Time of Attack

Начало книги

Qasim Ranjhani had not come to buy a bomb, though the regime had plenty for sale. He wanted something far more deadly.

Though he detested the squalor of Yodok prison, such an isolated place was the perfect laboratory for what he’d come to purchase.

The portion of Camp 15 where the hospital was located was dubbed the Total Control Zone, tucked deep in a dry river valley of one of the seemingly endless waves of mountain ranges that had caused early European visitors to describe the northern part of Korea as “a sea in a heavy gale.”

Ali Kadir, Ranjhani’s heavily bearded assistant, looked a decade older than his boss, but was the same age at thirty-nine. On the ride in, he had stared out the dusty window of the military van with an intrigued grin, studying the prisoners as if they were animals in a zoo.

Guard towers bristled every hundred meters among row after row of slumping concrete buildings. The entire camp, set at the base of a windswept mountain face, was surrounded and crisscrossed with barbed wire and rolled concertina, much of it electrified. Sharp-eyed guards, hunched and angry against the bitter cold, stood post, patrolled, and smoked here and there among the rabbit warren of dilapidated buildings.

Читать дальше →