Jonah held his breath as he broke the seal of his mask, slipping his sleeve in to rub away some of the condensation that had been collecting on the clear plastic. At least a facility with bad atmosphere wasn’t as dangerous as cave diving, where you were either breathing or drowning. Even if his tank ran dry, he could probably still drop it and make a run for the Scorpion before the poison set in. What did the old timers used to say about gear malfunctioning during a dive? Oh yeah—don’t stress about it; you have the rest of your life to fix it.
He slipped the mask back on, then raised his leg and cocked back a kick. His foot slammed into the locked door, hinges rattling. He aimed a second kick, using just enough force to crack the low-grade concrete and allow the rusting steel door to swing open with an eerie creak. Sun-Hi winced at the sudden noise, casting a worried look over her shoulder towards the sneaker-wearing dead man, lest the sound wake him. Light from the corridor fell on rows of long tables, each layered with digital cameras, computers, and drafting paper surrounding boxes of partially-disassembled military technology. The sheer scope of the collection was immense. Gear ranging from body armor to missile avionics, even shredded chunks of stealthy composite skin from an American helicopter, was stacked in rows of boxes. Jonah walked up to the box on the nearest table and reached inside to pick up a flame-licked, partially disassembled pair of four-optic panoramic, night-vision goggles.
Alexis came in from the corridor, peeking through the broken steel door for a moment before joining Jonah at Sun-Hi’s side. “What’d you find?” she asked, eyes poring over the military gear.
“It’s mostly American,” said Jonah, sweeping his hand over the collection. “A smattering of EU and Russian tech, too.”
“I’ve read about insurgents paying for pharmaceuticals in arms and captured gear,” said Alexis. “Never figured I’d actually see it with my own eyes.”
“Looks like the North Koreans are in the business of reverse engineering and selling specs. Not that they have a hope in hell of manufacturing much of it for themselves.”
The engineer shivered from behind her thick mask. “This place gives me the creeps. It isn’t like any naval base I’ve ever been on. And I’m not even talking about all the dead guys.”
“I don’t think this has been a naval base for decades,” said Jonah. “It’s an Office 39 facility — an outfit that spits out counterfeit currency and drugs, launders money, and deals arms. North Korea is desperately poor and economically blockaded to the gills. Ever wonder how Kim Jongun’s wife gets a two thousand dollar Dior handbag while her husband drinks Hennessy and shoots hoops with Dennis Rodman? This facility pays for it all. His Fendi yacht to boot.”
“So much for the sanctions.” Alexis scanned the room. “We’re walking through their slush fund and retirement plan, all in one.”
Sun-Hi pointed up at the ceiling. “So many wires!” she said, pointing to the thick black bundles as they traced their way across the low concrete ceiling towards a small back room.
“That looks like coax cable,” said Alexis. “Every camera feed in the facility probably leads through here.” She and Jonah followed the cables with their flashlights as they approached the doorway to a small office. They slipped through the unlocked wooden door to find another body, this time, an older North Korean man in an olive-drab coat and oversized military visor cap. He was slumped face-down over his internal surveillance computer workstation, as though sleeping. The entire wall behind the dead man was taken up by ceiling-high servers and a massive regional map, which marked the location of the Office 39 base, as well as nearby barracks, airstrips, military depots, and fixed artillery.
“He’s a general.” Jonah reached out to lightly brush the three silver stars on the man’s collar with his fingertips. “Maybe head honcho of this facility?”
“Look!” said Sun-Hi, pointing to the corpse’s bare legs behind the metal desk. The dead man was missing his pants. Alexis just silently nodded towards the nearest vent where the general had unsuccessfully attempted to plug the duct with his uniform trousers. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway — the entire facility was saturated with carbon monoxide.
“Remind me to die with my pants on,” grunted Jonah. He grabbed the general by the back of the collar and pulled his rolling chair out from behind the desk, and then tipped the body onto the concrete floor. He took the chair for himself, saddling up to the computer workstation.
Alexis tapped her watch. “Captain — we’re overdue.”
“The Scorpion isn’t leaving without us. The Japanese are expecting us back soon, and we’ll need to give them something concrete. After all, what’s the one rule of attending a fancy Texan barbeque?”
“Never arrive empty-handed,” grinned Alexis, flipping on the small office light. Jonah booted up the system and was rewarded with a scrolling startup screen in Korean characters. The dedicated surveillance system churned through an automatic internal diagnostic, beginning with a yellow-blinking status map of the immense facility.
It was bigger than Jonah had anticipated — the section with the submarine slipway was only one floor of the hive-like complex; beneath them, level after level of storage, research, and production facilities reached hundreds of feet further into the bedrock below. Internal security camera feeds began to flip by with increasing speed, images of counterfeit pharma, narcotics, crates of fake Japanese cigarettes, and a veritable underground warehouse of small arms and military explosives — and dozens upon dozens of dead men awkwardly juxtaposed against aging propaganda posters of smiling children and bountiful harvests.
“Did you see that?” asked Alexis as an image of a collapsed tunnel-like entrance flashed into view for an instant, the wide subterranean roadway completely sealed by fallen rock. Jonah paused the feed, spotting a cluster of ventilation pipes sheered by the force of the ceiling as it fell.
“These bases are designed to seal off and function autonomously in wartime,” said Jonah, pointing to the facility layout. “Something detonated the explosives at the entrance, but they also wrecked the exhaust pipes and eventually filled the entire facility with carbon monoxide from the diesel generators here, on the lowest level.”
“Why wouldn’t they divert the exhaust? Or simply turn off the generators?” asked Alexis in complete confusion.
“That I can’t answer,” said Jonah. “Something is deeply fucked down here. Sun-Hi — can you use a computer?”
“Yes! I love computer! Minecraft, Zoo Tycoon!”
Jonah was taken aback for a moment. He’d heard about the North Korean digital black market, Chinese laptops, and cell phones, USB drives full of soap operas and foreign music. Apparently the electronic distribution network went a lot deeper than he’d expected. He gave Sun-Hi the chair. “Grab everything — every recorded video feed, every document, every photo, activity log, anything that could tell us what happened here. The Japanese can piece it together later for themselves, but I want to give them as much to work with as possible.”
Sun-Hi brought up a blinking prompt and began to plug in a few simple commands. A magnetic tape backup system began to whirr in the servers behind them, collecting terabytes of information.
“Have you done something like this before?” asked Alexis, surprised.