Red Phoenix Burning (15 page)

Rhee could see the captives trying to reason it out. The tale sounded fantastic, but their captors were clearly not KPA soldiers. The corporal spoke up first. He’d seen these men kill North Korean troops, so it was easier for him to believe their story. “I want to go to the South.” He was already marked for death, so if this was some sort of elaborate ruse, he had nothing to lose.

The woman stared at the swim gear lying on the sand. “Will this submarine take us all the way to the South?” She said it as if their destination was the moon.

Rhee nodded. “It will take about a day.”

She looked over to Guk, standing nearby, who shrugged and nodded, then to her husband, who looked as befuddled as her, but he also nodded. She started crying again, but weakly, and clinging to the child in her lap. Speaking for both of them, the husband said firmly, “Yes. Please take us with you. What must we do?”

Rhee smiled. “Let’s fit you all with some flotation gear, and then we’ll take a swim.”

Chapter 7 - Maelstrom

22 August 2015, 6:00 p.m. EDT

CNN Headquarters

Atlanta, Georgia

The opening logo was the same one the network had used since the beginning of the crisis, a map of the Korean Peninsula with the part above the thirty-eighth parallel in jagged pieces, as if it was shattered glass. They’d modified it earlier that day, though, with the word “Liquidated” angled across the northern part in bright red letters.

The logo shrank and appeared to fall back, landing on the video wall behind CNN’s leading military correspondent, Catherine Donner, sitting at a long desk. The video wall showed a constantly moving mosaic of military hardware in action, buildings on fire, carefully edited sections of the now infamous death scene, and shots of cheering crowds surrounding a tall blonde reporter.

Ms. Donner was neither tall nor blonde. Her mid-length hair was more gray than brown, and a weathered face seemed to exist only to frame her trademark green eyes.

“Welcome to this special extended edition of the War Room. I’m Cat Donner and I’m here with our panel of political experts, and we’re pleased to be joined this hour by Dr. Mark Ulrich from the Nuclear Weapons Disarmament Council. He’s going to tell us about what we know, or more properly, what we don’t know, about the status of North Korea’s nuclear stockpile.

“Before we do that, we’re coming up to the six o’clock hour here on the US East Coast, but Korea is thirteen hours ahead of us. Most of us were drinking our morning coffee when we heard about Kim Jong-un’s very public death—no, assassination—by nerve gas, just as that country began its first night dealing with the incontrovertible proof of their absolute dictator’s demise. Now, it’s seven in the morning, a little after daybreak in Pyongyang.” She turned to a bearded man in his forties sitting with her at the desk.

“Dr. Russel Hayes is from the Brookings Institution, and the author of several books on North Korea. His latest is
Criminal Kingdom
, which was published last year. Doctor, virtually everybody on the planet that has access to the Internet has seen the images. It’s the first video on YouTube to get over a billion views. It’s not pleasant to watch, but is there anything in that clip that you feel has been missed, or that people should be noticing?”

Hayes had obviously been prepared for the question, because he answered immediately, “Almost as important as Kim’s death was the death of the others in the room, representing the upper two or three tiers of his regime—his reconstituted regime, I might add, since many of the original members were killed either in the explosion on the fifteenth, or in the violence since then.”

“Is the Kim regime wiped out, then?” Donner asked.

“No, although they are obviously weakened. Even with the coup attempt on the fifteenth, Kim’s faction had the advantage, because they were already in control. The next strongest group, the General Staff, had more raw power, but their lines of communication were broken at the top.”

Donner prompted, “And the Korean Workers’ Party was the third faction?”

Hayes nodded and answered, “They were actually the most numerous, with the most potential power. Everybody from a government economist to the street sweepers had to be a member of the party, and while technically loyal to Kim, the party organization has always been a law unto itself. Kim may have the steering wheel, but the party was everything else, from the economic engine to the infrastructure wheels to the workers in the gas tank. All three groups of course are corrupt, and are riddled with informers allied with the other two factions.

“When Kim reappeared, alive, many of the ringleaders of the other factions, who of necessity had been forced to reveal themselves, were arrested and shot. According to the refugees my contacts have interviewed, the arrests easily number in the thousands, while the executions before yesterday were in the high hundreds, all of leaders or important members of each faction.”

“And now Kim’s faction is leaderless as well,” Donner concluded.

“Which means it’s a mad scramble, with every man for himself. The diehards will remain, but anybody who can will try to get out or go to ground until the South Koreans get to them.” Hayes shrugged. “There are a lot of party officials that are watching the advance of the ROK Army the way the German civilians waited for the US and Britain in World War II.”

“And do the Chinese take on the role of the Russians this time?” she asked.

“No, the analogy doesn’t hold,” Hayes responded. “Beijing is very worried, and I wish I had a nickel for every Chinese press release reminding us that North Korea is a ‘sovereign nation.’ But as long as the US doesn’t go north of the thirty-eighth parallel, China can’t justify her own intervention.

“The challenge for the South Koreans will be to move quickly, before the giant that is China decides what it wants to do. If the PRC is presented with a fait accompli, it may simply accept Korean unification as a done deal. Because if China intervenes, then the US has to back up its ally, and unifying the two Koreas will no longer be the goal.”

“What takes its place?” Donner asked.

“Avoiding a nuclear war,” Hayes answered flatly.

23 August 2015, 8:00 a.m.

Pyongyang, North Korea

Cho Ho-jin ducked into the angle formed by a collapsed wall and checked the GPS on his phone. The city had been so badly torn up by the fighting that many landmarks were gone, converted into rubble that covered the streets. Choking smoke from dozens of fires had mixed with the August heat and humidity to form a permanent cloud. Visibility in places was down to a hundred meters, sometimes less.

The phone was his lifeline. He reported by voice now, no coded messages. That took too long. The signal was heavily encrypted, and he doubted that the North Korean security services, even if there were anyone watching for unauthorized cell phone use, would try to track him down in the middle of a battlefield.

Every building bore the marks of combat, and Pyongyang could join Beirut, Karbala, and Sarajevo in popular memory as urban battlefields.

Since arriving at noon yesterday, he’d identified some of the army units fighting in the city, with troops from all three sides vying for the possession of the capital. He intended to pass that information on as soon as he found a more secure place to spend the night. Roving patrols made it dangerous to use his phone in daylight, as he had to have an unobstructed view of the satellite—a little hard to do when one was scurrying from one wrecked building to another.

His last report of two days ago was one of his more revealing observations. The Ministry of State Security’s troops had allied themselves with the Korean Workers’ Party faction. Although rated as a paramilitary force, he’d seen them with heavy weapons and armored fighting vehicles. His last order was to “identify the Kim and KWP factions’ leaders,” as if he was a journalist who could ask for an interview.

The key would be to find the respective headquarters for each faction, then surreptitiously take photographs of anyone who looked to be in charge. It was impossible, of course. His handlers either had a poor grasp of the situation in the North Korean capital, or had been watching too many movies.

He’d been on the move all night, watching tracers arcing over different parts of the city. The night offered some concealment for somebody moving with purpose in a place where everyone who moved was an enemy.

His last meal had been rations looted from the backpack of a dead soldier. He’d wolfed them down while he watched a rocket barrage that fell like a river of fire. It landed somewhere to the west. Cho had no idea of the identity of the firer or the target. The canteen on the corpse’s belt was only half full, and Cho was saving the last few swallows against dire need.

The Potong River lay a few blocks to the east. He’d considered heading there to refill his canteen, but the Potong and other rivers that ran through the city had become boundaries and defensive lines. Instinctively, he avoided the open ground near the water’s edge. Even at night, there was too great a risk of a sniper with a night vision scope.

Many of Pyongyang’s two dozen bridges were down, either collateral damage or dropped deliberately. The party faction held this side of the river, and a respectable swath of the city, but Kim’s faction occupied several key buildings to the north, and in spite of attacks by both the party and the General Staff, they fiercely resisted.

With the General Staff to the east and Kim’s people to the north, the party faction’s headquarters had to be somewhere south or west of here. It wasn’t much to go on, but he’d been living on luck so far. He’d just hoped he had a little more left.

An armored vehicle came up the street toward his position, rumbling on eight wheels across the rubble and cratered surface. Already hidden, Cho pulled back farther into the shadows and watched the soldier manning a heavy machine gun in a small turret on top. He seemed more worried about rooftop snipers than ground-level threats, because he kept looking up, and never noticed Cho. The vehicle passed, like a tiger in search of prey, and once it was out of sight, Cho left and headed one block west, and then south, keeping well away from any troops that might be dug in along the river’s edge.

Cho progressed slowly, sticking close to buildings, pausing and listening as well as looking before crossing any open ground. Shortly after he started, he heard machine gun fire behind him, in the direction the troop carrier had headed, followed by more weapons fire and explosions. He judged it to be moderately close, although he’d thought the battle lines were farther north. More incentive to go south, but he fought the urge to hurry.

For most of the time, he might have been moving through an empty city. Occasionally he’d see a flash of movement as he turned a corner, or a face in a window. Many residents had fled in the afternoon after the broadcast, or during the night, with the remainder either dead, arrested, or in hiding.

There were enough bodies on many streets, either in uniform or civilian clothes, although civilian clothes didn’t mark one as a noncombatant. Only very old or very young men, and women of any age, could be considered true civilians. He’d hidden from groups of heavily armed men that were not in any uniform, and even from individuals, whether they had visible weapons or not.

Moving in the morning daylight was definitely more hazardous than nighttime, and Cho became grateful for the smoky haze that cut the visibility, even though it made his eyes sting. A fine layer of dust and grit also coated his clothes and provided natural camouflage.

Cho’s only goal was to work his way south and look for troop concentrations, while avoiding being seen and shot at by said troops. A lot of soldiers in one area meant some sort of base, and if it wasn’t the headquarters, it might provide a clue to the headquarters’ location.

Careful and cautious, he covered ground, always moving in a southerly direction. He spotted more uniformed bodies, but they appeared disturbingly fresh, the bloodstains wet. They still had their weapons, but Cho easily resisted the temptation to pick one up. There was already a good chance of him being shot on sight. Carrying a gun made it a certainty.

He’d stopped to check the bodies for water or food, which meant first checking them for booby traps. With his attention concentrated on searching for hidden grenades or other hazards, he’d failed to notice the tank turning onto the street several blocks behind him to the north. At least, that’s what he’d told himself later, trying to comfort an ego badly bruised at being surprised by a tank.

The tank crew’s attention may have been attracted by his movements. They may have thought the enemy soldiers were lying prone, or they simply had orders to shoot up anything suspicious. Cho’s first warning was the deep cracking sound of the tank cannon, and the shell striking the building above and behind him. Luckily, the high-explosive shell didn’t detonate until it was inside the structure. Enveloped in a choking cloud of smoke and dust, battered by pieces of falling brick and masonry, he hugged the ground as machine gun bullets kicked up dust around him.

He heard a scream nearby, and at first thought one of the soldiers was not dead, but then realized it was from behind him.

He turned his head to look, still keeping as low as possible, and saw an opening in the building where the shell had blown the wall out. He could see into the ground floor and the basement below it. There was movement in the basement level, and people, and he heard more cries, of pain and fear.

The tank’s diesel engine and the sound of its treads were getting louder. In half a moment, the remaining smoke would clear and the tank crew’s aim would improve significantly. Cho considered playing dead, but was worried that he didn’t appear dead enough. He decided the basement represented a better option, at least in the short term.

He low-crawled backward, covering the five meters in what seemed to be a few swift movements, and half-slid backward down a pile of sloping debris into the basement. The dimness of the basement was enhanced by the cloud of cement dust that hung in the air. Unlike the outside, there was nowhere for it to go, and it divided the room into brilliant dust-filled sunbeams and opaque shadows.

Cho scrambled out of the light toward a dark corner and had to stop short, because it was occupied. A middle-aged woman hugged two children, while an older woman sat leaning against the wall. They were covered with dust, but he could see blood on one of the children’s arms, and on the mother’s shoulder—a lot of blood there.

Out of the sunlight, his eyes quickly adjusted and he could see two more people, a young couple, in another corner, both as far away from the new opening as possible. He agreed with their strategy and headed for a clear spot next to the wall.

The family near him and the couple in the corner looked at the newcomer suspiciously. Cho ignored them and hunkered down in the corner, moving a few pieces of masonry to make more room.

The machine gun fire had stopped, and he heard the tank’s engine as it ground ahead. Once it was past, he’d have to . . .