Traditionally a Korean delicacy when slightly sautéed, the ants were sold downtown in glass jars by vendors scattered throughout the myriad alleys and side streets of Seoul’s brightly lit and bustling Myongdong district. Here, amid the spicy odors of kimchi (pickled cabbage) and the cooking of marinated meat, throngs of workers from late night shifts were hurrying home before the midnight curfew, past the variegated plastic canopies of the pushcart stalls, their owners hawking everything from soju (octopus) and pin daeduk (pork-and-vegetable-garnished mung bean pancakes), to the favored tangerines and oranges from the southern island of Cheju. The crowd’s shadows flitted through islands of fiercely burning carbide lamps that illuminated the vendors’ faces as if they were polished china, their voices rising, bartering becoming frantic in the race against the clock. Above the alleys, in the polluted and unusually cool summer air, neons flashed with accompanying urgency in the collective frenzy before the blackout drill, which tonight would precede the usual midnight-to-4:00 a.m. curfew, the blackout’s wailing of air raid sirens yet another reminder, as if any of the twelve million inhabitants of the city needed reminding, that they were only twenty miles from the border between North and South, and two and a half minutes from North Korea’s bombers, and within range of the NKA’s long-range artillery.
Only the night before, one of the South Korean patrols, continually on duty in the hills ringing Seoul, had clashed with six North Korean infiltrators. They had been intercepted while crossing the DMZ.
After a short, fierce firefight, not unusual along the DMZ, five of the infiltrators had been shot, one dying shortly after. South Korea’s CIOC (Counter-Infiltration Operations Command) was reasonably sure the six were from the NKA’s 124th guerrilla unit. It was this unit from which thirty-one North Korean commandos had penetrated the southern side of the DMZ on a bitterly cold January night during the infamous mission of ‘68, armed with AK-47 submachine guns and grenades, with express orders to assassinate President Park of South Korea. On the second day of the mission, four woodcutters saw them, notified local authorities, and the hunt was on. Even so, the guerrilla unit reached Pugak Mountain on Seoul’s northern outskirts, and charged the Blue House — official home of the president. Twenty-eight of the thirty-one North Koreans were killed in the ferocious gun battle that followed, rifle and machine-gun fire and bursting grenades echoing like strings of firecrackers in the hilly amphitheater around the city, causing several small brush fires. Two of the guerrillas managed to escape, but one, surname Kim, given names Shin Jo, no relation to the present General Kim, was caught. Trading his life against the certain fate of being shot as an infiltrator, Kim passed over to Chungang Chongbo-bu (South Korea’s Central Intelligence Agency) all the details of North Korean President Kim Il Sung’s plan to assassinate President Park, including the fact that at each of 124th Unit’s eight guerrilla bases in the North, there were three hundred volunteers.
This meant that since 1968, over two thousand North Korean agents were being prepared at any one time for further infiltration, agitation, and sabotage against the Americans and the South, that every day at least one agent was crossing the DMZ.
It wasn’t that the North Korean agent in the Myongdong area this evening before Independence Day had been badly trained. On the contrary, he had received high commendation from his base commander in Kaesong. Not only did he know the military dispositions, weapons, and insignia of all South Korean and American units, especially those along the eighteen and a half miles of the 155-mile-long DMZ guarded by elements of the U.S. Second Infantry Division, but in addition, before being sent south, he had been carefully instructed in those local habits and customs that can so often trip up an agent. He was made well aware, for example, of the new words and phrases creeping into the language. He was told to remember that even though South Korean men, like their North Korean counterparts, expected total obedience from their womenfolk, in the South one should no longer use the word sikmo, calling a maid a maid, but kajongbu—”homemaker” or “home manager”; in much the same way, his NKA instructor told him, as garbage collectors in America insisted on being called “sanitation engineers.” And the agent knew about the red ants. Savored by most Koreans, especially by those from the South, the insects were collected from their favorite habitat in the hills around Pusan and trucked to Seoul on the 270-mile highway that ran almost the entire length of South Korea. Once in Seoul, the ants, like so much other produce, were auctioned off to the highest bidders among the street vendors, who in turn sold them to shoppers off the fashionable Myongdong.
What better way for an agent to indulge his weakness for the delicacy that he could ill afford in the North and at the same time reinforce his cover as a genuine South Korean? Approaching the pushcart, he realized he had only forty-five minutes to get back to his safe, cheap yogwan, or “inn,” two miles from the city center, before the start of the midnight curfew and air raid drill. Still, he would have ample time if he used the subway. The misunderstanding that was about to occur was largely due to the fact that the agent, having only just slipped across the Han River near Kumchon fifteen miles northwest of Seoul the previous night, had been so busy avoiding ROK patrols and settling into the yogwan that he hadn’t yet had a chance to sit down and read a newspaper. This meant he’d missed the two-paragraph story in most of the dailies, except the Korea Times, which didn’t publish on a Monday, about the brush fires in the hills around Pusan, fires that had killed off large numbers of ant colonies. Reduced supply meant higher prices. Unaware of the sharp increase in price, the agent gave the vendor a ten-thousand-won bill, about ten dollars, for an eight-ounce jar. The vendor waited politely, the glass of red ants the customer asked for now costing twice the usual amount. His customer waited, expecting the jar of ants and at least two thousand won in change. Then he realized he hadn’t given the vendor enough. “Olmayo?”—”How much?”
“Ee-man”—”Twenty thousand.” The customer dug deep into his jeans pockets, joking weakly that it would wipe out his subway fare. The vendor, though annoyed, did not show it and got a good look at the man, remembering the posters, as common as theater billboards throughout the city: “If you see a stranger who does not know the exact price of things, or spends a lot of money and hasn’t got a job, or calls you tongmu, which means ‘comrade’ or ‘friend’—grab him! He is a spy.”
Well, he mightn’t be, thought the vendor. Then again… The vendor had lost both parents when the NKA had invaded in 1950.
“Sorry,” apologized the customer. “I haven’t got enough.”
“That’s all right,” replied the vendor, already starting to pack up his stall with the speed and deftness of long experience. “I’ll still have some of these left tomorrow — or another consignment will come in.”
“Thanks,” said the man, taking his leave.
The vendor turned off the carbide lamp, quickly asked a colleague to watch his cart, and followed the would-be customer out onto Sejongro’s sixteen-lane-wide avenue, where he saw the man walking north, drawing level with the huge statue of Admiral Yi. The admiral, in ancient armor, left arm akimbo, right hand gripping his enormous battle sword, had also been vigilant in his time, the vendor recalled, alert to foreign invaders, defeating the great Japanese invasion fleet of 1597.
The vendor, however, while full of the spirit of Admiral Yi, couldn’t see the yellow light of a police station, let alone a policeman. Where were they when you needed one? — always sniffing around when they wanted free samples from the cart. The only official in sight, her smart blue U.S. Navy-style cap barely visible amid the Hyundais and the noisy red and white buses roaring past, was an immaculately dressed and beautiful woman traffic director, her white gloves moving with the suppleness of doves in flight. But the vendor knew by the time he weaved his way through the river of oncoming vehicles and reached her, the man might disappear. Seeing a taxi sign above the crowd, the vendor dashed out to flag it down. But it was brown, only for military personnel, so he had to wait a second until he saw a green cab approaching. Barging ahead of others in line, he jumped into the backseat, glimpsing the yellow-uniformed woman driver as a blur, quickly instructing her to have her dispatcher alert the nearest police cruiser to meet up with them. To the vendor’s alarm, he heard the flag drop and the meter ticking.
“What are you doing that for?” he asked. “This is a public duty.”
“So?” She shrugged. “Someone has to pay.” He was astonished, but she was very young, and he knew that the horrors of the Korean War, so vivid in his childhood memory, must be nothing more than dead history to her generation.
For an anxious moment he thought they’d lost the stranger as they turned right into Yulgog Street, heading east near Changdok Palace and the zoo, but the young woman told the vendor to relax. She still had the man in view and was going to pass him, just in case he suspected he was being followed.
“How could he know?” asked the vendor. “With so many people about?”
“If he’s an infiltrator, he’ll have been trained in such things.”
After a few more minutes, amid the usual honking and insults to various ancestors, a beaten-up, off-white Sinji sedan drew alongside the green cab — two KCIA agents, the one driving telling the cabbie they’d take over, the other asking the vendor to point out the stranger in the crowd. Suddenly the man disappeared into an alley off the Sejong a hundred yards behind them. Without hesitation the vendor told the cabbie to stop, got out, and headed back toward the alley, the agents swearing, pulling sharply into a no-parking zone and following suit. It was now 11:45—fifteen minutes to blackout.
Five minutes later, at the end of the alley as the air raid sirens began their wailing, the two KCIA agents caught up with the vendor, who was now gasping, out of breath. “We’re in luck,” said the younger of the two.
“How d’you mean?” asked Chin Sung, his older colleague, a shorter man in his midfifties.
“He never got on the subway after all. He’s gone through Donhwamun Gate, so it’s either Changdok Palace or the Secret Garden.”
A strong wind hit them full force in the alley, kicking up dust and litter, forcing the shorter, older agent to lower his head, the grit bothering his contacts. “In luck,” Chin growled sardonically. “The garden alone covers seventy-eight acres.” Candy wrappers and fallen ginkgo leaves, their small, polished green fans turning black under a dim pole light, swirled scratchily about the men’s feet. For a moment the older agent felt nostalgic for the Olympics of ‘88—then the city fathers had made sure there was no garbage to be seen anywhere on the city streets, like the cleaner cities of Germany, where Chin had once been stationed, attached to the ROK embassy in Bonn and trade legation in West Berlin.
“Well, it’s just about curfew,” said the younger agent optimistically. “He isn’t going anywhere. Has to stay in there or risk being picked up the moment he leaves. And if he tries scaling the walls, we’ve got him!” Chin grunted, looking through the gate across at the pavilions of Changdok Palace, the home of the surviving royal family, and toward the lighted, wing-tipped roof of the pavilion by the Pandoji, the Korea-shaped pond, pathways radiating from it through maples, the wind moving through the trees like rushing water.
Chin took a small walkie-talkie from the inside of his coat. “All units — we’re going to lose him over the wall, whoever he is, if we don’t surround the whole area immediately.”
A voice crackled from somewhere on the other side of the gardens. “We’re cordoning it off now. You want us to send in the dogs?”
Chin shook his head in disgust. “No — I want to keep him in there. Trap him, not panic him.” Retracting the walkie-talkie aerial, Chin turned to the vendor. “You sure he acted suspiciously? Could have been a young buck hurrying to the gardens to meet his girlfriend — keep her warm during the curfew?”
“Yes,” said the vendor, “I’m sure. I’m telling you, it was nunchi.” He meant “eyemeasure”—beyond mere sight, a sixth sense. “And he didn’t know the price of the ants,” continued the vendor. “Everyone’s been reading about the fires down—”
“All right,” cut in Chin gruffly. “Where do you live?”
“In Chamshil.” It was the area of dozens of huge, look-alike cement high-rises clustered several miles south across the Han River near the Olympic village.
“We’ll get a car for you,” Chin told him, pulling out the walkie-talkie’s aerial again.
“Will you let me know what happens?” asked the vendor.
“Yes. Certainly,” said Chin, giving the vendor his card and signing a “pass through” chit for the blackout drill and curfew.
“Thanks for the tip,” said the younger agent. Soon another unmarked car quietly appeared at the far end of the alley.
“There’s your ride,” said Chin.
As the vendor walked away, five minutes before the onset of curfew and blackout, the younger agent tried to find out what his older colleague’s plan was without wanting to appear stupid. “He must know he’s being followed.”
“Not necessarily,” answered Chin. “Unfamiliar with the subway maybe, mistimed it. Rather than get caught in the curfew — probably decided to hole up for a while, stay out of sight till the morning. Garden’s as good a place as any, and there’s a lot of pavilions — in case it rains. Which,” he said, looking skyward, “I think it will.”
“I think we should go in and get him.”
“And if he is an infiltrator, what will you find?” asked Chin.
The young agent thought for a few seconds. “Maybe he won’t swallow it. While there’s life, there’s hope. Right? Look at Kim Shin Jo — came down to shoot Park, gets caught, and ends up with a nice suit and eating out. Peking duck. Some of the boys tell me that when he wanted, he even got to go to the Angel Cloud House, the kisaeng girls pampering and singing to him. Nice work if you can get it.”
“Yes, well, this guy isn’t Kim Shin Jo,” said the older agent, pausing, unscrewing the top from a Dristan bottle and tilting his head back, his voice more strained. “If we rush, our boy might pop the pill. Then where are we?” He paused, snuffling back the nasal spray while screwing the lid back on. “Damn summer cold.” He turned to the younger agent. “But let’s say there’s a slight chance he doesn’t know he’s being followed, that he simply ran out of time. Maybe he remembered the curfew but not the blackout — after all, blackout only happens once a month. Might be doing what a lot of others do — just sitting it out. So while he’s still got light to see by, he heads north on Sejong to Yulgog — then straight to the garden before blackout begins.”
“So?” asked the younger agent.
“In the morning we follow him home. That’s what we want. Why grab him now if we can get the whole cell?”
“You believe he doesn’t know we’re on to him?”
“No,” answered Chin. “But it’s a possibility. Old Kim Shin Jo didn’t know those woodcutters were on to him either. Did he?”
“You have a point.”
The air raid sirens were reaching full volume and the lights were going out all over the city, huge skyscrapers that dwarfed the Secret Garden’s gnarled pines and tile fluted walls suddenly appearing twice as big and brutish in the moonlight. “You want some gum?” offered the younger agent.
“Gives me gas,” said Chin, turning toward his younger colleague but unable to see him, the moon now enveloped by cloud. Even so, the younger man sensed the other tensing.
“What is it?”
“Unless,” began Chin, his voice dropping, “the garden is the meeting place and he has a set planted.”
The younger agent heard his colleague take out the walkie-talkie, his voice in whispered tones requesting the RDF — radio direction finding — truck to move in to pick up any signals coming from the garden.
“Ah,” said the young agent. “He’d be a fool to transmit from here. In the heart of Seoul!”
“You remember Sorge?” asked Chin. “Germans’ top Communist agent in Japan — the best of them. Told Moscow Japan wouldn’t be attacking through Siberia, so the Russians were able to move a million fresh troops from Siberia to Stalingrad. Changed the war. You know where Sorge transmitted from, my young friend?”
“You’re going to tell me. Right?”
“Used to give parties for all the big shots in the Japanese military aboard his yacht in Tokyo Bay. He’d slip away from the party — transmit from the cabin right below them.”
“He had balls then.”
“You think we have a Communist with balls here?” asked the older man, snuffling the spray again. “Not what you’d expect, is it — transmitting right under our noses?”
“No,” the young man conceded. “It isn’t.” After a few seconds he spoke again. “Shouldn’t you wait longer with that stuff?”
“What?” asked the older agent.
“Nose spray. It can screw up your sinuses if you take it too often.”
“Whose nose is it?”
Soon, in the darkness, they could hear the RDF truck rolling softly down the alley toward the entrance to the Secret Garden, crushing the ginkgo leaves blown down by the summer wind.