Atomic Kimchi

By Frank Poltenson

Kimchi is the spicy Korean food known for being hot. Atomic Kimchi raises the heat in every way.

When sabotage occurs on a sensitive Army installation in remote South Korea, the investigation falls to a small cadre of young and inexperienced Army Intelligence agents. A second crime, the theft of a nuclear warhead, throws the military into a panic. How was an atomic weapon stolen from a locked container in a buried bunker behind barbed wire on a guarded military compound?

David Zajac is a reluctant soldier, but a gifted and determined investigator. A chess game with massive international ramifications envelops young David and his fellow agents, hindering their frantic efforts to solve the crime and recover the weapon. Nothing is quite as it seems as friends, suspects, and lovers intertwine roles as the action moves between Korea, the US and Europe.

Atomic Kimchi is a fast-paced historical mystery thriller set in 1973 and is based on a true event.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Frank Poltenson
• Release date: Jun 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301733248

Frank Poltenson

Frank Poltenson was raised in upstate New York. He served as a Military Intelligence Special Agent in the US Army in the 1970s and was stationed in Korea for two years. He now lives in North Georgia with his wife, Laura, and their three dogs. This is his first novel.

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Atomic Kimchi

A Novel

By

Frank Poltenson

Atomic Kimchi

Frank Poltenson

Copyright 2013 by Frank Poltenson

All rights reserved.

Published by Dovetail Development Co. at Smashwords

Dovetail Development Co.

48 River Sound Circle

Dawsonville, GA 30534

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents:

Beginning

Author’s Notes

Part 1: Opening Moves

Part 2: The Middle Game

Part 3: Endgame

Glossary of Terms and Slang

Author’s Acknowledgments and a Request to Readers

About the Author

To Laura for all the obvious reasons

and

To all those who served in the shadows

so that others could live in the sunlight

Author’s Notes:

While set in real places and around actual events, this is a work of fiction. All the characters, events, locations, institutions and military units are products of the author’s imagination and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual people is unintended. In the few instances where references are made to well-known historical figures, their actions are entirely fictional.

The military has a language of its own. Those readers not familiar with its many acronyms, terms and slang will find a glossary at the end of the book to benefit their reading experience.

The convention for the English spelling of Asian cities (and people) has changed from the time of this novel, the early 1970’s, to today. For example, Busan was previously spelled Pusan, and Daejon was known as Taejon. The novel reflects the spelling of the period in which the action takes place.

Chance favors the prepared mind.

--Louis Pasteur

The game of chess can be thought of as having three phases: the opening, the middle game, and the endgame.

--Ricardo St. Stachowiak

"The Art of War in Chess"

Part 1: Opening Moves

Prologue

The Yellow Sea, March 1973

Lieutenant Ri Dae Jung slumped on the raft’s floor, salt water burning his shoulder and head wounds. The sound of gunfire coming from the beach receded as the outgoing tide drove his raft further offshore. In the gentle swells, he contemplated his impending death and the previous twenty-four hours of his failed mission.

The previous night, under the waning crescent moon, the old Soviet built diesel powered submarine had dispatched them a kilometer off the coast. Ri’s team of ten commandos landed onto the deserted South Korean beach without incident and made their way inland. They covered their tracks and hid the two rafts under a camouflaged tarp in the scrub brush. Waiting until the military curfew ended at dawn, they started making their way on foot toward their objective twenty kilometers inland. The ambush would take place midday.

Dressed in civilian clothes and carrying parcels hiding their weapons, they intended to blend in with the civilian population. Ri split them up into three groups to make them less conspicuous. Despite their civilian attire, ten hard men in a single group would draw unwanted attention. But their good fortune did not hold, and things quickly unraveled as soon as they encountered the general population.

At the first village, Ri watched from a distance as his first group of three attempted to board a bus, but there was a problem. For some reason, an argument ensued with the bus driver who called out his window to a policeman standing at the corner. When the policeman walked around the front of the bus to investigate, one of Ri’s men shot him twice in the chest with an automatic. His men then fled amid much commotion.

Ri’s second group found the empty taxi left for them in a prearranged location by a deep cover agent based in Taejon. At the first military checkpoint, soldiers waved them to the side for further questioning. Feeling they had been uncovered, the driver ran the blockade as his compatriots began shooting at the South Korean soldiers.

Unfortunately for the commandos, the checkpoint was covered by a .30 caliber machine gun mounted on the back of a jeep parked twenty yards up the road. The machine gun opened fire on the car and a fusillade of bullets promptly dispatched all four occupants.

South Korea had no civilian ownership of guns so two shooting incidents in the same area within minutes of each other meant only one thing, an infiltration of North Korean agents. The military raised the alarm placing the province on high alert. South Korea was essentially a military dictatorship and its large and omnipresent armed forces moved very quickly.

Lieutenant Ri saw his possibility of mission success evaporate like morning mist on a hot summer day. He needed at least five men to execute this mission, as well as stealth, surprise and luck. Those elements were rapidly vanishing as he heard troop trucks full of soldiers roar down the road as he and his two men hid behind a wall at the edge of the village.

His hope for his remaining contingent of three surviving and joining him dimmed when he heard exchanges of gunfire in the distance. The distinct sound of his men’s Kalashnikov rifles ceased in a final volley of M16 rifles and machine guns.

He had no choice but to abandon the mission and try to make a rendezvous with the submarine that night. As much as failure galled him, it served no purpose to sacrifice himself and his remaining two men. They could not complete the mission nor inflict any serious damage to the enemy. A report on the mission failure would be of value to his superiors in Pyongyang.

He announced his decision to his two remaining men. They would separate and travel individually back to the beach and meet at the hidden rafts after dark. Then Ri would signal the submarine by flashlight at midnight. If they received an acknowledgement, they would have fifteen minutes to make it out to the sub and back to safety.

They buried their rifles in the furrow of a rice paddy. Rifles would do them no good now. Each left in a different direction five minutes apart. Ri decided to be counterintuitive and stay in the village hoping to blend in.

He wondered why things had gone so badly so fast. The plan originated at the highest levels in the military, and the infallibility of the leadership had been indoctrinated into all citizens from birth. Yet, here he was in the middle of a complete disaster. They had not even gotten close to the location where they were to ambush the convoy and steal the cargo. The quick and utter failure confused him.

He stopped on the sidewalk, captivated by the items he saw through a storefront window. From floor to ceiling, food and utensils stocked the store. A stack of a dozen nested cooking pots rose almost two meters high. Crates of Pepsi were stacked next to boxes of ramen noodles. Shoppers picked apples, potatoes, onions, and tomatoes from large metal bins set on the narrow sidewalk.

Ri was both amazed and dumfounded. We don’t have this at home, he thought. The shelves of our stores are barren. We have almost no food; hunger is constant. Upon seeing his reflection in the window, the realization hit him suddenly. North and South are very different now. Too much has changed since the war. We even look different from these people.

He was dressed in drab colors and his ill-fitting clothes hung on his thin wiry frame. His haircut was different. He looked about at the people nearby. The children in the street wore bright clothes, red and white patterned sweaters and burgundy shirts. Children and adults both were well fed and laughing. Laughter was rare in his country.

Ri turned and made his way down the street. He stopped at the first clothing shop he saw and bought a new dark blue parka off the rack and a knit watch cap to hide his haircut. He struggled to smile as he left the shop, new muscles flexing in his face. He felt he fit in much better now as he made his way back toward the coast.

The alert had intensified and more army trucks passed him heading toward the sea. Traveling alone, Ri was able to circumvent some police barricades, as the authorities appeared to be looking for groups of men traveling together. He watched the police stop busses and check the riders. His decision to split his team seemed to be wise.

He neared the beach in the fading light and looked about but saw no one. He quickly departed the road and entered the scrub forest effectively hiding him from view from the road. He crouched and worked his way through the tangled roots toward the hidden rafts. Just ahead of him, Ri heard the slide of an automatic pistol pulled back. Nephew! he whispered hoping the password would carry just far enough.

Uncle! came the countersign. Good. At least one man had arrived before him and had the presence of mind not to shoot him.

Ri moved forward and was glad to see both his men at the rendezvous site. He assessed the situation from their hiding place. Ri assumed that the South Korean Army correctly deduced he and his men were North Koreans and the only way out was by water. Soldiers now patrolled the beach and more seemed to be arriving every minute.

They were about seventy meters from the water’s edge and darkness was setting in. Ri could see spotlights further up the beach. Escape was not going to be easy.

We wait, Ri said. We have a few hours. Maybe they will get bored and leave, he said with a confidence he did not feel. Ri then sat back and explained the plan for their escape. He estimated it would take them about a minute to get one raft clear of the brush, run down the beach and launch into the ocean. Several more minutes would place them mostly out of sight from the beach. Any foot patrols would have to be walking away from them as they made their escape. The surf would help muffle their noise.

At exactly midnight, Ri looked out and saw a foot patrol approaching. He had a five-minute window to signal the sub. The soldiers on the beach seemed to move like snails. Finally, they passed by and their backs were to them. Ri stepped out and pressed the button on the flashlight giving three one-second flashes, then a two-second pause, then two quick flashes. His men rose up behind him scanning the horizon. Time crawled as they waited for the response that would mean a chance to live another day. Then they saw it, a single flash directly off the beach.

He glanced up and down the beach. From the left, the direction the last patrol had come, he saw no one. Looking right, he saw the four-man patrol still walking away from them. We go now.

They dragged the raft from its hiding place, picked it up, and ran to the water. They were almost halfway to the water’s edge when the patrol turned around and started back.

The patrol soldiers noticed movement toward the water and realized within seconds what they were seeing. They shouted a warning to halt. One blew a whistle while another yelled into a walkie-talkie. The other two started shooting.

The man carrying the rear of the raft went down. Ri glanced back and saw it was a headshot, certainly fatal. The two men rebalanced the raft and sprinted the last few yards to the water’s edge. They waded into the rough surf ignoring the cold, jumped in and paddled frantically. Ri moved to the front of the raft. He shouted toward the rear, I’ll paddle, you shoot. Buy us some time.

The soldier pulled his automatic from his jacket and began shooting, trying to compensate for the raft’s choppy movements in the surf. The soldiers on the beach stopped firing and dove for cover as the bullets flew close by.

Ri pulled hard on his paddle in a desperate effort to gain distance from the beach. He heard the automatic empty and the sound of a new magazine being loaded. His man began shooting again, slowly and methodically, trying to keep the enemy pinned down as they made their escape.

Bullets flew by. He heard a grunt behind him then felt a sharp pain in his right shoulder. He pushed the pain back and continued his determined endeavor. Then, the surf sound vanished as blood roared in his head and white spots floated in his vision. He blinked several times to avoid passing out, then leaned into the paddle with a redoubled effort.

His hearing returned registering the increasing intensity of the offshore wind as the shouts and shooting sounds from the beach diminished. He placed his hand to his temple and saw it was covered in blood. Ri glanced back to the rear of the raft and saw it was empty. He collapsed onto the floor exhausted.

He contemplated his mission’s failure from the cold wet floor of the empty raft. All lost, he said to himself, then he felt the boat rise from the water and strong friendly hands lift him from the raft and carry him to safety below.

Chapter 1: Incident On A Saturday Night

Republic of Korea, June 1973

David looked up from the chessboard to the smiling face of Clark Kent’s twin brother, shook his head and said, I can’t believe how good you are at this. I know I’m good and you crush me like an empty beer can.

John sat back in his chair, smiled and said, Y’know, Zajac, chess for me is as natural as falling off a log. He laughed at his own inside joke as he looked at his watch and continued, It’s Saturday night. We could go to the Vil and get us some good looking girls.

Sorry, John, David replied as he placed the chess pieces back in their box. Lester’s made it clear he doesn’t want me sleeping with the locals. Not with my job.

John shrugged his broad shoulders, pushed his tortoise shell glasses back up on his nose and sighed. Ah, well, I guess I’m really not into it tonight either. I’ve only got about a month left before I’m out, and it would be nice to make it home without getting the clap.

They called it a night and walked from Camp March’s small recreation center into the warm Korean summer night. John waved and headed toward his enlisted quarters while David walked to his BOQ. David considered how fortunate he was to be living in officers’ quarters with his own private room even though he was only a corporal just like his new friend, John Driver. The difference between them was that David did not wear a uniform.

David Zajac was twenty-three years old and possessed the tall, slim build of a long distance runner, which he was. His inquisitive intelligence illuminated bright, light-blue eyes, and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses framed his long, lean face. His unruly, dark brown hair was cut a little long for a soldier, but he could get away with it in his civilian clothing status.

David entered his quarters, a Quonset hut painted some unintended version of faded orange. David thought it humorous to be living in a corrugated sheet metal building designed during World War II to be a temporary storage unit. The Army’s designation of temporary sometimes proved to be quite elastic. Regardless of its original intent, the building provided clean, cozy and comfortable living quarters.

He found his two fellow MI agents engaged in a spirited discussion about football. In one easy chair sat Lester Brown, his new boss, the Camp March MI field office commander. At thirty-one, Lester was a Green Beret and looked the part. He was David’s height, just under six feet, but he outweighed David by forty pounds. His muscular body appeared carved from black granite. His slightly graying hair was cut short and a constant smile revealed gleaming white teeth.

Sprawled on the couch was the six foot four inch frame of ex-college linebacker and former history teacher Kevin Romanowski. Kevin was twenty-five, had short, light brown hair and sported large Ray Ban aviator glasses. His incessant grin indicated he was on the hunt for something new and exciting.

The three agents shared something in common. They were all enlisted men serving in military intelligence in civilian clothing status allowing them to live in officers’ quarters. Lester was a sergeant first class, a grade E7. Kevin was a sergeant, grade E5. David was low man on the roster, a corporal E4. Since no one outside MI knew their ranks, everyone assumed they were officers. The three agents did nothing to dispel that assumption.

David couldn’t care less about football, so he took a beer from the small fridge in the hut’s kitchen area and walked back outside to sit on the hood of the blue MI jeep and think. He smiled every time he saw the bright blue US Army jeep with the red Naugahyde seats.

The blue jeep was an icon of military thinking. If uniformed soldiers drove regular olive drab Army jeeps, then jeeps for undercover Army personnel would have to be different; in this case, blue. The blue jeep epitomized the truism of the three ways of doing something: the right way, the wrong way and the Army way. As a math major formally trained in logic, David found the contortions of Army logic on the verge of painful.

He sat upon the hood and sipped his beer as he looked up at the stars in the clear night sky and contemplated his past week. A week ago, he was working out of the Portland, Oregon field office and living in a nice apartment in the northwest quarter. Now, he was living in Asia, on a small and remote Army post in the middle of South Korea. Everything was new and different. The whole arc of his life was on a trajectory unthinkable from what he envisioned two years prior.

David was here in the Army because he had lost the draft lottery. Four years prior, as a college student in New York, he watched the bizarre event on TV. That night, the fate of all the draft-age men in the country was determined as plastic balls containing slips of paper representing birthdays were drawn one at a time from a glass jar. He was shocked when his number came up twenty-first, cementing his destiny as a draftee unless he did something about it.

He wanted to avoid the draftee’s total loss of choice, so he explored his options and made the best of it, enlisting in the Army with a guarantee of serving in Military Intelligence. Reflecting on his five months of intelligence training in Arizona and his initial tour stateside in Oregon, he was surprised by how much he liked it and how good he was at his job.

David didn’t like to admit it, but joining the Army had been good for him. It forced him from his introverted shell into a place where he had to deal with people and with topics other than math and science. In his initial assignment in Portland, he conducted background investigations on Army personnel who needed security clearances. Every day, David had to interview teachers, neighbors, police and court personnel verifying candidates’ backgrounds. He learned to establish rapport, ask delicate questions, probe and elicit with agility.

Then he was required to go overseas, but the only two options available at the time were Korea and Vietnam. It was an easy choice. Vietnam was winding down, but soldiers continued to die every day. David didn’t want to be the last guy killed in that unpopular and divisive war. Still, Korea presented its own demons to David. He had very personal reasons to hate the place he thought of as the dragon long before he arrived there.

He looked up at the nearby hill at the center of the compound that dominated the landscape. Camp March existed to store Special Weapons. The Army loved using adjectives that obfuscated rather than described. Special Weapons meant nuclear weapons and they were stored at the top of that hill in a series of buried bunkers. He found it unsettling to be sleeping a quarter mile from a dozen nuclear warheads.

As David sat staring at the hill, an explosion interrupted his train of thought. A large vibrant plume of orange flame flew up into the night sky from the peak of the big hill as the distinct sound of torn steel assaulted his ears. He stared at the arsenal slack-jawed as black smoke rose into the cool night air and a siren began to wail.

Lester and Kevin ran from the hootch and looked up at the mountainside. Lester quickly scanned the sky looking for aircraft or other incoming threats. Holy shit, he said. David, did you see or hear any planes or incoming artillery or missiles? Anything like that?

David remained transfixed, staring at the growing plume of flame. No, I saw nothing. I was looking right at the hill when it just blew up.

They watched the spectacle until Lester broke the trance. OK, into the office. Kevin, get the jeep keys while I call Seoul. The three ran next door to the Quonset hut that served as Camp March’s MI field office.

Lester ran past the four battered steel grey desks, picked up the black rotary dial telephone, and called the MI night duty officer at Eighth Army headquarters in Seoul. This is Field Office Commander Brown at Camp March. Two minutes ago, we had an explosion in the special weapons storage depot. Origin unknown, damage unknown. It appears not to be, repeat NOT, incoming enemy action. We’re beginning an investigation immediately. I’ll call back within the hour. He hung up.

Everyone, get your credentials. David, get your camera and make sure you have film.

David ran back next door to the BOQ. He grabbed the black wallet containing the gold badge and ID card identifying him as a Special Agent and clipped it into his shirt pocket. He snatched his camera bag containing his Canon FTb 35 mm camera and two boxes of 36-exposure Kodak Plus-X black-and-white film. He darted outside to the jeep with its two waiting occupants and jumped into the back.

Let’s go, Lester ordered. Chaos reigned as Kevin drove away from the BOQ toward the entrance to the hillside storage depot. Armed MPs in jeeps and a fire truck with its siren screaming were just ahead of them. As they drove past the main gate, they witnessed MPs waving in the GIs running from the nearby nightclubs through the wide-open gate.

The tall hill, barren of any vegetation, was ringed with light poles at both fence lines. David concluded there would be no hiding on that hill as any approach would be extremely visible from the top or bottom. They drove through the single gate in the chain