General Oh stood rooted for a long moment. Were his ears lying to him?
Again he asked the orderly as the camp sprang into life all around. Jeeps were heading south. Every man knew his duty. For this was the historical moment all had trained for.
"ROK K-l tanks are pouring up the Munsan Valley, Comrade General. But they drive into the teeth of horror. For have we not been preparing for this hour for over forty years?"
General Oh's doughy features went flat as a pond. His eyes creased in his moon face, and his mouth went slack as if the muscles of his mandible had been sliced by a bayonet.
He groaned like a wounded man. "We are doomed."
"Comrade General, we are already victorious. They charge into the gleaming teeth of our entrenched forces. We have prepared. Even now bullets and spare parts are rushing to the front. Soon Seoul will be ours, for the fools of the South have given us the pretext to seize their fine cities and women."
"No. No. You have it wrong. This was not the way it was supposed to happen. This is not what we have prepared for."
He wheeled and shouted at a driver. "You, stop. Unload those munitions. They do not need more bullets at the front. They need rice."
The driver looked momentarily blank. His expression seemed to ask, What type rifle fires rice?
"Rice!" General Oh screamed. "Rice. Send rice to the front. All the rice you can scrounge. Only rice can save Pyongyang and our Supreme Leader. Rice! Rice! Do you hear me? Rice!"
And falling to his knees, General Oh of the Inmungun knew all was lost. This was not the historical moment Pyongyang had anticipated. This was disaster, and he was the general in charge of the disaster.
Captain Cang commanded the first line of defense of the DPRK. He lived in a mountain, Stone Mountain, which overlooked the Munsan Valley. Within his mountain he cleaned and oiled and drilled his great 170 mm Koksan gun and its gun crew.
All the mountains overlooking the DMZ had been hollowed out and great elevators built within. On these lifts sat the Koksan guns, their tubes pointing south though the thick natural granite.
They were the perfect defense. When the signal came, his gun crew would swing into action like the well-oiled machine it was trained to be. The breech would be rammed shut. The gun was always kept loaded. The huge elevator would toil upward, lifting gun and gun crew while synchronized gears caused great steel blast doors to lift, exposing the rising gun tube just long enough to deliver its terrible 170 mm shell. The gun was preaimed. All the Koksan guns were preaimed.
There would be time for one shot and one only. Then the elevators and the blast doors would return to prefiring position before the counterfire systems of the mysterious South could lock on and target the mighty Koksan gun.
Return fire would perhaps dent the blast door if properly targeted, but most likely it would chip at the obdurate granite of Stone Mountain. By that time, the great Koksan gun would already be reloaded and toiling upward for its second punishing blow against Seoul, which was but thirty miles away.
That was the purpose of the Koksan gun during war. To pummel the capital of the mysterious South into submission.
That was the battle plan in place for forty years. Ground-based SAM missiles would add to the rain of destruction. And once Seoul was softened up, the million men of the Inmungun would pour south to take the Southern capital.
That was the plan.
The reality didn't go according to the plan.
When the signal came that war had at last come, Captain Cang got his gun crew organized. The breech was slammed home as the lift hoisted. Moonlight streamed into the hollow of Stone Mountain as the blast door rose ponderously.
When the preaimed gun reached firing position, Captain Cang prepared to give the order to fire against the hated Southern capital.
He was already too late. The battle plan presupposed certain realities. None of them assumed ROK tanks already rolling across the DMZ and elevating their tank guns toward the blast doors themselves.
While Captain Cang savored the moment of battle, the honor of directing the first Northern shot, the ROK tank gun opened fire, lobbing a shell that screamed toward his invincible Koksan gun, silencing gun and his crew forever in a paroxysm of violence.
All across the DMZ, mountaintops were erupting as Koksan guns began falling to an enemy all had been told to expect but no one really believed would come.
As he careered through the night toward the front, General Oh saw the flashes and heard the reverberations of the night exploding all around him. In the back of his jeep were canvas sacks of rice. Rice in abundance. As much rice as his strategic reserves had held.
Which was exactly seven ten-pound burlap sacks.
For General Oh knew what his underlings did not. The preparation for war with the South presupposed a Northern attack. Not a Southern invasion. The frontline defenses were stretched thin, with bullets in plenty but insufficient rations. The frontline troops were kept on short rations for a very good tactical reason.
When the order came from Pyongyang to drive south, General Oh, who was to give it, would unleash his men, driving them south, hungry and envious, their sole motivation the generous provisions the Southern capital held.
It was a struggle they could win because they were fighting toward the most important short-term goal any soldier could fight toward.
Food.
A purely defensive war was another matter. They had arms aplenty to hold their positions. What they didn't have was rice. And without rice the underfed Inmungun wouldn't hold their positions very long. Without rice they couldn't hold back the Southern forces a day.
And so he careered toward the front with all the rice his jeep could ferry, hoping to forestall defeat long enough to call up reinforcements he knew would also arrive hungry and in need of rice.
It was hopeless.
Worst of all, General Oh knew the South knew this. That was why they had dropped the ROK barriers behind their advancing tanks. It was to discourage retreat in the face of an overwhelming foe. And a force that had no retreat option would fight all the more fiercely.
Chapter Forty-four
If once all roads led to Rome, in the late twentieth century all off-ramps on the global information superhighway led to the computerized desk of Dr. Harold W. Smith at Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York.
Mexico was camped on the United States's southern border, her intentions unknown.
In the Middle East, Kuwait had attacked Iraq, and Iran was readying its short-range Scud missiles to deliver long-delayed punishment raids upon downtown Baghdad.
While everyone threatened Israel, no attacks were launched. Israeli nuclear-tipped Jericho II missiles had been readied, and all the Middle East knew it.
Pakistan had launched a non-nuclear-tipped M-11 missile against Indian soil. It shredded a herd of cows, creating possibly more raw indignation than if the prime minister had been murdered and the Taj Mahal blown up.
Bombay had retaliated with a single launch of an Akash missile. It splashed harmlessly into the Rann of Kutch.
Virtually every nation on earth was publicly announcing the development of a new superweapon destined to dominate warfare in the next century. But no one had activated theirs. Capitals the world over were in an uproar. War jitters danced across the face of the globe.
In his Spartan office only Harold W. Smith knew the truth. There was no flood of superweapons. Only one. And only one nation would possess it in the end.
As he tracked the airline credit-card purchases through eastern Europe to Asia, Smith saw, as if on a map, that wherever Remo and Chiun landed, that region became an instant powder keg.
Rome. Bulgaria. Macedonia. As Smith worked, they popped up on a flight to Beijing. Almost as soon as Smith's computers reported the fact, Russian Topol-M ICBMs pretargeted on China were cleared for launch. This according to National Reconnaisance Office satellite reports, which Smith's net-trolling computers intercepted.
Obviously spies were lurking at airports the world over, furtively reporting the movements of the Master of Sinanju to their spy masters.
And with each visit, the world lurched inexorably toward global war.
Simply because a spurned Korean had given a speech before the United Nations.