“If they ever find out you’re picking up the lingo, you’ll be in serious trouble.”
Gerald grinned. “I’m not about to give myself away,” he said. “And my best teacher is General Chung’s youngest daughter, little Nabi. It’s just a game to her. Besides, I’m only picking up the odd word here and there, although the Korean for ‘piano’ is exactly the same as ours. Who’d have thought that? But, from what I gather, there’s been books smuggled in across the frontier and unnatural creatures have been sighted in the woods there.”
“It’s started then,” Maggie said flatly. “Soon it’ll be the helicopter fly-pasts with readings over loudspeakers. Not that they need them in Pyongyang: the whole place is wired up to that annoying PA system. But where do we go from here? There’s nowhere left to hide. We’re trapped in the last corner of the world. What’ll happen to us then?”
“Anything that comes flying into this airspace won’t last long,” Gerald reminded her. “The Marshals are itching to launch their missiles as it is, specially Tark the Shark. He’s a blood-soaked devil, that one, and just back from the south. He’d have pressed every red button already, given half the chance. That’s probably why the Chinese haven’t tried the old helicopter routine around here. They’re only thirty or forty kilometres behind these mountains don’t forget. No, I think Mr Fellows is going to try a different approach. After all, we’ve got the two things he desperately wants.”
“Lee and Martin.”
“Yes, Lee and Martin. For two very different reasons.”
They fell silent and huddled together, facing the featureless mist.
Gerald and Maggie had clicked the moment they met and greatly enjoyed one another’s company. The fact he was almost seventy years old and she only fifteen didn’t matter. She was not only the granddaughter he had never had, they were also firm friends and laughed at the same things.
“Time to go,” he announced presently. “Martin and I have got another of those useless coffee mornings with the big hats in half an hour. Get in out of this cold and tell everyone choir practice at the usual time later. Oh – and remember: ’tis the season…”
“Fa la la la la,” she sang after him as he departed along the terrace, followed by the female soldier.
Maggie turned back to the fog. The last time she had sung a Christmas carol had been back in the camp, over the fresh grave of a young boy killed by one of the Punchinello’s spears. Maggie was ashamed to realise that she couldn’t even remember his name now. Too many faces had gone from her life. But one she would never forget belonged to a girl called Jody. She shuddered in horror whenever she recalled what Dancing Jax had done to her. Jody had been caught between the two worlds. Here her eyes turned to blue glass, while in Mooncaster she had become a hollow glass rabbit, filled with a virulent plague. The memory of that would haunt Maggie for as long as she lived.
“Which probably won’t be too much longer,” she murmured softly.
Peering into the thick white vapour, Maggie thought over what Gerald had said, about the creatures sighted in the far south. What if others had started to creep across the nearby Chinese border? The wooded valleys and mountain slopes could already be crawling with them, invisible in the concealing mist. This disturbing thought caused her to jump away from the wall and she hurried back inside the military base. The metal door clanged shut behind her.
IT WAS ONLY marginally less cold inside the mountain. Martin Baxter was waiting on the concourse, behind the main entrance. It was a huge imposing space, where five of the key tunnels converged. The facility was so large and rambling it required transport to travel from one area to another, and each of those routes was wide enough to accommodate two lanes of traffic. One of the tunnels even had rails laid down to convey heavy equipment and munitions. The walls of this man-made cavern were bare rock and the lighting was basic and functional, connected by hanging wires and cables.
Dominating the central area was a scaled-down version of the twenty-metre-high bronze statue of Kim Il-sung in Pyongyang. Even though it was smaller, this was still seven metres tall. With its right arm outstretched, it looked as though it was directing the vehicles driving around it. Above the entrance to each passage hung the red starred flag, and the same design, with its blue borders, had been worked into the mosaic floor.
The first time Martin had set eyes on this impressive interior, it reminded him of early James Bond movies, with those amazing sets of the villain’s lair designed by Ken Adam. The geek in him had gone a step further and couldn’t help imagining daleks gliding around, instead of the old jeeps and bicycles that the base used, and robot Yeti lumbering around outside. But he hadn’t mentioned that to anyone. Only Paul, his partner’s twelve-year-old son, would have appreciated it. But Paul had been one of the first victims of Dancing Jax and was now part of the Ismus’s entourage, together with Carol, the boy’s mother. Martin missed them both desperately.
That morning he was agitated and annoyed. These weekly meetings with the Generals were pointless. They never listened to what he had to say and barely concealed their contempt at his presence. Since the rescue of the children from England, absolutely nothing had been accomplished. He couldn’t understand it. They wouldn’t even discuss a campaign against the Ismus. Their policy was to wait and gather as much information as they could, which, more often than not, they didn’t share with him. Martin decided that today he was going to get some answers. They owed him that much. He wasn’t just anybody. He was the thorn in the Ismus’s side, the man who had denounced him from the start, who had spent the best part of a year trying to warn the rest of the world.
A tinny voice barked and crackled from the tannoy system and went echoing through the tunnels. The language was Korean, but it was so distorted that, even if it had been in English, Martin wouldn’t have been able to understand what was said. Just the usual announcements and orders of the day, he supposed.
A veteran jeep pulled up alongside. The North Korean war machine was a curious hotchpotch of new technology and relics of the past. Although it had almost a thousand missiles trained on South Korea, possessed ZM-87 laser weapons, was nuclear capable and had an active space programme, most of its other arms and vehicles dated as far back as World War Two.
An even younger female soldier than the one that had been shadowing Gerald was at the wheel and a grim-looking guard with an AK-47 sat beside her. She directed a stony-faced expression at Martin and the former maths teacher clambered in beside Gerald who was sitting in the back.
“Piccadilly, please, cabbie,” Gerald quipped. “And don’t go the long way round or you won’t get a tip.” These trifling games were what got him through his time here. Life inside this mountain was barely tolerable, so he embraced every opportunity to tickle it along. At times his teasing attitude infuriated Martin, but the children adored him for it.
The girl betrayed no sign she had heard and drove on. Her name was Chung Eun-mi, eldest daughter of General Chung Kang-dae.
When he first arrived in the country, Martin’s irrepressible sci-fi self had noted that, just like the Bajorans in Star Trek, here the family name preceded the individual name.
Conscription at seventeen was mandatory for everyone, but, for Eun-mi, there was no other possible path. This was a vocation. It was her life’s dream to wear this uniform. She was everything her father could have wished for in a son. Perhaps, if she had been a boy, their relationship would have been different.
Eun-mi was passionately loyal to the state, determined to devote herself to the People’s Army,