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them to seize it.”
    The man started to gabble something, but Kim cut him off. “Silence!” He wiped a trace of spittle off his lips. “You have failed the State and endangered our historic plan. I will not listen to your excuses.”
    He leaned forward over his desk. “You came into this room as a colonel, comrade. You will leave it as a lieutenant. A lieutenant in charge of a penal platoon.”
    Kim smiled thinly as the officer’s face crumpled. He had just destroyed a thirty-year career. “You are dismissed. Now get out of my sight.”
    He watched silently as his bodyguards led the man out of his office. Truly, no drug could possibly match the exhilaration that swept through him whenever he used his power as the Great Leader’s son and designated heir.
    But slowly, very slowly, the exhilaration slipped away, replaced by a growing sense of frustration. The tunnel the Americans had stumbled across was only one of many that were being dug at his orders, but its discovery would make them more alert, more careful. As a result, work on the other tunnels would have to be stopped—at least until the Americans and their South Korean puppets had again been lulled into a false sense of security. Kim Jong-Il could feel his carefully laid plans slipping once more into the distant future, and that was something he was unwilling to contemplate. He had always been impatient.
    History was slipping away from him—out of his grasp. Every passing day made the South stronger militarily and economically. Every day increased the growing gap between the two halves of Korea. Every day brought with it the chance that his father might die without securing Kim’s succession to the leadership.
    Kim gripped the arms of his chair. He knew only too well that there were many in North Korea’s government who would cast him aside if they could. Some were jealous of his power. Some called themselves “true communists”and claimed they opposed a dynastic succession. Others held grudges for imagined wrongs.
    But so long as Kim Il-Sung lived, his son’s enemies were powerless to move against him. More than forty years of absolute rule had enabled the elder Kim to build a nation shaped in his own image and governed by his slightest whim. Kim Jong-Il knew that kind of power could not be inherited, it could only be earned—forged over time his enemies would not give him, or forged in the fires of a war, a common struggle against the hated American enemy.
    His own enemies inside the government had already tried to move against him once. Kim felt a small chill as he remembered the bomb planted aboard his father’s personal train. A bomb planted by officers loyal to General Oh Chin-U, the then defense minister and leader of the pro-Chinese faction inside North Korea. The assassination attempt had failed, and the known conspirators were either filling unmarked graves outside Pyongyang or slaving away in special camps. Its aftershocks, however, were still rippling through the Party, the Army, and the Foreign Ministry.
    Kim Jong-Il smiled thinly to himself. Not all the effects had been bad. He’d used China’s suspected involvement in the bomb plot to persuade his father to side more closely with the Soviets. That had been an essential move. Only the Soviets had the kind of advanced weapons the People’s Army needed to match the Americans and their Southern puppets. But Kim held no illusions about the motives of his Russian backers—they didn’t believe in charity. They believed in power.
    And every high-tech weapons system the Soviet Union gave or sold the North increased its hold over Pyongyang. At some point it would be too late to go back. He and his father would have sold their precious self-reliance for radar-guided missiles, modern battle tanks, and advanced submarines.
    Kim Jong-Il shook his head. He knew the risks well. After all, what was life but a succession of risks—some greater and some smaller? Better to view the game as a race. A