Everything erupted into an icy standoff in December 2002. The Americans located a Korean freighter near Socotra Island off the coast of Yemen and requested a nearby warship from the Spanish Navy to apprehend it. A few hours later, the Spaniards fired several broadsides over the ship’s bows, forcing it to stop, and then boarded. The So-San, which flew no flag, contained fifteen SCUD missiles, large as life, carefully hidden under a cargo of 40,000 sacks of North Korean cement. There were, in addition, fifteen conventional warheads, twenty-three tanks of nitric acid (rocket propellant), and eighty-five drums of unspecified chemical. Kim’s men had finally been caught red-handed.
But before the U.S. could roar its disapproval, North Korea announced it would immediately restart the nuclear reactors at Yongbyon and resume operations producing electricity. A total lie. They’d never ceased operations, and what the reactors really produced was plutonium — plutonium for nuclear warheads. Kim seemed to think he could best operate his country’s economy by becoming an illegal nuclear arms dealer, selling weapons-grade plutonium, medium-and short-range missiles, and warheads. It was hard to imagine a more antagonistic marketing plan, deliberately designed to infuriate the Americans, especially a Republican Administration that was essentially fed up to the back teeth with rogue states and uncooperative, pain-in-the-ass foreigners.
The international inspectors now claimed they were unable to continue monitoring the North Korean facility. And Kim Jong-il expelled them all within a few more days.
As the first decade of the twenty-first century wore on, the reactors at Yongbyon continued to harvest plutonium, and reports arrived daily at Fort Meade that the big cog in the Korean nuclear wheel had undoubtedly become the great mountain of Kwanmo-bong in the remote northeast, only 25 miles from the Chinese border.
It was to this hidden underground plant that General Ravi Rashood was now headed. Deep inside that mountain, he hoped, was the one weapon that would drive the hated Americans out of the Middle East forever.
He did not even pretend to understand the Oriental mind. All he knew was that North Korea had a reputation for on-time, no-questions-asked delivery. Their product was not cheap, in fact everything carried a risk premium, bumping up the price to compensate the Koreans for any unhappy circumstances that might befall them as a result of their manufacturing policies.
Very few people from the outside world had been permitted to see the North Korean nuclear facilities, certainly not inside the enormous mountain caverns that housed the plant. But the Hamas General, whom the Koreans swiftly identified as a major customer, had insisted on stringent terms for his acceptance of the product.
Yes, he would accept the ex-factory terms. As soon as his order left the plant, it became the property, and its journey to a seaport the responsibility, of Hamas. The Koreans would accept no liability for accident.
General Ravi assumed this meant that if the whole lot accidentally disappeared somewhere on the highway, the Koreans were still owed the money. He told them he would agree only if he and his men watched and supervised the loading, and traveled with the product trans — North Korea to the waiting ship. In the end he accepted that there would be just one Korean driver for the 300-mile journey to the western seaport of Nampo.
He had been told that North Korea, which is about the size of the state of Mississippi, had a population of 24 million, half of whom lived in Pyongyang. But even after driving halfway across the country, miles upon miles through a deserted, rugged landscape, he had no idea where the others lived. Only occasionally were there small fishing villages clustered to his right, on the shores of the Sea of Japan.
Ravi had been allowed no insights or prior knowledge before entering the country. There were no photographs or promotional handouts demonstrating the excellence of Korean manufacturing. He was just given a map of the country showing the main towns and roads, and a driver to take him to the factory inside Kwanmo-bong.
The only other facts the General knew about North Korea were military — that this ridiculous, backward Third World outcast owned the third largest army in the world, with 1.2 million men under arms (as opposed to 650,000 in South Korea). One quarter of Korea’s GDP was spent annually on their Armed Forces and yet their Navy was very modest, their air force large but mostly obsolete.
The place gave Ravi the creeps. But he had no time to worry about that. In a couple of hours he would need to be on high alert, and he stared straight ahead, thinking, while the big army truck clattered along the coastal highway.
They came roaring through the towns of Hamhung and Pukchong, and followed the northeastern Korean railroad to Kilju and Chilbosan. Another 20 miles and his driver would veer left off the main road onto what looked like a track — only this one would be a 15-mile track into the foothills of the mountains, and then cleaving a long upward path through the granite range. Wooden guardhouses would stand sentinel on either side, every half-mile. Almost nowhere along this sinister highway was it possible to be out of sight of the armed patrols. It was, without question, the most secret of all roads, befitting this most secretive of all nations.
For General Ravi it meant the end of a long journey, starting essentially in Moscow, although he had not gone there personally. Here, the formal inquiry from the Iranian Navy requesting the purchase of a number of RADUGA SS-N-21 cruise missiles, two of them equipped with 200-kiloton nuclear warheads, had been met with a stony silence, and just one question—Do you intend to have them fitted into your Barracuda submarine?
The Iranians valued their relationship with the Russian Navy and were not about to tell a flagrant lie. Their affirmative reply had led the Russian Navy to inform them they were unable to supply the RADUGAs under any circumstances whatsoever.
Next stop Beijing. The Iranians asked if they could produce a missile precisely copying the RADUGA. It was a question that elicited an immense amount of hemming and hawing from the Chinese, who finally admitted that after having been so closely involved with the Hamas mission of Barracuda I in the U.S.A., the last thing they needed now was for Barracuda II, with a boatload of nuclear-capable Chinese-made missiles, to be discovered by the Americans, in brazen conflict with the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
In general terms, the Chinese were not averse to assisting their friends and clients in the Middle East. They had an extremely serious interest in the oil fields around the Gulf, and were prepared to run certain risks while helping the occasional rogue regime. But that did not include arming the second Barracuda for these wild men from the Middle East to cause havoc. Too dangerous. No good for business. Americans can get cross with Muslims. Not China. The Chinese did not really have a missile that would be readily adaptable to convert to the RADUGA dimensions anyway. They probably had the guidance and tracking software, cunningly acquired from the Americans in the 1990s, but they were less confident in their own hardware, especially for short-range cruises.
Which left General Ravi with few options, the most unlikely of which was the little state of Bosnia, where Jugoimport, a state-owned conglomerate in Belgrade, was reputed to have been working with Iraq to develop a cruise missile. Jugoimport was also reported to be working with the military operation Orao Arms, located in Bijeljina, the second largest city in the Bosnian Serb Republic, up in the northeast.