The Vacation That Never Came
After the weekend passed, Monday morning arrived.
In the parking lot of a 200-pyeong mansion in Unjung-dong, Pangyo, a beast gleamed beneath the morning sun, coiled and waiting like it was alive.
The modest little “toy” Chairman Cho Seunghyun had sent me.
A Porsche 911 GT3 RS.
A high-end supercar, the distilled essence of internal combustion and mechanical engineering, known as a racing car for the road.
“Wow….”
With the engine already running, I stared at those elegant curves and let out an involuntary sigh of admiration.
It was perfect.
From the engine bay to the exhaust line, from the suspension joints to every last inch of the chassis.
All I could see flowing through the car was a clear, graceful blue current.
Not a trace of those ominous red problem spots.
This was on a completely different level from those crude, money-soaked tuning cars—it was the perfect balance born of German craftsmen’s grotesque, decades-long obsession with shaving steel down to perfection.
“Right. After all that hard work, I deserve a taste of this too.”
I patted the bodywork with satisfaction for a moment, then forced myself into the bucket seat of the car, which was softly rumbling with the engine on.
The vibrations of the 4.0-liter naturally aspirated boxer engine shivered pleasantly through my back.
With the gear in neutral, I gave the accelerator a light tap.
Vroooom—!
The blissful roar, punching straight at my heart, delighted my ears.
On weekdays, it was enough to ride in the company limousine provided by the firm, sitting in the back while the chauffeur drove, but today, of all days, I wanted to take the wheel myself.
My first supercar commute.
How was I supposed to resist that?
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
The VIP parking area in front of Hanseo Defense headquarters’ main lobby.
As the red Porsche slid in and came to a stop with a ferocious exhaust note that seemed to tear at the pavement itself, the employees hurrying to work all turned at once to stare.
“Whoa… what car is that? Someone in our company actually drives something like that to work?”
“Wow… I’m jealous.”
“That’s insane, seriously. Did you hear that exhaust?”
Leaving their murmurs behind, I opened the door and stepped out at an unhurried pace.
In a crisp tailored suit, briefcase in one hand, I took off my sunglasses—and the jaws of several employees who recognized me dropped open.
“Huh? Isn’t that Executive Director Baek Gunwoo… the one who got promoted this time?”
“A new executive? Or some chaebol third-generation trust-fund nepo baby?”
A third-generation chaebol, a trust-fund nepo baby.
I snorted inwardly.
Well, with a 5-billion-won annual salary, a 200-pyeong mansion in Pangyo, and a Porsche 911, I supposed that was how people saw it.
Come to think of it, I had personally carved all of this out with my own hands, one piece at a time, but still—it wasn’t much of an exaggeration to call me one now.
Only a few months ago, I’d been treated like a spare part under Department Head Song, hanging by a thread on the list of employees slated for early retirement. Looking back on those days, it was a complete reversal of fortune.
As I walked into the lobby in such a good mood, the morning breaking news was playing on the huge screen at the front.
“Wow, wasn’t that the project Solaris was working on? So they actually pulled it off.”
“There were rumors it was about to be scrapped because they couldn’t solve the torpedo vibration problem. How the hell did they fix it overnight? Did the ADD doctors all get worked to the bone together?”
“Man, I’m jealous. If our company could just get one spoonful on a huge national maritime project like that, the year-end bonus would be amazing.”
The employees standing in the lobby, sipping coffee, murmured to each other in voices thick with admiration and envy.
On the screen, meanwhile, footage showed a huge column of water shooting up over the horizon, followed by archive shots of President Park Jincheol, Chief Engineer Kang, and the other ADD researchers cheering.
“Heh, the news got out fast.”
Of course, nowhere on that screen was there a mention that Hanseo Defense’s Executive Director Baek Gunwoo had fixed hundreds of billions of won’s worth of problems with a single wrench.
From the Ministry of National Defense and the Agency for Defense Development’s point of view, it had probably looked better to package it as a success built on their own technology.
That didn’t matter to me.
My wallet was already stuffed to the point of bursting, and the fact remained that the weapon I had touched had pushed our national defense one step further.
Now there was only one thing left.
To get, at this point in time, the one thing I truly, honestly wanted.
I took the elevator with light steps and headed to the top floor, to the chairman’s office.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
“Hahaha! Welcome, our treasure of Hanseo!”
The moment I opened the chairman’s office door and stepped inside, Chairman Cho Seunghyun sprang up from the sofa, arms wide open to greet me.
His grin stretched from ear to ear.
“I should’ve seen the look on that old Song from Solaris’s face with my own eyes. Just hearing his voice over the phone was enough to wash away ten years of indigestion.”
“I was just lucky. It happened to be something I could solve.”
At my words, the chairman let out a snort of laughter.
Then he patted my shoulder and went on, “No need to be that modest, Executive Director Baek. A capable man should get a little enjoyment out of how good he is. President Park at the Agency for Defense Development was praising you so much he practically wore out his tongue.”
“Haha, really?”
“Of course. If it hadn’t been for you, the schedule would’ve been thrown into a terrible mess. You saved the ADD and Solaris alike. And thanks to you, we got our own decent cut of the pie too.”
Chairman Cho pointed a finger at the documents resting on one side of the table.
It was a file marked Exclusive Supply Contract for Torpedo Drive Shafts.
“Come, sit down and let’s talk. You must’ve had a rough time working down in Geoje, right? Submarine work, torpedo repair—truly, you’ve had your hands full.”
With that, he had his secretary bring in the finest black tea.
I held the teacup lightly and looked at him.
Gratitude was gratitude, but this time I needed to get a reward that went beyond the material.
“Thank you, Chairman. And I tried the toy you gave me this morning—it’s absolutely fantastic.”
“Right? I made a direct call to the Germans at headquarters and had them release it.”
“Well, um, Chairman.”
“Hmm?”
“Would it be fair to say that I can, honestly and in good conscience, turn off my phone and rest for about a week now? I’ve been breathing sea air, and I just can’t shake the salty stink. I haven’t even been sleeping properly, so I’m pretty worn out.”
All the while—Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and all the way down to 200 meters beneath the sea.
I’d been wrestling with steel without a single chance to rest, so now I needed perfect recovery.
My head was already filled with a perfect plan: driving the Porsche I’d brought in that morning along the East Sea coastal roads and maybe visiting a few good restaurants along the way.
That was what I was thinking.
“……”
At my words, Chairman Cho’s hand, which had been raising the teacup, froze in midair.
The gaze that had been roaring with laughter a moment ago now drifted awkwardly somewhere into space.
“…Chairman?”
“Kh, khm.”
He suddenly cleared his throat and avoided my eyes.
“Y-you’re not serious, are you? Right?”
“Haha. Of course I know that. You should rest. Absolutely, of course. After all that work, you’d be crazy not to.”
“Then why do you suddenly look so troubled, Chairman…?”
“Well, you see, Executive Director Baek….”
Something felt ominous.
My fifteen years of corporate survival instinct started screaming red warning lights.
Then, just as I feared, he said, “What if you just do one more job. Just one more, and then you can rest?”
I could only wonder if I’d misheard him.
“…What? One more job?”
“Yes. Just one.”
“Chairman… with all due respect, I just came up from the bottom of the sea after fixing a torpedo shell. My ass is still wet, for crying out loud…!”
“I know! I do know! But this isn’t me asking because I want to ask it.”
With a troubled click of his tongue, Chairman Cho pulled a thick document envelope from the desk drawer and held it out to me.
On the front of the envelope was a bright stamp reading Top Secret, along with the seal of the National Security Office of the Blue House.
“…The Blue House? No, why is this suddenly coming from here?”
“The government—no, the Presidential Office—has directly singled you out and sent an urgent request for cooperation.”
“Me? From the Presidential Office and nowhere else…? Why?”
I took the documents with a stunned expression.
Chairman Cho began his explanation with a stiff face.
“Right now, our government is putting everything on the line to sign an enormous comprehensive defense cooperation framework with Sweden in Northern Europe—an MOU, basically. It’s a huge package deal, tied to everything from next-generation main battle tanks to self-propelled artillery and air-defense systems.”
“How huge are we talking?”
“Thirty billion dollars. About 40 trillion won in our money.”
“…How much?”
A weak breath escaped my mouth.
Forty trillion. It was such an absurd number that I couldn’t even form a real sense of scale around it.
This wasn’t just a Hanseo Defense problem; it was a historic national project that had the fate of South Korea’s entire defense industry riding on it.
“The problem is our competition. Unluckily, it’s Germany.”
“It really is Germany, isn’t it.”
“Exactly. The birthplace of mechanical engineering and the eternal giant of European defense. Those arrogant German bastards have decided they can’t let a Nordic market that’s practically their own backyard get stolen by us, so they’ve come at it with their pride on the line.”
For engineers, Germany was almost like a sacred land.
The country that had produced the Leopard, the textbook tank.
The country that had sculpted the perfect Porsche I’d driven in that morning.
Though it had been in decline in many ways lately, Germany was still Germany.
Especially when it came to competing through technology, their recent decline probably meant nothing at all.
“The local winter tests are being conducted in Sweden’s rugged mountainous regions, in the middle of snowfields where the temperature swings down to minus thirty degrees… and our equipment, especially the cold-weather specialized improved model we proposed for Sweden’s next main battle tank program, is producing fatal errors.”
“What kind of… problems?”
Chairman Cho narrowed his brows deeply.
“Two. One is the lower chassis track tension. The other is the upper gun barrel’s thermal deformation.”
“Thermal deformation?”
“Yes. Don’t misunderstand. It’s not that our tank is garbage and breaking down. It’s more that the specs are too high, and those insane Nordic ice fields physically can’t keep up.”
He tapped the documents on the table impatiently and continued.
“Take the gun barrel. When you’re firing high-speed rounds with a muzzle temperature of 3,000 degrees in a snowstorm at minus thirty, the steel barrel can’t withstand that extreme temperature difference and warps ever so slightly.”
As I listened, I pictured the tank’s structure in my head and muttered, “The top of the barrel is freezing in the blizzard while the underside is burning, and the thermal expansion coefficient is getting twisted out of alignment. The thermal sleeve probably hit its limit, or the sensor logic on the MRS—the muzzle reference system—couldn’t keep up with the extreme deviation and zero the gun properly.”
“Exactly! And the tracks, too. At minus thirty, the snow packed between the road wheels gets compressed and turns into concrete-hard ice instantly. There isn’t enough environmental data for Sweden, so the existing sensors can’t adjust the tension. If they drive through snowfields, the tracks stretch too tight and just come flying off.”
Mechanically, it all made perfect sense.
It was the classic dilemma of top-spec cutting-edge equipment that hadn’t been synchronized with the local environment.
“Meanwhile, the German tanks already spent decades rolling around on that ice, so their data is perfect. If this goes on, we’ll hand a 40-trillion-won market straight over to the Germans and become a laughingstock. And in that situation… it seems Sweden’s defense minister has some personal connection with the Saudi acquisition unit commander.”
“Don’t tell me…?”
“Yes. Your guess is right. They heard the rumors.”
Chairman Cho looked me straight in the eye and drove the point home.
“There’s a crazy machine ghost in Korea, they say—a lunatic who can bring dead lumps of steel back to life in an instant. Bring him here right now. If that man proves, with his own hands, that Korean technology can beat German mechanical engineering in a Northern European blizzard, then I’ll sign a 40-trillion-won contract on the spot.”
The chairman paused to catch his breath.
“That’s apparently what the Swedish side asked for outright.”
“Ha….”
I pressed a hand to my forehead.
It seemed my karmic debt from fixing a HAWK missile system in the Saudi heat and crushing the pride of the Chinese competitor had snowballed and detonated in Northern Europe.
At this point, I was no longer just an executive at a defense company—I was about to be forcibly conscripted as a 40-trillion-won national strategic asset.
“So, Executive Director Baek. I need you to go to Sweden for me.”
“Chairman….”
“Take a month off after you come back. No, two months. You can even use the corporate card to eat unlimited Swedish salmon.”
An insane invoice worth 40 trillion won.
And a lunatic mission to beat Germany’s elite, the ultimate kings of mechanical engineering.
I looked out the chairman’s office window with a hollow expression.
There, in the VIP parking lot in front of the lobby, sat the luminous Porsche 911 I had just received.
Ah… my vacation.
My drive.
My coastal road.
So that’s why the German car had been glued to my hands from the moment this morning started—it had all been part of the setup for going to cut down the Germans, hadn’t it?
“Haah… understood.”
In the end, I admitted defeat and stood up.
Not being able to rest right away was irritating, but somewhere deep in the blood of this engineer’s body, a strange competitive urge had begun to stir—a desire to smash the arrogant noses of those German engineers.
“What’s the schedule?”
Chairman Cho checked the desk clock as if he’d been waiting for me to ask.
“Right now. You’re taking off in three hours.”
“What? Three hours? No, I have to go home and pack. We’re talking about heading straight to a minus-thirty-degree Arctic icebox, and I don’t even have the right clothes….”
“Don’t worry. Executive Director Cho Yerin already arranged everything—from a top-grade cold-weather suit tailored to your size to all the equipment you’ll need, even your underwear, and had it sent ahead to the airport.”
The old fox.
He’d clearly known from the start that I wouldn’t be able to refuse, and he’d finished all the arrangements in advance.
“Head to the Private Business Aviation Center at Incheon International Airport. With the Blue House coordinating, we’ve already secured a one-pass flight clearance for Hanseo Group’s private jet. Manager Maeng from the power pack team and Chief Jo, who’ll be your hands and feet on site, are already waiting inside the jet.”
A fast pass from the Presidential Office, the group chairman’s private jet, and even my own familiar people.
It was the overwhelming VIP treatment fit for a firefighter being rushed toward a 40-trillion-won national project.
I shoved the key to my luminous Porsche deep into my pocket and let out a short sigh.
“Understood. Let’s leave right away. Ah, Chairman.”
“Hmm?”
“When I get back, you really have to give me vacation. Really.”
“Hahaha, don’t worry about it.”
Leaving behind Chairman Cho’s booming laughter, I turned my steps toward Northern Europe, where a savage blizzard was waiting.
Vacation… he would really give it to me, right?
He’d better not renege on it, seriously.