CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Changchon Mountains, North Korea
General Oh Chol’s first assignment with the military, nearly thirty years earlier, had been to oversee the digging of tunnels beneath the DMZ. One of his assignments, in fact, had been construction of the infamous Third Tunnel near Panmunjom. Back then, most of the work had been done by hand, using compressed-air drills and conventional pickaxes. It had been slow going, and on a good day crews were lucky to advance more than a few yards through the subterranean rock standing between them and access to neighboring South Korea. On more than one occasion, Oh had given in to his frustrations and resorted to dynamite, and even the progress was slow and painstaking, not to mention costly in terms of lives lost and delays caused by the occasional rupture of underground water tables.
This day, as he made his way along the burrowed conduit leading south from the Changchon Rehabilitation Center, the general—refreshed and pain-free after more than twelve hours of morphine-induced sleep back at the underground missile base—couldn’t help but admire how times had changed for the better. The tunnel had been cleared away at a phenomenal rate of nearly 250 feet a day, practically fifty times as fast as his best crews had ever been able to manage. After a few miles, he came upon the reason for the accelerated excavation.
He’d reached a congested work area loud with the noise of ground crews, machinery and the hum of generators powering halogen work lamps mounted on strategically placed tripod stands as well as sconce-holders hammered into the rock walls. At the center of all this boisterous activity, mounted on a fresh stretch of steel rails marking the meeting point between the Changson tunnel and its shorter counterpart, was a two-hundred-ton, Chinese-built Dae-181 Tunnel Boring Machine.
The cylindrical contraption, vaguely resembling one of the monstrous, first-stage boosters for the Taepo Dong missile systems, was front-fitted with a rotating bore rig that, in essence, chewed its way through any rock unable to withstand the high-torque grating of its diamond-tipped drill bits. The Changchon bedrock, comprised primarily of shale and limestone, had clearly been no match for the TBM.
And the borer was just part of the tunneling crew’s high-tech arsenal. On the rails directly behind the Dae-181 were a pair of co-joined electric locomotives whose combined horsepower was needed to pull the borer backward after a tunneling shift so that crews could move in and widen the gap. Aiding in the latter task was a pair of large, gleaming yellow mucker-loaders. The machines, each the subterranean equivalent of a high-priced bulldozer, were both mounted with crawler treads, allowing them to easily maneuver on either side of the bore machine and help with the removal of debris. The muckers, with their massive, scalloped jaws, were a marvel unto themselves, capable of scooping up to three tons of material a minute, a job comparable to an hour’s work by the chain gang crews of Oh’s day. If the rest of the country’s industries could be even a fraction as productive as the tunneling operations, the general mused, DRNK’s long-dormant economy might actually approach self-sufficiency, eliminating the need to blackmail fat cats like America and Japan for economic aid. But that was a matter for another day.
Laborers milled around the front of the borer, clearing a six-foot gap on either side of the apparatus and scooping loose rock into the mucker-loaders. Oh, who’d reached the juncture by way of a small, battery-powered cart, signaled the men aside long enough to squeeze past them into the shorter tunnel, which had been created by the conventional means Oh was more familiar with. He paused long enough to congratulate both work crews, then rode the last few hundred yards to the spot where the northward tunneling had first begun.
Once he stepped off the cart, the general found himself inside the massive, four-story cavity of the most recent building to grace the would-be urban sprawl of Kijongdong. Oh knew there were work teams outside the structure finishing off the building’s mall-like exterior, but their progress didn’t concern him. As long as they gave South Korea and its allies the impression that they were building nothing more than another phony edifice, they were doing their job. It was the work going on inside the new structure that held the general’s interest. And he was encouraged by what he saw.
The central area of the structure’s reinforced concrete foundation had been lined with the same fire-resistant compound used on missile launch pads to the north in Musudan and Paekun-ri, and a similar lining had been placed around two large bunkers crowding the far corner. Once the tunnel from Changchon to Kijongdong was fully cleared away, tanker trucks would haul rocket fuel to the site and transfer it to holding tanks inside the bunkers. The missiles, of course, would follow.