1000 Yards

He ran to the conference room where the meeting was to be held, angrily presented his credentials for inspection and went inside. Proceedings had already commenced. The opening address was being given by Lieutenant General Kim Yong-chol, one of the Vice Chairmen. He was praising the computer programmers who had executed such an audacious attack on the Imperialists and their southern lackeys. They were, he opined, in the vanguard of a new kind of war, the kind of war that would send the enemies of the Fatherland back to the dark ages. The usual nonsense, but this audience was primed for it. The room was large and Kim had entered at the rear, the disturbance kept to a minimum. He took it all in quickly: there was no sign of the Englishman, not that he expected to find any. It was a bomb, surely. He had smuggled a bomb into the country, hidden it here and rigged it to explode. He was going to take out as many of the generals as he could.

“Excuse me!” he shouted. “Comrades! My name is Kim Shin-Jo. I am a Major in the Ministry of State Security. I must ask you—”

His eye caught something out of the window and the words caught in his throat: he didn’t know what it was. A flash of light? The quickest glint of something? A reflection? He glanced across the cityscape to the half-finished Ryugyong Hotel, the only building in the city that was taller than this one. It was half a mile away. Time slowed down. He saw it again, definitely coming from the hotel, that huge tapered arrow pointing straight up into the lowering sky.

People had turned to look at him.

He saw another tiny bloom of light, a different kind of flash against the dark concrete of the hotel’s bare skeleton, and then heard a strange sound, a pop that was similar and yet dissimilar to the sound that the seal on a jar of coffee makes as it is pierced. His warning went unsaid as the general toppled backwards, breaking his fall on the edge of the lectern for a moment, but then sliding to the right as his body lost purchase and completed its journey with a graceless thud to the stage. The disbelief came first — the whole room experienced it — and then the thought that the general must have fainted before Kim realised, with shocking and awful clarity, that the odd noise he had heard before was the sound of something shearing through glass, a noise a

The weakened window bulged once, twice, and collapsed in a million pieces of broken glass that shone like diamonds.

The Englishman was disastrously, cataclysmically accurate. He was aiming for headshots and hit both perfectly, blowing each one all over the insides of the conference room. He hit the Director of the RGB an inch above the right temple, the bullet pulverising his skull into fragments that sprayed across the room (those nearby would be tweezering fragments from their flesh for days afterwards). The man slumped forward until his chest fell between his knees and, thereby unbalanced, his body rolled forward off the chair and to the ground. His comrade, yet another general, swivelled his head at the sudden commotion, experienced a moment’s worth of complete horror to see his colleague without a head, before the third bullet hit him between the eyes, dead centre above the line of his nose. The fifty-calibre projectile ploughed straight through skull bone and brain matter, exiting with horrendous gushers of blood, brain, and bone fragments. Both bullets slammed into the thin partition walls, passed through the next two offices and, eventually, their momentum sufficiently impeded, exploded in a shower of zirconium sparks that immediately started hungry fires.

Kim found that he was on the floor. People were rushing around him, jostling him, treading on his hands. He clambered upright. The Chief of the General Staff collided with him.

The man flung him side. “Get out of the way, you fool!”

The fourth bullet struck the general on the right side of his face, dug its way through the flesh and bone and teeth enamel, ploughing through the rear of the throat and into the bone of his shoulder, atomizing it into thin pink mist on the exit. His knees locked, even against the sudden and awful collapse of his weight, and so instead of tumbling he pivoted and was almost lowered downwards, dropping into a chair as if it was his favourite armchair at the end of a difficult day.

The bullets flew with delayed supersonic bangs that rang out only as the audience was begi

The fifth shot was already on its way by then.

It struck a general who had been sitting in the first row, also in the head.

The result was identical.

The conference room erupted in panic — pure pandemonium — but there was nowhere for any of them to go. Every seat had been filled and as the attendees tried to make for the passages at the end of the rows they tripped over the chairs and each other. A scrum developed at the door. Kim dropped to the ground and wrapped his arms over his head. There was nothing he could do until the Englishman grew tired of his sport, shooting fish in a barrel.

18

Someone had overturned the table with the urns of coffee and tea. Milton watched through the scope as his fifth and final target sheltered behind it. He fired. An inch of plywood was like a skein of tissue to a fifty-calibre bullet travelling at 27,000 feet per second. Another huge bloom of blood splashed out onto the beige-coloured wall.

Milton stopped shooting.

His ears were ringing.

“Is it done?” Su-Yung said.

The next sound he heard, unmistakeably, even at this distance, was the muffled sound of screaming.

“It’s done.”

The unfinished room was full of the smell of burnt powder. Milton pushed himself backward on his toes and his forearms, moving away from the window. He swept the six spent shell cases into a pile. He scooped them into his hands and dropped them into his pocket. They were hot to the touch.

“How many?”

“Five,” Milton said.

“But you only shot six times. You hit five?”

Milton nodded.

“Extraordinary.”

Milton indicated the rifle. “I just point and shoot,” he said.

“That is a painful lesson for them to learn. And in their own building.”

Milton said nothing.

“We must go,” Su-Yung said. “They will close down the area. We must not be here when that happens. Your cover will not stand up to scrutiny.”

Milton came to his knees and stood up. He closed the plastic sheeting again, feeding the ties through the corresponding eyelets and tightening them. There was no sign that he had ever even been here. He wrapped the rifle in the blanket again and they made their way back down the stairwell. The garage was still deserted, gloomy and silent, although the sound of sirens was audible from outside. Su-Yung went to the van but, when she turned back to Milton, she looked concerned.

“What is it?”

“Kun was supposed to meet us here. He was going to drive you out of the city.”

“He’s been delayed?”

“No, he would not allow that to happen. My brother is a very dependable man. I am afraid that he must have been arrested.” She frowned, composing herself, and then set her face with a stern expression. “It is no matter. I know where you need to go. I will drive you.” She opened the door and pulled herself inside. “Quickly. We ca