Third World War (7 page)

Park Ho, aged sixty-four, brushed his hand along the cold metal of a T-62 Soviet-made battle tank. He saluted the commander who was standing upright in the turret, goggles high on his forehead, eyes clear and staring straight ahead of him down the tunnel. The commander snapped back a salute.

Park was five inches short of six foot, as muscular and wiry as he was small. He prided himself on achieving power from the lowest of the military ranks. His father, a corporal, had at first enthralled him with his stories of the battles of the Korean War, then had vanished, leaving him in a crumpled city living through a day he never wanted to experience again. Grief and fear became hostile emotions, and he never married because of them. Instead he clawed his way to the top of the military establishment. He joined the elite Bureau of Reconnaissance unit. He trained personal bodyguards for the leaders of Cuba, Cambodia and several African countries. He led the infiltration of commandos into South Korea itself, and later served as a diplomat at the UN and in Vienna as an arms control negotiator. On the long, cold North Korean winter evenings, he had taught himself English, Russian and Chinese, and after the collapse of Soviet communism, he had written papers for the nation's founder, the Great Leader Kim Il-sung, as to how North Korea's juche ideology of self-reliance could be modernized for the twenty-first century.

As he inspected the line of tanks, Park remained in awe of the dedication of his people, precisely because he had come from among them. He had won his present status by distancing himself from the political elite who inherited influence and office without having to prove merit.

While they had become soft on too much satellite television, French brandy, German Mercedes and white-skinned prostitutes, Park had been with the troops, whether far north on the Chinese border or as he was here, now, deep underground, metres from South Korea on the Military Demarcation Line.

Today, the men whom Park despised were being held under house arrest in a compound just north of Pyongyang, and the man who would soon declare himself president allowed himself a rare and faint smile.

Dozens of tanks, fuelled, equipped and armed, were lined up in row after row in a huge, staggered complex of tunnels which ran the length of the ceasefire line with South Korea.

In the layer above them were squadrons of fighter aircraft in hangars hewn into rock. The runways on which they were to take off were also underground. The first the enemy would see of an aircraft was when the wheels left the ground and it was airborne. Huge artillery guns skilfully hidden in undergrowth and rock, designed to deceive analysts of imagery from satellites and unmanned surveillance aircraft, could pulverize the South Korean capital Seoul, only thirty miles away. Commanders of military hovercraft armed with devastating rapid-fire cannon and heavy machine guns waited for the order to attack. The thick rubber air cushions were kept half-inflated to carry human waves of men across the water on to enemy territory. Far below ground, on the third level down, thousands of men lived on rotation, as if on an aircraft carrier, to be infiltrated through tunnels which would bring them up to attack behind enemy lines.

Park walked the full length of the first line of tanks, his hand held in a steady salute. Men returning his salute allowed themselves no expression of emotion. He couldn't tell if he was welcome as their new leader. But he sensed an air of gratitude. There was an atmosphere of war in the tunnels. For more than fifty years, North Korean soldiers had been on a daily footing for war. Finally, the man who would deliver it to them had arrived.

At the end of the tunnel, under tarpaulins, were stacks of artillery and tank shells, filled with a lethal mixture of napalm and explosives. These were to be used on American and South Korean troops right on the border. Park wanted every American dead within an hour of the attack being launched. They might have absorbed casualties in Iraq, but 37,000 dead American soldiers on the Korean peninsula would collapse that nation's will entirely.

The doors of the lift at the end were open for him. It carried him up to a covered area above ground. The drone of a helicopter became louder, and Park watched as it landed on a quadrant 'H' sign. On this clear, cold day, at this precise time, a satellite camera would be overhead, the lens operating at 0.25 metre resolution and picking up his grainy image as he broke cover and walked to the aircraft. Analysts at the National Security Agency would examine radio traffic from the helicopter. Park made sure the pilot mentioned his name in transmissions because he needed the Americans to know who he was and where he was going.

The ageing Soviet MI-24 took him quickly away from the demarcation line. As it gained altitude, Park looked down on the rows of blue huts, where the ceasefire agreement had been signed in 1953. He saw the flash of the sun in the lens of a camera on the south side of the line. Just to the north he looked proudly down on the massive North Korean flag hanging from the highest mast in the world and the neat huts of the farmers dotted around at its base.

The nose of the helicopter dipped. It shuddered in light turbulence as the pilot turned it north and took his bearings from the six-lane highway to Pyongyang. Below, ginseng and cabbage fields nestled between mountains under which his tanks and aircraft waited.

As the helicopter settled into the short flight, Park reflected on his ugly battles with the heir and anointed successor of the Great Leader, Kim Il-sung, which had now finally been won. Slice by slice, his country had been sliding towards Americanization. Soon it would have become another East Germany, wretched, defeated and swallowed up. Park had been determined that whatever the future held for his great nation it would not be that.

Up ahead on the curve of the horizon he saw the outskirts of his beloved Pyongyang. It was truly one of the most beautiful and ordered cities in the world. He asked the pilot to fly lower and follow the Taedong River which glistened pure blue in the sunlight. Once across the Yanggok railway bridge, the monuments of his nation were laid out before him: the skilfully sculptured statues of the Great Leader, Kim Il-sung, who had liberated the nation from the Japanese and founded the juche philosophy of self-reliance that had made North Korea so powerful; Kim Il-sung's magnificent mausoleum, adorned with fresh flowers laid every day by his citizens; the Pyongyang Grand Theatre set just back from the west river bank; the Korean Central History Museum which told of the struggle to retain independence and ward off American aggression; the Children's Palace, where the most perfect little human beings performed with absolute precision; the Tower of Juche, 150 metres high, decorated with 230 granite and gemstone blocks sent by admiring leaders from all over the world, and from the top a symbolically flaming torch stretching another 20 metres into the sky.

The pilot turned the helicopter west, flying over the Victorious Fatherland Liberation Museum, then headed due north again over West Pyongyang railway station and Chongsan Park. The aircraft climbed and settled into the final stage of its journey.

While the United States championed the rights of the individual, North Korea championed the rights of the community. Both were at extreme ends of ideology, yet while North Korea was poor, Park had never seen the shame, humiliation and desperation on the streets and in the villages of his country as he had witnessed in America. When travelling abroad, he had sipped vintage cognac at an embassy dinner in Paris, listened to the duet from the Pearl Fishers at the Royal Opera House in London, inspected the Mercedes factory in Dusseldorf. Each time, he had promised that one day he would return Korea to its greatness.

Empires rose and empires fell, and Park Ho would be remembered as the man who defeated American power.

Outside Pyongyang, the pilot took the helicopter up, heading further and further into the highest mountains in the country. A brilliant panorama of forests and hillsides covered in snow, of tumbling waterfalls and icicles and mountain passes with deep-blue winter lakes stretched ahead.

*****

Just before landing, Park instructed the pilot to make another radio transmission stating clearly their coordinates. He wanted the United States to know his destination. Officially, it was known as the Kanggye No. 26 General Plant. But this was a huge underground military facility, which even a nuclear bomb could never harm. The helicopter turned into the breeze and the pilot set it down. Park, in full military fatigues, stepped out and stood, head unbowed, by the whirring rotor blades.

A general in charge of the plant led the greeting party of scientists and technicians, dressed in the neatly laundered grey tunics of the Korean Workers' Party or the clear white of a laboratory coat. These were the men and women who had brought Park so close to achieving his ambition.

Park stepped into a lift. On the descent it stopped twice in security airlocks before delivering him to the control room from where he would conduct the war. The room was packed with people, lined up in formation, amid work stations and surrounded by walls of computerized screens. As Park stepped on to the platform, a huge picture of Kim Il-sung appeared, wrapped around the whole wall.

Park bowed at the image and cheers echoed round the room. He left through a side door into a small empty room, where he took off his uniform and held up his arms while he was dressed in an insulated suit, breathing apparatus and a radio and earpiece in the helmet. He stepped into a glass antechamber. On the other side he was met by men, also in protective clothing. Row after row of single ultraviolet bulbs stretched back as far as he could see. They provided the only light in the laboratory.

'General,' he heard the voice of a scientist begin in his earpiece. 'Please turn to your right and follow me.' He followed, walking between a row of lights, each bulb covering a cluster of eggs in a tray. They were in a sort of atrium. Far above was a ceiling. Five different levels of the laboratory ringed the outer wall. The first two were open. The upper levels were sealed with reinforced glass. Every twenty metres gauges told the temperature, humidity, air pressure and content of the atmosphere, including the level of hazardous materials.

Right at the top, he knew, was the lethal zone, where skin or lung contact with a virus, such as Ebola, or a chemical, like sarin, would lead to instant death. Below that were killer bacteria - anthrax, tularaemia, Rift Valley Fever and others. For years, his scientists had tried but failed to design an effective delivery system to carry the weapons on an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Park was led further into an area freshly hewn out of the underground chamber. The scientist stopped at a door and showed Park into another airlock. Once through, they entered an office. It was a practical room with two telephones, newspapers left on the top of a desk, a notice board with work rotas, political slogans and instructions for escape in case of fire. Four empty cups stood unwashed in a sink and cigarette butts filled an ashtray. The wall to the left showed a picture of Kim Il-sung. Faint martial music played through a speaker in the ceiling.

'You can take off your helmet now,' said the scientist. He removed his own, took off his spectacles and wiped them on a paper towel. 'General Park,' he said holding out his hand. 'My name is Li Pak. I am the senior virologist. It is a privilege to show you around.'

'So the deliveries from Australia and Russia were successful?' asked Park. He handed Li his helmet and let him unplug the headset from his shoulder.

'Indeed,' said Li enthusiastically. He pulled down a wall chart and switched on a laser torch, which he pointed at scientific symbols running along the top line of the chart. 'Now, if we start here--'

'Forget this stuff,' snapped Park. 'Tell me as if I'm a child. I will have to explain this to our enemies in simple terms. You must inform me in the same words.'

His hand shaking, Li turned off the laser and put it on a tray under the chart. 'We have just passed through the area where we are keeping eggs which carry the smallpox virus,' he began hesitantly. 'As you know, the Americans, British and others have mass-stocked a smallpox vaccine. Once infected, a patient takes two or three days to contract the disease, and several weeks to die. Within that time, the patient can be vaccinated and make a full recovery.'

Park began pulling out a chair. Li broke off to help him. He brushed his hand sycophantically across the seat as if to clean it before Park sat down, then took a seat himself on the other side of the table. 'From Australia we procured mice which had been vaccinated with an agent called interleukin-4 or IL-4. Originally, IL-4 had been part of an experiment to sterilize mice. Of course, it was impossible to vaccinate every mouse. So the idea had been to spread IL-4 through the mouse population on a relatively harmless virus known as mousepox. But IL-4 was far more active than had been anticipated--'

Park slammed his hand down on the table. 'I don't need every detail,' he threatened. 'What I want to know is, does it work?'

Li glanced straight at Park, but didn't hold his gaze. To do so would have been insubordinate.

'We did try using IL-4 with mousepox on humans. But it had no impact. From the agent, we designed another sterilizing substance which is specific to the human ovaries. But again, it did not work on humans when we used mousepox.'