From the Fatherland, with Love, page 62
“When they don’t even come home, you never know what they’re really up to,” laughed Mrs. Foodstuffs, lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke through pursed lips. She had curly hair dyed auburn, and was wearing black tights, flat buckskin shoes, and a dark-brown knitted suit, with an orange shawl around her shoulders. The restaurateur’s wife was in jeans and sneakers, but she was wearing what looked like a Prada sweater with mink fur trim around the collar and long diamond earrings dangling on either side of her face. Chikako couldn’t even begin to imagine how much they must have cost. She also noticed the white leather Max Mara coat slung over the shoulders of the real-estate agent’s wife. Chikako was the only one of them without dyed hair, and her gray suit, bought at a budget store that offered a forty per cent discount to City Hall staff, looked as cheap as it was. She didn’t much enjoy chatting with these wealthy women, though she didn’t actively dislike them. They at least respected her as a successful woman with an important job. All had married relatively late, only having kids after thirty, but they positively doted on their children. Chikako had read in some child-raising book that most young mothers went through a phase when their animal instincts took over, and being covered in a kid’s various excretions didn’t bother them at all. It must be true even for women like this, she thought.
Though the economic gap between them and her was obvious, they were all comrades in motherhood. And despite their general flashiness, they were too refined to meddle in other people’s affairs—unlike her gossipy neighbors, for example. “It must be really hard on you now, Onoe-san,” the real-estate agent’s wife told her. Chikako agreed that it hadn’t been easy. She was currently negotiating with the KEF, for example, about wharf space for five hundred ships. Thanks to the blockade on Hakata Port, it should be possible to fit them in, but the city wanted to limit them to the Okihama and Higashihama piers. They had already agreed that ten boats, each with a KEF officer on board, would be sent out to guide the ships into harbor. The young wives were impressed, and told her so.
“But what’s going to happen now?” asked the Sony man’s wife, twirling the key to her BMW around her finger. Everyone in Fukuoka was wondering the same thing, but nobody had an answer. The bank president’s wife changed the subject: “I just downloaded the latest anime from Studio Ghibli and copied it onto a DVD. You can take turns borrowing it, if you like.” Everyone clamored to be first, so they had to resort to “rock-paper-scissors” to decide the order. Chikako couldn’t help thinking how tough they all were. They had no idea what was going to happen, but they knew exactly what their function was right now. Their kids still needed to be fed, bathed, dressed, and taken to kindergarten every day.
Chikako had already told them that the KEF had promised City Hall they wouldn’t seize any land, property, or assets belonging to ordinary Fukuoka residents. But there was no guarantee that they’d keep that promise, and if they wanted to take your stuff, all they had to do was label you a criminal. No one knew how they would govern the city. The only thing she had learned for certain in the week she’d been assigned to the command center was something that should have been obvious: each North Korean was a unique individual. She often worked with a female officer in the logistics and supplies division by the name of Kim Hyang Mok, who was well educated, straightforward, and very hardworking. Chikako sometimes wondered when she ever got time to sleep. But then there was the hulking major Kim Hak Su, always in battledress, with that chilling look in his eyes. She’d been appalled by the abusive way he treated some of the people under his command; he frightened her so much that she now avoided all eye contact with him.
Once they’d settled the matter of the DVD, one of the women asked Chikako, with a worried look, whether there was any risk of the LNG tank in Higashihama being blown up if the fleet was attacked. Chikako said she didn’t know. She couldn’t very well ask any of the KEF officers about something like that. But after spending a week with them, she had to wonder whether they would really do anything that desperate; they struck her as surprisingly sensible. Kim Hyang Mok had done an incredible job of negotiating with local traders, and had been almost childishly delighted when she’d managed to get hold of some insecticides and antiseptics for virtually nothing after that insect outbreak over the weekend. A potential attack on LNG sites was effective as a threat, but it would be suicidal actually to go through with it.
To finish with, Chikako told the wives about the paper recycling. This was a story she’d actually heard from Ri Gwi Hui, a female intelligence officer. “Any idea how the resident codes and other personal information were leaked to the KEF?” she asked. “No—do tell us!” they said. “It’s true that the general-affairs department handed over the codes in response to direct threats. But in fact for the last ten years Fukuoka has been exporting waste paper. We get lots of containers coming in from abroad, right? Well, there’s no sense in sending any of them back empty, so we decided to export our waste paper. Southeast Asia is short of paper, so we send them ours to recycle. But here’s the thing. At City Hall, for example, they’re always going on about how we’ve got to economize, so we jot down notes or whatever on the back of used paper, without bothering much about whether it has any personal details printed on it. And since shredding everything would take for ever, it all gets exported for recycling.”
The women were listening closely. “I was told that a lot of the paper shipped in those containers ends up in North Korea, and they have an army of people go through it page by page, checking for any useful information. There’s a massive amount of personal information on all that stuff, not just from City Hall, but from banks and private companies too—and this was monitored for anything they could use when they invaded Fukuoka. Not only that, but I was told that the programming for the Juki Net is commissioned from private companies that subcontract most of the work to China and India, who in turn re-subcontract some of it to North Korea.”
“Unbelievable!” said the Sony man’s wife. “Who’d ever have thought they’d do that?” Chikako said she had to get going. After double-checking when her turn for the DVD was, she said, “Bye now,” and started toward her car. The restaurateur’s wife had parked her Saab right in front of Chikako’s Mazda, and she walked along with her. “I heard something very strange from a young lady I know,” the woman said, and lowered her voice. “She’s married to the heir to the old bean-jam bun shop just down the road from our restaurant. He’s over thirty but still involved in the Speed Tribe, and she said that over the weekend he and his friends helped a group sneak into the Sea Hawk Hotel—a group claiming it was going to topple the KEF. Mind you, this was over drinks, so I don’t know if there’s any truth in it.” She ran her finger along the sticker with Hangul writing on Chikako’s car. “I don’t suppose anything happened at the hotel last weekend, did it?” Chikako shook her head and said, “No. Nothing in particular.”
She drove alongside Central Park, then turned right before Fukuoka Tower to head for the command center. She had tried to find some music on the car radio, but all the channels were relaying the latest news of the North Korean fleet. On NHK 1, a well-known commentator on military affairs was saying something about the SDF’s warships and fighter planes being among the best equipped in the world, capable of easily destroying this outdated fleet simply by launching missiles at it. All four of the Kongo class of Aegis destroyers had been dispatched to the Tsushima Island area. Even just one of them could probably sink most of the four hundred and eighty-seven ships so far confirmed. The original Aegis cruiser was designed to protect aircraft carriers from enemy planes, and although he didn’t know why the Maritime SDF, which didn’t have any aircraft carriers, needed such high-tech ships at a cost of a hundred and twenty billion yen each, the Aegis had not only a formidable capacity to process information but also attack power: multiple missile launchers, backed up by radar that could detect and follow over a hundred targets within a radius of four hundred kilometers. The Ground SDF had the Type 88 Surface-to-Ship Missile for coastal protection, and the data link with the Maritime SDF’s P-3C planes had apparently been completed some five years earlier.
“What this means,” the commentator coolly went on, “is that the SDF’s latest equipment, designed for sophisticated electronic warfare, is now faced with an armada of the lowest-tech ships imaginable—ships that look as though they’ll sink on their own, without any encouragement from us, and with zero ability to gather information or even to attack. The fleet is essentially defenseless, and, incredibly, they appear to be only checking each other’s position and speed by eye. In other words, they don’t have any radar, and most of them don’t even have proper radio transmission. Yet sailing they are—and getting closer and closer. And we’re just sitting with folded arms, watching. If that isn’t ironic, then I don’t know what is.
“We can’t attack because the North Koreans are effectively holding the whole nation hostage through the occupation of one city and the threat to blow up LNG stockpiles around the country. But if the government was determined to block them from crossing the territorial limit, it could be over in a matter of minutes. To put it bluntly, these are little more than armed ‘boat people.’ It wouldn’t even make sense to lay mines since they would probably line up ten or so ships and make a dash for it, the first ones getting blown up to let the others through—suicidal, but simple.”
Listening to his comments only underlined how gutless the government seemed to be. It was the same kind of attitude her husband had. He hadn’t wanted to leave his job, but he couldn’t bring himself to turn down a friend’s request. Similarly, the government didn’t want the fleet to reach Fukuoka, but they couldn’t risk any terrorist attacks. Choosing one thing meant sacrificing something else; so many people simply didn’t understand this, and her husband was a perfect example of it. He’d probably been spoiled by that awful mother of his—or smothered by her, more like. The woman had pride and disappointment etched into the wrinkles on her face. “Do as I say and you can have everything; disobey me and you’ll get nothing”—this was undoubtedly the sort of implied threat that she’d held over her son, impressing upon him that there was nothing to be gained from thinking for himself and making his own decisions.
This train of thought brought Mizuki to mind. About six months after her divorce, she had been out drinking with him when he’d suddenly made a pass at her. Chewing on a piece of chicken gizzard, he calmly said, “How about an affair with me?” Chikako respected Mizuki and was flattered, but he was married and had a couple of kids in high school. “You can’t be serious,” she told him. “I’m not pretty, and I haven’t an ounce of charm.” He admitted that there were plenty of prettier women. “But plenty are a whole lot uglier too!” he said, and laughed. She loved his smile so much that she wavered a bit, but in the end decided against the idea. She just didn’t see herself in that kind of situation. When she told him this honestly, he’d taken it in good grace and carried on giving her advice and a listening ear just as he always had done. But every morning, looking in the mirror, she noticed the spreading crow’s feet around her eyes, and the skin on her arms and legs was beginning to get flabby. She sometimes wondered what her life would have been like if she had taken up with him—yet she didn’t regret it. She had promised herself that, whatever happened, she’d never harbor any regrets.
After she passed the Fukuoka City Bank and the Fujitsu Building, the Sea Hawk Hotel came into view, raising its thin blade into the blue sky. The building always looked so unstable to her. Peering up at it glittering silver in the sun, she recalled what the restaurant owner’s wife had said about bikers helping an anti-KEF group to get into the hotel. Chikako had already left for home by then and hadn’t actually seen anything herself, but it had been reported on the news the next morning that in the early hours a local Speed Tribe had entered the restricted area and circled the hotel, and that the KEF commander had called for security to be tightened up at the checkpoints. The woman’s story was hearsay twice removed, so it was impossible to judge how much truth there was in it, and it was apparently something told over a drink or two. She decided to ask Mizuki later what she should do with that sort of information. Chikako slowed down to cross over Yokatopia Bridge and then stopped at Checkpoint A, greeting the familiar guard in Korean: “Annyeong haseyo.”
She parked on the bottom level of the first-floor parking lot. The Sea Hawk Hotel had no second floor because of the ballrooms’ soaring ceilings, and the parking lot adjacent to the first floor was divided into lower, middle, and upper levels, to make the most of the space. When she got out of her car, Chikako strained her ears to see if she could hear anything from further down—screams, for example. The B2 lot was where those arrested were being held. Of course she had never seen the detention facilities with her own eyes, and the subject was taboo in the command center. But she had often seen people crossing the lobby as they were being taken down there. There had been a lot of familiar faces—a well-known doctor, for example, who ran a special nursing home for the elderly about which there’d been a lot of rumors, and a former member of the Upper House. A staffer from the tax department at City Hall, seconded with her, had helped the KEF draw up a list of those suspected of large-scale tax evasion.
She and her colleagues on secondment often talked at lunch or on the way home about what sort of place the detention center really was. The fact that none of them had actually seen it only stoked their curiosity. They couldn’t discuss it at work, so they had to rely on things they’d gleaned from various KEF soldiers. I heard they use a vise on people and crush their fingers… They say that after just a day in there, the prisoners look like ghosts… It sounds like a living hell… Almost a hundred people had already been locked up, but they were all characters it was hard to sympathize with. There were a couple of women there, too. One was a legendary battle-ax in her fifties who employed women from all over Asia in a string of massage parlors she operated in the Nakasu entertainment district, while the other was a company boss in her forties who’d made a fortune smuggling aphrodisiacs and slimming drugs from China. The man in charge of deciding whom to arrest often checked with the seconded staff regarding the sort of reputation these people had, and tended to select only those that ordinary residents complained about. At any rate, they were supposed to be moving the detention center to Odo soon.
She went through several doors until she reached the escalator hall, then headed along the corridor to where the command center was now based. On entering the hotel, the smell of insecticide stung her nose. Were they still spraying? There had been a major outbreak of insects on the third and fourth floors on Saturday, and they’d moved their HQ downstairs. It seemed the neglected tropical plants in the cafe next to the tower of guest rooms had been to blame. That morning, when Chikako had gone to work, the fire shutters over the main entrance were already closed and the soldier on guard told her to go to the first floor, so she knew something must have happened. Things from upstairs had been piled in a first-floor banquet hall: large TV monitors, computers, telephones, bundles of documents and writing materials, crockery, sleeping cots, and a large number of uniforms, caps, and so forth. An engineer had been called over from the camp to weld shut all doors that had access to the third floor. Soldiers were brushing bugs off their uniforms, some in a panic, scratching at their hair or stripping down to their underpants. In the ladies toilet, Ri Gwi Hui, Ri Gyu Yeong, and Kim Sun I were changing into new uniforms. When she asked what had happened, she was told “Bugs! Everywhere!” The floors of the banquet hall and the bathroom were littered with the bodies of small insects of a type she’d never seen before. Work had been completely disrupted by the fuss, and documents had been scattered and lost.
Today, Commander Han Seung Jin, First Lieutenant Pak Myeong, and First Lieutenant Jo Su Ryeon were seated in easy chairs in the banquet-hall lobby discussing something, but they fell silent as Chikako approached. Pak returned her greeting and asked how preparations for the wharfs and anchorage in Hakata Port were going. Everything should be ready by three o’clock that afternoon, she told him. She always spoke Japanese with Pak, but could follow a simple conversation in Korean. She thought she’d heard them use the word for “quarantine.”
She liked walking along the thick red carpet that ran from the lobby to the ballroom where she worked. The sweet smell of kimchi blended with the cigarette smoke that hung over the hall. All of the North Korean men were heavy smokers. Ri Gwi Hui’s electronic-intelligence team had been expanded and was gathered in one corner of the room, tapping away at keyboards as they compiled a database in order to get resident-register numbers for the extra troops arriving shortly.
In another corner a seventy-inch TV screen was covering the deployment of SDF ships at Japan’s territorial line and the F-15 Eagle fighter planes preparing to scramble at Kasuga airbase. But nobody was watching—they were all confident that no interception would take place. The ballroom was about the same size as the gym at Chikako’s middle school. Liza Minnelli and Whitney Houston had apparently performed here, and their photos were hanging by the entrance. Now it contained twenty or so desks laid out in three rows and partitioned off. There were about twenty officers permanently stationed here who were in charge of sections like Strategy, Intelligence, Propaganda and Guidance, Logistics and Supplies, Construction and Engineering, Medical Affairs, as well as the KEF Special Police and legal, financial, and transport departments. A number of rank-and-file soldiers under them were constantly coming and going, and more and more local traders were visiting in person too.
