sent word to Second Operations Command headquarters and they are on their way here now, to question him further. Even if he doesn’t know exactly where he was going, they’ll try to gather what clues they can — offhand remarks by his escorts, any maps he may have seen, even how much gas was in the vehicle. Getting answers from him has the highest priority possible.”
Kary asked, “A missile expert can probably tell you a lot, but how will it help? The Kim holdouts are already launching missiles. I was watching the news about that attack on Guam earlier today.”
“His specialty is guidance systems,” Colonel Gyo explained. “He’d been trained in both Russia and China. Their missiles haven’t been very accurate so far, and he was told that it would be his task to make them more accurate. It sounds like he knew how to do it, too.”
“And then they’d launch a lot more missiles,” Kary concluded.
Gyo nodded. “Yes, exactly. Your orderly may have saved many lives. Now if we can just find out where they were taking Ga, we’ll know where to look for the missiles themselves. Then we can end this once and for all.”
Suddenly the target of everyone’s gaze, Cho tried to find somewhere to look. Kary was smiling proudly. Gyo and Ban were grinning at him as well. Cho suspected it was not only at the thought of frustrating the holdouts’ plans, but at the praise they’d receive for discovering the missile expert.
But they were all missing something. The other three hadn’t done the math properly. Once the holdouts realized that their expert was a no-show, they might just start lobbing their missiles anyway, and to hell with accuracy. Chemical warheads didn’t need to be very accurate. Neither did nuclear weapons.
He could have simply nodded and accepted the credit, but he couldn’t remain silent. Not any more. “Colonel, I might be able to help with that problem.”
Cho had a small audience now. After his revelation, Colonel Gyo had organized a meal while they waited for the representatives from Second Operations Command. They included the deputy commander, a two-star general, as well as military intelligence people and two civilians who simply gave their names as “Park.” Given that Park was the one of the most common surnames in Korea, they might as well have given no name at all, but not giving a name would have been considered very rude.
Kary had insisted on staying with Cho, first asking politely, then pulling rank and insisting that she be party to any interrogations. Naturally distrustful of the military, she was doubly suspicious of anyone involved with espionage or counterintelligence. What she had learned from Cho only reinforced her impression.
After the Second Operations Command officers arrived, it had taken some time, and a few phone calls, to explain Cho’s exact status and his wearing of a Republic of Korea Army sergeant’s uniform. The general was quite unhappy, and was almost ready to arrest Cho for the offense, but the intelligence people were more philosophical.
In the end, Cho Ho-jin found himself facing a division commander, the command’s deputy commander, their intelligence staffs, and other unnamed intelligence types. Kary, wearing civilian clothes, was a splash of bright color on one end of a wall of camouflage battledress. For someone who’d spent his life avoiding attention, it was near torture.
Cho drew strength from Kary’s presence. By nature and profession, he was a private person, his life a closed book that was never meant to be read. But they needed to know what he knew, and that they could trust that what he said was true.
“I was eight when my father was killed. I still remember clearly the house we lived in. It was on Taesong Lake, a little outside Pyongyang. It sat on a hill facing the lake, and I didn’t understand until later how luxurious it was. We had plenty to eat, and I even had toys.
“My father was often gone, and I had no brothers or sisters, but my mother had servants, and a military orderly that I played with. I was spoiled and told that because of our family, I could look forward to a life of privilege and accomplishment, in return for our absolute loyalty to the Kims.
“When the last war began, I remember my mother worrying about my father, as all women worry about their men when they go off to war. Although he’d be away from the fighting, any headquarters was a valuable target, so it was not unjustified. As far as I know, she never imagined that his own leaders would kill him.
“We didn’t get a lot of news about the fighting while it was going on. Even I was old enough to recognize that we weren’t being told the truth about what was happening, but my mother justified it, because of security, she said. Spies were everywhere.” Cho smiled at the irony, but there was no humor in his expression.
“The first time we knew the war was over, or that the war was lost, was when they came for us. It was late morning, and an officer pounded on our door. When my mother opened it, the man loudly read a proclamation that my father had committed treason, betrayed the state, and paid for his crimes with his life.
“They almost dragged the two of us into a waiting car. My mother was in tears, but neither the officer nor the driver would answer her questions. We were driven to a small village northwest of the capital, and almost dumped in front of an empty house. The officer informed us that if either of us were ever discovered outside the village, we would be shot. He took the time to read the proclamation aloud again, so that the citizens of the village would be ‘properly warned,’ and then drove off.