ICBMs had been dismantled and, over the course of the past three months, using circuitous routes and staggered delivery schedules, Oh had seen to it that the armament had been transferred, one by one, to Changchon. The final missile had arrived two days earlier and reassembly had been completed only a few hours before the general’s arrival.
Oh was looking over the missiles when he was joined by Major Jin Choon-Yei, a short, lean career army officer in his early sixties. Jin, a long-time colleague of Oh’s, had taken charge of operations at Changchon when the general had been called back to Pyongyang, and the major had supervised the site’s transformation into the primary hiding place for North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. Prisoners at the concentration camp, along with Lieutenant Corporal Yulim and the camp’s security force, had been kept in the dark about the nature of the facility and construction had been carried out by military inductees and trusted private contractors.
“Things are coming along nicely, yes?” Jin remarked after the men exchanged greetings.
Oh nodded. “So far, so good. What about the warheads?”
“Over here.”
Jin led Oh past the missiles to a garage-size steel vault imbedded in the mountainside. The door to the vault was closed and guarded by a pair of sentries who stood as rigid as statues, diverting their gazes from the two officers.
“We have four warheads ready for deployment,” Jin told the general, pointing past the sentries at the safe. “The others, as you know, are en route from Yongbyon and Pyongyang.”
Oh nodded. “The next shipment should arrive by tomorrow morning, with the others to follow soon after.”
“We’ll be ready for them,” Jin assured the general.
“Good,” Oh said. “There’ve been no problems, then? No setbacks?”
“None,” Jin said. “The closest thing we have to a problem is some crumbling of the bedrock where we didn’t encase it in concrete. It’s very minor, though.”
The major pointed, dragging Oh’s attention to the area where the warhead vault was imbedded into the raw cavern walls. Small heaps of fallen rubble had accumulated on the ground at the base of the vault and Oh could see faint stress fissures in the nearby rock.
“Keep that monitored,” Oh suggested. “If the fissures widen, I’ll have someone brought in to see if we need to fortify the rock.”
“It probably wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Jin conceded.
Oh made a mental note to call the KPA’s Corps of Engineers regarding the matter, then quickly turned his thoughts to other matters.
“Now, then,” he said, “what about the launch site?”
“I just spoke to your nephew and he says things are coming along,” Jin reported. “And the access tunnels are close to merging, as well.”
“Already?” Oh was pleasantly surprised. He’d made a point not to pry into his nephew’s handling of construction at the missile base, and it appeared now that his faith in the younger man’s talents had paid off.
“Here,” Jin said, leading Oh away from the site, “let me show you.”
Jin’s office was located in the first of the prefab rooms situated along the far wall. Once they’d entered the room, the major directed Oh’s attention to a bulletin board mounted on an easel across from his desk. Tacked to the board was a topographical map of South Pyongyang Province, which was bordered to the west by the Yellow Sea and to the south by the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas. Two thick lines drawn with a marking pen snaked through the Changchon Mountain Range. The longer line, stretching for nearly seven miles, wound its way south from the facility. The second line was far shorter, barely a quarter-mile long, reaching northward from Kijongdong, a controversial North Korean installation located just north of the DMZ. A barely discernible gap marked where the two lines would eventually intersect.
“We’ve been working around the clock in both tunnels,” Jin told Oh. “If all goes well, by morning the tunnels will have connected. Once that happens, it will only be a matter of widening a few stretches and clearing away debris, then we can haul the missiles and warheads to the launch site.”
Oh smiled faintly. From the sound of it, they would achieve launch capacity within a week, well ahead of even the most optimistic projections made a few months ago. Kim Jong-il would be pleased.
“I’ll check the tunnels in the morning,” the general told Jin. “In the meantime, I’m exhausted.”
“Your room’s the way you left it,” Jin assured him.
“Good,” Oh said. “Before I retire, though, I was wondering. My back has been acting up and I forgot my medication. If you could help me out…”
The major smiled indulgently and went to his desk, unlocking one of the side doors. He removed a vial and handed it to the general. “This should take care of the pain and help you sleep.”
There was no label on the vial, but Oh knew the capsules were filled with doses of morphine, a byproduct of the rehabilitation center’s heroin operations. Oh thanked Jin and quickly helped himself to one of the capsules. He was about to excuse himself so that he could get to his quarters before the morphine kicked in when Jin broadsided him with a pointed query.
“Forgive me for bringing this up, General,” the major said. “I know things seem to be going well, but I’ve been hearing certain rumors about the missiles. About how well they might perform.”
Oh’s smile faded as quickly as it had appeared. He turned to Jin, eyes flashing with irritation.
“What rumors?” he demanded.
Jin blanched. He took an involuntary step backward and stiffened.
“Forgive me,” he repeated. “It wasn’t my place to bring this up.”
“What rumors?” Oh pressed.
Jin hesitated, then said, “What I’ve heard is that these missiles are based on designs first drawn up by the Project Kanggye Team. The team that defected.”
Oh struggled to maintain his composure. The mass defection of all five nuclear weapons specialists comprising the Kanggye Nuclear Research and Development Team had supposedly been kept under tight wraps ever since it had been carried out two years ago. The crew, which had devised the means by which to nearly double both the range and accuracy of the Taepo Dongs, had been replaced by other physicists and military scientists who’d discovered that several members of the original team had tampered with their work data prior to defecting. The need to scrutinize every scrap of data to try to rectify errors had effectively derailed the missile program for the better part of fourteen months, and there was still concern that the replacement team had failed to contend with all the problems the defectors had created. And because there was no way to test the Taepo Dongs without attracting the attention of the outside world, the odds of failed launchings or errant trajectories were far greater than hoped for. The ranking brass had done its best to downplay the risks while fast-tracking production of the ICBMs, but in the back of everyone’s mind, including Oh’s, was the concern that a glitch planted by one of the defectors would avoid discovery and prove the undoing of the whole enterprise.
Oh saw no point in trying to deny
