The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man. Jonas Jonasson
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Название: The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man
Автор: Jonas Jonasson
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Приключения: прочее
isbn: 9780008275587
isbn:
Captain Pak turned to his first mate, who was told he must take his belongings and move down with the crew, since he had just been relieved of his officer’s cabin. He should instead have the two foreign men installed there. Furthermore, the first mate should make sure a sailor stood watch outside the cabin, unless he chose to guard it himself, to make sure the two gentlemen didn’t come to any harm or, for that matter, get up to causing any harm.
The first mate gave a salute. He wasn’t happy about this development. Forced to associate with the crew for the sake of two aged whites … No, the captain should have left them at sea. This could only end as poorly as it had begun.
Captain Pak Chong-un sensed trouble brewing. Once again he checked the contents within the otherwise securely locked door to the safe in the captain’s quarters. He kept the key on a chain around his neck.
The safe contained all the mandatory ship’s logs, a copy of maritime law, and a briefcase full of four kilos of lead-shielded, enriched uranium.
The task he had personally been delegated by the Supreme Leader was now only three days from completion. There were no clouds on the horizon of this task. In a literal sense, that was. Which meant, as always, that the American satellites were keeping a watchful eye on him. That was a cloud in and of itself, albeit a metaphorical one. Another was the two foreign men in the first mate’s cabin just on the other side of the wall.
Captain Pak allowed himself to sum up the situation before walking the few steps to the neighbouring cabin. ‘Ugh.’ He stared at the watchman until said watchman realized he should open the door for his captain. And then he stared again until the watchman closed the same door.
‘Gentlemen, it is time to be interrogated,’ said Captain Pak Chong-un.
‘Lovely,’ said Allan.
Congo is the second-largest country in Africa and has always been rich in two particular things: natural resources and misery.
The most miserable period of all was when King Leopold II of Belgium used the country as his private rubber farm. He enslaved everyone he encountered and had upwards of ten million people killed. That’s an entire Sweden. Or an entire Belgium, if you prefer.
When Congo gained independence many difficult years later, a certain Joseph Mobutu ended up in the president’s chair. He became most famous for selling his country’s resources to the highest under-the-table bidder, keeping the money for himself, and changing his name to ‘the All-powerful Warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake’.
This guy, thought the United States, was the future of Congo and Africa. And, with the kind aid of the CIA, the All-powerful Warrior remained in power for several decades. Uranium succeeded rubber as the most interesting natural resource. Indeed, the USA received the uranium for the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki from Congo and, as thanks for the help, assisted in the installation of a Congolese nuclear research facility under the leadership of the all-powerful one who left fire in his wake. It’s possible that this was not the United States’ brightest political decision in history.
In the country where everything was corrupt, no exceptions, large quantities of enriched uranium vanished. Some of it turned up here and there and could be secured, while an unknown amount remained missing.
Time passed. The most important security services in the Western world no longer had the energy to search for what couldn’t be found. What remained was to try to keep any more from reaching the black market. Some of those with operational units found comfort in the fact that at least the missing uranium lost strength with each year that went by.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, however, was in possession of knowledge that made her view of the whole thing rather less rosy. Frau Merkel had already been around longer than most of the world’s leaders and she was counting on being re-elected next autumn. Her background as a chemist told her that she would not be in her current position on the day the missing isotope no longer posed a potential threat to her country. To be sure, she still had a lot to give, even at the age of sixty-three, after twenty-eight years in politics. But even so, her own half-life was considerably shorter than that of enriched uranium: four point five billion years.
Kim Jong-un had never asked to be the person he became. In fact, two older brothers were ahead of him in line, but one sealed his fate when he took his family under his wing and sneaked out of the country under a fake name to go to Tokyo for a lark. To Disneyland, to boot – he was 0 for 2. And their father, Kim Jong-il, considered his other son far too weak. That basically meant he was suspected of being gay. Here and there, it was considered questionable to love whomever you wished.
Their father Kim was quite advanced in age when he took over from Eternal President Kim Il-sung, and likely had plans for a similar run-in period for his youngest son. But the problem with life is that people both high and low die when they die. Suddenly there he was, the twenty-five-year-old son, expected to move forward the legacy of his just-deceased father. Or preferably further than that since his father had gone down in history as the man who had turned a hungry people into a starving people.
In the span of a few months, young Kim went from capable Game Boy player to three-star general. He wasn’t given terrific chances by international analysts. A puppy, commander of a series of battle-scarred officers, including the puppy’s own uncle? Surely that would never work out.
And it didn’t. For the uncle and the generals. It’s possible that they were scheming, but before they could finish they were purged, every last one. Young Kim proved to be a person not to be trifled with or herded about. The uncle was sentenced to death for, among other things, being unfaithful to his wife. Nowhere in the twelve-page verdict was there a word about the fact that young Kim’s father had had five children with three different women.
Several years earlier young Kim had attended school in Switzerland under a secret name while his mother travelled around Europe to shop for the sorts of things the average North Korean had never even seen a picture of. Kim was more interested in basketball and videogames than girls, but his grades were nothing to sneeze at. And when he hastily, and with a decent amount of enthusiasm, took over the entire nation his grandfather had created and his father had partially ruined, it was his grandfather he took after. He was an extrovert, liked to mix with his people, might thump the occasional citizen on the back when he was in the mood – he even spoke to them. Above all, he adjusted the dials of the homemade Communist system, after which the food didn’t run out on as many tables as quickly as it had before.
So, as the world continued to titter in horror over the puppy, he made sure that the citizens were no longer starving even as he realized that the country he’d inherited must either curl up and die or pick a fight with the whole rest of the world, which was striving to make sure that the former occurred.
He chose the fight-picking.
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