Free Red Phoenix by Larry Bond Page A

tightrope over a deep pit had first come over him as he’d waited to fly out of Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport.
    “Be careful, Sergei. Be watchful.” General Petrov, deputy commander in chief for air combat training, had whispered in his ear as they stood together looking out the departure lounge window into the late-night darkness. The old man had chuckled at Borodin’s alarmed expression, but his words had been blunt—a rare thing for the short, stout, white-haired friend of his father.
    “These North Koreans are slant-eyes, yes, Sergei. But they are clever slant-eyes. They’ve played us off against the Chinese for decades, and only now does it seem that we’re pulling them into our nets. “But”—the old man had waggled a finger in his face—”only just. They could easily slip outside. We can’t afford that, Sergei Ivanovitch. You understand? So you must notoffend them. You must not disparage this personality cult nonsense—this godhead—they’ve built up around the old man Kim and his son.”
    Petrov had dropped his voice and laid an arm around Borodin’s shoulders. “So, a word to the wise, eh? Walk softly in North Korea, there are powerful eyes watching. Politburo eyes, Sergei. You don’t want to count trees or dig for gold, you understand? Walk soft.”
    Borodin shivered slightly as he remembered those last words. This might well be the season of glasnost, but the icy forests of Siberia and the man-killing mines of the Kolyma were still there—they’d just been pushed into the shadows a bit.
    His memory moved on, through the long, high-altitude journey eastward across the Soviet Union, then lower above the rugged peaks of the Taeback Mountains, and finally south across the narrow plains toward Pyongyang. Into this cavernous hangar carved out of a mountainside east of the capital.
    The “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong-Il, son of North Korea’s absolute ruler, had met the plane personally. No surprises there. Neither Borodin nor his political officer, Major Yepishev, had expected the Great Leader himself, Kim Il-Sung, to make an appearance. According to both the GRU and the KGB, the old man’s health was increasingly fragile, and they’d arrived on a hard, gray day, heavy with cold rain driven by the wind.
    There wasn’t much trace of the rotten weather in here, though, Borodin thought, surveying the high-vaulted hangar that held not only his Ilyushin airliner, an Il-18, but also several other, smaller transports, a reviewing stand, and a uniformed crowd of North Korean dignitaries. The size of the place made a mockery of perspective and dwarfed its human occupants—stretching for several hundred meters from tunnels cut deeper into the rock out to a set of thickly armored main hangar doors. Lighting, ventilation, and fire suppression systems turned the ceiling into a nightmarish tangle of shafts, cabling, and piping.
    The Soviet colonel couldn’t even begin to imagine the amount of labor it had taken to carve all of this out of solid rock. It surpassed even the massive engineering works carried out by his own country’s Civil Defense Force. He cast a sidelong glance at the row of impassive Korean faces on either side of him. What was going on inside those heads?
    The silence alerted him. The band had stopped playing, and now Kim Jong-Il stood ready to speak at the podium.
    Borodin found the man’s appearance unsettling. On the surface the “Dear Leader” seemed soft, pudgy—a stark contrast to the colonel, who’d always prided himself on his trim, flat stomach and narrow, high-cheeked features. But the eyes, the eyes were dangerous—cold and hard behind those thick glasses. They were eyes that suited a man who now controlled his nation’s entire internal security and military apparatus.
    Kim’s voice was soft, commanding attention by necessity more than bybluster. “Socialist brothers, we welcome your presence here. We hope that your gracious visit will permit a useful exchange of