“Because of what happened in Russia?”
Scott gave her a look.
“I heard about the Baltic mission. They said it was Chechen terrorists with a Russian sub.”
He laughed. “Hell, Chechnya doesn’t have a navy.”
Fumiko didn’t laugh.
“Look, it was nothing, just a routine recon.”
“They said there was a woman involved… an American woman…”
“Don’t believe everything you hear.”
“…and that you and she almost didn’t make it back.” She put a hand on his arm.
Scott considered, then said, “You’re right, it was touch and go. A group of Chechen terrorists led by Alikhan Zakayev commandeered a Russian sub based up on the Kola Peninsula. They had a plan to drive the sub into the harbor at St. Petersburg during the recent summit meeting between the U.S. and Russian presidents and blow the reactor, to contaminate the city and every living thing in it. I took command of a Russian Akula, tracked Zakayev down in the Baltic Sea, and prevented it from happening.”
“You mean you torpedoed Zakayev’s sub.”
“Couldn’t have done it without help from Alex Thorne. She’s a scientist attached to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Very bright. She figured out what Zakayev was going to do and, well, more or less saw us through a reactor casualty of our own. We lost coolant to the Akula’s reactor and almost had a core meltdown. If it hadn’t been for a Russian officer who patched it up, I wouldn’t be here now. And most of the Baltic region would have been radioactive and uninhabitable for who knows how long.”
Scott heard loping footsteps, someone returning to the house. Fumiko took her hand away.
“Commander Scott, we’re waiting,” Kennedy said from the driveway.
“Sorry you won’t be there in Pearl to see us off,” Scott told her.
“Me, too,” she said.
4
The new Dear Leader, Marshal Jin, arrived at the special detention center, twenty-five kilometers south of Pyongyang. The high-security facility, a squat, ugly concrete blockhouse, its walls punched through on four sides with rows of narrow, vertical windows, sat at the end of a paved road, one of the few in the Chungwa region.
The stamp of the guards’ booted feet and their presentation of arms greeted Jin inside the main entrance. Jin and an aide swept past their ranks and fell in with the prison commandant, who was dressed in full military regalia, including jodhpurs, aiguillette, and Sam Browne belt.
The commandant ushered Jin into a spartan office furnished only with a coal-burning stove and metal table and chair. One end of the table had been set with cups of rice wine and bowls of kimbap — sushi — and kimch’i — fiery cabbage.
Jin, his full attention on the closed-circuit color video monitor at the other end of the table, ignored the food. The chair, held by the commandant, materialized under Jin, who sat, gripped by an image on the monitor of Kim Jong-il, transmitted via hidden camera inside his cell deep within the detention center.
Jin almost didn’t recognize the former Dear Leader. Shoeless, dressed in a filthy powder blue jumpsuit, and without his trademark black-framed glasses, Kim looked exhausted. He’d lost weight, which had caused his pudgy face to collapse. The jumpsuit hung from his body like a sack. His bare feet were purple from the cold and disfigured by bunions. Kim sat, not moving a muscle, on the edge of his bunk, which was suspended from chains bolted to the cell’s stone wall.
“He refuses food, Dear Leader,” said the commandant, inclining his head slightly toward Jin.
Jin couldn’t care less if Kim starved himself. It would save the time and trouble of executing Kim slowly in a vat of boiling salt water laced with lye. Or throwing him alive into a furnace. A bullet in his brain was too quick.
Jin studied Kim’s ashen face. Kim the traitor; Kim the drunk; Kim the womanizer. The Swedish prostitutes he favored should see and smell him now. They might think twice about allowing all that unwashed flesh to crush them, two and three at a time, against satin sheets, or they might balk at the idea of licking French wine off his body while he writhed with pleasure and called for another bottle to be uncorked.
Jin stood. “I’ll see him.”
The cell door shivered and swung open. Kim blinked; a flash of recognition ignited his dull eyes.
“I have nothing to say,” Kim croaked, his throat blocked with phlegm, his doughy lips barely moving. He warmed his hands under his armpits.
The cell was filthier than Jin had thought. Kim, in addition to refusing food, had refused to use the bucket provided and instead had defecated and urinated on the floor of the cell. Jin almost gagged on the smell, which cut his nostrils like a knife. The commandant lifted, then dropped, his shoulders, as if to say there was nothing he could do about Kim’s bad habit, which was his only means of revenge for such a grave loss of face. Let Kim breathe his own shit, Jin thought.
Jin motioned that he wanted privacy; the commandant stepped into the passageway but left the cell door slightly ajar.
Hands linked behind his back, Jin looked down at the hunched figure of the man who had ruled North Korea for almost twenty-five years and who, during that period, had unleashed a wave of brutality that at times had sickened even Jin, a master himself at using terror and pain to control his enemies.
“Go away.” Kim hawked and spat between the polished toe caps of Jin’s boots. “I have nothing to say.”
“And there is nothing you can say that I want to hear,” Jin said. “Instead, you will listen to me. An indictment has been handed down by the People’s Council of Ministers. You have been charged and found guilty of treason and have been sentenced to death.”
Kim, gaze planted on the gob of gray phlegm between Jin’s boot toes, said nothing.
“The People’s Council of Justice has given me the task of carrying out your sentence. I am free to choose the time of your execution and, most importantly, the method.”
“Then kill me now.”
“There is more.” Jin waited until he had Kim’s full attention. “Your uncle, your sister and her husband, and both your sons have been arrested. They, too, will pay for your crime. I will rid the State of all traitors who have disgraced your father, the divine leader, Kim il Sung.”
Kim looked up. “Are you trying to frighten me?”
“Frighten you? No. Those are the facts.”
“As I said, kill me now.”
Jin bent at the waist to make sure Kim heard his words clearly. “No, not now, but very soon. After you watch your relatives die one at a time.”
“Is that what you came to tell me?”
“No. I came to tell you that your Japanese friend has agreed to meet me.”
Kim reacted like a muscle poked by an electric current. His gaze bored into Jin.
The marshal straightened his back. “He and I have a commonality of interests. He also has the technology I need and the means to turn our raw materials into usable tools.”
Jin did an about-face to make his exit. Kim said, “Wait. Stop talking in riddles. What are you saying?”
Jin halted, a hand on the cell door. “This: Very soon the United States will no longer be a threat to our existence or to the rest of the world. With your friend’s help we will have the means to cripple the U.S.”
“He won’t go through with it. He’s lying to you.”
“If you think that, you don’t know him at all. Believe me, he’ll do it, because he wants revenge as much as we do.”
“Then you’re both insane. You’ll turn the entire world against us.”