The Secret Weapon
Under Lee Ki-jo's guidance, Hausman arrived in Incheon.
The Korea Explosives plant.
The interpreter trailing Hausman explained that this was the place that had begun producing dynamite only a year before.
"Dynamite? That stuff's been around for a hundred years, and you're proud you're making it now?"
Hausman sneered.
The interpreter added that it was only the second such production in all of Asia, but the remark did him no good.
Hausman watched Ki-jo coming toward him in his own car.
That idiot was confident he could satisfy me? Just you fail to satisfy me. I'll make you pay in full for that insolence.
Ki-jo, for the benefit of the man glaring at him and biding his time, opened the car door.
"Advisor, thank you for coming all this way. There's a secret weapon hidden here."
Hausman climbed out, straightening a back gone stiff from an hour and a half on unpaved roads. One look at the plant that had become only the second in Asia to succeed at making dynamite drew a sigh out of him. It was a shabby wooden building that looked as if the first typhoon would carry it off.
"Please follow me."
Ki-jo led him to the Korea Explosives office. President Kim Jong-hee and the staff were waiting out front, and they bowed deeply to Hausman. He barely acknowledged the greeting as he went inside.
A single chair and a table had been set out for him. On the table sat something wrapped in a cloth.
Is that the secret weapon?
Hausman sat down without much expectation. Ki-jo drew the cloth back himself, and a crude object was revealed before the American's eyes.
"What is this?"
"An anti-personnel blast mine, developed jointly by Cheongsan Development and Korea Explosives."
"A blast mine?"
The moment Hausman saw the thing the Koreans were calling a blast mine, a hollow laugh escaped him.
"This is a mine?"
"Yes, sir."
He looked the Korean-made object over. It resembled the roof tiles Koreans used when they put a roof on a house.
"Allow me to explain how the blast mine works."
Ki-jo turned through the charts he had prepared and laid out the principle of the device.
"First, this weapon descends from the singijeon, a fire-arrow volley weapon developed by Joseon, a kingdom founded on this peninsula about five hundred years ago."
He turned the chart, and a convincing illustration appeared: a wheeled carriage mounting something like a hundred rocket-powder arrows. It looked a great deal like the Katyusha multiple rocket launcher the Soviet army had used in the Second World War.
"They actually used that?"
"They did. It was used in the field about three hundred years ago, during a war with Japan."
"And? Did they fight Japan and win?"
"They won."
Hausman gave a short, scoffing laugh.
"So what does that weapon have to do with the thing on the table?"
Ki-jo turned another page. There was the blueprint of the weapon he and Kim Jong-hee had developed.
"Hmm."
At the sight of the drawing, Hausman pushed his glasses back up his nose.
"What's that set into the front?"
"Steel balls."
"And the thing backing the rear?"
"A thick steel plate."
"And the middle is gunpowder?"
"Yes."
Hausman nodded. He was a soldier who had faced plenty of vile Nazis and communist guerrillas. Nazis and Reds alike would slip a bomb into a jewelry box, or pack one into an ammunition crate that held a map, and leave the thing behind as a booby trap. They would cram the trap with anything that might become a fragment, so that when it went off the shards flew in every direction and left a great many wounded.
He examined the object on the table once more. Clay had been spread across the face, and steel balls set densely into the clay.
"Where did the balls come from?"
"They were taken from bearings that could no longer be used."
Hausman nodded again, then tapped the back of the blast mine with a finger. He felt a solid, heavy plate of steel.
If the powder between the clay slab and the steel plate goes off, the balls will be thrown forward.
The principle was clear enough. When the charge between the plate and the balls detonated, most of the blast energy would be driven toward the balls, because the force of burning powder always sought the weaker side. Set into a curved face like a roof tile, the balls would fly, spread, and scatter across something like a hundred and eighty degrees. Three or four hundred of them were embedded in the clay. If even one in ten struck a man, thirty or forty people would go down.
Hmm. Not bad.
The idea was a good one. Plant them on the trails the guerrillas used while you were hunting communist partisans, and a single detonation could wipe the enemy out. They looked useful against the human-wave attacks the Chinese had thrown at them in the Korean War as well. Every time the Chinese came on in successive waves, one of these blast mines could easily erase a charging squad. Machine guns and artillery had struggled to stop that tide, but if you emplaced several of these you could save ammunition, and they would be effective close to the trenches, where friendly artillery could hardly reach.
"You tested it?"
"Yes. Several times. I can show you right now."
"Then show me."
Hausman wanted to know whether the weapon would work the way he expected.
Ki-jo took him out to the tidal flat along the shore in front of the plant. It was low tide, and the Korea Explosives men had planted scarecrows across the mud to match the hour when the water was out. Thirty or forty meters behind the scarecrows, a blast mine had been set. Behind Hausman, who was plainly curious about what the bomb would do, Ki-jo allowed himself a quiet smile of triumph.
It still hasn't been adopted as standard issue in the United States. This will be the first time he's seen one.
The bomb Ki-jo had built was what would come to be called the Claymore. Its formal designation was the M18A1 anti-personnel directional fragmentation mine. Development had begun in 1954 and would be completed in 1956, but adoption would not come until 1960. It had never yet been fielded. Testing was still underway, and outside the circle of men involved in its development, no one knew the weapon existed.
Building a Claymore was not especially difficult. The structure was simple, and the explosive inside required only about as much as went into a single mortar round.
"Shall we run the demonstration?"
Kim Jong-hee, standing at Ki-jo's side, asked. Ki-jo handed Hausman a helmet he had prepared in advance.
"Please begin."
At Ki-jo's leave, Kim Jong-hee raised a red flag and sounded a siren for three seconds. When the demolition signal came from a hill a hundred meters back from the beach, a Korea Explosives man pressed, three times each, the detonator wired to ten Claymores. The mines arrayed on the right began to go off one after another.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom—!
Flame leapt, and powder smoke billowed thick. Ki-jo could feel how badly Hausman wanted to see what the bombs had done. The man was bent toward the beach.
The wind carried the smoke off, and the scarecrows planted on the mudflat came into view. Most of them were still standing, perfectly intact.
"Huh?"
Hausman made an odd sound, as if disappointed.
"Please go down and look for yourself. It won't be what it seems from a distance."
Ki-jo led him down onto the flat. As they drew near the hundred-odd scarecrows, the effect of the bombs lay bare. Steel balls that had flown some forty meters had punched clean through them, leaving holes everywhere. Hausman nodded at a punctured board.
"Penetration's still alive and well."
"Yes, Advisor. If those had been men, they would have taken fatal wounds and gone down."
"Right. The plywood's thin, so they went straight through. In a body they'd bury themselves. Truth is, a bullet's better stuck in a man than passing clean through."
It was a very Hausman thing to say. He broke into a rough laugh in front of a scarecrow whose prop had snapped where several balls had struck together.
"This one's spine is broken! A real man, and his waist would've been cut in two! Ha ha ha!"
His mouth split all the way to his ears.
"What did it cost to develop?"
"About six hundred dollars in all."
"Six hundred?"
"Yes. Four hundred to buy the balls from scrap bearings, and two hundred for Korea Explosives' powder. We dug the clay nearby."
"Did you."
Hausman's mind turned quickly. The structure was simple, and the price was cheap. Against guerrillas, or against regular troops coming on in human waves, it could deliver real stopping power. As he saw it, the effect would be far greater if they abandoned the powder the Koreans had made and used C-4, the plastic explosive the U.S. Army already had. Storage and transport would be safer, too. For now these Koreans had neither the skill nor the money, so they had stuck the balls onto an exposed slab of clay. Put that same arrangement inside a plastic case, though, and you could emplace it in the rain without a problem. A little refinement, and this would be one hell of a weapon.
"Is there a company in Korea that can make plastic?"
"There's a firm called Lucky Chemical that makes cosmetic cases and soap boxes out of plastic. But give us the machinery, and we can make them ourselves."
"That so?"
Hausman nodded and beckoned Kim Jong-hee over.
"You. Come here."
The moment Kim Jong-hee approached, Hausman asked him outright.
"You know plastic explosive?"
Kim Jong-hee had studied under an Anglican missionary as a boy and could speak English.
"I do. You mean the clay-form explosive detonated by electricity?"
"That's the one."
Hausman was convinced he had finally found a proper use in Korea for CIA money. Looking into what the Agency had spent so far, he had found large sums poured into useless places—cultural projects such as publishing, backing for Liberal Party politicians, absurd amounts of money thrown away. A soldier to the bone, he was certain that producing and issuing the blast mine Ki-jo had just shown him was exactly what this country needed. Lay these steel-ball bombs along a cease-fire line a hundred and fifty-five miles long, and even if the Chinese came again in human waves, they could be stopped on the cheap.
I thought he was an arrogant little bastard. Turns out he's actually useful.
In a better mood, Hausman clapped Ki-jo on the shoulder. He decided to trust the file his predecessor had written—Frank Powell, a CIA man of the same German immigrant stock. Lee Ki-jo really was creative. More than that, he was exceptional. He fussed over businesses that made no money, but that was probably just a hobby he indulged because he had the means. Geniuses, after all, pulled plenty of mad stunts. Hausman set his suspicions aside.
"You got more of these charges made up?"
"We do."
"Let's run it again."
Watching the excited Hausman, Ki-jo felt a quiet relief. The Hausman he knew was a butcher of men, the sort who did not care in the least how many people died so long as it served the purpose. Hand a man like that a bomb made to slaughter people, and of course he would be delighted.
When the second demonstration ended and they returned to the plant, Cho Choong-hoon had a barbecue waiting. At the sight of him, Hausman pointed.
"You the businessman with all the friends in the U.S. Army?"
"That's me. Cho Choong-hoon, friend of the Americans. Ha ha ha!"
Cho, who had hosted plenty of banquets for American troops, treated Hausman warmly and kept him laughing. Drinking the champagne Cho had brought, Hausman looked from Lee Ki-jo to Kim Jong-hee to Cho Choong-hoon.
These fellows are really something. They don't look it, but they've got talent.
He raised his glass and offered a toast.
"President Lee will soon be putting up a plant in Korea to make blast mines. Let's stamp out some weapons and stop the Reds!"
Ki-jo understood him perfectly. Build a Claymore factory in Korea with CIA money. That suited him fine. Put up a plant on the Agency's dollar, hire people, and lay Claymores along the cease-fire line—two birds with one stone. He smiled broadly and settled in to enjoy the celebration.