hand and headed for the barn.
“My baby kicked me,” her friend said.
“Really? Just now?” Forensia asked, still scanning the farm; she never would have offered to help out Dafoe if she’d known how freaked out she was going to be working out here with just Sang-mi for company.
Her friend nodded. “When we started walking, I felt it.”
“That’s great. First time?” Looking everywhere at once.
“No.” Sang-mi smiled slyly. It had been so long since Forensia’s friend had brightened that her smile did feel like a first.
Sang-mi had had ample reasons to feel glum. First, her Pagan boyfriend got her pregnant, after insisting that he’d had a vasectomy. Then he promptly took off for three months to “see the sights” in Vietnam, China, and Thailand. A real loser, in Forensia’s opinion, though Sang-mi wouldn’t hear any criticism of him, saying sternly, “He’s my baby’s father.”
And now it turned out that Sang-mi had been carrying more than a baby. She’d also been bearing the news that she’d divulged to Forensia about North Korea—about a plot that involved her own father.
Sang-mi had told her that the reason the CIA was still debriefing her dad was that he was an expert on North Korean plans to launch thousands of rockets that would release trillions of sulfate particles into the atmosphere. The sulfates would block the sun and send the Earth into a deep freeze that would mean endless winter for most of the planet for many years.
“Dafoe’s friend wrote about it,” Sang-mi had added, surprising Forensia, who’d known little about Jenna Withers’s book, other than its broad subject: climate change.
“What did she say?” Forensia asked.
“She had a section about the North accusing the U.S. and other countries of causing climate change and the famine in the North.”
“Is that true?” asked Forensia.
“Who knows,” Sang-mi said. “But that’s why the North developed this secret plan.”
Sang-mi went on to say that the North Koreans had taken an idea advocated by many geoengineering proponents and turned it into a weapon of unprecedented mass destruction. Forensia thought her friend was exaggerating until Sang-mi had explained the worldwide effects of the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991.
“The missiles would be like many Pinatubos,” Sang-mi had said, “and the sulfates will make the whole Earth very cold. That’s the big reason my father defected, along with me,” she patted her belly, “even though he knew that they’d arrest his mother and father and torture them and keep them in prison until they died.”
Forensia had been shocked, but Sang-mi had just continued, “They were tortured but we think they are still alive.”
“What is the North waiting for?” Forensia had asked.
“For something horrible to happen that they can exploit. That’s what the North always does. When the U.S. was busy invading Iraq, the North started sending missiles over Japan, just to let them know that they could reach huge population centers with their bombs. They’re always looking for pressure points.”
This morning they’d been awakened by a call from Sang-mi’s mother, who had been nearly hysterical. Her husband’s CIA handler had contacted him right after the jihadists threatened to blow up the tanker. Forty minutes later a helicopter whisked him away. Sang-mi’s mother had no idea where he had been taken or when he might return.
Forensia paused in the shade of the barn and turned to Sang-mi. “I don’t get something. The CIA took your dad away after the jihadists announced their crazy plans, but what would that have to do with North Korean rockets? That’s so weird. There’s no connection between them and the Maldives. They have different religions, different cultures, and very different politics.”
“The tanker has everything to do with those missiles,” Sang-mi replied pointedly. “The sulfates in them and the iron oxide in the tanker both lower temperatures. One works in the ocean and the other in the sky. Both of them together,” she shook her head, “would be very, very bad. Not twice as bad—many times as bad. That’s the connection.
“The North, they see everybody paying attention to the tanker, and the Supreme Leader,” her anger was on rare display, “says to his army, ‘Now we can get the whole world’s attention.’ That’s what he wants. And once he gets it, you watch, he’ll say ‘You think the Maldives is bad? Wait till you see what I’ve got.’”
“But for what?”
“For everything. They have nothing. They need food, oil, cars, gas, trucks, trains. Anything you can think of. The country is a disaster.”
The threat of a double blast of