Dmz this is the future o.., p.19
DMZ: This is the Future of War (Future War Book 7), page 19
Captain Jeong Goh, commander of the South Korean Presidential Security Service, looked across the causeway at the visitor center with disdain. Why was Ri continuing his futile resistance?
The North Korean paratroops assigned to take the western side of the spillway had just radioed that they had secured the western flank and were preparing to assault the building. Goh ordered them to wait, and though he could hear the officer in command didn’t like being told what to do by a South Korean, their chain of command had been agreed by officers many times more senior, and he had no choice but to comply.
Goh had no preference for whether the State leaders inside the building were taken dead, or alive. His principle mission objective was to obtain the thumb sized nuclear trigger carried by North Korea’s leader, Madam Kim. The access codes generated by the device changed hourly and it was supposed to be completely secure, accessible only with Kim’s DNA print and a code phrase known only to her. But North Korea’s paranoid Generals had long ago developed a way to ‘unlock’ the device in case their supreme leader was unexpectedly ‘incapacitated’. All that was needed was physical access to it.
A secondary objective was to capture the two State leaders so they could be publicly tried for treason, but that political goal was not critical to his military mind.
Goh did not regard himself as a status-quo loving reactionary. He had been working towards a ‘United Republic of Korea’ all his life. But one achieved not by neoliberal capitulation, but by an East German-like collapse of the impoverished North. In the future Goh had once envisaged, in a starving North Korea, crippled by sanctions, riven by internal division, the citizens of the North would eventually rise up and overthrow their despotic leaders and beg for admission to the Republic of Korea, of that he was certain.
Not sitting at the bargaining table as equals, but forced to accept whatever scraps the South was willing to grant them.
Instead, Goh’s government had sold South Korea’s soul, promising the North equal representation in a people’s assembly, continued command of the ‘Northern Military District’ and a merger with the armed forces of the South that would only weaken Korea’s overall defenses to a level that could embolden China, the true enemy of Korea, to threaten Korean sovereignty in the North.
Goh considered himself a passable student of history, and looked at what had happened to NATO when it granted membership of the western alliance to members of the former Warsaw Pact. Did it make NATO stronger? No! Instead, the weaker Warsaw Pact nations drained resources, bringing nothing to the military table but rusty Cold War tanks and outdated Russian-made aircraft and missile systems that had to be replaced at enormous cost, thinning out NATO’s ground forces by demanding western troops and aircraft be stationed on its eastern borders whenever a provocative Russia rattled its sabers at them, and putting Western Europe at greater risk of a nuclear strike – for what?
Democracy? Western democracy was a whore that spread debilitating disease to every nation embracing it.
Goh turned his attention to the visitor center across the other side of the causeway. There was no firing from that direction now. The hard core of Ri’s men had barricaded themselves inside and were holding the two protectees in the basement stronghold, no doubt. They had barricaded the fragile glass doors with a five ton armored car.
It wasn’t the ideal situation. His own men in the close protection detail were supposed to have ambushed Ri’s agents and secured the North Korean Supreme Leader while the rest of his protection force was engaged outside. But something had gone wrong inside the building.
Now Goh’s force would have to fight its way into the building and breach the stronghold downstairs. Not ideal at all.
He grabbed the arm of the soldier beside him. “Find me the radio operator.” As the man disappeared, he composed the message he planned to send to the rebellion’s leadership group on either side of the demarcation line … Peace Dam secured. Targets isolated. Capture imminent. The mission wasn’t complete, but he no longer doubted it would be.
Reaching into the cab of his LTV, Goh grabbed a white rag he’d brought along to wipe fog from the windscreen. His opposite number from the North had been pliable during their planning for the ceremony. Perhaps he could be persuaded to see reason now.
Special Agent Helen Lee needed a plan for how to get a message out and alert the world to what was happening inside the offices of Prime Minister Ted Choi.
For operational security reasons, Security Service agents were not allowed their own cell phones when on duty, only their service issue radios. She had been filing her reports with Commander Pak from her apartment, using her private cell phone and an encrypted app, but that was still in a locker at Panmunjom, left behind in the panic of their evacuation. So that option was out.
Her briefing from the former Commander of the Presidential Security Service before she joined the Prime Minister’s security detail had been for her to watch for ‘anything odd’. He’d received reports that Prime Minister’s public support for reunification was not matched privately. Of surreptitious meetings with military and political figures from the North, who were also known to be anti-reunification. And of a cult of rewarding ‘loyalty’ with tenure within the Prime Minister’s security detail that went against the service policy of rotating its agents between details to keep them from becoming complacent, or forming inappropriate personal attachments that might impact their judgement.
After 20 years in the service, she knew the routines of duty as well as she knew the faces around her and her place among them. So she was perfectly placed to spot changes or deviations from normal practice.
They were immediately apparent, and she reported them faithfully to Park. It was perfectly normal, for example, for a team to go for drinks when they were off duty, share a meal and a few beers. The Prime Minister’s detail did this, and Lee was invited.
But this team also met privately on weekends, for meals and drinks at the detail commander, Yeo’s apartment. And to these meetups, Lee was not invited. She only found out about them by accident, overhearing conversations between her colleagues when they didn’t realize she was listening.
She couldn’t help notice she was the only new agent in the detail for more than two years, and had only been appointed after the death in a firing range accident of one of their colleagues. Appointed, she now knew, thanks to the influence of her former mentor.
But strangely, no one wanted to talk about the ‘accident’. It was taboo. Any inquiry she made was turned aside, until one day one of her colleagues took her aside and said bluntly: “Stop asking about Yang. He was a screw up. Better he died on that range than on duty, where he could have put us at risk, right? So leave it alone.”
Lee did not leave it alone. But because the accident had happened on a security service range, the police investigation had been minimal. Lee still had connections inside Sejong City police though, and she’d met one of them for drinks, asking him if there was anything unusual about the investigation.
“Unusual?” he asked. “Ask me what was usual about it, that will be a shorter conversation.”
He told her they had only been allowed to interview one of the three agents and the instructor at the range that day. Both had told police the same story, almost word for word. The man’s gun had misfired, and he had suffered a fatal head wound. Police had not been allowed to inspect the faulty weapon. The coroner’s report had been sealed ‘for national security reasons’, with only the cause of death – gunshot injury to the head – communicated to police.
Lee had passed this intelligence on to her old Commander and in a rare breach of their communications protocols, he had called her back immediately. “The agent who died. He called internal security two days before his death, asking for a meeting. He died before the meeting could be held,” Pak told her. “Be careful, Lee. Very, very careful.”
And now, after the bombing of Panmunjom, the Prime Minister of South Korea was meeting with Kkangpae mobsters?
‘Odd’ did not do the events of the day justice.
She was still standing in the corridor outside the Prime Minister’s Office, when the door was flung open and the protection detail commander, Yeo, stepped through it. He signaled to Lee and the other agent. “You two, come with me.”
Lee did as she was told, heading down the corridor behind Yeo, with her colleague beside her. Photographic portraits lined the wall, stretching off for yards in both directions. The nameplate on the bottom of the one nearest her read ‘Prime Minister Paik Too-chin, 1970-71’. To his left at the end of the corridor she saw another security agent standing by a dark wood paneled door, HK45 held loosely in hands crossed in front of his crotch.
They hit the end of the corridor and entered the fire stairs, going down one level. Lee knew it was still part of the Prime Minister’s complex … a section of the complex that contained interview rooms, rarely used. Perhaps somewhere down here she could find a phone. They paused at a door with a thumbprint scanner by the handle. Lee waited as Yeo applied his thumb to the lock and the door clicked. He stepped back. “Inside.”
The door let into a small, unused office containing a bookcase full of what looked like reference books, a desk and chair, and a large video conferencing screen that was showing screensaver pictures of sunny Sejong City landscapes. Lee assumed Yeo was about to brief them on a new task.
She was wrong.
As she moved into the room, Yeo pulled his pistol and pointed it at her. “Agent Moon, take her weapon,” he said to the other agent.
Apparently prepared for the order, the man reacted immediately and without question. He pulled his own weapon and motioned with his free hand. “Hands behind your neck,” he said, reaching forward for the weapon under her jacket.
One gun pointed at her head, another at her chest, Lee had few options. But she knew she was about to have even fewer. “What the hell is this?!” she asked, raising her hands to the level of her head. The other man, Moon, reached for her pistol.
She moved. Taking a step toward Moon to put him between herself and Yeo’s pistol, she slapped the gun out of Moon’s hand. Before he could react, she stepped sideways and locked an arm across his throat, pulling him off balance but keeping him between her and Yeo.
Or trying to.
Yeo reacted faster than Moon. Taking two steps himself he put himself beside Lee and lifting his pistol, he clubbed her across the temple.
Keys to the Hermit Kingdom
Peace Dam, South Korea
Inside the stronghold at the Peace Dam visitor center, Captain Ri of North Korea’s Supreme Guard Command had tried fruitlessly to raise his headquarters in Pyongyang. The landline had been cut of course, and mobile communications and radio were being jammed by Goh’s LMADIS unit.
His men outside the visitor center had been overwhelmed by a sudden push from the landed force to the west, and the few officers they had protecting their east flank, holding the causeway, had not made it back into the visitor center before their rear guard had been forced to pull back inside the center and take up firing positions at the windows.
Ri had not wanted the role of commander of the Supreme Guards Company B. B Company was the unit most often assigned the role of protecting the Supreme Leader, and Jong Chong Ri had zero respect for Her ‘Excellency’, Yun-mi Kim.
Ri was a product of the North Korean political system. His place in officer school and his rank had been won through his father’s party connections. His father had secured him a place in the Supreme Guard Command as a way for him to make friends in high places. The posting had brought with it privileges too. Better food than in other units, a uniform allowance, medical care at the same level as senior party officials, for him and his family.
Before taking command of B Company, he had never had to speak directly with the Supreme Leader, Yun-mi Kim, let alone assume sole responsibility for her protection. He had been happy enough leading protection details for the ever changing coterie of ministers and generals in her inner circle. Foiling an amateurish assassination attempt on the Trade Minister by a disgruntled employee had brought him the promotion to Commander, Company B, after the man who had been in that role for ten years, retired.
He had agonized over accepting the post and discussed his concerns with his father: the only one he could have such a conversation with, without fear of betrayal.
“She is leading us to defeat and trying to make it sound like victory,” Ri said. “I do not understand why you continue to support her.”
His father was a white haired, slightly built man in his 70s, a cadre politician in Pyongyang and survivor of countless purges by three generations of Supreme Leaders. “A rock in the middle of a river does not tell the river where to flow. And yet the river obeys.”
His father’s tendency to spout eastern philosophy passed for wisdom among his political cronies. For Ri, it was simply obscure and infuriating.
“How is that even relevant?” he snapped back. “Am I the rock, or the river?”
As usual, the old man did not answer directly. “You ask how I can continue to support the woman you believe is betraying her nation?”
“Yes.”
“The answer is in your question. I do not believe Madam Kim is betraying the People’s Republic. Why do you think we developed the most feared nuclear arsenal in South-East Asia?”
“To defend ourselves against our enemies, of course.”
His father chuckled. “Spoken like a soldier. Nuclear weapons are a political tool, not a military one, Jong-chun. To use them is an admission of defeat, not a path to victory. So what use is a nuclear arsenal that is never used?”
“I ask you one question, and you reply with five,” Ri sighed.
“Because you do not ask the right questions,” his father said. “Ask me this one. Father, which is better, to make our destiny as an equal partner in a United Korea, or to live forever as a vassal of China.”
“Your kind would make us a vassal of the South!” Ri said.
His father did not take umbrage at the criticism. “No, we would trade our nuclear power for political power in the government of a stronger, united Korea. Your reactionary superiors in the military are like an army of caterpillars, shouting at those who would be butterflies that they are wrong to build cocoons. They would remain caterpillars forever, but do not realize that to do so dooms them to extinction.”
Ri frowned at the analogy. As usual, it sounded so simple, but was layered with meaning.
His father put a hand on Ri’s knee. “There is another answer to your question of why I support Madam Kim.” He stood, and moved the hand to Ri’s shoulder, squeezing it reassuringly. “When you meet her, you will understand.”
His father had left Ri in no doubt he should take the promotion without complaint, and in the last few months he had come to understand a little of what his father meant. Yun-mi Kim’s conviction was compelling, and her passion for her cause was contagious. She had a steely public persona, but a humanity few outside her inner circle got to see.
He got to see it himself on one of his first protection assignments – a formal banquet for an African head of State. During the dinner, one of the serving staff, a young girl who had been vetted but who Ri marked as suspiciously nervous, spilled a cup of tea on the table in front of the African leader.
As the serving staff fussed about, cleaning up the spillage, Ri had the girl taken aside and questioned. As he was deciding what to do about her, Madam Kim had made an excuse to leave the table and summoned him over.
“What was that about?” she asked. “The girl looked terrified.”
“Nothing, your Excellency. She is weak from malnutrition. I will order her escorted from the building and removed from the staff.”
Kim had looked at him with one raised eyebrow. “Have you considered an alternative, Commander?”
“Your Excellency?”
“Give her a solid meal and then ask the banquet manager what he is doing with the wages he should be paying to his waiting staff.” She had smiled. “Of course, the decision of how to handle it is yours.”
It was the first of many small interactions with North Korea’s Supreme Leader that had surprised him. And though he still struggled to see the truth of her vision for Korea, he could not fault the authenticity of her belief in it. Nor did he question that having accepted the position, his sworn duty was protect Yun-mi Kim, no matter how he felt about her personally.
Which all seemed very academic, now that he found himself staring into her face and explaining that his small force was about to be overrun. The firefight outside had ceased momentarily, but only because the forces outside had won the opening engagement. He should probably spare the enemy and his country the embarrassment and shoot himself in the temple, right now. But there was a decision to make first.
“Your Excellencies, we are badly outnumbered and the enemy is at our gates. You have a choice. Either negotiate a surrender, or attempt to escape in the armored vehicle outside.”
Madam Kim was incredibly composed, which was more than he could say for the craven coward who was the South Korean President.
“You have no communications with our forces outside?” Madam Kim asked him tersely.
“No, your Excellency,” he said, bowing deeply and not meeting her eyes. “Our communications appear to be jammed. We were attacked by our own troops in the east and west, and by South Korean forces from the top of the dam…”
“Nonsense,” the South Korean President, Si-min Shin, scoffed. “What possible reason would …”
“Mr. President, please let me take Captain Ri’s report,” Kim said. Shin was clearly not used to being interrupted, and his face flushed red, but he bit his tongue. “Continue, Comrade Captain.”
