Chong rode the subway for the next two hours. Perhaps he could send the message to Pyongyang immediately on his own recognizance, assuming the rumor to be true. But his training told him otherwise. Like a good newspaper reporter, he had always operated by confirming such a rumor on the basis of two independent sources. And so, as he sat in the subways, his face covered by the pages of the Asahi Shinbun, the subterranean reflections flashing past him like memories of another life, he waited until eleven-thirty before he called the two agents.
One, an English speaker, was watching CNN’s transworld service. The other had already unrolled his bed mat when the phone rang. But both told him the rumor was correct, that Freeman had had large numbers of American soldiers, stationed in Japan, called to give blood for the USVUN hospital ship USS Tampa heading for the Gulf of Tonkin. This was normal in such war situations, but the Tampa had taken unusually large amounts of Rh-negative blood aboard. Chong again called the first agent, and worked the phrase “inclement weather” into his dialogue, an instruction to the agent to forward the information immediately to Pyongyang. In turn, Pyongyang sent a most secret, class one, number-for-word, onetime pad message to its embassy in Beijing.
There is no Rh-negative blood in China. If the American general was storing it up aboard Tampa, it could mean only one thing: he was prepared to strike deep into China proper.
North Korea secretly but immediately pledged troops to help China if this eventuality arose, knowing that China already had enough, with a professional army of over two million. The gesture from Pyongyang, however, would be greatly appreciated and might well secure what North Korea, after her forced agreements with the U.S., needed, or rather wanted, most: to have China share as much as possible nuclear technology and/or weapons with North Korea.