Chapter 1

The world authorities didn’t even realise what was happening around the world until it was all over - and when they did, they certainly did not associate it with the coup d’état in North Korea and the expulsion of all foreigners including diplomatic missions. That dozens, and then hundreds, of the best female athletes all over the planet were suddenly disappearing over a period of a few months hit them like a lead balloon - when they eventually recognised that it was happening.

But by then it was too late. It was all over. The kidnappings ceased as quickly as they had begun - and nobody had any idea who had perpetrated the kidnappings or why we had all been spirited away.

The papers made merry, of course. The speculations were as weird as they were erroneous. Nobody came up with the real reason; and even us victims didn’t find out for some time what our captors wanted us for.

My name is Shalomar and if you have seen the TV show Mutant X, you will know what I look like for although I am about the same age as the star whose character has my name, and therefore my parents could have had no conception of her, we might as well be twins. I am as fair and blue-eyed as she is and my body is just about a facsimile of hers, too. That is to say I am extraordinarily athletic. This is partly through my own efforts for I am a dedicated gymnast but I also have to thank my parents for their genes for I was naturally physical in build.

She is also very beautiful and I hope I am not being immodest when I say I was very like her in this regard, too. I had reason to rue this beauty, though, for it was one of the criterions used by our kidnappers to select their victims. The others were extraordinary physical development and a high IQ. I was lucky in this latter area, too, breezing through school and university without much effort at all.

Oh, I come from London. From Wood Green, actually, and I was attending Cambridge where I was studying law. At the time of my kidnapping I was just nineteen years old and I thought I had the world at my feet. How wrong I was!

I was in the middle range of those spirited away; that is to say, I was not the first or the last. This meant that Jenny, Jennifer Lalink, the highly gifted track star from Tottenham, went before me. I read the newspaper reports of her kidnapping with some distress for I knew her since we trained in the same gym and was actually quite friendly with her.

Jenny was as black as I was fair, her chocolate-brown skin really beautiful - as was her magnificent physique - and no, I am not gay, but I can appreciate the beauty of another female and she was certainly in the top ten where looks were concerned.

Her kidnapping was carried out without any fuss on the Saturday night after a track meet and indeed it was some days before anyone realised she was missing. She lived by herself in a flat and the fact she hadn’t shown up for work on the Monday morning was put down to illness. It wasn’t until Wednesday morning therefore that anyone really began to worry and the newspapers got onto the fact that one of England’s best track athletes was missing.

And it was the same with me. Some months after Jenny’s disappearance and when I had ceased to actively worry about her, I was in my little car and headed back to my college at Cambridge when I was pulled over by what seemed to be a traffic cop. He wasn’t, but I wasn’t to know that until it was too late. It was on a lonely back road that I used habitually to avoid the busy highway and as soon as I wound down the window to ask what was wrong, he had shoved a pad in my face and I was out of it.

I don’t know what happened after that but I surmise someone took the car and disposed of it while I was bundled into the back of a van and driven somewhere to be prepared for my journey. What I do know was that when I woke up I was naked and trussed up like poultry about to be roasted. Alongside me was another girl, this one darker than me but just as athletic. We were both gagged very effectively by one of those awful ball gags on a strap that was pulled tightly around our necks, dragging the large rubber ball right into our mouths and shutting off entirely our means of making anything but ‘mmmppph’ noises and even these very muffled.

She was as naked as me and we both shivered a little in the cool of the evening.

We sat in our trussed state on the metal floor of what felt and looked like a small delivery van and our bodies were thrown this way and that as it rounded corners, and braked and accelerated.

I should describe the way they had trussed us. It was horrible.

Our knees had been pulled up to our chests and an iron bar inserted under them. Then, while we were still unconscious from the chloroform, they had pulled our hands under the bars where they extended out from our knees and cuffed our thumbs together in front of our shins. In that position, we were utterly helpless and with the gags in place, totally unable to protest or indeed, communicate at all.

It was night time when the other girl and I came to our senses for we could see enough out of the air holes in the van to recognise street lights when we passed them. We were in the van for some time after we regained consciousness. How long exactly I don’t know for my watch had disappeared with my clothes and it’s hard to estimate time when you have no other reference points.

The van came to rest eventually, however, and when the back doors were opened I really shivered for a cutting wind licked in and cut at my nakedness. And now as the men stared in at me, that nakedness was underlined to me - tenfold.

I am not a prude. I was never one to hide my body when showering after gymnastics training or an event but I wasn’t one to flaunt it either and especially not to men. Oh I had had my boyfriends of course. All girls do, but I had not allowed any of them liberties with my body; not even to touch my breasts and certainly not into my bed. I had been curious, of course, especially as most of my friends had surrendered their virginity long ago but I just had a thing about it. My dreamboat was going to come along some day and I wanted to be intact when he did.

The sight of those men now staring in at us was both an awful shock as well as being utterly shameful for me. As I looked at them I realised they were all oriental. At that time I didn’t know from where since I was not then an expert on the racial differences between the Chinese, Japanese and Korean races, for example. Now I know there are quite significant differences but not then and so I suppose I just assumed they were Chinese. I had reason to be sorry they weren’t of that ancient race for I was to discover that for all the reputation the Chinese have for being past masters at the twin arts of torture and cruelty, the Koreans far and away outstrip them - or at least the Koreans I came into contact with did.

It seemed we were on an airstrip of some sort. Not your major airports but one devoted solely to airfreight. How did they get round the customs inspections, you ask? By bribery, that’s how. As we were bundled out of the van I saw an Englishman in a uniform handed an envelope and while he looked at our two naked bodies with obvious lust, he wouldn’t meet our eyes as we were manhandled into the aircraft.

How did they do it? Easy! Two of the more muscular Koreans simply grabbed the outer edges of the pole under our knees and hoisted it up. As they did, my body swung around upside down so my head was now down under the pole but that didn’t worry them. They merely hoisted the pole onto their shoulders and walked up the gangway into the rear of the plane and deposited me, very unceremoniously, onto its ribbed floor and then went back to pick up my companion.

They put us down on our bottoms so we were again right side up and then tethered the two ends of each of the poles to the curved interior wall of the cargo hold and then left to go forward to the crew compartment. As they did, the rear ramp closed and the engines began to start and warm up and then we were taxiing for take-off.

That journey was a nightmare. It was freezing cold in the cargo area of the plane and although it didn’t fly high it was not pressurised at all and there always seemed to be draughts all around us. They didn’t take the gags out and neither did they ease the bondage that had held us immobile for so long already that our joints were cramped.

We sat there, our backs against the cold wall of the fuselage, our knees pulled up tight to our breasts, our bottoms numb as they perched on the ribbed floor of the plane. They didn’t feed us or even give us a trickle of water. They didn’t do anything to us, not even sit and look at us. Perhaps it was too cold for them in that cargo hold but you would have thought that given two attractive and very naked females at their disposal, they would have at least stayed and looked at us. I was to discover they were so scared of their boss, the new Korean dictator who had ousted the communist government and set up an even worse regime in its place, that they wouldn’t even risk looking at us, let alone touching our flesh.

We dozed from time to time but the frigid cold soon woke us up again, as did the couple of re-fuelling stops on the way. But if we thought those stops might have provided an opportunity for us to be rescued, we were sadly mistaken and after an hour or so on the ground without the cargo doors even opening, we were off again, to climb high enough that the cold again licked at our naked bodies.

I smiled at my unknown companion from time to time as she did to me (as far as those awful ball gags allowed, anyway) but that was all we could do. We couldn’t talk and we didn’t even know one another’s name... and then suddenly it hit me. Jenny Lalink! She had disappeared. Had she been kidnapped by these men too?

Of course she had, as I was shortly to discover ...

Once on the ground at Pyongyang, we had even more reason to shiver. It was winter and snow lay around everywhere. But that didn’t mean they covered us at all. I was to discover they prized hardiness in their citizens very highly and for us, for the purpose we were about to be put to, that hardiness was another prime requisite.

The now well covered up guards who had accompanied us undid the chains holding us to the fuselage and hoisted us up on their shoulders once more so that again we swung round to hang upside down from the poles by our knees as they marched us out of the plane and down to a military truck parked near its rear ramp.

Yet another dreadful journey with both of us shivering uncontrollably, our skins blue with cold and our teeth chattering while the soldiers sitting on the bench seats on either side of the truck grinned and chattered to one another about our bodies (no doubt). I had no knowledge of Korean then of course but it was obvious from the expressions on their faces and the way they pointed at us that it was our bodies that were the topic of conversation.

We arrived eventually at a palace-like structure within high stone walls and at last the temperature became bearable at least. To the pair of us, it was like heaven although it probably wasn’t all that warm really.

They carried us into a room which I thought must be like the throne room at Buckingham Palace and in the principal chair of which sat a lean, cruel-looking man in a military uniform. This, I now discovered, was General Sun Mak, the relatively youthful (he was just thirty-seven) new President of North Korea and a man the West was going to learn to fear as they never had any of the former communist rulers of that nation.

We were dumped unceremoniously on the floor right in front of the dais on which he sat and, at his nod, the thumb cuffs that had held us trussed up like a roast chicken for so many hours were now unlocked and at last we could drop our hands to our sides and relax our legs at which the bars under our knees fell to the floor (to be quickly retrieved by two of the soldiers on duty).

“On your hands and knees, scum-slaves!” barked an officer who now backed up his staccato order with a jab of an electronic prodder to our bodies, wherever he could poke them. In my case, this was to my left breast and I screamed in pain as well as outrage at the horrible shock. In my companion’s case, it was to her right cheek and she too screamed at the pain. But the shocks had the right effect. We both quickly assumed the degrading and humiliating pose like doggies on our hands and knees side by side before the lean hard man on the throne above us.

He stared down at us for a few minutes, his eyes taking in our naked athletic bodies and perhaps also our beauty but then he gave another of the minute nods to his aide who then barked at us to stand up. They didn’t need to use the prodder this time. The pain from that last shock to my bosom was enough to make me instantly obedient but I now felt even more ashamed as in an erect position my formerly private parts were now on full show to all the men in that room.

There were dozens of them. Beside the President, on both sides of his throne, were ranged his ministers, or at least some of them and they seemed mostly to be army or navy officers. But there were others, men in suits and some in Korean national dress and all of them looked at us in the same inscrutable oriental way, giving away nothing of what they were thinking.

The President barked something at one of these suit-attired men and he coughed and moved over to us. He now leered at us as he approached us. “Our beloved President has asked me what I think of you two latest slave sluts,” he said in rather stilted English. “I am therefore going to inspect you while he watches. You would be very advised to accommodate me in that inspection and not to resist even the more intrusive examinations of your bodies.”

I stared at him. I was scared. Very scared. I was also ashamed. I had never been naked in front of a room full of men before and while I am proud of my body, I couldn’t imagine anything worse than being medically examined before them. I said so. “Sir, I really cannot allow you to conduct an inspection of my body here, in front of all these men.”

“Oh you can’t, eh?”

He stepped back and nodded to the soldier holding the prodder. The man grinned briefly, thumbed the switch on the monstrous thing and then shoved it rudely into my vagina.

“Aaagheeeaaaghooowwwghaaagh!” I howled and now jumped from one foot to the other, my hands down at my loins, my scream of utter agony slowly receding, very slowly.

“And what about you, slut-slave?” the awful man said.

She blushed but nodded hurriedly. “Whatever you want, Sir,” she said quickly, her eyes wide with fear as she watched me coming back to some semblance of normality after the worst possible pain I could ever imagine began to abate. I didn’t blame her. I wouldn’t be protesting again, either.

The man, who we later found out was an eminent geneticist and director of the slave farm for which we were destined, now moved up to her and began to inspect her body. He was not careful of her modesty, either. Indeed, if anything he was absolutely lecherous in the way he felt and fondled her lovely body. Oh he certainly inspected her flesh and even took out a stethoscope to listen to her heart and lungs (and presumably other organs of her beautiful body), but his hands were also lustful, cupping and fondling her firm breasts, sliding down her muscly belly to probe into her slightly hairy vagina and then, after forcing her to spread her legs and bend over and touch her toes with the palms of her hands, even probed inside her anus.

And all the while the President looked on, his face as inscrutable as those of his ministers and aides but as I watched him, and them, I knew - I could sense - that they were all highly inflamed by the scene.

Then it was my turn. I shuddered as the man turned his attention to me. “You will be in much demand, I know, my beautiful new slave. With looks like yours: a body as athletic as this-” (which he said while his hands moved all over my breasts and belly) “and such a rare beauty coupled with your blonde hair and blue eyes, you will be lucky to have a night to yourself - but only after you have been ritually deflowered.”

I stared at him. So he had discovered my virgin status but more to the point, was he saying what I thought he was? I turned and glanced at the other girl, whose name I still didn’t know and her face told me she had heard and understood what the man had said. So we had been kidnapped as prostitutes, eh?

But then I had another thought. If that were the case, surely we would not have been brought before the President himself? Were we going to be concubines to him? No, that didn’t make sense either. If we had been, we would only be available for his sole use and not ‘in demand’ a phrase that implied many men would use us.

It was all very confusing - but still very shaming for we were still stark naked and the stares of the men around us were all on our bodies, even if their faces were still as impassive as ever.

The truth, when we at last discovered it, was vastly more bizarre - and horrifying - than either of those two scenarios, bad and all as they would have been. But I won’t jump the gun. Allow me to unfold the events as they occurred.

Alicia (the name of the other girl - actually, Alicia Nicklin, a swimming star) and I were left standing there while the man reported on his findings to the President. They must have been favourable for he nodded and actually smiled, then rose and left the room, followed by his entourage.

We were then left with a few soldiers and the man who had examined us who now addressed us again.

“My name is Dr Yuen,” he said softly. “You are now slaves in my care. Obey me and my staff in everything and your life will be bearable - and perhaps even enjoyable. Resist and you will suffer - suffer in ways you cannot even imagine. We Koreans have forgotten more about the ancient art of torture than you in the West will ever learn so be warned.”

We were taken out of the throne room and back to the yard into which the army truck had delivered us and now herded into a smallish nondescript van. “Lie face down on the floor and place your hands up behind your heads,” the doctor ordered then climbed up to sit on one side of the van while the armed soldier sat on the other. I couldn’t see them but I could feel their eyes boring down into my nakedness as I lay there next to Alicia, my breasts and thighs and my sexual organs now pressed down on the icy-cold ribs of the little van’s floor. Cold, it seemed, was to be with us all the time.

Another journey. This one much shorter and then the van stopped and the rear doors opened to reveal more soldiers. The doctor ordered us out and once more we were standing in a snow-covered yard, our bare feet right in it while the cold wind lashed at our nakedness. It must have been cold even for the doctor and the soldiers for we were now hurriedly ushered into this building, a very large and a fairly new one from its appearance - all plain, unfinished concrete of which the lines from the formwork were still apparent. As I stared up at it, I shuddered. It didn’t even have windows! We were herded in through a small steel door and the warmth hit us as if a lovely blanket had been cast over my shoulders. I relaxed visibly although my fear of what might be facing us hadn’t abated one iota.

We were led straight to the gymnasium and there, the sight that met my eyes as we were ushered in, to stand just inside the twin doors was one that utterly astonished me. There were hundreds of them in there. Yes, really. I don’t know exactly how many but it was somewhere between two and three hundred girls, every single one of them a female athlete, some of Olympic quality but all top class.

They hailed from all over the world and included all three basic racial types, Oriental, Negro and Caucasian - and many mixtures of them. Every one of them was stark naked and even more than that for each was utterly hairless. Not a sign of hair anywhere on their bodies. From the crowns of their heads to the tips of their toes, each was utterly nude, excepting only for a ponytail that poked up from the very top of their heads and was held vertical by a series of rings then flowed down their backs - and everywhere else as smooth as the proverbial baby’s bum. They had been permitted to retain their eyebrows and lashes but apart from them - and the so demeaning ponytail (which I later learned was intended to mark us as breeding slaves), they were utterly naked.

I think I cried out at the sight but my noise didn’t even attract a glance from a single one of the hundreds of naked, beautiful - and so damned athletic girls there. Every one of them was working her body to the utmost while technicians and the ever-present soldiers stood over them, the soldiers’ rifles at the ready while the technicians, or more properly, trainers had their prodders in one hand, armed and ready to inflict more of those awful shocks to their bodies; while they held canes in the other. I shuddered yet again as I watched those girls performing all manner of exercises.

Some were on the mats performing press-ups and sit-ups and the like; others were on exercise bikes, driving the pedals at a frenetic pace while the sweat literally shot from their bodies; still others were working on gymnastics equipment - and I don’t just mean the sort normally used by girls: these young women were working on sets of parallel and horizontal bars, leaping over pommel and vaulting horses, swinging on the ends of a pair of Roman rings or shinnying up and down long ropes set in a row and dangling from the roof high above us.

“Good God,” I breathed as I stared at the incredible scene before us. I had been a gymnastics star of some note back home. Not perhaps Olympic quality but good, nevertheless. I had therefore worked in many gyms but nothing I had ever seen before compared with this. First of all, of course, there was the total nakedness of each and every one of the girls there.

It was just so obvious! Not a stitch to cover any of the private parts of those hundreds of girls, their bodies so blatantly exposed to the dozens of men, some in white shorts and singlets, some in soldiers’ uniforms who were driving them to harder and harder effort.

Then there was extreme nature of their nakedness. They had no hairs on them - anywhere! Not on the tops of their heads but also not on their sex. The pubic mounds and even their vaginas were so totally exposed as of course were their breasts, all perfect in shape and size.

There was also the universal honey-gold tan on each of the white girls. The others retained their natural skin colour of course but every single one of the Caucasian or part-Caucasian girls wore an all-over tan that made them look even more beautiful. It wasn’t a dark tan, just a light golden colour.

But there was more that had me standing there agog at the scene before me. There was the effort each of those girls was applying to her work. I had always believed in working my body to the limit. Only in that way could a modern-day athlete even hope for success, but this ... this was inhuman! As we stood there and watched, I could see every one of those girls was lathered in sweat. She was applying every last shred of her energies into the work of the moment and I could see why.

The soldiers didn’t prod the girls. They were obviously there for security reasons only, but the other men did. As I said earlier, each was armed with a cane and a prodder and they weren’t averse to using them, especially the prodders and I shuddered yet again as I remembered the terrible pain of that thing as it had been applied to my breast - and even worse, to my reaction when it was thrust into my sensitive vaginal opening.

Now, as I watched the white-coated men chivvying the girls along, I noticed they regularly thrust the sharp tines of the prodder into their bodies. Sometimes, if they were being lenient, it was only into a thigh or a bottom cheek but more often it was to the soft flesh of one of their breasts or even worse, into their sexual organs. It was no wonder every single one of them was sweating like the proverbial pig as she applied her magnificent muscles to the task in hand.

As I said, these were many and varied and they even included one of those horrible and diabolical instruments of torture known as an abdominal table. I had good reason to hate that thing for my personal trainer had made me use one for a couple of weeks a year or so ago. You don’t know what they are? Believe me, your ignorance is indeed bliss!

They don’t look much. Just a short, narrow table about three feet high whose four sturdy legs are bolted to the floor. It’s what you have to do on them that is so horrible. You climb up and slip your feet through the straps at the bottom corners and that leaves your buttocks sitting off the other end. Then you have to swing your body back and down until you are bent like a bow, your hands now reaching down to the floor. Your trainer then makes you stay like that for a few seconds, stretching every muscle horribly and then, keeping your hands outstretched to add to the weight of your upper body as your belly and thigh muscles work to hoist you back up again, up you go until your torso is lying right along your thighs and your hands now reach down to touch your toes.

Even one such repetition is diabolical. My trainer made me work up until I could do twenty. But these girls had been at it for hours!

I suddenly had an urge to bolt. Fortunately, reason got in the way of such a rash action and I stayed still but I knew then that we, Alicia and I, were in for a horrible time of it.

It was then I caught sight of Jenny. You remember Jennifer Lalink, the track star from Tottenham? Well now I saw her. She was working on the parallel bars and for a track athlete she was doing very well, very well indeed. I realised I hadn’t recognised her immediately because without the tight curls of hair on her head (and now with the beginnings of a ponytail), she looked so different but now that I looked more closely I recognised her face, even through the sweat and strain of her work.

I stared at her in awe. Partly that awe was because of her newfound skill as a gymnast but more it was the sheer beauty ... no, beauty is the wrong word although she was incredibly beautiful, but it was the magnificence of her body as it swung this way and that on a piece of equipment that in my experience had always been reserved for male gymnasts, that was so startling.

Being stark naked, her body was no longer hidden in even the slightest way by a gymnast’s clothing - shorts and an athletics singlet. Every single muscle in that stupendous body was thus fully, openly and totally evident as each corded, rippled and strained. And with the pubic hair gone, that nakedness was even more total.

I have never - not ever in my whole life - been attracted sexually to a woman or a girl but as I stood there in the entrance to that gym and watched Jenny performing, I felt a distinct thrill - a sexual thrill - down in my loins.

I shook my head. What was the matter with me! I wasn’t like that. I knew it. I glanced at Alicia, my companion in misery and felt a lot better. Her eyes too were sort of glazed over as they stared from one to another of the hundreds of naked, magnificent athletes all working at a frenetic pace at their various activities.

I returned my gaze to Jenny’s naked work on the bars and as I stared at her body I knew it was even better than I remembered it from our workouts in the gym. She was sleeker, finer, her skin smoother, her muscles more sharply defined. I didn’t think she had had an ounce of fat on her body before but perhaps she had for the definition of her muscles was now so sharp as to remind me of the belly muscles on a male gymnast.

Then my reverie was interrupted by the Korean doctor speaking. “Soon, slaves, you too will be performing as they are, and your bodies will be as good. Right now though, it is time to continue your tests...”