Before she could be transformed into 210 tons of scrap, however, money quietly changed hands, a certificate was forged, and the Rosa was quietly moved from her port at Warnemünde through the Kiel Canal to an out-of-the-way pier on the Hamburg waterfront.
There, she was repainted and her engines refurbished. There was still some question about her seaworthiness, but after all, it was only necessary that she make one final voyage. One week after departing Hamburg, she could sink forever beneath the waves of the North Sea, and it would no longer matter.
She’d already been at sea for three days, having departed the German port early on Sunday. That was a day earlier than originally planned, but a certain amount of flexibility had been built into the operation, just in case there were last-moment complications. On Tuesday morning the Rosa was loitering at an otherwise undefined spot in the North Sea fifty miles east of Flamborough Head when a thirty-foot cabin cruiser out of the English port of Great Yarmouth approached. Signs and countersigns were exchanged, first by carefully worded radio exchanges until they were within visual range, then by flashing lights. After some preliminary maneuvers to bring the cabin cruiser in under the lee of the larger vessel, three men — Major Pak and two RAF gunmen — clambered up a cargo net and onto the ancient trawler.
Pak’s first question as soon as he stepped onto the Rosa’s main deck and faced the vessel’s captain was sharp and to the point. “Where is it?”
“Main hold forward,” the captain replied. “Under our nets, for camouflage.”
“Take me there.”
The forward hold stank of fish, but Pak ignored the stench as a couple of Rosa’s crewmen pulled the nets off the massive wooden crate, which rested on wooden supports and was still fitted with the straps and snap-swivels used to hoist it aboard. “Compressor, Air” and the name of a well-known industrial manufacturer were stenciled on the crate’s side, along with the usual shipping information and serial numbers.
Actually, there were two large crates in the Rosa’s hold, the second much larger than the one Pak was examining now, but that other piece of cargo had been Hyon Hee’s special charge, and Pak doubted that it would serve any purpose now. He ignored it, concentrating instead on the “air compressor.” Using a pry bar, he popped open the top and looked inside at the dull, lead-gray cylinder a meter and a half long and nearly a meter thick resting inside. Then, with the crewmen and Rosa’s captain standing nearby, Pak unlocked a hinged access plate on one end of the cylinder and swung it open, revealing a clotted tangle of wires, cables, and electrical connections inside. The rough handling the device had endured so far didn’t seem to have harmed it. A thorough manual check of its power supply, arming circuits, and antitamper mechanisms suggested that everything was in working order.
There was, in fact, little that could go wrong with the thing, for its design was almost idiot-proof. Pak couldn’t even see the real guts of the bomb, for those were sealed away in the front half of the device, behind massive lead shielding. Inside that shielding, however, a hollow sphere shaped from roughly two kilograms of plutonium was surrounded by nearly fifty kilos of plastic explosives, in which were embedded scores of electrically fired detonators. Most of the rest of the bomb consisted of the battery, a complex arming device that Pak himself had had a hand in designing, and the outer casing, which was little more than a shell two meters long. Dozens of wires penetrated the inner shielding, passing through rubber-plugged openings. The entire device weighed just under a ton, most of that from the lead shielding.
Those openings in that shielding for the detonator wires were a serious weak point in the bomb’s design, Pak knew, and one that had been responsible for unfortunate levels of radioactive contamination already both in North Korea and in Germany. If the Rosa’s captain knew just how hot the exterior of the device and the crate carrying it were, he would never have volunteered himself and his crew for this operation; certainly, he never would have come this close to the thing while Pak had it open!
Pak knew the risks since he’d worked with the assembly team back in Yongbyon in the first place. He suspected that he was dead already, though it might take a few more years for that death to manifest itself. He’d been exposed to the low levels of radioactivity trickling through the rubber-sealed holes drilled in the shielding for hundreds of hours. Exposure was insidiously cumulative.
But that, of course, was of no importance, since Pak didn’t expect to survive long enough to develop cancer or radiation sickness. Even if the mission succeeded perfectly in every detail, even if he was able to make good his escape afterward, he knew well that an unknown but large number of the world’s governments would never permit him to live, not when the degree of his participation in this operation became clear. It was distinctly possible that even Pyongyang would join in the hunt, if only to convince the rest of a very angry world that North Korea’s government had not actively participated in Operation Saebyok, that Pak and a number of others had done what they’d done independently.
Pak was more than willing to accept that. He preferred a quick and sudden death at the hands of comrades to the lingering agonies of leukemia. Besides, the prize to be won in this game was so much vaster than any one man’s life.
“Is it safe to be this close?” the captain asked, peering a little nervously over Pak’s shoulder.
“Of course,” Pak lied. He patted the dull surface of the shielding. “This is lead, five centimeters thick. It is perfectly safe.”
“That thing’s not armed, is it?” one of the crewmen said.
“Of course not. That will be taken care of tomorrow, once we’re at the objective.”
Following a carefully memorized routine, Pak began an electronic check of the device, examining each of twenty-four electrical circuits and the battery itself using a small voltmeter with silver probes that he touched to various connections, one after the other. The Rosa’s crewmen watched him with a morbid fascination, and so intently that Pak could practically hear the sweat dripping from their faces.
The materials used in the construction of the device had come from widely different sources. Most important, of course, had been the plutonium, part of a much larger cache purchased from an ex-Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces colonel who’d needed enough gold to set up himself and his harem in comfort somewhere in Argentina. The story of how the plutonium had been smuggled from Chelyabinsk to Vladivostok to Yongbyon, despite the efforts of the Russian government, the Chinese, and the Russian mafia, was a small epic in itself.
The electronics had come from Japan — specifically from one of Japan’s larger industrial corporations, one that had been in trouble more than once selling restricted materials to the Soviets. The plastic explosives, on the other hand, were of American manufacture; there was a company that did a lot of ordnance work for the U.S. government but was more than willing to deal with anyone who offered their CEO enough money. It was incredible, Pak thought, just how eagerly individuals from the various Western nations would participate in their own cultures’ destruction. The West will hang itself, Lenin had once prophesied, and we will sell them the rope to do it.