Milton tossed the rifle inside and got in after it, sliding the side door closed. Su-Yung reversed and, driving with particular care, drove them up the ramp and out onto the street. Milton risked a glance out of the window: the crowd from the Square was beginning to disperse, hundreds of people choking the pavements, some of them walking in the road. There was no sign that anything was amiss. The noise of his six shots would have been absorbed by the clamour of the Parade. Milton doubted that these people would ever know what had just taken place three hundred feet above their heads; the regime would suppress the news, replacement generals would be promoted to fill the spots vacated by the dead, and little would change. But those men would know, now, that they were not safe, not even in the redoubt of their own capital.

Milton sat quietly in the back, shielded from observation. He knew that if they were stopped it would be almost certain that he would be seen and, if that happened, there would be more bloodshed. He laid down the sniper rifle and collected the M-4 instead. He popped the magazine free and checked the load. He slid it back into the port and punched it home with the heel of his hand. Then, he took the tracking device from his pocket. It was small, about half the size of a smartphone, and would transmit his location and receive the location of his destination via the American military’s GPS satellite network. It was accurate to a metre and the battery was good for a week. That ought to be long enough. He thumbed the switch and a red light glowed to signify that the unit was active.

Su-Yung drove on.

19

Milton killed the engine of the boat and left it drift. He was two miles off the eastern coast, drifting through a thick blanket of sea mist. He had initially thought that the weather had been kind, shielding him from view as he put out from the tiny inlet near to Jungsan in Pyongyang Province. On two occasions he had heard the engines of old Russian-built MiGs overhead, and both times the jets had curved away with no indication that he had been seen. Now, though, the fog was less helpful. It blinded him, too, and he needed to see where he was going so that he could make his rendezvous.

It had taken him and Su-Yung two days to reach the coast. The first day was the worst, crawling through the city until they found quieter roads where they could travel more quickly without causing suspicion. They found a deserted barn near Taedong and sheltered there until darkness had fallen, and then set off again. They travelled only at night, driving carefully, the van’s lights off, the M-4 laid out across his lap and the 9mm thrust into the waistband of his jeans. There had been several moments where he had been sure they were about to be discovered. The worst was the army jeep that had bounded along the main road just as they had turned off it. The driver had stopped at the beginning of the bridge that spanned the creek they had just crossed, the spotter in the back scanning the landscape with a pair of infra-red binoculars. A big .30 calibre machine gun was mounted on the back of the jeep; if they saw them, he knew that that monster would chew them up. Su-Yung and Milton were quiet, hardly breathing, but the soldiers did not see them. They moved away after a long five minutes and they did not come across them again.

The North Korean landscape recalled the black brushstrokes of Oriental paintings. They passed through areas that were strikingly beautiful, reminding Milton of the American Pacific Northwest, yet these gentle hills and plains were washed out, as if the colour had been bleached away by the poverty. There were the dark greens of the firs, junipers, and spruce, offset against the milky grey of the granite peaks. The paddy fields were brown and insipid at this time of year. Everything was yellow and brown, the colour leached away and faded. There was no signage on the roads and he saw only a handful of cars, just sickly oxen lowing in their pastures, the ploughs they were expected to pull waiting alongside.

The next night they reached Jungsan. It was a small fishing village and they had found the boat that Kun had arranged for him without difficulty. Su-Yung waited at the jetty as he embarked, transferring his weapons into the boat. Her face was blank, austere, and he knew that she was thinking of her brother. She waved him off as he started the engine and put out to sea. Milton had tried to persuade her to head north, to China, but it was a pointless exercise. She had decided to go back to the city to look for Kun. She was determined, and she would not give him up.

Milton relied on the tracking beacon to guide him to the exfiltration point. It had been silent for the first few hours but then it had started to chirp. It sounded regularly now, a low buzz every few seconds. He knew he was close but he couldn’t see where he was supposed to be going.

He thought, then, that he saw a hulking shape to port but the mist rolled in even thicker and he doubted himself. The temperature was icy and the journey had chilled him to the bone, his teeth chattering helplessly. He cocked his head, listening. All he could hear was the slow lap of the water against the prow of the boat, the buzzing of the beacon and, he fancied, the mournful boom of a foghorn in the direction of the shore.

A voice away to his right. He held his breath, listening hard. The voice came again, distorted in the mist, and he pulled on the oars, nudging the skiff around in the direction that he guessed it was coming from. He saw a dull glow, a bloom of fuzzy light a hundred yards to his right. He pulled on the right oar, turning the skiff again, and made for it. He heard his own name being called, loudly, and then the wind picked up, a gust of ten or twelve knots, the sounds blown away. He pulled the oars harder, increasing his speed. The fulgid glow was extinguished and quickly replaced by a powerful spotlight.

“I’m here,” he yelled out, his voice weak and unreal. “Over here!”

A long, low shape, the deepest black and enormously large, formed itself from out of the mist ahead of him. He saw the raised conning tower, the sleekly curved sides of the hull where they met the crashing waves. As he grew closer he could discern the shape of the ship: a long, fattened cigar, three hundred feet from port to stern. HMS Ambush had been positioned off the coast for a week, waiting for its twin optronic masts to detect the telltale signal of his tracker. The skiff bumped up against the side of the submarine and a rope was tossed down. Milton fished it out of the icy sea, fastened it to the gunwale and pulled himself up. He grabbed the mittened hand that reached down for him. He could see the gold leafing on the peak of a Navy cap beneath the fur trimming of a parka hood.

“Good evening, sir,” the man called as Milton clambered aboard the hull. “How was your trip?”

“I’ve had better. What’s the news?”

“It’d be fair to say you’ve created quite a stir.”

Milton negotiated the hatch and followed the officer down into the guts of the submarine. The steady pulse of the engines started, the anchor chain roared back into the aft Main Ballast Tank and the Ambush started to submerge beneath the waters of the quiet bay.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Dawson works in the film industry. He lives in Wiltshire.

DEDICATION

To Mrs D and FD.