“B-1s,” her love says to her, in a relaxed, almost pleased tone of voice. He has a sip of beer, smacks his lips. “Lancers. They used to carry a fully nuclear payload, but black Jesus did away with them. There’s still enough firepower on board to cook every dog in Pyongyang. Which is funny, because usually if you want cooked dog in North Korea, you have to make reservations.”

“They should’ve risen up,” Sandy says. “Why didn’t they rise up when they had a chance? Did they want work camps? Did they want to starve?”

“That’s the difference between the Western mind-set and the Oriental worldview,” Bobby says. “There, individualism is viewed as aberrant.” In a murmur he adds, “There’s a certain ant-colony quality to their thinking.”

“Excuse me,” says the Jew in the middle aisle, sitting next to the Asian girl. He couldn’t be any more Jewish if he had the beard and his hair in ringlets and the prayer shawl over his shoulders. “Could you lower your voice, please? My seatmate is upset.”

Bobby had lowered his voice, but even when he’s trying to be quiet, he has a tendency to boom. This wouldn’t be the first time it’s got them in trouble.

Bobby says, “She shouldn’t be. Come tomorrow morning, South Korea will finally be able to stop worrying about the psychopaths on the other side of the DMZ. Families will be reunited. Well. Some families. Cookie-cutter bombs don’t discriminate between military and civilian populations.”

Bobby speaks with the casual certainty of a man who has spent twenty years producing news segments for a broadcasting company that owns something like seventy local TV stations and specializes in distributing content free of mainstream media bias. He’s been to Iraq, to Afghanistan. He went to Liberia during the Ebola outbreak to do a piece investigating an ISIS plot to weaponize the virus. Nothing scares Bobby. Nothing rattles him.