Hyungchol Choi's Interview

THE DEMILITARIZED ZONE: SOUTH KOREA

 **[Hyungchol Choi, deputy director of the Korean Central Intelligence**
Agency, gestures to the dry, hilly, unremarkable landscape to our north.
 One might mistake it for Southern California, if not for the deserted
pillboxes, fading banners, and rusting, barbed wire fence that runs to
either horizon.]

 What happened? No one knows. No country was better prepared to repel
the infestation than North Korea. Rivers to the north, oceans to the
east and west, and to the south [he gestures to the Demilitarized Zone],
 the most heavily fortified border on Earth. You can see how mountainous
 the terrain is, how easily defensible, but what you can’t see is that
those mountains are honeycombed with a titanic military-industrial
infrastructure. The North Korean government learned some very hard
lessons from your bombing campaign of the 1950s and had been laboring
ever since to create a subterranean system that would allow their people
 to wage another war from a secure location.

 Their population was heavily militarized, marshaled to a degree of
readiness that made Israel look like Iceland. Over a million men and
women were actively under arms with a further five in reserve. That is
over a quarter of the entire population, not to mention the fact that
almost everyone in the country had, at some point in their lives,
undergone basic military training. More important than this training,
though, and most important for this kind of warfare was an almost
superhuman degree of national discipline. North Koreans were
indoctrinated from birth to believe that their lives were meaningless,
that they existed only to serve the State, the Revolution, and the Great
 Leader.

 This is almost the polar opposite of what we experienced in the South.
We were an open society. We had to be. International trade was our
lifeblood. We were individualists, maybe not as much as you Americans,
but we had more than our share of protests and public disturbances. We
were such a free and fractured society that we barely managed to
implement the Chang Doctrine 1 during the Great Panic. That kind of
internal crisis would have been inconceivable in the North. They were a
people who, even when their government caused a near genocidal famine,
would rather resort to eating children 2 than raise even a whisper of
defiance. This was the kind of subservience Adolf Hitler could have only
 dreamed of. If you had given each citizen a gun, a rock, or even their
bare hands, pointed them at approaching zombies and said “Fight!” they
would have done so down to the oldest woman and smallest tot. This was a
 country bred for war, planned, prepared, and poised for it since July
27, 1953. If you were going to invent a country to not only survive but
triumph over the apocalypse we faced, it would have been the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea.

 So what happened? About a month before our troubles started, before the
 first outbreaks were reported in Pusan, the North suddenly, and
inexplicably, severed all diplomatic relations. We weren’t told why the
rail line, the only overland link between our two sides, was suddenly
closed, or why some of our citizens who’d been waiting decades to see
long lost relatives in the North had their dreams abruptly shattered by a
 rubber stamp. No explanation of any kind was given. All we got was
their standard “matter of state security” brush-off.

 Unlike many others, I wasn’t convinced that this was a prelude to war.
Whenever the North had threatened violence, they always rang the same
bells. No satellite data, ours or the Americans, showed any hostile
intent. There were no troop movements, no aircraft fueling, no ship or
submarine deployment. If anything, our forces along the Demilitarized
Zone began noticing their opposite numbers disappearing. We knew them
all, the border troops. We’d photographed each one over the years, given
 them nicknames like Snake Eyes or Bulldog, even compiled dossiers on
their supposed ages, backgrounds, and personal lives. Now they were
gone, vanished behind shielded trenches and dugouts.

 Our seismic indicators were similarly silent. If the North had begun
tunneling operations or even massed vehicles on the other side of “Z,”
we would have heard it like the National Opera Company.

 Panmunjom is the only area along the DMZ where opposing sides can meet
for face-to-face negotiations. We share joint custody of the conference
rooms, and our troops posture for each other over several meters of open
 courtyard. The guards were changed on a rotating basis. One night, as
the North Korean detachment marched into their barracks, no replacement
unit marched out. The doors were shut. The lights were extinguished. And
 we never saw them again.

 We also saw a complete halt to human intelligence infiltration. Spies
from the North were almost as regular and predictable as the seasons.
Most of the time they were easy to spot, wearing out-of-date clothes or
asking the price of goods that they should have already known. We used
to pick them up all the time, but since the outbreaks began, their
numbers had dwindled to zero.

 **What about your spies in the North?**

 Vanished, all of them, right about the same time all our electronic
surveillance assets went dark. I don’t mean there was no disturbing
radio traffic, I mean there was no traffic at all. One by one, all the
civilian and military channels began shutting down. Satellite images
showed fewer farmers in their fields, less foot traffic in city streets,
 even fewer “volunteer” laborers on many public works projects, which is
 something that has never happened before. Before we knew it, there
wasn’t a living soul left from the Yalu to the DMZ. From a purely
intelligence standpoint, it appeared as if the entire country, every
man, woman, and child in North Korea, had simply vanished.

 This mystery only stoked our growing anxiety, given what we had to deal
 with at home. By now there were outbreaks in Seoul, P’ohang, Taejon.
There was the evacuation of Mokpo, the isolation of Kangnung, and, of
course, our version of Yonkers at Inchon, and all of it compounded by
the need to keep at least half our active divisions along our northern
border. Too many in the Ministry of National Defense were convinced that
 the Pyongyang was just aching for war, waiting eagerly for our darkest
moment to come thundering across the 38th Parallel. We in the
intelligence community couldn’t disagree more. We kept telling them that
 if they were waiting for our darkest hour, then that hour had most
certainly arrived.

 Tae Han Min’guk was on the brink of national collapse. Plans were being
 secretly drafted for a Japanese-style resettlement. Covert teams were
already scouting locations in Kamchatka. If the Chang Doctrine hadn’t
worked…if just a few more units had broken, if a few more safe zones had
 collapsed…

 Maybe we owe our survival to the North, or at least to the fear of it.
My generation never really saw the North as a threat. I’m speaking of
the civilians, you understand, those of my age who saw them as a
backward, starving, failed nation. My generation had grown up their
entire lives in peace and prosperity. The only thing they feared was a
German-style reunification that would bring millions of homeless
ex-communists looking for a handout.

 That wasn’t the case with those who came before us…our parents and
grandparents…those who lived with the very real specter of invasion
hanging over them, the knowledge that at any moment the alarms might
sound, the lights might dim, and the bankers, schoolteachers, and taxi
drivers might be called to pick up arms and fight to defend their
homeland. Their hearts and minds were ever vigilant, and in the end, it
was them, not us, who rallied the national spirit.

 I’m still pushing for an expedition to the North. I’m still blocked at
every turn. There’s too much work to do, they tell me. The country is
still in shambles. We also have our international commitments, most
importantly the repatriation of our refugees to Kyushu…. [Snorts.] Those
 Japsare gonna owe us big-time.

 I’m not asking for a recon in force. Just give me one helicopter, one
fishing boat; just open the gates at Panmunjom and let me walk through
on foot. What if you trigger some booby trap? they counter. What if it’s
 nuclear? What if you open the door to some underground city and
twenty-three million zombies come spewing out? Their arguments aren’t
without merit. We know the DMZ is heavily mined. Last month a cargo
plane nearing their airspace was fired on by a surface-to-air missile.
The launcher was an automated model, the type they’d designed as a
revenge weapon in case the population had already been obliterated.

 Conventional wisdom is that they must have evacuated to their
subterranean complexes. If that is true, then our estimates of the size
and depth of those complexes were grossly inaccurate. Maybe the entire
population is underground, tooling away on endless war projects, while
their “Great Leader” continues to anesthetize himself with Western
liquor and American pornography. Do they even know the war is over? Have
 their leaders lied to them, again, and told them that the world as they
 know it has ceased to be? Maybe the rise of the dead was a “good” thing
 in their eyes, an excuse to tighten the yoke even further in a society
built on blind subjugation. The Great Leader always wanted to be a
living God, and now, as master not only of the food his people eat, the
air they breathe, but the very light of their artificial suns, maybe his
 twisted fantasy has finally become a reality. Maybe that was the
original plan, but something went disastrously wrong. Look what happened
 to the “mole city” underneath Paris. What if that occurred in the North
 on a national level? Maybe those caverns are teeming with twenty-three
million zombies, emaciated automatons howling in the darkness and just
waiting to be unleashed.