Marc Cameron
Time of Attack
For Catelyn,
our beautiful, wild flower
And they took ashes of the furnace… and Moses did sprinkle it up toward heaven and it became a boil breaking forth with blains on man, and on beast.
PROLOGUE
Qasim Ranjhani had not come to buy a bomb, though the regime had plenty for sale. He wanted something far more deadly.
Though he detested the squalor of Yodok prison, such an isolated place was the perfect laboratory for what he’d come to purchase.
The portion of Camp 15 where the hospital was located was dubbed the Total Control Zone, tucked deep in a dry river valley of one of the seemingly endless waves of mountain ranges that had caused early European visitors to describe the northern part of Korea as “a sea in a heavy gale.”
Ali Kadir, Ranjhani’s heavily bearded assistant, looked a decade older than his boss, but was the same age at thirty-nine. On the ride in, he had stared out the dusty window of the military van with an intrigued grin, studying the prisoners as if they were animals in a zoo.
Guard towers bristled every hundred meters among row after row of slumping concrete buildings. The entire camp, set at the base of a windswept mountain face, was surrounded and crisscrossed with barbed wire and rolled concertina, much of it electrified. Sharp-eyed guards, hunched and angry against the bitter cold, stood post, patrolled, and smoked here and there among the rabbit warren of dilapidated buildings.
Apart from the red points of their green wool DPRK uniforms and hats, gray ruled the day at Yodok, as if color had been bled from wood and paint and sallow faces, so all melded into the surrounding rock and snow.
Some of the prisoners, new arrivals, had been arrested with as many as three generations of their family. Their faces still held the look of mouth-gaping astonishment, having only vague guesses as to what had brought them, their children, and even their aging parents to such a hell on earth. Others, the old-timers, clad in whatever rags they could stitch together against the high mountain cold, trudged along at their daily chores like the walking dead that they were. For in Yodok internment camp, life was the only sentence.
Inside the hospital, Ranjhani took shallow breaths, as if he might somehow avoid particular aspects of the squalid air.
The unsettling scratch of tiny claws on tile jerked the Pakistani’s attention away from a babbling DPRK colonel. He watched a skinny black rat scuttle along the baseboard, then dart across the chipped floor of the hospital’s front office. There was no waiting room. It was not that kind of hospital.
A gaunt cleaning woman wearing a threadbare prison smock and patched gray pants looked up at the sound. Hawk-like, she turned her head toward the rat. A deft flick of her straw broom sent the animal slamming against the block wall. Pinching the unconscious beast by the tail, she let it drop into a plastic paint bucket with a rattling thud. Like the rat, the woman was little more than a bag of bones. Her chopped, utilitarian hair hung lifeless and sparse. Brown eyes sagged over hollow cheeks, absent even the memory of a smile.
Ranjhani paid particular attention to the skin of her left arm. It was pink and puckered well above her gnarled hand, as if by a chemical burn. She moved to resume her sweeping, but the Pakistani grabbed her arm above the elbow, as one might pick up a stone to examine it. He was careful to avoid contamination from the seeping scar at her wrist. The woman went limp at his touch.
Ranjhani was not tall. Most would have considered him on the slender side, but compared to the stooping woman, he was a well-fed giant. A smartly trimmed goatee, flecked with gray, framed full lips that pursed when he thought about anything very hard — as they did now while he studied the prisoner. In her hollow eyes there twitched the same sense of desperation he heard from the snick of tiny claws as the rat tried to escape the plastic bucket.
Ranjhani perused the wounded flesh with great interest. It was recent, still weeping clear fluid. The simple act of handling a broom must have been excruciating for the woman.
Colonel Pak of the North Korean National Security Agency bent at the waist, peering down at the bucket, nose crinkled.
“That is astonishing!” He stood under a life-size picture of Kim Jong-Un, the Dear Leader.
“Astonishing?” Ranjhani raised a black eyebrow, letting the woman’s arm fall away. “How so? What could possibly be so astonishing about a rat?”
Colonel Pak gave a detached shrug. “We do not see many rats around the camp. The filthy prisoners have eaten most of them.” He laughed, the chuckle turning into a phlegm-rattled cough. “They eat snakes, snails, even kernels of corn they dig from plops of cow dung. They are dogs, I tell you, Doctor Ranjhani. Not even human.”
Ranjhani had known hunger, but never bad enough to dig his food from cow dung. It was, he thought, easy to imagine this half-wild woman doing just that. There was a quiet panic about her and the hundreds like her inside this forlorn mountain prison. He’d seen the look before, in the eyes of a girl he had drowned for snubbing his advances.
Most of the girls he’d known considered Qasim Ranjhani handsome — or at least they had told him so. A Pakistani national, he’d inherited his father’s dark skin and thinnish features. He was given to precise haircuts, face lotions, and strong cologne — a metrosexual, if such a term had existed in Lahore.
He raised a scented handkerchief to his nose and looked up at the colonel. “Perhaps we might take a look at our objective?”
“Of course,” Colonel Pak said, sticking out his bottom lip in an odd, chimpanzee-like way he didn’t seem to realize he was doing. He shot a withering stare at the woman with the broom, a stare that held the power of life or death. “Get out of here, bitch!” he barked. “Go clean the guards’ dispensary!”
“Yes, Comrade Colonel,” the woman answered robotically as if numb to his tone. She grabbed the rat bucket and slipped out the door without looking back.
Pak picked up the desk phone outside the door and barked something in Korean. All Ranjhani understood was “Doctor Khong,” the name of the man he’d actually come to see.
While they waited, the colonel produced a little notebook from the pocket of his uniform. He looked up from under the bill of the round military hat that sat on his head like an overly large platter. His bottom lip crept out again. “I must have the guards remember to cut that woman’s corn ration since she has found herself a rat. Full bellies breed a sense of entitlement—”
The metal door swung open without warning, and a harried man that had to be Doctor Khong stepped out. Sweat covered his high forehead. His hair was mostly hidden under a white surgeon’s cap that matched his lab coat. Flitting eyes, like those of a nervous prey animal, flicked around the room.
“Oh. You are already here,” he said, panting as if he’d run a block to meet them rather than just coming from the back hall.
“I gave you plenty of notice.” The colonel’s face darkened, bottom lip curling.
“Of course, of course.” Doctor Khong’s head bobbed in an automatic nod. He spoke in short choppy sentences, as if he had to breathe between every two or three words. “It is fine. Really. Some minor issues, but I will explain.”
“Issues can earn a man a bullet in the back of his head,” the colonel said. “You would do well to remember that, Doctor.”
Khong pulled open the door. “Not to worry, Comrade Colonel. Really. Please, follow me.”
Ali balked outside the door, having an idea what was on the other side. “Should we not put on some sort of protection, a breathing apparatus perhaps?”