Yoo took a rolled rope ladder from the niche they had dug, and with his back to the wall of the narrow passageway, he shinned to the top. Attaching the ladder to a rock, he lowered it down and they began bringing the drums up.

Major Lee moved back through the tunnel on all fours. Sometimes his knees didn't even touch down as he kicked off with the balls of his feet, his legs going past his elbows as he raced ahead. He pulled the flashlight from his shoulder and doused it as he neared the passageway on the southern side, then sprang onto the hemp line. He scurried up, hand over hand, then paused just below the rim.

There was no one around. Pulling himself through, Major Lee patted his left pocket, made sure the switchblade was still there, then ran into the night.

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

Wednesday, 7:00 A.M., the Diamond Mountains

The 7.65 X 17mm Browning, officially known as the Type 64, was a North Korean-made handgun. It was more or less a copy of the Belgian Fabrique Nationale Browning Mle. 1900 pistol, but what appealed to Colonel Sun, and why he had asked Colonel Oko to bring that weapon specifically, is that it was manufactured in a silenced version.

Bent over the backseat of the jeep, Sun's orderly handed the Colonel the 64 and kept one for himself. Sun had already checked to see that it was loaded when they left the beach. He trusted Colonel Oko only so far. Their fathers had served together in a unified Korea, fighting the Japanese, and they had played with each other as boys. But while any man who would allow his own soldiers to be killed for the furtherance of a cause was to be admired, he was never to be fully trusted.

And what am I doing that's any different? Sun asked himself. The soldiers who were working with him and Major Lee were all volunteers, but what of the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands who would die when war broke out? They weren't volunteers.

Yet, what they were doing must be done. He had known that since 1989, when he crystallized his thoughts and published an anonymous pamphlet called The South Is Korea. It enraged intellectuals and pro-unification activists, which told him he was on the right track. In the booklet, not only did he maintain that eventual reunification would be a cultural and economic disaster, it would destroy the lives and careers and political aspirations of officers on both sides of the border. That alone would create chaos, for soldiers like Oko would not take a mustering out and token post with grace and gratitude. He'd stage a coup that would plunge the peninsula into a war greater and more deadly than the relatively small conflagration they were planning. Besides, incontrovertible separation would prevent repeats of brutal confrontations like the 1994 riots in Seoul, where over seven thousand troops clashed with ten thousand pro-unification supporters and more than two hundred people were injured. Those protests would only grow worse as the U.S. continued its efforts to help the North replace its old graphite-moderated nuclear reactors. New nuclear reactors would decrease the amount of plutonium and atomic bombs the North could produce, thus making them more responsive to a mutual defense pact with the South.