Tag Archives: spy

Jun Ho’s First Train Ride

north korean train depot

Jun Ho was only six-years old and this was his first train ride. Daddy couldn’t come, but Mommy said they were going all the way to Russia.

Soo Mi took her only child by his hand as the train pulled into Pyongyang station. It would take eight days to reach Moscow and anything could go wrong in that time. She showed the forged identity papers to the conductor. It was unlikely her husband would suspect they’d attempt to escape this way.

Her son was so excited as they sat in their seats. He giggled as the train started moving. They would never see North Korea again. Her long assignment as a sleeper agent was over. She was taking her precious boy and North Korea’s nuclear secrets to the west with her.

Her husband, a Major in the Korean People’s Army, would search for them in vain.

I wrote this for the What Pegman Saw photo writing challenge, with images provided by Google maps. Today, the pegman takes us to North Korea. The challenge is to use a single image as the inspiration for crafting a piece of flash fiction no more than 150 words long. My word count is exactly 146.

I took a peek at the image used by Rochelle Wisoff-Fields on her blog post response to the prompt (no, I haven’t read her story yet), and although I could have used another photo, I was captivated by the idea of traveling by rail in North Korea. I found out that there is a train that travels back and forth between Pyongyang and Moscow by way of Irkutsk.

From there, I used North Korea’s nuclear threat to the world as a hook and my wee tale practically wrote itself.

To read other stories based on the prompt, go to InLinkz.com.

The Landing

5 red square

Image: Google Maps

“I made it.” 18-year-old Mathias Rust had just landed his Cessna 172 on Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge by St. Basil’s Cathedral near Red Square. He’d flown through some of the most heavily guarded airspace in the world and wasn’t shot down by Soviet Interceptors.

Mathias got out of his aircraft and was nervously greeted by passersby.

Older couple Valentin Popov and his wife Anna approached the pilot. They were astonished the Air Force had allowed this landing. “Where are you from, young man?”

“Germany.” They assumed he meant East Germany.

He knew he would be arrested soon by the KGB, but it didn’t matter. His flight from the Helsinki-Malmi Airport, over the Baltic, and into Russian airspace proved that a small aircraft could only be tracked intermittently.

Once they let him out of prison, he’d report his findings to the West German military. Their stealth planes would do a much better job.

My story is based on an actual event. On May 28, 1987, 18-year-old Mathias Rust, a German aviator with only about 50 hours of flight experience, flew a rented Cessna 172 from Helsinki, Finland to Moscow.

The link I provided above is to his Wikipedia page, which chronicles all of the details.

I changed the outcome and his intent quite a bit, turning him into a West German spy. At the time, Rust said “he wanted to create an ‘imaginary bridge’ to the East, and he has said that his flight was intended to reduce tension and suspicion between the two Cold War sides.”

I wrote this as a very minor “cold war thriller.”

This was written in response to the What Pegman Saw weekly photo prompt using a Google Maps view. Based on the prompt, you must write a short story/flash fiction of no more than 150 words.

For more stories based on this week’s prompt, visit InLinkz.com.

My word count is exactly 150.