Force, dressed in camouflage uniforms, now ringed the Golden Crescent, which probably made it the safest place in the city.
After thanking Nicci for sticking around, Jenna rushed to her room, flopped on the bed, and speed-dialed Dafoe.
“What a nightmare,” Jenna said. “This isn’t the country I left ten years ago.” She lay back against a cushiony headboard and told Dafoe what she and Rafan had been through.
“You pulled a fuse out of a bomb that filled the back of a van?”
When Dafoe spoke with such astonishment, it hit Jenna for the first time that what she’d done might have been amazing. She’d been in such a pell-mell mode since the attempted bombing, she hadn’t slowed to think about it much.
“Yeah, I did,” she said, “but Rafan was the one who realized something was up.” She added that her old boyfriend had also been taken for debriefing, but since she was done, she expected him back momentarily. “He’ll be staying the night, just for safety’s sake. I just want you to know that there’s nothing romantic going on,” she added. “I just don’t want him going back to his condo with a mad bomber on the loose, and with Senada’s brothers out to get him. At least there are soldiers all around this place.”
“I appreciate your telling me, but I always try to trust someone until I can’t.”
“Me, too, and sometimes it actually works—if they don’t work in TV.” Jenna laughed. Despite everything that had happened tonight, it felt great to hear Dafoe’s voice. It would have been wonderful to have had him by her side. “So what’s going on with North Korea? That’s the last place I expected to hear about all the way out here.”
Dafoe laid out Sang-mi’s revelation about the North Korean arsenal of rockets loaded with sulfates.
“I’m sorry to say that what Sang-mi told you makes a lot of sense.”
“I take it that that means something to you.”
“You bet it does.” Jenna jumped up and looked through the big glass doors that led to the balcony. Stars blazed in the tropical night like mica chips splashed across the galaxy. “Blowing up sulfates in the stratosphere in a carefully controlled way is one of the main options that the task force was going to look at. That can block just enough sunlight to cool things down. But what Sang-mi’s saying is really scary. Is she sure about what she’s hearing from her father?”
“She seems to be.”
Jenna walked onto the balcony, looking at the inky ocean that eventually wound its way to the shores of North Korea. “The iron oxide in that tanker is dangerous, but we honestly don’t know how dangerous. But there’s no question that blowing up millions of tons of sulfates is a doomsday scenario. Volcanoes have done it, so we know that sulfates definitely bring down temperatures. And they do it fast. Huge quantities, like the amounts Sang-mi is talking about, would create winter conditions for years, and that would cripple food production and probably kill billions of people before the sulfates finally dispersed. You can imagine how countries are going to react if their people are starving to death. There would be wars everywhere.”
“What kind of mind even comes up with this stuff?”
“The Supreme Leader,” Jenna said sardonically, “is a real sicko. But what bothers me most,” she went on, “is that the North Koreans are really good at exploiting the worst kinds of fears. They love to wait until world attention is totally fixed on something, and then they up the ante by doing things like launching test missiles or declaring themselves a nuclear power. Or if they suspect that the U.S. is even thinking of any kind of move against them, they remind everybody that they have thousands of rockets trained on Seoul,” the capital of South Korea, “and that they’ll burn down the city. For an incredibly poor country, they’re incredibly good at stirring things up. And you never know when they’re bluffing.”
“Sang-mi says they’re not bluffing,” Dafoe said,
“If she’s right, and they really do have thousands of rockets packed with sulfates, their timing is perfect because nobody would even want to think about five hundred thousand tons of iron oxide going into the ocean at the same time that millions of tons of sulfates are exploding into the stratosphere. I can say categorically that that would be the end of the world as we know it.”
“Well, if that isn’t bizarre enough, now I have to take you into the land