I didn't pry; I'm used to working off the books. And I wasn't sure whether Ken would give me a straight answer if I did.

"I can understand why you wouldn't want to do it," said Ken. His voice was suddenly philosophical. "You're famous, right? Getting out toward retirement age. Maybe past it, if truth be told. You're past the point of taking risks."

"Don't try to get me going with that reverse psychology c.r.a.p."

"No, I'm being serious. Spying, covert action, war fighting-it's a young man's game. All us old farts have too much to live for. We can't afford to be expendable. Too many people depend on us. Right?"

I shrugged. Even back in the days when Ken and I were running around in Vietnam, people depended on us-he had a crew, I had a platoon. But we were still expendable. It came with the territory.

"Because if you did this, you'd be expendable," said Ken. "Absolutely expendable."

"What happens to the weapons when you find them?"

"The president's call." Ken shrugged. "I don't blame you, d.i.c.k."

"Blame me for what?"

"For getting old."

I laughed.

"But the thing that keeps pushing me," he said slowly, "is the thought that Kim will sell one of these nukes down the road to somebody like Bin Laden. If I don't find them and New York blows up, I'll never be able to live with myself."

Ken Jones had lost a lot of hair since I first met him, but he had the same conscience. And it was infectious.

Unfortunately.

"Didn't Bill Casey get in trouble for personally running ops through the back alleys of the government?" I asked. Casey was CIA director under President Reagan. Many people in the agency and SpecWar community felt he was a h.e.l.l of a director, but he'd also managed to provoke Congress to the point that his successors had had their hands tied.

Not that Congress didn't generally deserve provoking.

"Who's running an op?" replied Ken. "I'm just having drinks with an old friend."

"Since it's drinks, I better have a refill," I said.

[ III ].

YES, I DID contact Kim Jong Il's minion the next afternoon and tell her that I would accept the invitation. Yes, I realized there was a h.e.l.l of a lot more going on here than anyone, including Ken, had told me. No, I wasn't sure what it was, though my suspicions at that point leaned heavily toward a possible plan by the CIA to get rid of Kim Jong Il as well as his weapons.

Hating sc.u.mbag commie dictators is all well and good, but that wasn't my only motivation for going to North Korea. I was curious about who he was, and why he wanted to see me. I didn't buy the fan bulls.h.i.t, but I was curious about what was going on.

"So who will your date be?" asked Ms. Chimdae.

"My date?"

"It is customary to bring an escort to dinner."

"I'm a stag kind of guy."

She hesitated for a moment. "We can arrange for an escort."

"Blonde or brunette?"

"Which would you prefer?"

"Who's easier?"

I glanced across the room. Trace Dahlgren had her arms crossed in front of her chest, scowling at me.

"That's all right," I told my would-be Korean pimp. "My escort will be Ms. Trace Dahlgren. You want me to spell that?"

"Please."

Now if this had been a true social situation, my escort would have been Karen Fairchild. Karen and I had been seeing a great deal of each other over the past several months. Our relationship had begun as strictly business-Karen worked for the Department of Homeland Security, where she'd been hired as one of the agency's token competents. Every government agency has a few of them, generally so spread out in the bureaucracy that they can't actually get anything accomplished.

Taking Karen with me to North Korea, however, wasn't an option. She was heavily involved in a project involving preparations against biological warfare attacks, an a.s.signment that had her working nearly to seven every night-which in the government world is the equivalent of around the clock. Besides, while Karen has proven her mettle in difficult situations before-most recently by batting a live grenade out the window of a NATO meeting-she's not a trained shooter. If I was going into the lion's den, I needed someone to watch my back.

Trace Dahlgren and I had a brief though highly enjoyable encounter of the romantic kind some time back.6 But our relationship now is strictly professional and platonic. Of late, her heart had been stolen by a good-looking helicopter pilot named Ike Polorski. They'd met six weeks before when she'd ventured over to the local flight school to fill in some gaps in her education. Somewhere between the cyclic and the stick, romance had bloomed, and they were soon pulling each other's yokes. Trace was head over calloused heels in love with Polorski, or "Tall, Dark, and Polack," as I called him.

This was a more politically correct description than "that f'in' Polack," which also described him perfectly. Being Slovak myself, I was qualified to know.

I bring up Trace's love life because Trace had planned a hot weekend with TD&P. She expressed extreme reluctance to exchange it for a trip to bucolic North Korea. Not that she refused to go or even argued against the a.s.signment. Either would have been far easier to deal with. Instead she pouted. Even I felt sorry for the recruits the next day. We had three cases of heat exhaustion, two sprained ankles, and a broken nose by lunch.

Just when I was debating whether to get another escort for Korea or relocate training to the local hospital grounds, Trace received a text message from Tall, Dark, and Polack, explaining that he had been hired for an absurdly well-paying gig in j.a.pan and had to leave as soon as possible. He'd be there for about a week.

Why don't you join me? he asked.

Trace arranged a rendezvous in Kyoto, to take place after our dinner with the dictator. Her att.i.tude did an immediate one-eighty, and the afternoon session saw seven cases of heat exhaustion and one broken leg. I sent her home to pack before the early evening live-fire exercise, figuring that if I didn't, I'd feel obliged to hang around for the funeral services of half my recruiting cla.s.s.

[ IV ].

NORTH KOREA HAS a long and intriguing history. In past centuries, the Koreans have had encounters of the violent kind with China and j.a.pan; though it p.i.s.ses the j.a.panese off when you say this, it's likely that the present emperor has Korean ancestors back in the family tree.

j.a.pan eyed the Korean peninsula in the nineteenth century for all the usual imperial reasons, and its occupation and influence took various forms. j.a.panese agents a.s.sa.s.sinated the Korean empress in 1895; in 1905 the country was declared a j.a.panese protectorate, thanks to a treaty the Koreans signed basically at gunpoint. Korean resistance grew steadily, though it wasn't able to do much against the j.a.panese. The March 1st Movement of 1919 is a landmark in pa.s.sive resistance, though we don't hear much about it in the West. World War II and the defeat of j.a.pan brought both the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the country; the occupying forces more or less split the peninsula in two into North and South around the thirty-eighth parallel. Originally there was a plan for a combined government under the administration of the UN, but that got shoved aside after North Korea styled itself as the Demo cratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on September 9, 1948.

The U.S. withdrawal from the South in 1949 brought the true benefits of democracy to the fledgling country-political chaos and confusion. The South Koreans took hold of the gifts with great enthusiasm as they elected and then rebelled against their chosen government at close and regular intervals.

In 1950, the North Korean government decided communism was so much fun the South should enjoy it, too, and sent a few million bodies south as traveling salesmen. The Russians supplied the weapons.

MacArthur had something to say about that, and with the (generally uncredited but critical) help of some early proto-SEALs, reversed the order of things with a landing at Inchon. Worried about the effect on real estate prices when the Americans rolled the North Korean army up toward the Yalu River, the Chinese "volunteered" every military age male in their country to go south for winter break. Things were shaky for the next few months, until the Americans learned that the Chinese had a severe weakness for glazed duck, and subsequently cooked enough Chinese goose to force a stalemate back more or less at the thirty-eighth parallel, the original boundary between the two Koreas.

The North Korean leader-or Russian puppet, depending on your point of view-who caused all this fuss was Prime Minister Kim Il Sung. Kim proved marvelously incompetent as a war leader, but being a dictator means never having to say "joesong-hajiman andwaeyo." He already understood that the number one characteristic of a successful dictatorship is to kill every possible rival, something he did with great vigor after the war. Eventually, he declared himself The Great Leader and proceeded to run North Korea as far into the ground as possible.

Or so it seemed until he died and his son, my erstwhile host Kim Jong Il, took over. Kim Jong Il pushed North Korea even further into debt and over the edge of sanity. But let's give credit where credit is due: he introduced such welcome reforms as changing the calendar so that the years began with Kim Il Sung's birth.

Kim Jong Il's great claims to fame are his nuclear program and unbroken string of record crop failures and famine, but he's no slouch in the areas where despots are traditionally judged. Whether you consider his concentration camps-the largest, Camp 22, holds something on the order of fifty thousand people, though the population is regularly trimmed by killing any children born to inmates-or his annual Hennessy cognac budget ($700,000 a year for moldy French wine), the man is a master of fascist nuance.

While today China bears the closest resemblance to an ally the North Koreans have, there's still a pretty strong undercurrent of distrust and even outright animosity between the people of the two countries. Some of the best North Korean insults refer to the Chinese. Of course, att.i.tudes toward the Chinese are absolutely tame compared to the officially sanctioned loathing of America. According to the North Korean government, in fact, the Korean War is still going on. According to the official media, victory is just around the corner.

The State Department provided me with a thick binder of background on Kim, along with an even thicker binder on something called "diplomatic etiquette." I'm not sure what was in it, but since I had my suspicions I put it to its best possible use, rolling the pages into a log and burning it in the fireplace to ward off the midnight chill.

More useful was the special Navy Gulfstream the State Department procured to take Trace and me to Korea. Not only was the aircraft fast and well piloted, but a bright lieutenant had stocked it with Bombay Sapphire in advance of my flight.

The good Dr. Bombay made the patter of the Gulf-stream's third pa.s.senger tolerable. The pa.s.senger was a short, nervous fellow named Lee Kamere whom Fogglebottom had sent along as a Korean translator and protocol expert. Lee himself was actually a bit better than most State Department flunkies I've met; he didn't have the snotty airs or bespoke suits of the worst of the breed. But he had an unfortunate nasal quality to his voice that under the best circ.u.mstances was grating. And his laugh sounded like the squeal of a hyena with its tail caught in a meat grinder.

It took us three stops and roughly twenty hours to reach j.a.pan. The military base at Hamamatsu had been alerted to give us the VIP treatment, and there was barely enough time to stretch my legs on the tarmac or wax nostalgic about past visits before we were taking off and heading toward North Korean airs.p.a.ce. Local time was now 1010 hours military, 10:10 a.m. civilian, and there was not a cloud in the sky.

To this point, the trip was long and boring, a situation that can only be truly appreciated after you've experienced the opposite. Mr. Murphy-the proprietor of the infamous rule that whatever can go wrong will go wrong at the worst possible time-seemed to have missed the plane. The implanted locator devices behind my ears had stopped itching, and I was actually becoming curious about Kim Jong Il. Right up until the point where we neared their border, the trip looked like it was going to be as dull as a visit to Safeway, or maybe Safeway without the food.

As we approached the border, the North Koreans sent a welcoming committee to speed our landing. The committee consisted of four MiG-29 jet fighters, which announced their presence with a high-speed get-to-know-you dash at our nose.

Playing chicken with North Korean pilots is not highly recommended, since the North Koreans are unfortunately well known for their lack of flying skill. Our pilot flicked the Gulfstream hard to port, and one of the MiGs still managed to pa.s.s so close that its wing nearly grazed the window near my seat.

I was picking myself up off the floor when the pilot announced that one of the planes had just turned his targeting radar on. Given that we were unarmed, this was not a good sign.

"They're not answering our radio calls, Commander," the pilot told me when I went up front to see if I could help. "I don't know what's up their a.s.s."

"Let me see if I can talk to them," I said. "I speak their language."

"Begging your pardon, sir, but I know Korean," said the copilot.

"I'm not talking about Korean," I told him.

I took the copilot's headset, and made sure I was on the interceptors' frequency.

"Annyeonghaseyeo," I said. "h.e.l.lo."

There was no reply. Which was fine by me.

"Listen, you worm s.h.i.ts," I said in English. "This is d.i.c.k Marcinko. I'm on my way to chow down with your boss's boss's boss, Kim Jong Il himself. This flight has been approved by more people than live in Delaware. If you make me late for the soup course, I'm going to be p.i.s.sed off. And so is he. Now turn off your bleeping missile radars and back away, or I'm going to grab my sub-machine gun and do some wing walking."

How much of the words they understood may have been debatable, but the tone was all they really had to decipher. In less than a minute, the radars were off and the planes had backed away. I gave the copilot his radio set back and went to finish off my drink.

[ V ].

THE KOREANS ROLLED out the red carpet for us at Pyongyang. There were three different bands, which brought tears to Trace's eyes-that's how bad they were. The official welcoming committee consisted of two navy officers and an army general, along with a short, fat fellow who was the Korean equivalent of our translator, Lee Kamere. I'm not saying he was ugly, but he reminded me of a dog my first wife once owned.

Everybody started bowing deeply as I ambled down the steps. I joined in, and we spent the next few minutes bulls.h.i.tting each other on how happy we were to make our mutual acquaintances. Trace stood to the side, rolling her eyes in between bows. Kamere and his Korean cousin began jabbering away, half in English, half in Korean. When everyone had stretched their trunk muscles to the max, we were led to three waiting Mercedes, with each of us consigned to a separate car.

A ragtag selection of military and civilian vehicles joined us. The motorcade began slowly, the limos pulling out one by one and heading across the wide cement expanse to the terminal building, a structure that would have looked as if it were a 1950s cigarette factory except for the mammoth photograph of the Great Leader, Kim Jong Il, who stared down from the edge of the roof. Yet another high school band stoked up as the cars pulled up. A fresh contingent of officers came out of the doors and lined up at the edge of a yellow silk carpet. They nodded as we were ushered inside the building to an arrivals area several times as big as those at JFK International Airport in New York.

People milled around the far end of the hall. Most carried suitcases, apparently intended as props to fool us into thinking the airport was extremely busy. (In fact, the next outgoing flight was three days away.) A long table was set up in the middle of the s.p.a.ce; six different customs officials sat there waiting for us. The special pa.s.sports the State Department had issued for the trip were confiscated; in their place we were handed leather wallets. These contained a variety of official papers written in Korean. The customs officers then took turns inspecting these papers, stamping and in at least one case sniffing them. Finally we were declared legal and waved toward a crowd of small children holding flowers.

"Welcome-Demo d.i.c.k," said the kids as I approached. "We-very honored-to see you."

A few of the kids stepped forward holding out copies of my last book. Naturally, I began signing them. They may be commies in training, but they have good literary taste.

"Don't let this go to your head," muttered Trace as the authorities began to disperse the autograph seekers. "I'm sure Kim arranged the entire show."

"Oh, no, they really do admire Rogue Warrior books here," said Kamere. "The books are studied for insight into the Western mind. The Rogue Warrior ethos touches something very Korean at its core."

"That would be sickness," said Trace.

We were led out through the front of the terminal, where to the strains of yet another out-of-tune band we boarded a fresh trio of limos. The procession proceeded to downtown Pyongyang. The trip would have moved LA freeway drivers to tears: we traveled down highways wide enough to land a jumbo jet7 but utterly devoid of traffic.

Pyongyang is a strange mix of Workers' Paradise (circa 1955) and Asian squalor. The city's skyline is dominated by a ma.s.sive triangular building called the Ryugyong Hotel, a 105-story building that was abandoned in 1992 after Kim's father spent about two percent of the country's gross domestic product building it. From the distance, it looks like a landing dock for a UFO; up close it looks like the world's biggest derelict building, with crumbling cement and open, gla.s.sless s.p.a.ces.

Then there's the Korean Arc de Triomphe, which honors the Koreans who ended World War II by single-handedly defeating the j.a.panese. A little farther along is the ma.s.sive statue to the Great Leader, Kim Jong Il's father, a bright bronze mannequin over sixty feet tall.

The cars stopped at the plaza near the statue.

"What we want to do here," said Kamere, gesturing to me after we got out of the cars, "is buy one of those flower displays the girls are selling. Then we place it at the statue's feet, and bow."

"I don't want to do that," I said. "Trace, do you want to do that?"

"I'd rather be gored by a bull."

"It's protocol," insisted Kamere.

"It's more like bulls.h.i.t," said Trace.

"Please. Don't create an incident," hissed Kamere. "You're supposed to pay your respects to the Great Leader."

He pulled out a few five-dollar bills and walked over to the vendors. Actually, the entire transaction had been worked out in advance, and before Kamere could give the girls any money, one of our escorts came over and slipped the girl a few won for the flowers.