Hong quickly found the keys and slammed the trunk hood, then grabbed the fallen Stetson hat and put it on, lowering the brim over his forehead. He reached the driver’s-side door just as the other car was driving past. It was an SUV driven by a middle-aged woman. Tilting his head downward so the woman couldn’t get a good look at his face, Hong waved nonchalantly as he opened the car door. The woman waved back and drove on.
With a sigh, Hong eased himself behind the steering wheel and slid the key into the ignition. The sound of the engine turning over was music to his ears. He put the car into gear and eased his way onto the road, then accelerated up to the speed limit. After rounding the first bend, he came to a stoplight. A right turn would take him to the Strip. He chose instead to go left and was soon on Interstate 5. He kept an eye open for the turnoff to Boulder Highway, which would eventually lead him back to the safehouse in Goffs. There he could plot his next move…
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Changchon Mountain Range, North Korea
Anyone looking for evidence of Kim Jong-il’s iron-fisted control over the citizenry under his rule had to look no further than the concentration camps. The camps had first sprouted up in the wake of the Korean War and had targeted primarily Japanese-Koreans, but over the years the ranks of the imprisoned had swelled to the point where now more than a quarter-million individuals—nearly ten percent of North Korea’s entire population—had been yanked from the streets and carted off to the twenty-four “rehabilitation centers” spread throughout the country.
Few of the inmates were criminals in the true sense of the word. According to an estimate by Amnesty International, for every prisoner guilty of a true criminal offense, there were twenty who had been sent to the camps for far more dubious reasons that varied from unlawful assembly or participation in religious ceremonies to such petty infractions as an inability to recite, on command, Kim’s First Inaugural Address. And there were instances in showcase cities like Pyongyang and Kaesong, where those who perceived as to too old, infirm, or merely unattractive were shunted off to the camps so that they wouldn’t sully Kim’s ongoing attempts to portray his isolated country as “heaven on earth.”
Most of those incarcerated came to accept their fate with meek resignation, but, understandably, there were also those who came into the prisons boiling with anger and resentment, and for them the inhumane conditions at the camps only served to fuel their rage at Kim and the regime that had kept him in power since the day he’d been handed the reins of power by his ailing father, Kim Il-Sung.
Nowhere had malcontent festered closer to the boiling point than at the facility in the Changchon Mountains, and for those prisoners who were determined to put an end to the cruelty and barbarism heaped upon them, this day’s incident at the poppy fields had been the last straw.
For weeks, a handful of inmates had been plotting their move, and in that time they’d carefully approached others in the camp, slowly amassing a group of nearly seventy men and women willing to stand up to their torturers and try to overthrow them. And now, in the dead of night, while the others slept, the masterminds behind the plot huddled close in their barracks to discuss their options.
“We’ve waited long enough,” Prync Gil-Su whispered to his co-conspirators. “It is time to act.”
Prync was a rarity among the prisoners. As recently as six weeks ago he’d been a high-ranking officer with the KPA whose loyalty to Kim Jong-il had been unquestionable. All that had changed the day when, while inspecting the latest renovations to the palatial mausoleum where the remains of Kim Il-Sung had been interred following his death, Captain Prync had casually speculated how much food and medicine could have been purchased with the hundreds of millions of dollars that had been poured into the monument.
In the weeks prior to the visit, Prync had been saddled with the logistical task of burying sixteen thousand famine victims in the central province of Pyongan-Namdo—a mere fraction of the three million North Koreans who’d died of starvation over the past dozen years—and he’d spoken out in mere frustration, never expecting his comments to be passed along, much less taken as a direct jab against Kim Jong-il.
But two days later he’d been hauled from his bed, shackled and beaten in front of his family, then shoved into a truck by goons working for the Ministry of Internal Security. It hadn’t been until he was halfway to Changchon that someone had bothered to inform him that he’d been found disloyal to the regime and sentenced to the concentration camps. His pleas of innocence had only earned him further beatings, and since arriving in Changchon he’d been cut off from all contact with his family, though he’d been told that they, too, had been imprisoned at another camp somewhere in the north provinces.