A secret service agent greeted him at the bottom. “Good morning, General.”
“Is the President here yet?”
“No, sir.”
Murphy hesitated at the door, shifting his briefcase to his left hand. He’d been thinking lately of getting back to his forty-two-foot Hans Christian sloop on the Chesapeake, the same kind of boat Walter Cronkite used to sail. In fact, they’d been in the Bermuda race twice, neither of them winning, and he had to feel that those had been simpler times. But then they’d all been unsophisticated then by comparison to now. He used to quote Shakespeare to Cronkite just to show that he ran the CIA with something a step above a bureaucratic sensibility. Light verses, silly even: “As if we were God’s spies.” A snatch of something else from King Lear had been running around inside his head lately, and it wasn’t so light. “The weight of this sad time we must obey; Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” Maybe that was the trouble after all, perhaps only men like McGarvey had ever known how to speak the truth.
Most of the President’s crisis team had already arrived and were talking quietly among themselves around the highly polished oblong table. Murphy took his place on the left next to Thomas Roswell, director of the National Security Agency, General Arthur Podvin, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the other three Joint Chiefs of Staff.
To the right of the President’s position were Harold Secor, his national security adviser, a studious Harvard professor whom the media maintained was the most intelligent man ever to hold that position, and Secretaries Jonathan Carter of State and Paul Landry of Defense.
Roswell had been saying something to General Podvin. He turned to Murphy and slid a bulky file folder over to him. “These came over from the National Reconnaissance Office just before I took off. I don’t think you’ve seen them yet.” Roswell was a stern-faced man who dressed impeccably, as if he’d just stepped from a CitiCorp board meeting. He had a sharp mind and ran a tight shop in an agency three times the size of the CIA.
Murphy studied the first of what appeared to be high resolution KH-13 satellite photos of Japan’s three main islands. Numerous areas were highlighted in red, and he recognized them for what they were, Japanese air force and navy bases.
“The Japanese are on the move,” he said.
“Across the board, Roland. Looks as if you were right, they’re expecting trouble.”
Murphy flipped through the rest of the two dozen photos. “What about the Koreans?”
“Not a thing.” Roswell gave him a searching look. “How about your sources on the ground. Anything happening in Pyongyang that we should know about?”
“It’s quiet.”
“Too quiet,” Roswell said. “What the hell are they up to?”
The President came in, took his place and when everyone was settled he looked around the table. “We have a lot of ground to cover this morning, so let’s get started. Roland, give us what you have and we can go from there.”
“Yes, Mr. President. In the past forty-eight hours there’ve been some disturbing developments in North Korea, the Sea of Japan and on the Japanese main islands themselves.” He took a leather-bound folder from his briefcase and handed it down the table to the President.
“Much of what we’ve put together comes from one of our own submarines which happened to be on patrol off the North Korean coast and spotted what the captain thought was an unusual situation.”
“The Seawolf,” Admiral Howard Mann said. “I know the skipper, Tom Harding. He’s one of the best. Whatever he has to say you can take as gospel.”
“As you all know by now, there was an underground nuclear explosion Thursday at a supposedly abandoned nuclear power station on North Korea’s Sea of Japan coast. At the moment our best estimates are that it was in the fifteen to twenty-five kiloton range, about the same strength as the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima. To this point we have no information from Pyongyang or any of our other resources on the ground, although the South Korean CIA has promised something by this afternoon. Apparently they’ve sent a team to Kimch’aek, which is the coastal town nearest to the site.” The truth, Murphy thought. Every director before him had learned that as far as the administration they worked for was concerned, the truth was relative and highly subjective.
“What you may not fully appreciate is that we do not believe the explosion was a test. Nor do we believe it was caused by a problem with the abandoned reactor. In fact we think the explosion was caused by sabotage and involved a nuclear weapon.” Murphy paused a moment. “One of five that we believe the North Koreans have managed to build over the past seven years.”
It was a bombshell. The men in this room were not dumb, but they were accustomed to dealing in hard cold facts. Although there had been speculation that the North Koreans were developing an active nuclear weapons program, there’d never been any direct evidence.
“Can you support that, General?” Secretary of Defense Landry demanded. He obviously felt as if he’d been left out of the loop on something critical to his job. “Hell, the entire country is an accident looking for a place to happen.”
“During the 1997 Seoul debriefings of Hwang Jang Yop, he told the South Koreans that five gun-type weapons — that is, nuclear devices using U235 rather than plutonium — had already been built or were nearing completion. Until now there has been no confirmation. Yop specified that the weapons were in the twenty kiloton range and would be stored at one of North Korea’s coastal nuclear generating stations. Over the past five days there has been some intense activity at Kimch’aek that we’ve been trying to evaluate. They were moving something out of there in a big hurry and under a great deal of secrecy. Apparently the Japanese beat us to the punch.”
“Are you saying that the Japanese sub delivered a suicide crew to destroy the facility?” the President asked.
“It’s likely they sent a team ashore to gather proof that the North Koreans did in fact possess nuclear weapons. For whatever reason they may have found themselves in a situation where escape was impossible, so they did the only thing they could to prove what they’d found. And that was to explode the bomb.”
“Have all five of them been destroyed?” Landry asked.
“Just one,” Murphy said. “The other four had already been moved out.”
“You say that we monitored the previous activity at the station. Do we know where they took the four weapons?”
“No, sir. We have no resources on the ground, and the weather closed in, making our satellite useless for about twenty hours. By then it was too late. The bombs could be anywhere in North Korea.” Murphy spread his hands. “The South Koreans are sending people in, but it’s anybody’s guess if they’ll have any luck, or just how long it might take them to come up with some answers.”
“In the meantime the situation out there is getting even worse,” the President said.
“That it is,” Murphy said. “The crew from the stricken Japanese submarine were rescued overnight, with no interference from the North Koreans. But Captain Harding reported that a pair of Orion sub-hunter-killer aircraft are searching the waters in the vicinity of the downed submarine. We’ve confirmed that the aircraft are Japanese, from the MSDF base at Sasebo, but the question is what are they looking for? We don’t have that answer yet.”
“They know where their damned submarine is located,” General Podvin said. “Do they suspect that we’ve got one of our subs in the area?”