The Empire's Counterattack (1)
After the decision for my second trip to Korea was finalized, I shared a phone call with my local collaborator that felt as though it had been ages.
“How’s the body holding up? Looking pretty intact for someone who took an explosion head-on, aren’t you?”
“Well… I’m not sure if I should call this thanks to you, but yes. If it hadn’t been for that, I’d have been dead long ago.”
I briefly reflected on the man on the other end of the line and everything he had been through.
Ham Cheon-ho, the representative director of Cheonma Sangsa, had suffered injuries severe enough to kill him when he was caught up in the Hong Kong terror attack.
—That, at least, was the version of events the world knew. The attack had swept up not only the head of a major South Korean conglomerate but the Governor of British Hong Kong as well.
Of course, every last detail of the affair had been scripted and orchestrated by me. From the perpetrator Ryu Geum-cheol to the victims—the Hong Kong Governor and Ham Cheon-ho alike.
Whatever the truth, the world had accepted the terror plot I had staged as undeniable fact, and as a result North Korea had been buried under a mountain of damning suspicion.
The ones who had howled the loudest were, of course, the Republic of Korea and Britain.
When their own citizens—not ordinary people, but members of the highest social strata—were clinging to life by a thread, anything short of a hardline stance would have looked stranger still.
Britain in particular had reportedly flown into a rage at the prime ministerial level without any special prompting from me.
I had never laid out the full scope of the operation I had run in Hong Kong for the British imperial government. The only people who knew the complete truth were those already inside the organization.
I had not failed to anticipate the British government’s furious reaction. On the contrary, I had even considered using the response of a government that did not know the full story as a bargaining chip.
To deceive the enemy, one must first deceive one’s own side—that was only natural. I simply had not expected the reaction to reach quite this pitch.
Like an automated hunting routine left running on its own, Britain’s self-directed diplomatic pressure on North Korea and the communist bloc had become nothing but pure advantage for me.
The British Empire maintained no diplomatic relations with North Korea.
That being the case, it possessed no “civilized” diplomatic channels through which to express its outrage.
And so the empire’s fury toward a rogue state inevitably began to seep out through every non-diplomatic channel available.
The first to open fire were the media outlets, led by the BBC.
In the original history the Arduous March had begun only after the collapse of the Soviet Union, so from the perspective of that North Korea it had actually been advantageous to let the outside world know even a fraction of the horror.
Only then might Western nations, from a humanitarian standpoint, offer some form of aid.
They had even invited foreign correspondents to Pyongyang and permitted reporting from certain stricken villages.
Distortion and downplaying had been the default, of course. No one ever truly knew exactly how many people had starved to death during the Arduous March that unfolded on the eve of the new millennium.
But in this world, things were different.
With the Soviet Union still standing tall as the overlord of the communist states, and with the Cold War still very much alive, the Western nations had no particular reason to support North Korea.
Offering aid would have been the strange choice. One could have been called a red for less.
And then, in the middle of all that, this same rogue state had gone and staged an unprecedented terror attack in the heart of Hong Kong?
How could anyone not be seething?
This was still an era before “terrorism” in the modern sense had been properly defined.
The kind of terrorism we know today could reasonably be said to have begun the moment airplanes were flown into the Twin Towers.
That being so, the explosion that tore through the middle of Hong Kong carried even greater weight. People simply were not yet accustomed to this particular brand of shock.
Under ordinary circumstances, the internal affairs of a North Korea even more closed off than in the original history should have remained largely unknown.
Although the Soviets regarded North Korea as something less than a properly functioning communist state and kept it at arm’s length, the two countries were still bound together in something resembling a community of fate, like it or not.
They remained heavily intertwined in intelligence matters as well, which meant far fewer opportunities for Western agents to infiltrate.
In other words, compared to the original history, North Korea’s internal situation should have been far harder for the outside world to learn.
None of that mattered, however—not when a mage who had once glimpsed the future was still very much alive and well.
It was not as though I had failed to cross-check the facts.
Even if history had twisted, the broad currents might remain the same, but the finer details could easily have changed.
I did not, however, entertain any serious notion that the character of Kim Il-sung the Hump-nosed—a man interested only in preserving his own power—had somehow improved.
“Come to think of it, you have your own connections in the Republic of Korea’s political circles, don’t you? How have they been reacting?”
“That… if it ever got out that I told you this kind of classified information…”
“It’s fine. You’ll die faster for not telling me than for getting caught talking. Still don’t understand that?”
“As you said… the famine was progressing at a far more severe level than expected. How on earth did you know that…?”
“You don’t need to know. Hmm. Is that so?”
Infiltration into the closed state of North Korea had grown more difficult, but that did not mean Britain’s reach failed to touch the northern half of the peninsula at all.
Moreover, proving the existence of something whose very existence is uncertain is a completely different problem from confirming something one is already half-convinced is real.
I had guessed that an Arduous March of similar timing had unfolded in this world’s North Korea as well, and after having the British verify it, I received confirmation that my prediction had not been wrong.
All that remained was to quietly leak the facts to the media, starting with the BBC.
It was not as though this country’s press were government mouthpieces—if anything, the opposite was true, except where the royal family was concerned—but the papers had seized on the bait I dropped with greedy enthusiasm.
And this was the result.
What had begun as a dry recitation of North Korea’s catastrophic state was seized upon by other outlets, sensationalized, expanded, and reproduced until the whole thing became a circus.
I made no effort to correct the flow of these rumors.
The more confused people became, the more it proved just how vast an influence I could exert upon the world.
Once the media opened fire, the political class responded next.
This time I dropped a quiet word in the Prime Minister’s ear. If Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives wanted to keep steering a favorable political climate going forward, wouldn’t it make sense to come out hard right now?
Thatcher had little real choice in the matter, but it was still better to give the appearance of offering options.
With Britain’s press and political establishment throwing their weight behind the campaign, it quickly became the consensus across all of Europe.
The nations of the European Union cited the British Empire’s reports day after day, leveling increasingly harsh criticism at North Korea.
Of course, if Britain alone had taken the lead it would not have been so easy.
Europe in particular contained countries that shared direct borders with the Eastern Bloc—nations for whom the American, British, and French nuclear umbrellas felt distant while Soviet nuclear missiles loomed close.
What made the difference here was American intervention.
Around the time I had been deep in negotiations with the people of the Magical Defense Bureau, including Matthew W. Lewis, the sudden incident in Hong Kong had been more than enough to alter both the nature and the duration of those talks.
From the Americans’ perspective, I was someone who had predicted the Hong Kong incident to a certain degree.
They could not very well blame me for it, either—I had been prepared to tell them, only for the event to erupt far sooner than expected.
How exactly were they supposed to pin anything on me or my organization? The Americans were in a position where they ought to have been begging me to explain how I had known about the terror attack in the first place.
For President Clinton, solidifying a cooperative relationship with a syndicate that at least spoke a language he understood must have seemed the better option.
I thought so too. When one’s approval ratings were already in free fall from scandal after scandal, what was one more contract with the devil?
I had taken that desperation to the negotiating table and extracted every concession I could.
It was not, strictly speaking, an unfair deal. In many ways it stood in contrast to the unequal treaties my current country of residence had once forced upon its desperate former colonies.
It was from this point that the organization began to entangle itself more deeply with the Americans.
As I was turning these thoughts over, Ham Cheon-ho carefully spoke up.
“I… the people you left behind in Korea told me you would be visiting this country again soon…”
“Ah, that’s true. I need to stop by briefly to handle one piece of business. Naturally, you’ll be cooperating as well.”
“I… see.”
At my words, Ham Cheon-ho’s tone carried a faint note of reluctance.
It was understandable, in a way. Who would be happy to hear that a superior was coming in person to the place where one lived?
Understanding, however, did not mean I needed to accommodate his feelings.
A puppet should behave like a puppet.
If one only ever cracked the whip, the toy would break soon enough. At this point I casually offered a carrot.
“Still, Ham Cheon-ho. You’ve been running hard on your feet all this time, haven’t you? A few weeks ago you even threw yourself into an explosion ready to die.”
“Yes…”
Having completed the mission, he was entitled to a reward—that was only natural. I allowed the corner of my mouth to curl slightly as I leaned a little closer to the laptop webcam.
“How about the redevelopment contractor for Kowloon Walled City?”
“…What?”
It was a matter far too massive for any single company to handle.