Slowly, wrapped in terrible agony, Kim turned his head. Most of those in the room with him were writhing on the floor, gagging and clutching at their throats. A few, still able to move, had ripped the red silk wall hangings down and were pounding frantically on the blast doors that sealed this chamber off from the rest of the redoubt. But they were weakening even as he watched, slumping to their knees, coughing uncontrollably as they drowned on their own saliva and secretions.
Beyond the power of speech now, Kim Jong-un lost his grip on the edge of the podium. Twitching and shaking without volition, he slid to his knees and then fell onto his stomach. More sutures ripped open. A fiery wall of pain roared through him, forcing a shrill, bubbling scream past his clenched teeth.
Millions of North Koreans and millions more around the world watched in horror and amazement as Kim Jong-un, the Supreme Leader, convulsed and writhed and groaned and tore at his clothes and bandages.
They were still watching as he died, along with most of the members of his new, handpicked regime.
Six hundred meters above the Audience Chamber, Ro listened in satisfaction as the last of the sarin nerve gas they had pumped into the ventilator shaft hissed out of the cylinder. The sound faded.
It was finished.
Chapter 6 — Whirlwind
Brigadier General Tony Christopher stared at the television screen, frozen by sheer surprise and the horror of what he’d just seen. The cameras were still working, one facing the podium, and two others covering the crowd. They continued to pan slowly across the room, or zoom in and out. There was one close-up of Kim Jong-un’s face that lasted at least a minute. He’d died in mid-spasm, and blood spattered his chin and the floor where he’d fell. Tony could not look away, or even close his eyes.
Everyone — the guards, the audience, and of course Kim — lay unmoving. In the back of his mind, Tony kept expecting the picture to go dark or turn to static. Did this mean the assassins controlled the television studio? That they were choosing to transmit these pictures as proof of their success? Or was there nobody left alive to hit the “off” switch? There certainly weren’t cameramen moving the cameras back and forth, not in that room full of poison.
The question was enough to kick-start his frontal lobe. Shaking off the images that crowded his mind, he turned to look around him.
News of Kim Jong-un’s survival had reached him yesterday, in the middle of a tour of the air bases and units in South Korea. As deputy commander of the Seventh Air Force, Tony Christopher was supposed to report to his boss on any problems that had surfaced because of the mobilization during the crisis. With the expectation that the DPRK announcement signaled the end of the crisis, he’d elected to continue the tour — the mobilization had been a good real-world test.
And he’d been especially reluctant to cancel the tour right then. The next stop on the schedule was the Eighth Fighter Wing, at Kunsan. He’d served and fought in the 35th Fighter Squadron, based at Kunsan, back in the day. He’d chosen to watch the speech in the squadron’s ready room.
They all knew him, of course, not only as deputy commander of the Seventh Air Force, but by his call sign, “Saint,” and his seventeen kills during his tours of duty in Korea and Iraq. As a distinguished alumnus of the squadron, a photo of a much younger Captain Christopher hung on the ready room’s wall, just to the right of the squadron’s emblem, a snarling black panther crouched and advancing. It showed him with one hand on the wing of his F-16, smiling, new major’s insignia on his uniform, after his fifteenth kill — a “triple ace.” The squadron still flew F-16s, although a much newer version than the “A” model he’d flown back then.
Standing up and turning, Tony faced the fighter pilots filling the ready room. Laid out like a small auditorium, rows of seats faced a large flat-screen display at the front, an unused podium pushed to one side. They sat, stunned, confused, and shocked by the wide-screen horror. Some didn’t seem to understand what they’d seen, and he could hear questions asked in quiet voices: “What was that? Did he really just die? Was that real?” The ones that weren’t talking to their comrades were looking at him or the other commanders in the front row.
Tony instinctively knew it was real. While they were all used to a stream of exaggerations and outright falsehoods from the North, a faked TV show of Kim’s death would only harm the regime, at a time when he needed to show strength. He accepted the fact that Kim and most of his cabal were dead. But what happens next?
Colonel Andrew Graves, CO of the Eighth Fighter Wing, had of course escorted Tony on his tour of the base, with the commanders of the 35th and 18th Fighter Squadrons in trail. The four senior officers had taken up the center of the front row. The colonel and his two squadron commanders were now looking at him, or more properly, to him.
Everybody in the room knew exactly as much as Tony did about the death of Kim Jong-un. In fact, most of South Korea had probably been watching, or at least listening on the radio. There would be no uncertainty this time.
Tony fought to shift his thinking. Kim’s survival and television appearance was supposed to restore his rule. Unwelcome as the regime was, the stability it offered was better than bloody civil war and a humanitarian crisis. Tony knew the Seventh Air Force was already planning to send units brought in as reinforcements back to their bases in CONUS and elsewhere, and to reduce operating tempos back to normal. He’d heard Colonel Benz, the Seventh’s operations officer, grumbling about the havoc their alert was raising with the training and maintenance schedules.
But that was ten minutes ago. He turned to the wing commander. “Andy, please find Captain Drew and my flight crew and tell them I’ll be flying back to Osan immediately.” Graves looked over at a lieutenant, who left the room at a dead run. Tony raised his voice just a little, so it could be heard throughout the room. “I won’t predict what orders my boss will send out, but ignore anything in the pipeline right now about standing down. Make sure everybody’s ready to fly.” He paused, and the wing commander and two squadron commanders all nodded solemnly. Graves gestured to his two squadron commanders, and they left, followed by the rest of the 35th’s pilots.
As the room emptied, Graves’ cell phone sounded, and after listening, the colonel reported, “Your aircraft crew is preflighting now. They’ll be ready in ten minutes.”
“That gives us five to sit and think,” Tony replied.
“The ROKs will go north,” Graves stated flatly.
“Concur, but we won’t unless our boss says so,” Tony agreed. “The best we can do is hold the fort while the South Koreans take the rest of their country back.”
The colonel asked, “Is there anything at headquarters saying the South won’t succeed?”
Tony shrugged. “The only thing that could stop them is China, and as long as we don’t go north, the Chinese may stay on their side of the Yalu.”
Graves checked his watch and gestured toward the door. They started walking, with Christopher setting a fast pace. “And the Seventh Air Force becomes a piece on the chessboard of international politics,” the colonel remarked, a few steps behind.
“An accurate, long-range, devastatingly powerful chess piece,” Tony declared, smiling. They stepped out of the squadron’s ops center into the bright, almost blinding heat. An air force jeep was waiting to take the general to his helicopter, and the two hopped in.
“General Carter and I have discussed what to do if the ROKs went north, with or without the US. In this case, the simplest plan is to take one hundred percent responsibility for air defense while the entire South Korean air force takes on the DPRK, which they are well qualified to do. Our AEW and other specialist aircraft provide support for their offensive from across the border, heavily escorted.”