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A few moments later he was back in the control room. Lee looked up at him from the helmsman’s seat. "Well?"

"They’re all right, Comrade Daewi." Park glanced back over his shoulder at the forward compartment and suppressed a shiver. "All secure."

Lee turned back to his controls. "Action stations." His hand moved on the trim wheel, levelling off the submarine at periscope depth. A few moments later, a fuzzy black and white image appeared on the video screen. Lee grunted, turning the periscope through a slow circle. All there was to see was the waves and the darkness.

"Right, we’re going in." Lee clicked the intercom to Oh in the engine room and gave him his instructions, and, turning to Park, who had the sonar headphones on again, raised an eyebrow interrogatively.

Park shook his head. The image on the screen was changing, waves washing over the periscope as the submarine began creeping forward, creating a wake which might be visible in the darkness. Lee, accordingly, retracted the instrument and turned his attention from the now blank screen to the controls. Apart from the low hum of the electric motor in the engine room, there was almost total silence.

"Ten kilometres," Park said, reading from the map. He glanced up at the readout and made a quick mental calculation. "Sixty-five minutes."

Lee nodded. His earlier malice had vanished, and now he was the cool-headed professional officer who had become the youngest submarine commander in the KPANF. The current was growing stronger this close to shore, and the sub’s speed began falling away, but not so much as to badly affect headway.

"I wonder how the others are getting on," Park said.

Lee shrugged slightly. "Not our business. Any sounds?"

"No, Comrade Daewi." Park sat back in his seat. Temporarily, he had nothing to do except listen on the sonar, and he could afford to relax his concentration a little. Immediately, the tension he’d kept at bay all this while returned at full force. He remembered the twitching bundles in the forward compartment and had a sudden mental vision of what might happen if the straps did come loose. Of course, there were the other restraints, but...

Blinking furiously, Park tried to dispel the mental image that had just brought up. Instead, he tried to think of his home, in Onsong in the far north, the familiar old apartment with the water-stained walls. His parents had given him his own room, as a child, and the water stains on the wall by his bed had grown to become old friends. He could discern faces in them, grinning and angry faces, and one which looked just like Kim Jong Il except for the glasses.

Remembering, he bit back a smile. If he’d told anyone about the stain, he might have got in trouble. But the Kim-head had been poised above one that looked like a cloud, and that in turn had hovered low over the unmistakable silhouette of the forequarters of a ship, with high flared bows and a heavy superstructure. It looked as though the Brilliant Leader was looking down on the ship speculating whether his spectacles were inside it.

One day, when his parents were out, he’d brought a girl home. That was Kim Mi Hyun, and she was the first girl who’d ever agreed to go anywhere with him. Mi Hyun wasn’t very pretty, but she was quiet and intelligent, and never mocked Park for being so tall and hairy like a Russian. But when she had come into Park’s room, and he’d tried to kiss her, she’d looked around uneasily.

"I don’t like it in here," she’d said. "Let’s go."

"Why?" Park had been surprised and hurt. "It’s not so bad."

"No, I suppose it’s all right. But it’s making me uneasy, as though someone’s watching." She’d pushed Park away when he had tried to kiss her again. "Let’s go," she’d said, an edge in her voice. "I mean it, Kang Ho."

Later that evening, Park had returned to his room and flung himself on the bed. At first he burned with resentment against her, and then he remembered the faces on the wall from the water stains. He began to resent the water stains, but there wasn’t much he could do about them.

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