But it was only Tumangang, the Russian–Korean border halt. The train crews, though they had ‘spelled’ each other for seven days and six nights, were exhausted. Fresh teams came on board. Had the vehicle been a passenger train carrying those very few Western tourists who make the journey it would have rolled on the last few hundred miles to the capital.
But this was a special cargo for a special destination. Mount Paektu was many miles away from the main line Pyongyang to Moscow. The train would be diverted and its cargo disembarked for reloading on to a branch line. The border station teemed with agents of the SSD secret police.
Under new command it rolled across the estuary of the Tumen River then turned towards the west and the hinterland which housed the sacred mountain and the secret silo keeping the Hwasong-20 from prying eyes.
The Marshal took the news in his palace in Pyongyang and beamed with pleasure. His duplicity had worked. Eager for détente, President Moon to his south was sending relief aid of corn, wheat and rice. South Korea had had a good harvest, with ample surpluses to donate. He, the Dear Leader, was within a week of becoming a truly global thermonuclear power.
Sir Adrian had the habit of subscribing to several small-circulation technical magazines on foreign affairs and intelligence analyses. It was in one of them that he read of a man called Song Ji-wei, of whom he had never heard. The visitor was going to give a talk about Korea. A small attendance was expected. Nevertheless, the retired spymaster decided to meet him.
Mr Song had had an extraordinary life. He had been born North Korean fifty years earlier and when he was just ten his parents had escaped to China and thence to the West. But in the process they had become separated from their son, who was captured by the police, who, after several weeks, threw him on to the streets.
Part of the grip over the people maintained by the Kim governments is the ruthless punishment of the entire family of an escaper. Parents, siblings, offspring – all are arrested and sent to concentration camps if anyone tries – let alone succeeds – in escaping abroad. Wishing to leave at all is a crime.
Released from police custody, the child became one of those who are called ‘fluttering swallows’; street urchins who live rough, sleeping in alleys, scavenging for food, receiving no education. This was far from the capital, so no tourist would ever see one. At eighteen, Song too tried to make a break for the Chinese border, crossed it in the pitch dark of a moonless night, but he was caught two days later, stealing food. Back then, the Chinese authorities handed refugees over to the North Koreans. Song was sentenced to a labour camp for life. There he was tortured, beaten and put to work. He suffered for eleven years before he made his breakout.
This time, he went with three companions and again made for the northern border with China, rather than the South Korean border, the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, far to the south. Far from being demilitarized, the DMZ is the most lethal border in the world: in fact, two borders with a mile-wide strip between them containing landmines, spotter-towers and machine-gun posts. Very few ever make it across to the south.
The quartet got into China. One of them, having worked there, spoke good Mandarin. The other three kept their mouths shut while the Chinese-speaker secured them rides on trucks and the freight car of a slow-moving train. They moved further and further into China, away from the border, with its numerous patrols. Then they turned south and eventually reached Shanghai.
It is a very long time since Shanghai was a fishing village. Today it is simply vast. Its miles of docks, quays and jetties play host to merchant ships of every kind. Most are large container ships, but there are still coastal freighters and they found one bound for South Korea across the East China Sea.
They stowed away under the canvas covers of a lifeboat. Discovered at sea by a single crewman, they persuaded him to replace the canvas tarpaulin and say nothing. Half starved and weak with hunger, they slipped ashore at Busan, South Korea, and appealed for asylum.
Song Ji-Wei had a good brain. He recovered his health and got a job, which enabled him to make a living. Ten years later, with his life savings and some local financial backing, he began to fight back. He started the No Chain Movement. When he and Weston met after his talk he explained to Sir Adrian what he was doing.
The core of the bewildering docility of the broad masses of the people of North Korea, he said, was their utter ignorance of anything that happened in the outside world. The sealing of their country and their lives from everything elsewhere was total.
They had no radios to listen to foreign broadcasts, no TVs, no iPads. From morning until night, then through until dawn, and throughout their lives, they were drenched in pro-government propaganda. Without any standard of comparison, they thought their lives were normal, instead of thinking them grotesquely distorted.
Out of 23 million there were about 1 million of the state-privileged who lived reasonably well. They did not suffer from the periodic famines that saw bodies piled in the streets, with the survivors too weak to bury the dead. The price was total and absolute loyalty to the Kim dynasty.
About twenty per cent of citizens, children included, were informers, supported by about 1 million secret police, constantly vigilant for a hint of disloyalty or disobedience. They might change – they would change – said Mr Song, if they could be told what a wonderful life was possible with freedom. His task was to try to inform them.
Near the border he had posted several volunteers, waiting for a south-to-north wind. Then small helium balloons were released with messages and pictures describing life in the South. These balloons drifted north, rose until they burst and rained their messages on to the landscape. Though it was an offence to read them, he knew that many did.
Sir Adrian recalled the story he had heard of the now-dead Kim Jong-il and his private dread of the ‘Ceauşescu moment’, when the people stop cheering and, one by one, start to boo.
‘What would you need to expand your operation?’ he asked now.
Mr Song shrugged and smiled. ‘Funding,’ he said. ‘The No Chain Movement gets no material help either from the South Korean government or from abroad. We have to buy the balloons and the helium gas. With funding, I could even look into moving from balloons to drones. These could be recovered intact and used again. Over and over.
‘With drones I could move to small, cheap, battery-powered tape-players. The spoken word and the moving picture are much more persuasive, more convincing. The North Koreans could see life in the South for what it is. The freedoms, the liberty, the human rights, the ability to say what you think and what you want. But that is a long way off.’
‘And you think your once-fellow citizens might change? Rebel? Rise up?’
‘Not immediately,’ said Mr Song. ‘And it would not be the broad masses of the people. As in Romania years ago, it would be the generals who you see fawning upon the fat man. They really control the machine of suppression and enslavement. It suits them to live in wealth, ease and privilege. At the moment, worshipping the Kims enables that to happen.
‘Do not forget the age factor. In my society, age is venerated. The whole High Command is old enough to be Kim’s father. They do not like being treated with contempt. The defection of General Li has shaken them badly. So Kim has to deliver, and go on delivering. The West being so gullible, believing Kim is one day going to abandon all his nuclear weapons, enables him to go on delivering. So the generals will stand by him … until they are themselves threatened. Then they will strike, like the generals of Romania.’
‘You are persuasive, Mr Song,’ said Sir Adrian. ‘Personally, I cannot help you. But I may know someone who can.’
He had no doubt the overburdened British taxpayer should not be saddled with yet another contribution to a foreign cause, but he was not lying when he said he could think of a possible donor.
No one will ever know what really went wrong in the heart of the holy mountain of Paektu that day in September.
The Hwasong-20 missile towered up from the
base of its silo far below. It was truly enormous. With extreme care, component by component, the new RD250 power unit from Russia had been installed. With even greater care, the highly unstable propellant, the hypergolic liquid that would launch it halfway across the planet, had been inserted. There was no thermonuclear warhead yet and the high-tensile steel doors to the sky were still in place.
But all complex systems have to be tested. It was during the testing that something went awry. In theory, there was nothing that could go wrong. Switching circuits on and off, ensuring that connections will not fail at the moment of need – these should not be hazardous.
The blast tore the holy mountain apart. It made the deliberate explosions at Punggye-ri, so eagerly watched by the media and American observers, look like celebratory fireworks.
There were no foreigners at Paektu. But the North Korean generals were there, crouching in their bunkers. They had come to observe a triumph. They stumbled back to their limousines, brushing the rubble dust off their uniforms.
Far away, in several directions, seismic detectors noted a tremor somewhere in the north of Korea. It was identified as being from the only volcano in that part of the world. They concluded it must be Mount Paektu rumbling. But surely it was dormant?
The outside world, the watchers of seismic recording screens, could only speculate as to why a seemingly dormant volcanic mountain had suddenly rumbled. In the palace of The Marshal in Pyongyang, there was no enigma, just delay.
The generals who had been present at the disaster of Paektu returned to the capital in their limousines, sweeping through villages of rake-thin, under-nourished peasants who cheered them because they dared do nothing else. Once arrived, they dared not be the first to break the news. Only after repeated enquiry by the plump dictator did one of them admit there had been ‘a problem’. When the full details emerged the hapless messenger lost his job and his freedom. He was sent to a labour camp.
In that culture, to scream with rage is to lose face, yet scream was what The Marshal did. For an hour. The courtiers fled in terror. When calm returned he demanded every tiny detail and finally ordered a root-and-branch inquiry into what had gone wrong. Later analyses of the wreckage would ascertain that the flaw must have been inside the RD250 engine that had arrived from Russia, some manufacturing error that caused a tiny spark. Whatever it was, the propellant fuel had ignited. But that was several weeks away.
In the immediate aftermath, The Marshal knew only that his gamble had failed. The Hwasong-20 had been the missile that, tipped with the most lethal thermonuclear warhead he possessed, should have made him a true nuclear power, invited to sit at the highest of high tables. His scientists now told him it would take years, and astronomical sums of money, to recreate the missile and another silo in another mountain. That was when he summoned the Russian ambassador, who left ashen-faced.
Chapter Nineteen
IT TOOK SIR Adrian three days to find his donor for the Korean resistance movement, the No Chain volunteers working under Mr Song. He began with quiet talks with two old contacts inside the National Crime Agency. This used to be the Serious Organized Crime Agency and, although not part of the capital’s Metropolitan Police, it works closely with the Met but has a nationwide jurisdiction.
It also has divisions that concentrate on narcotics and the known Russian underworld. He spoke with the heads of both those divisions before settling on Mr Ilya Stepanovich. He was a former high-ranker in the Russian underworld who, like the now-departed Vladimir Vinogradov, during the economic collapse of Russia years earlier, had used money, bribery and violence to acquire a controlling interest in an industry. This was his country’s platinum business. Out of this he had become a billionnaire.
This enrichment enabled him to become a supporter in funds and influence of the Vozhd when he was rising through his first premiership; after he had snatched it in ‘arranged’ elections, his presidency had now become permanent. The linkage had never been broken. Stepanovich’s tentacles still reached into both the Kremlin and the underworld. His criminal record had been erased and he had moved to London to live the life of the Russian mega-rich who had been permitted to settle as ‘non-domiciled’.
He lived in a £20 million mansion in the city’s wealthiest enclave, Belgravia, kept his executive jet at Northolt, and his social entrée, instead of a football team, was his string of racehorses trained at Newmarket. He had several non-secret phone numbers for friends and contacts, and another that was very secret indeed and protected by firewalls installed by some of the best cyber-geeks on the market. He presumed it was untappable. Luke Jennings had cracked the access codes in days. Dr Hendricks, once more without a clue as to how Luke had done it, set up an untraceable listening watch which eventually logged a call to a number in Panama City. This was identified as a bank.
The mentor at Chandler’s Court put the young genius back to work. Another few days saw the in-house database and its covert records of overseas-account holders penetrated. The database enquired of the caller, who was clearly identified as Mr Stepanovich himself, because the ID codes were all perfect, how much he wished to have transferred and to which account with which bank.
There was no actual telephone involved. This was computer talking to computer. Sir Adrian allocated the role of ‘caller’ to himself, sitting in the computer hub at Chandler’s Court with Dr Hendricks at the computer console asking for instructions. Sir Adrian glanced at a sheet of paper in his hand.
It bore the e-details of a new account in a reputable merchant bank situated in the British Channel Islands. Letter by letter and figure by figure, Sir Adrian read out the account details. Dr Hendricks tapped them into the keypad and the instructions went in a nanosecond to Panama. Then he looked up.
‘Panama is asking how much of the contents of this account you wish transferred.’
Sir Adrian had not thought of that. He shrugged.
‘All of it,’ he said. In another second the transfer was made.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Hendricks, staring at his screen. ‘It’s 300 million quid.’
The phoney Mr Stepanovich terminated the connection. He had already ensured that reverse-engineered enquiries would never lead back to Chandler’s Cross. Then Dr Hendricks started to giggle. Across the room on a chair, Luke Jennings smiled. He had done something that had pleased his friend, so he was happy. Sir Adrian drove back to London.
Of course, this was far too much for the needs of Mr Song in Seoul. Sir Adrian cabled him a handsome operating fund to drench North Korea in subversive propaganda and permitted himself to offer some large anonymous donations to charities involving abused or hungry children worldwide, and damaged or crippled soldiers.
Domestic staff at the Belgravia mansion, chatting to one another over off-duty beers at the Crown and Anchor around the corner, mentioned hearing a sound like that of a wounded animal coming from their employer’s sitting room after dinner earlier that evening.
What they did not divulge, because they did not know it, was that the departed fortune did not belong to Mr Stepanovich. He had been sheltering it for the Vory v Zakone. It was the Russian underworld’s cocaine money, and they have a reputation for being very sceptical of excuses when their wealth goes missing. Mr Stepanovich saved his life by repaying them, but the racehorses had to go.
The day after the cheerful beers beneath the rafters of the Belgravia pub there was a very closed meeting at Chequers. Among the politicians was the Prime Minister, who was in the chair but said little, preferring as ever to listen to the real experts: the Foreign Secretary, the Defence Secretary and junior ministers from three other ministries. But they were there to listen to some very senior civil servants.
These included the Chief of the Defence Staff, the Chief of the SIS, the Director of the National Cyber Security Centre and his colleague from GCHQ, and one representative each from the SIS and the Foreign Office who spent their careers studying Eastern Europe and Russia. News had come in from various sources, and no
ne of it was good.
A team of Dutch scientists, after years of study, had concluded that there was no viable doubt that the Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 shot down over Ukraine in July 2014 with the loss of 283 passengers and 15 crew had been downed quite deliberately by a Russian missile crew operating a Buk missile out of Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine.
Intercepted radio chit-chat had confirmed those responsible were not Ukrainian rebels and knew perfectly well that their target was a civilian airliner. Most of the passengers were Dutch.
‘There must be retribution,’ said the Chief of the Defence Staff. ‘Or at least deterrence. The provocations are mounting and mounting, to intolerable levels.’
There were grunts and nods from around the table. The next speaker was from the Foreign Office, and he was followed by the man from the NCSC.
There had been a devastating cyber-attack on Ukraine, on her banks, her government and her power grid. It was now being called the NotPetya attack. It had masqueraded as a criminal attack aimed at extracting a ransom as a condition of its cessation, but no Western cyber-crime agency was in any doubt that the Russian government was behind it.
More to the point, said the head of the NCSC, the cyber-attacks on Britain coming out of Russia were becoming weekly more and more vicious and more and more frequent. Each one caused damage and each cost money to defend against. It was the Foreign Secretary, at the invitation of the Prime Minister, who summed up.
‘We are living in an age more dangerous than any in our lifetimes,’ he said. ‘The headlines are dominated by globe-wide terrorism mounted by a weird, pseudo-religious death cult stemming from a perverted Islam. But that is not the main threat, despite the suicide bombers. ISIS is not a nation-state.
‘A dozen countries now have nuclear bombs and the missiles to launch them. Four are thoroughly unstable. Three others are not only ruthlessly dictatorial internally but relentlessly aggressive externally. North Korea and Iran are two of these, but the league-leader by her own choice is now Russia. Things have not been this bad since Stalin’s time.’