Truth, it is said, is the first casualty of war, and Uchida was managing to get a firm footing on its blathering throat. He had finally begun to control the narrative, managing to use his influence with the media outlets. He needed to shift their attention from the technical details of the disaster to the human stories, which were abundant in such a catastrophe. Of course, he couldn’t control all media, especially the independent foreign press. Their staunch support for free speech made them particularly resistant to influence.
Nevertheless, he had a significant advantage: many major shareholders of the primary Japanese media outlets were under his influence, allowing him to sway their reporting and narratives. This control proved vital, especially in the following weeks when the reactor explosions became a global spectacle. The subsequent chemical explosion, which produced a mushroom cloud-like formation, seemed almost like a personal challenge to him!
Despite this, it turned out to be not that difficult to keep control of at least the local media. After all, only a few people had been actually killed as a direct result of the explosion at the plant. Some of the employees, not all, had done what they had been paid to do – their jobs. Those who had died or were injured while doing their duties, presented him with another opportunity to spin the story away from himself. He had managed to turn their ‘heroics’ into deflecting accounts of ‘daring do’, all helping to focus attention away from the main issues.
There were just a few small problems that, for some reason, persistently niggled at his self-assurance. The company could not yet confirm the whereabouts of a batch of spent uranium rods that had been replaced on the day of the tsunami. Considering the devastation wrought upon the facility, this was understandable. He was sure it was just the overzealous nature of the organisation in action. He was confident that absolute verification of their location would be confirmed shortly. In addition, there was also the issue of some of the still missing personnel who had been working in the reactor areas. There were some that had still not yet been accounted for. Everyone else was either alive, some it was true to say barely, or confirmed dead. The bodies of all the other workers had been eventually recovered, some in somewhat unusual places, several of them a few kilometres inland from the plant. These were some of the cowardly people who had left their posts and driven for the high ground but failed to make it. Most had got there quite quickly, having driven at breakneck speeds, not stopping for hell or the reality of the high waters chasing them. These employees were all now accounted for. They had also been warned not to tell of their escape for the sake of exposing their own cowardly embarrassment as well as the company’s tenuous position following the disaster. As for the general population in the vicinity of the plant, many had died from being caught by the pace of the rising waters, but none attributed to the explosion at the plant… well not yet anyway.
A significantly larger issue was dealing with the public outcry that followed the forced evacuation from the ever-expanding exclusion zone, which had turned into a far more serious problem to deal with. Gone were the days when the common folk put up and shut up. Now, not only did they have the audacity to openly criticise the company and its actions, but also began to organise themselves into focus groups, directly lobbying politicians to take action. They discernibly saw an opportunity to make money for themselves, to supplement the meagre handouts that the government offered to individuals to build their shattered lives following the actual tsunami.
The antinuclear factions had jumped upon it, of course, and politicians, seeing the full force of the now weighty pendulum of public opinion bearing down on them, began to fear for their pathetic careers and had listened to the ignorant masses. There was no doubt that the pressure would force the nuclear energy companies to a near total national shutdown.
He saw that all of this would require managing, the growing fury would need to be deflected away from where the real blame was genuinely attributed. The raft of culpabilities steered onto rocks of derision and disparagement, macerating any truth, by diluting it with falsehoods and fake news. It would not be easy, but he was beginning to build a strategy to which may just actually work.
His Korean partners had made clear their uneasiness, but they now seemed to be placated after his discussion with Kwak. Indications from them now were that they felt content in his strategy for containing the situation and he began to feel a growing confidence as his plans fell into place.
His train of thought was abruptly derailed as he gazed into the face of a casually dressed man who had seemingly appeared out of nowhere, like a phantom materialising in the living room of his apartment.
Without any warning, a solid steel dart flew out and jabbed him in the left eye, returning equally as fast via its elastic tether and instantaneously sprung back out, hitting him a second time in his right eye. The range between them was less than a metre, and to the victim the double strike felt like a single blow, it was delivered so quickly. The pain was excruciating, far worse than anything he had endured before. It felt like someone had stuck a pitchfork in his face. It had happened without warning and far quicker than he could react to prevent it. He reacted now though, by bringing both his hands up to eyes as he reeled backwards. He rubbed his hands into his eyes, trying to physically push the horrific pain away and was sickened to feel the glutinous wetness of his ruptured eyeballs on his cheeks. Both hands now holding the front of his face, he threw back his head releasing a blood-curdling scream, just as his assailant knew he would.
With his head momentarily lifted in response to the pain, he formed a triangular frame with his raised forearms and the horizontal line of his collar bone, exposing his throat at the centre, creating the assailant’s second target, just as he had intended.
His attacker allowed the deadly steel weight attached to the end of the rope dart to again recoil to its full length behind him. The range had increased to nearly two metres now, as the terrified man staggered backwards. He fed a few more centimetres of the cord attached to the steel dart and flicked it out again, hitting the man just below his Adam’s apple, instantly crushing his throat.
Uchida’s terrified screams were halted by the sudden inability to pass any breath over his vocal cords or draw a final breath into his chest. The pain inflicted by the rupturing of his eyes, that had been so foremost in his consciousness, now became less all-consuming as the sudden need to breathe became his priority. He fell to his knees as he started to lose consciousness, slowly sitting back on his ankles as his strength began to drain from his body. His folded legs were spread wide in front of him, the strain he would have normally felt in his thigh muscles now deemed irrelevant as his life force passed from him. He tipped slowly backwards, coming to rest with his head not quite touching the floor.
The assassin watched him die. It was part of his craft to understand all human endeavours. Although death was just death in the end. He should know, he had seen a great deal of it in his career, but still never failed to be surprised at the uniqueness of the final moments of a person’s expiration.
He looked at the steel dart he had caught in his hand after the final strike. It was pendant-like in shape, similar to a large fishing weight, buffed to a dull hue. The hammer end was domed, designed to act like a cosh, not to penetrate flesh. This component of the weapon, the dart itself, was probably over a hundred years old, part of a set he had drawn from the quartermaster.
The rope dart was an ancient weapon, used by many countries around Asia in various forms over the millennia. Though deadly in trained hands, it was a speciality weapon with limited effectiveness and had not been a real favourite in his professional circles. The benefits to him were that it could be easily concealed within the minimum of clothing and its obscure design removed it from suspicion as a tool of death if discovered.
However, what was now attached to the end of the dart, had given it a bit of a renaissance. Instead of the original length of hemp rope traditionally used, modern technology had added an extra piece of utility that had transformed its capabilities – in the right hands of course. The enhancement was accomplished by attaching a high-performance elasticated cable constructed in a composite of dense natural rubber, combined with a dual helical binding of nylon threads, finished off with a covering of a black silicon coating, transforming the rope dart into something far more versatile.
The size of the elastic cord could be varied, this one was 15 millimetres in diameter and 3 metres in length, stretching to 5 metres when fully extended. With a little innovation and a few modifications of his own, he had made the weapon a deadly tool in his adept hands; a master in its use.
The assassin took a sterile wipe out of a packet he held in an inside pocket of his coat and started to clean the weapon down. A strong smell of ninety per cent rubbing alcohol rose into Min Hyun-woo’s face as he pulled the lanyard through the sterile wipe. Min was a diligent man; he knew this to be a fact as he was at least forty years old and still alive. He had no idea exactly how old he was, for he was taken from a North Korean hard labour camp at a very young age, possibly around five years old. It was hard to say, he had scant concept of ‘age’ at that time and his memories from then were fragmented, though rather vivid. The permanent state of terror that his parents seemed to be in being one of his strongest memories. A fact reinforced thirteen years later when he had been required to murder them for committing crimes against the state.
They had not been the first humans he had murdered, of course, the camps were full of ‘enemies of the State’ and he had already lost count of the number he had dispatched during his training. The only part of this process he remembered were the different techniques and weapons he practised with. After all that was the most important part.
They had transgressed against the Supreme Leader, and it was only fair that their transgressions be rectified through a significant sacrifice to the state. By becoming subjects for extermination, they contributed to the vital process of forging model Korean citizens, exemplars like himself.
He was officially a member of the National Academy of Collective Farming. A front for the training of some of the most effective spies and assassins that had ever existed. The dead man in front of him now a testament to the rigorous standards he had been instructed in.
He looked at his watch, it had taken him all of fifteen minutes to access the building, using the copied access cards and keys they had created back when Uchida had first become an asset to them. A standard prudent approach in dealing with associates, part of a range of interventions put in place for the soul purpose of dealing with a situation such as this arising.
What could not be regarded as standard was the blatant manner in which he had been ordered to undertake the assassination. He abandoned all pretence of stealth in favour of speed. It was inevitable that the authorities would soon notice his presence in the building, and, with that, the revelation of his identity was only a matter of time. A substantial operation must be underway for his superiors to act in such an unprofessional manner. Dropping the weapon down one arm of his long-sleeved shirt, he began to make his way back to the street where his colleagues would be anxiously awaiting his return.