Nina coughed, squinting downwards. Her husband was still gripping the ladder below her. ‘Keep going,’ he gasped, ‘or we’ll choke on this crap.’ They resumed their climb, the bullet wound in Nina’s arm burning with renewed pain. ‘So, you think everything that just blew up was expensive?’
‘I’m going to guess that any sane poverty-stricken country wouldn’t even have considered it,’ she replied.
‘You haven’t met many dictators, have you?’
‘Have you?’
‘More than I’d like.’
‘Why am I not surprised?’ Nina reached the top of the ladder. ‘Okay, big-ass manhole cover blocking the way.’
‘Let me see.’ She leaned aside so Eddie could peer at the obstruction. ‘No locking bar on this side. Either we can just push it open, or . . .’
‘Or?’
‘Or it’s locked from the top.’
She sighed. ‘I will be really, really pissed if the thing that keeps us from getting out of here is a buck-fifty padlock.’
‘Pretty sure there’ll be more than that trying to stop us. Shift over.’ She squeezed against the cables, Eddie squirming up beside her. ‘This is cosy.’
‘Mind on the job, mister.’ They both managed their first smiles in some time. ‘Are you ready?’
‘Yeah.’ He wedged his shoulder against the cover, bracing his feet. ‘On three.’
He counted down, then both pushed upwards. For a moment the heavy metal disc remained firmly in place, before shifting with a graunch of rusted metal. Eddie shoved harder, Nina seeing faint lights through the gap as it widened. ‘Looks like a tunnel,’ she said.
He raised a foot to a higher rung and strained again. The cover rose, Nina forcing it sideways. A few more seconds of effort, then Eddie lowered to bring it down flat on the floor before shoving it clear. ‘That’s given me a chip on my shoulder – out of the fucking bone.’
He retreated to give Nina space to climb out. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked, helping him up.
‘I’ll be fine, so long as I don’t have to carry any sacks of coal.’ He surveyed their surroundings. ‘Okay, now where the hell are we?’
They had emerged in a tunnel, rectangular in cross-section rather than circular. Other passages branched off it. ‘This was the level they were digging out, wasn’t it? Maybe they haven’t finished it yet.’
Eddie’s gaze followed the path of the cables from the shaft to the ceiling, where they joined other thick skeins running overhead. ‘They all go that way,’ he said, pointing down one leg of the gloomy tunnel. ‘Those power lines we saw on the way up the mountain came in through the runway tunnel, so if we follow ’em, they should take us to the way out. Eventually.’
‘We’ve still got to get up there, though,’ Nina reminded him as they started down the passage. ‘I don’t think calling the elevator will be a good idea.’
‘Hopefully there’s more ladders— Oh balls.’ A sound from somewhere ahead: the echoing clatter of running feet, growing louder. ‘They’re probably not here to give us a guided tour.’ They hurried into a dimly lit side passage.
‘Where do you think this goes?’ Nina asked.
‘Somewhere that hasn’t got a shitload of soldiers running towards us, I hope.’ They rounded a corner, seeing a crossroads ahead. ‘Great, it’s a fucking maze.’
‘Look, more cables.’ Another set of heavy-duty power lines ran across the intersection. ‘Do we follow them?’
‘Yeah,’ he decided. ‘They probably join up with the ones behind us.’ They ran to the crossing and turned right.
The tunnel complex turned out to be extensive. Following the power cables, they went through chambers that had been completed but stood empty, awaiting new production lines. The chatter of the soldiers’ boots was still behind them, but dispersing as they spread out to search. The open manhole had been found.
Other noises became audible ahead. Underlying everything was the wail of an alarm, but through it they heard a constant chittering: the clash of metal tools against rock. ‘This must be where they’re digging,’ said Nina nervously, remembering that the slave workers were being overseen by numerous armed guards.
Eddie saw brighter lights where the tunnel opened out. ‘Shit, we might have to go through that to get to the way out.’
The cables ran into the new chamber. They had not recently passed any side routes that might safely skirt the excavations – and Nina’s glance back caught the distant flare of a flashlight. ‘They’re coming!’
‘Fuckeration,’ muttered Eddie. ‘Okay, we don’t have much choice . . .’
They slowed as they approached the end of the passage. A ragged cavern had been blasted out of the mountain’s heart, now being shaped by hand. Eddie crouched and led Nina behind a pile of rubble just inside to survey the scene. About two dozen prisoners were working in the irregular space, some hacking at the stone walls with picks while others cleared the debris and loaded it on to a conveyor belt heading down the tunnel into which the cables ran. They were overseen by three soldiers: two with Type 58 rifles, the third with a shotgun. The trio seemed unsure how to respond to the alarm. Even in the troops’ confused state, though, there was no way Nina and Eddie could reach the exit without being seen.
‘Okay, what do we do?’ Nina whispered.
Eddie’s gaze followed the conveyor, seeing a stack of red-painted wooden crates near the tunnel mouth. Explosives, he guessed; dynamite or something similar. A potential weapon, but he would be shot long before reaching them. He looked back at the piles of broken stone around the cavern’s perimeter. ‘Maybe we can sneak round these if we—’
A voice blared over a loudspeaker. Even without knowing the language, both recognised it as Bok’s. ‘What’s he saying?’ Nina wondered.
‘Probably warning about us,’ Eddie replied, but the sudden change in the guards’ expressions revealed that something else was going on. Confusion gave way to shock as Bok continued to bark commands – then the emotion spread to the workers, a wave of fear running through the chamber. A few broke from their places, pleading in horror.
That small show of resistance was enough to snap the soldiers out of their bewilderment. Faces turning as hard as the surrounding stone, they spread out, shouting at their prisoners and gesturing for them to gather together in the centre of the space. Most went meekly even in their obvious terror, but a few fled, scrambling behind the rubble.
‘Shit,’ Nina gasped. ‘They’re going to kill them!’ The alarm was probably a radiation warning, prompting an evacuation – and the slave workers were considered disposable, too much trouble to corral and bring to the surface.
A woman burst from the main group and sprinted around the edge of the cavern, towards the passage behind Eddie and Nina. Two soldiers hurried to intercept her, bellowing orders. She ignored them, crossing an open space between the mounds of rubble—
One running guard fired his shotgun. The frightened woman’s grimy clothing shredded in a spray of red as the pellets ripped into her chest. She tumbled limply to the floor, trailing blood. The prisoners screamed, more of them scattering.
The other soldiers turned, about to unleash automatic fire upon the helpless crowd—
There was a pickaxe on the pile of stones by Eddie. He snatched it up as he charged from cover at the man with the shotgun, swinging it – and impaling him through the back, its long spike bursting out of the soldier’s chest with a torn chunk of his heart transfixed upon the end. The Korean let out a gargling shriek, the Englishman grabbing his gun as he fell.
The nearest soldier spun in surprise—
Eddie lunged at him, pumping the shotgun to load a new shell and firing it into his stomach. The point-blank blast tore a hole right through the soldier’s body, a gruesome fountain of blood and intestines exploding out of his back.
The third soldier, forty feet away, whirled to face the new threat—
Eddie rapidly pumped the shotgun again before body-slamming the dead man at chest height and ramming the weapon straight through the gory hole in his torso. Bullets smacked into the corpse’s upper body and punched messily out just above the Englishman’s head.
Hand inside the dead soldier’s guts, he pulled the trigger again.
The shotgun boomed. Forty feet was still well within its lethal range, the tightly packed spray of red-hot pellets reducing the North Korean’s face and upper chest to bloody mince. He staggered backwards, firing a last few rounds before collapsing.
Nina scrambled over the debris. ‘Eddie! They’re coming, behind us!’ The tramp of approaching feet had grown faster at the sound of gunfire.
‘Get that gun!’ he shouted, pointing at the last soldier’s fallen rifle. She ran past her husband as he snatched up the second man’s weapon and hurried back to the rubble near the tunnel entrance. He dived on to the pile of stones, taking aim at the opening.
More soldiers rushed from the passage—
Eddie’s rifle blazed, bloodily cutting down the half-dozen North Koreans. He jumped up and ran to the fallen troops. One was still moving, clawing for his gun. A single shot to the back of his skull ended the threat. The Yorkshireman peered around the corner. No movement in the gloom. ‘Nina, we’re clear. Come on!’ He swapped his empty weapon for one of the fully loaded ones on the floor, then headed for the exit.
‘What about the workers?’ Nina said. She had picked up the Type 58, the prisoners regarding her fearfully. ‘The soldiers will kill them!’
‘Don’t suppose any of you speak English?’ Eddie called to them.
To his surprise, he got an answer. A skinny man with a swollen purple bruise on one cheek tentatively raised his hand. ‘I . . . speak English,’ he said quietly, hardly daring to meet their gaze.
‘Okay,’ Eddie replied. ‘I’m Eddie, she’s Nina, and we’re leaving. All of us. The guns over there – get them. We’ll have to shoot our way out.’
That only intensified the man’s fear. ‘We’re trapped down here too,’ said Nina. ‘They’re trying to kill us, just like you – we don’t have a choice.’
‘If you get the guns, at least you can fight back,’ Eddie added. Nobody was yet in sight down the main tunnel, but the wailing alarm and the conveyor’s rattle prevented him from hearing if anyone was approaching from its side passages. ‘Even if you don’t want to come, tell the others so they can decide for themselves.’
The man hesitated, then spoke in his native language to the prisoners. It quickly became clear that there were two groups: those who had been so traumatised and crushed by their jailers that they were afraid even to consider the possibility of escape, and a smaller number who while just as physically ground down still harboured a spark of resistance. These latter moved warily away from the others as if expecting some cruel trick; when it became clear they were not about to be punished, they went to the dead soldiers and shared out their weapons. When all the guns were taken, the remainder gathered pickaxes, determined not to be left defenceless.
‘What about you?’ Nina asked their translator, who had not armed himself. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Ock,’ he replied, finally finding the courage to look her in the eye. Some of the other prisoners were regarding her with expressions that went beyond simple curiosity. It took a moment to realise why: they were staring at her hair. North Korean propaganda posters, she knew, sometimes demonised Americans as red-headed, freckled thugs.
‘Will you help us?’ When he hesitated again, she continued: ‘You’re the only one who can speak English – we need you to talk to the others.’
‘I . . . I do not know,’ he stammered. ‘My wife, she is here also, on another floor.’ His eyes flicked upwards. ‘If I help you, they will kill me – and they will kill her!’
‘They were going to kill you anyway,’ Eddie pointed out as he examined the red crates.
‘Yes, but . . .’ The strain of trying to resolve the dilemma made him tremble.
‘Ock,’ Nina said softly. ‘We’ll do everything we can to help you, and to find your wife. I’m not a soldier, but Eddie is. A very good one. If anyone can get all of us out of here, he can.’
‘So long as we don’t stand around here all day with our thumbs up our arses,’ the Yorkshireman added.
‘He’s also a very rude one,’ she said, glaring at him. But he had a point. ‘We’ve got to get out of here. Are you coming with us?’
Ock finally whispered an answer. ‘Yes. I will help you.’
‘Thank you.’ She looked at the reluctant prisoners. ‘Try to get as many of them to come with us as you can, then tell the ones with guns to do what Eddie tells them.’
‘Did any of the guards in here smoke?’ Eddie asked, opening one of the wooden boxes.
‘Did they smoke?’ echoed Nina uncertainly. ‘Why?’
He lifted out something that could have come straight from a cartoon: a stick of dynamite wrapped in red paper with a fuse hanging limply from one end. ‘So I can light these!’
Ock gawped at him, then pointed at the guard impaled by the pickaxe. ‘Him.’
‘Get his lighter, or matches, whatever.’ Eddie stuffed several sticks into his pockets, along with a couple of longer coils of fuse, then returned to the tunnel. From somewhere in the distance he heard a thudding drumroll: the sound of rifles firing in unison. ‘Those fuckers,’ he said, realising what it meant. ‘There must be other workers on this floor – they’re killing them! We’ve got to move now, before they trap us down here.’
Nina scurried to the dead soldier, digging gingerly through his pockets and pulling out a crumpled book of matches. ‘Got them.’
‘Great – let’s go.’ He started down the tunnel at a rapid jog, moving alongside the conveyor so he could use it as cover if anyone appeared ahead. Nina ran to catch up, followed by the armed prisoners. Ock had a hurried discussion with the other workers, then the group – with varying degrees of reluctance – came after them.
The tunnel met with another a couple of hundred yards ahead, a larger passage slicing across its end at an angle. The conveyor stopped at another belt, dropping the last few pieces of broken rock that had been loaded before Bok’s announcement on to its still-laden counterpart.
That was not the route concerning Eddie, though; rather a smaller side passage that appeared to link the two main shafts. ‘Hold on,’ he said as he approached it, signalling those behind to slow. He stared intently at the darkened opening, and saw flickers of light washing along its walls from within. ‘Shit! Someone’s coming. Nina, give me those matches!’
She handed him the matchbook. ‘You’re going to use dynamite?’
‘If we run out of bullets, we’re fucked.’ He pulled out one of the sticks, then struck a match. ‘None of those soldiers back there had spare mags. The Norks probably can’t afford ’em.’
‘That’s great, Wile E., but it won’t matter if you bring the roof down on us!’
But he had already lit the fuse. ‘Everyone down!’ he snapped. Nina hurriedly ducked behind the conveyor, Ock yelping a translation to the prisoners before joining her in cover.
Eddie ran to the passage, holding the sputtering explosive in one hand. He peeked around the corner – and saw the silhouettes of several soldiers advancing on him, one holding a torch.
The beam snapped up and locked on to his face—
Eddie jerked back as bullets smacked against the wall, stone chips stinging his head. He flung the dynamite around the corner, then dived to the floor and covered his ears. Shouts of panic came from the passage, followed by a scuffle of footsteps as some of the soldiers turned and fled, while another made a desperate scramble to tear out the fuse.
He failed.
A piercing bang came from the tunnel, followed by a surge of flying dust and grit and body parts. Deeper booms shook the floor as part of the ceiling collapsed, crushing what remained of the soldiers into oblivion.
Even covered, Eddie’s ears were still ringing from the detonation. ‘That’s another bloody step closer to needing a hearing aid,’ he complained, returning to the others. ‘We need to keep moving.’ They set off again, the Koreans glancing down the wrecked tunnel with expressions that suggested hope was rising within them for the first time in years.
They reached the main intersection. Eddie waved for caution as he went to the corner and checked the new tunnel, but the only movement was the ceaseless trundling of the second conveyor belt. The power cables ran along the roof. ‘Does this go to the way out?’ he asked.
Ock peered nervously past him. ‘To the lift that takes rocks to the surface, yes.’
‘If it takes rocks up, it can bring soldiers down,’ Eddie warned, signalling for everyone to follow him along the tunnel.
41
It took the fugitives a few minutes to reach the tunnel’s end. Two other conveyors ran into the chamber beyond from adjoining passages, their termini choked with mounds of rubble. The reason it had not been cleared was instantly apparent: all the slave workers had been shot, bloodied corpses littering the floor.
‘Bastards,’ Eddie growled. He surveyed the area, but the soldiers who had committed the murders were gone. ‘The guards must’ve evacuated.’
‘Yeah, but they’re coming back!’ Nina said in alarm. A large elevator shaft was cut into the room’s side – and the cables within were moving.
‘Everyone with a gun, with me!’ Eddie shouted, running towards it. The armed prisoners followed as Ock relayed the command.
‘What are we doing?’ asked Nina.