Red Phoenix Burning (11 page)

Kim squinted at the clock mounted on the opposite wall and frowned. Its hands swam in and out of focus, impossible to read. “How much longer?” he muttered to the young, grim-faced officer at his side.

Colonel Sik Chol-jun was one of the few men he trusted, one of the bodyguards who had pulled him alive from the bomb-ravaged ruins of the Banquet Hall.

“Thirty minutes to your broadcast, Supreme Leader.”

“Good,” Kim said tightly, clenching his teeth as another wave of agony washed over him. “Then it is time for my injection.”

Sik nodded crisply, raising a hand to summon the doctor waiting nervously with the small group of cameramen and sound technicians.

The doctor, a middle-aged man whose fear-filled eyes were magnified by a pair of thick spectacles, hurried to them.

“You know what is required?” Kim demanded harshly.

“Yes, Supreme Leader,” the doctor said, already opening his medical kit. “Enough medication to dull the pain, but not so much that your speech patterns or thought processes are affected.”

“You will prepare two injections,” Kim told him, watching closely while he filled a syringe from a sealed ampule.

The doctor looked up, surprised. “But, Supreme Leader—”

“Do it.”

Trembling, the doctor obeyed, filling another syringe.

Satisfied, Kim turned to Sik. “Carry on, Colonel.”

Before the doctor could react, the younger officer took the first hypodermic away from him. Then, ignoring his startled squawk, Sik jabbed the needle into the doctor’s own upper arm. A spot of bright red blood appeared on his shirt.

Silently, Sik handed the used syringe back to the stunned doctor, who stood wincing and rubbing at his arm.

“Now we wait, Doctor,” Kim said quietly. “And if you are still alive in five minutes, you may give me that second shot.”

He turned back to Sik. “Take your station in the control center, Colonel. You know my orders.”

“Yes, Supreme Leader.” For the first time, the young officer smiled. “Everything necessary will be done.”

Security Control Center, National Command Redoubt

Colonel Sik paused just inside the control center, waiting briefly while his eyes adjusted to the dimmer light. The armed guard posted at the entrance grunted slightly, closing the heavy steel door that separated this room from the rest of the complex.

“Lock it,” Sik told him.

“Yes, Comrade Colonel,” the soldier said, spinning a wheel set into the door. Super-hardened bolts smoothly slid into place with an audible click.

Sik nodded, satisfied. Now it would take a powerful shaped explosive charge to break in.

Set even deeper inside the mountain, the control center was crowded with computer consoles, equipment panels, and TV monitors. Piping and electrical wiring covered almost every inch of the plain concrete walls and ceiling. Signs identified controls for the redoubt’s ventilation systems, internal and external alarms, blast doors, fire suppression systems, and for an array of command-detonated minefields covering the slopes outside.

Four officers manned the various consoles, their fingers flickering on keyboards and old-fashioned switches as they monitored data, video, and audio feeds from the internal systems and from the various observation and guard posts scattered across the face of Myohyang-san.

Sik checked his watch. Fifteen minutes until Kim Jong-un went live on televisions across North Korea, announcing his survival and his determination to regain control.

“Go to maximum internal security,” he ordered.

“Yes, Comrade Colonel,” the senior watch officer, a major, said. He tapped a series of switches. Lights flashed red and the TV monitors showed blast doors sliding shut in corridor after corridor and room after room. One by one, the blinking red lights turned green. “All doors secured and locked.”

“Activate overpressure systems.”

The captain manning the ventilation panels nodded, already flicking controls.

Sik heard a low hiss. He swallowed twice, clearing his ears. Raising air pressures in the redoubt’s sealed tunnels and chambers was a means of defending against outside chemical, biological, and radioactive contaminants. Toxic gases, vapors, and particles would be blown back outside, rather than sucked in through the ventilators that supplied the complex with fresh air. “Confirm that the Audience Chamber has positive pressure,” he said, watching carefully.

“I confirm that,” the other man replied, tapping a switch and dial in the center of one of his panels. “Ventilation System One-C is fully operational.”

“Very well.”

Sik turned to another captain, this one tasked with monitoring the external defense and observation posts. “Sound the general alert.”

“Yes, Comrade Colonel.”

Klaxons sounded three times, echoing shrilly across Myohyang-san’s steep, forested slopes. Sik observed closely, checking the various TV monitors as they flicked from channel to channel. Each showed soldiers hurrying to camouflaged gun positions and surveillance posts.

“All defenses manned and ready, Comrade Colonel,” the senior watch officer reported.

“Make sure,” Sik told him evenly. “Sound the alert again.”

Silently, the major nodded to his subordinate. Sik carried Kim Jong-un’s favor and trust. No one wanted to cross him.

Outside, the klaxons blared again, sounding three more times before fading away.

Above Observation Post Nine, Piro Peak

Special Forces Captain Ro Ji-hun counted carefully. Four . . . five . . . six. He grinned in the darkness. It was time. He stretched carefully, testing each muscle. He and the eleven men under his command had spent the last seven days concealed beneath camouflage tarps in the middle of this boulder field high up on the mountain—moving as little as possible, conversing only in sign language, eating cold field rations, and always on edge against the possibility of discovery by a loyalist patrol.

He flicked on his shielded penlight, illuminating a circle of watchful, wolfish faces. “Remember the plan,” he said softly. “Move fast. Move silently. Kill quickly and quietly. Understood?”

His men nodded.

“Then follow me.”

Cradling his Czech-made Skorpion submachine gun, Ro quietly slithered out from under the camouflage tarp and crouched beside a massive, weathered rock. His troops joined him. Seven of them carried silenced submachine guns like his. Four were harnessed to a mesh-covered, metal cylinder slung between them.

Through narrowed eyes, he studied the observation post about one hundred meters down the slope.

It was a simple layout, just a narrow trench jackhammered out of the rock. At one end, slabs of granite and sandbags laid over the trench offered protection against shrapnel from artillery shells or bombs. This high up the mountain, no one really expected they would have to defend against an infantry attack. Four loyalist soldiers were visible, two peering through handheld binoculars at the valley floor far below and two more using more powerful, mounted scopes to scan Myohyang-san’s other peaks and the surrounding airspace.

Ro glanced to the right. There, fifty meters from the observation post, a low, rounded gray hummock topped by a clump of brush marked their primary target. From the air, that mound would look like nothing more than a ripple of rock on the mountain’s flank. But it was man-made, not natural.

He tapped his senior sergeant on the shoulder and pointed back to the narrow trench. “Sergeant Maeng. Take that observation post. No prisoners.”

Maeng, squat, heavily muscled, and scarred, grinned back at him, showing a mouthful of bad teeth. “Yes, Comrade Captain.”

The sergeant and his six men rose and headed downhill, spreading out across the slope—moving in short bounds, with three or four commandos always kneeling and positioned to fire while the others advanced.

Ro watched for a moment and then looked away, satisfied that Maeng would handle matters with his usual brutal efficiency. He signaled to the men harnessed to the metal cylinder. “Let’s go!”

With the captain in the lead, they moved out from the boulder field, angling their way cautiously down toward that low gray hillock—straining against the weight they carried.

Security Control Center

One of the monitors was now switched to show the television feed from the Audience Chamber. Kim Jong-un still stood braced behind the podium, while aides were guiding the generals and marshals who would serve as his backdrop into position.

“We have control over all circuits to Pyongyang, Hamhung, Wonsan, Kaesong, Nampo, and the other major cities,” a voice reported. “Broadcast begins in one minute.”

“This is a great day, comrades,” Sik said quietly.

The four officers grouped around the equipment and computer consoles nodded vigorously.

A phone buzzed.

One of the watch officers picked it up. “Yes? What is it?” He listened for a moment and then turned to Sik. “Observation Post Nine reports possible movement near the Paegun Hermitage.”

“I will speak with them,” Sik said, stepping forward. He took the phone. “This is Colonel Sik. Report your situation.”

“Sergeant Maeng here, Comrade Colonel,” a gravelly voice answered. “Captain Ro and his team are in position.”

“Very well. Carry on.”

Sik put the phone down and shrugged at the others. “A peasant jumping at shadows. But better to be unnecessarily vigilant than caught napping, eh?”

The other officers chuckled.

“Broadcast begins . . . now!” the voice from the monitor said.

The image changed, showing a vast rippling North Korean flag. Stirring music swelled in the speakers with the crash of cymbals as the national anthem began playing.

“Attention!” Sik snapped.

The four watch officers obeyed, jumping to their feet. Behind them, the guard stiffened to attention, with his chin up and his eyes fixed on the monitor.

And Sik was in motion.

Whirling around, he punched the guard in the throat, crushing his larynx. Gasping, straining vainly for air, the soldier dropped to his knees.

Without hesitating, Sik tugged the pistol out of the dying man’s holster. He flipped the safety down and continued turning—already squeezing the trigger as he came on target.

The pistol cracked four times, deafeningly loud in this confined space.

Hit in the head, each of the four watch officers went down. Blood and brains spattered across several of the screens and consoles.

Through his ringing ears, Sik heard the music fade out and looked up in time to see a stern-faced Kim Jong-un begin speaking.

The colonel smiled. The timing was perfect.

He moved to the ventilation systems control panel, found the switch marked 1-C, and flipped it. On a dial above the switch, the needle showing air pressure in the Audience Chamber began falling.

Sik picked up the phone and punched the button that would connect him to Observation Post Nine.

“OP Nine,” Maeng growled.

“It is done, Sergeant,” Sik told him. “Tell Captain Ro to proceed.”

Without waiting for an acknowledgment, the colonel hung up and stood watching Kim Jong-un rant, promising death to every traitor and the immediate restoration of order under his unchallenged rule.

This would indeed be a great day, Sik decided.

From the time he was a small boy, the colonel had grown up believing that his father, a man he had never really known, had lived and died as a Hero of the Fatherland. Major Sik Sang-chol had been the brave commando leader who spearheaded a surprise attack on the American headquarters in Seoul. And though the raid failed to eliminate the American commander in chief, General McLaren, it had successfully sowed confusion and chaos in the enemy’s high command.

As a young soldier, Sik had been determined to honor his father’s memory by serving the regime with unswerving faithfulness and courage, even to the point of death if necessary. His loyalty and demonstrated skills had driven him ever higher in rank and responsibility, until at last he earned a post as one of the Supreme Leader’s personal bodyguards.

And then his world collapsed around him.

One of his superiors in the Guard Command had shown him the secret files on his father’s operation. It had been a suicide mission, though none of the commandos had known that. The extraction routes his father had been promised were never put into operation. Worse still was reading the evaluation attached to his father’s personnel file, an evaluation in Kim Jong-il’s handwriting.

MOST SECRET

Major Sik Sang-chol

Second Reconnaissance Brigade, Special Forces

Loyalty: High

Command ability: Acceptable

Suitability for further advancement: Nil

Recommendation: Expend him

From that moment, Sik Chol-jun had lived for one thing only—the chance to take revenge by killing Kim Jong-il’s own son, the so-called Supreme Leader. When the bomb in the banquet hall failed to kill the tyrant, the colonel had been tempted to finish him off right there in the smoldering rubble. But too many of the other bodyguards were there with him, frantically digging through ruins. Better, Sik had thought, to stay alive and act the hero—ready to play his part in the backup plan.

This plan.

Ventilator 1-C Intake, Piro Peak

Ro watched from the clump of artificial brush that concealed the ventilator shaft, one of the dozens that fed the redoubt hundreds of meters below their feet. He saw Sergeant Maeng clamber out of the observation post trench. The noncom pumped his arm twice. That was the signal.

He turned to the soldiers squatting beside the metal cylinder. A length of flexible hose ran from the nozzle of the cylinder into a small, dark opening, shaft 1-C. Ro nodded to the commando crouched right by the opening. “Test it!”

The corporal shook out three matches and lit them together. For an instant, they flared up brightly and then went out. The smoke vanished, sucked into the shaft.

Without waiting any longer, Ro dropped to his knees and started feverishly turning the valve below the cylinder’s nozzle. It began hissing, spewing its highly pressurized contents through the hose and down the ventilator shaft.