1000 Yards

17

Kim rushed between the opening doors of the elevator car and, shouldering aside the attendants who were guarding the door, tumbled into the offices of the Reconnaissance General Bureau. Yun had telephoned ahead with news of the threat but, as he had breathlessly relayed to Kim as the Major sped across the city, the security officers had dismissed his fears with supercilious disdain. There was, they said, nothing that a single man could do to threaten the leadership of the People’s Army. To suggest otherwise was ridiculous. The building’s security had never been breached and was considered to be impregnable but, to humour him, it would be checked. In the absence of better evidence of the threat — the narcotic ramblings of a man whose mind had been broken were not sufficient — the meeting could not possibly be cancelled. Kim knew why: no-one would want to admit to the generals that there was the possibility that they might be fallible.

He ran to the conference room where the meeting was to be held, angrily presented his credentials for inspection and went inside. Proceedings had already commenced. The opening address was being given by Lieutenant General Kim Yong-chol, one of the Vice Chairmen. He was praising the computer programmers who had executed such an audacious attack on the Imperialists and their southern lackeys. They were, he opined, in the vanguard of a new kind of war, the kind of war that would send the enemies of the Fatherland back to the dark ages. The usual nonsense, but this audience was primed for it. The room was large and Kim had entered at the rear, the disturbance kept to a minimum. He took it all in quickly: there was no sign of the Englishman, not that he expected to find any. It was a bomb, surely. He had smuggled a bomb into the country, hidden it here and rigged it to explode. He was going to take out as many of the generals as he could.

“Excuse me!” he shouted. “Comrades! My name is Kim Shin-Jo. I am a Major in the Ministry of State Security. I must ask you—”

His eye caught something out of the window and the words caught in his throat: he didn’t know what it was. A flash of light? The quickest glint of something? A reflection? He glanced across the cityscape to the half-finished Ryugyong Hotel, the only building in the city that was taller than this one. It was half a mile away. Time slowed down. He saw it again, definitely coming from the hotel, that huge tapered arrow pointing straight up into the lowering sky.

People had turned to look at him.

He saw another tiny bloom of light, a different kind of flash against the dark concrete of the hotel’s bare skeleton, and then heard a strange sound, a pop that was similar and yet dissimilar to the sound that the seal on a jar of coffee makes as it is pierced. His warning went unsaid as the general toppled backwards, breaking his fall on the edge of the lectern for a moment, but then sliding to the right as his body lost purchase and completed its journey with a graceless thud to the stage. The disbelief came first — the whole room experienced it — and then the thought that the general must have fainted before Kim realised, with shocking and awful clarity, that the odd noise he had heard before was the sound of something shearing through glass, a noise announcing that a spiderweb of fracture, delicate strands radiating from a central point, had suddenly been flung across the large window a dozen feet from the general at his lectern, and that at its centre a small, round, hole had been drilled in the glass, which, though badly damaged, held. It took a second more for the pulverised remains of the man’s head to start leaking blood, the dark bloom spreading from his body, a crimson corona, at which point the human fear of blood — primal, automatic — asserted itself. Screams and panic and rushing for the exits and diving for cover but, by that time, two more bullets were already on their way downrange.

The weakened window bulged once, twice, and collapsed in a million pieces of broken glass that shone like diamonds.

The Englishman was disastrously, cataclysmically accurate. He was aiming for headshots and hit both perfectly, blowing each one all over the insides of the conference room. He hit the Director of the RGB an inch above the right temple, the bullet pulverising his skull into fragments that sprayed across the room (those nearby would be tweezering fragments from their flesh for days afterwards). The man slumped forward until his chest fell between his knees and, thereby unbalanced, his body rolled forward off the chair and to the ground. His comrade, yet another general, swivelled his head at the sudden commotion, experienced a moment’s worth of complete horror to see his colleague without a head, before the third bullet hit him between the eyes, dead centre above the line of his nose. The fifty-calibre projectile ploughed straight through skull bone and brain matter, exiting with horrendous gushers of blood, brain, and bone fragments. Both bullets slammed into the thin partition walls, passed through the next two offices and, eventually, their momentum sufficiently impeded, exploded in a shower of zirconium sparks that immediately started hungry fires.

Kim found that he was on the floor. People were rushing around him, jostling him, treading on his hands. He clambered upright. The Chief of the General Staff collided with him.

The man flung him side. “Get out of the way, you fool!”

The fourth bullet struck the general on the right side of his face, dug its way through the flesh and bone and teeth enamel, ploughing through the rear of the throat and into the bone of his shoulder, atomizing it into thin pink mist on the exit. His knees locked, even against the sudden and awful collapse of his weight, and so instead of tumbling he pivoted and was almost lowered downwards, dropping into a chair as if it was his favourite armchair at the end of a difficult day.

The bullets flew with delayed supersonic bangs that rang out only as the audience was beginning to realise what was happening to them.

The fifth shot was already on its way by then.

It struck a general who had been sitting in the first row, also in the head.

The result was identical.

The conference room erupted in panic — pure pandemonium — but there was nowhere for any of them to go. Every seat had been filled and as the attendees tried to make for the passages at the end of the rows they tripped over the chairs and each other. A scrum developed at the door. Kim dropped to the ground and wrapped his arms over his head. There was nothing he could do until the Englishman grew tired of his sport, shooting fish in a barrel.