Chapter 27

The Gyeryongdae Bunker

7th Corps Command and Control Room.

Clerks and communications officers moved incessantly back and forth in front of their equipment.

"Any signal?"

"The packet loss is too severe. It keeps disconnecting, so we can't receive anything."

"Keep trying."

The sound of keyboards being tapped filled every corner of the command and control room. The intranet, which had been completely disconnected for two days, was beginning to come back to life little by little.

But it was nowhere near enough to call a complete recovery. The transmission speed didn't even reach half of 1 Mbps, let alone 1 Mbps itself.

In practical terms, it felt little different from the days when people connected to online services using 56K modems. Even opening a single situation report took dozens of minutes.

Yet their faces showed anticipation rather than tension.

"It's all right. It doesn't matter if it's slow. Let's take our time, everyone."

"Yes, Operations Officer."

It didn't matter if it was slow. It was fine if the connection kept dropping. What mattered was that reports on the situation at military units throughout South Korea had begun flowing through the intranet into the command and control room again.

One of the operations section clerks muttered.

"Since it looks difficult to send or receive photographs, why don't we prepare everything in text beforehand?"

"Hmm···. Shall we?"

"Yes. We can distribute situation reports to subordinate units in text first, and submit reports to higher headquarters in text as well."

He pointed at the monitor.

"We can even draw maps using text instead of images. If we represent coordinates, roads, and enemy positions by combining simple symbols···. I think 100 kilobytes would be more than enough."

"More than enough, huh···. That's a rather crude way of putting it, but it's a good idea."

"Yes. Then, Operations Officer, uh···?"

Only then did the clerk realize that the person holding his shoulder and looking at the monitor with him wasn't the operations officer he usually worked with.

He hurriedly turned his head. Standing before him with a satisfied smile was the corps commander, wearing three stars on his collar.

"G-gah···. C-Corps Commander, sir."

"Why are you so surprised? It's a good idea. Let's do that."

"Y-yes. Understood, sir."

"Photographs and maps are secondary priorities. First, organize all situation reports into text and share them with subordinate units."

"Yes, sir! Understood!"

As soon as the order was given, the command and control room became twice as busy. Reporting formats were immediately revised, and instructions to 'prioritize text reports' began going out to every unit.

It would be a mistake to think that war was fought only by infantrymen carrying rifles outside. Without the clerks working inside and outside the command and control room, the war effort couldn't function.

Administration was also warfare.

Hundreds of situation reports arriving from various units had to be sorted chronologically, duplicate information filtered out, and every detail updated on a single situation board in real time.

And clerks couldn't afford to make mistakes. A single small typo could create an error in the information. Errors in information led to incorrect decisions, and hundreds or thousands of lives rested on those decisions.

Choi Pil stood in a corner of the command and control room, staring intently at the situation reports that the clerks continued updating. His expression was tense.

There was something unsettled about him, a sense of unease. And it wasn't just Choi Pil. The staff officers sitting beside him wore the same expressions.

What was making them so anxious?

"Still nothing from there?"

"Yes, sir. Not yet."

Reports were occasionally coming in from the Cheorwon axis. The 3rd Infantry Division was still fiercely defending its positions along the mountains east of Cheorwon, and reports were also arriving from divisions on the Gangwon Province front, rear-area units farther south, and even mobilization divisions that had completed their personnel requisitions and were organizing their forces.

But there was one place from which no news had come at all. Not a single situation report, message, or transmission had arrived.

It was the most important city in the Republic of Korea.

Seoul.

#

The Republic of Korea maintained a list in preparation for wartime.

From number 0 to number 100.

It was a small, thin memorandum matching one name to each number.

Number 0 was the President of the Republic of Korea.

Number 1 was the Minister of National Defense.

Number 2 was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Next came the Army Chief of Staff, the Navy Chief of Staff, the Air Force Chief of Staff, the Deputy Commander of the Combined Forces Command···.

And the list continued in that manner. It could be called a survival roster created to preserve South Korea's wartime command structure.

When war broke out, the people on that list would move to designated secret facilities to maintain the Republic of Korea's chain of command.

The list also included a very small number of civilian specialists considered essential to conducting the war. But among the twenty people whose safety had to be secured above all else, the group known as Code Black, there was only one civilian.

He was Dr. Ju Jo-myeong, South Korea's foremost scientist, a special adviser to Olos, jointly operated by the Agency for Defense Development and military intelligence agencies. He held more than ten doctoral degrees in fields essential to warfare, including nuclear physics, communications engineering, electronics, security, cryptography, and artificial intelligence.

This was Gyeryongdae,

The underground bunker beneath Army Headquarters.

"Didn't I tell you to straighten out those fucking idiots at the telecommunications companies ahead of time!"

"D-Doctor···. That wasn't the only problem, was it?"

"Exactly! There wasn't just one or two problems! Tell them all to prepare for prison once this war is over!"

The conference room was filled with generals, each wearing at least three stars on his uniform. But the person whose face was reddest and who was shouting the loudest was Dr. Ju Jo-myeong. The generals couldn't even properly raise their heads in response to his words.

Only Minister of National Defense Han Jong-beom, who had personally invited the doctor to serve as an adviser, and the Army Chief of Staff, who had always supported him generously, were barely managing to restrain the doctor's outburst.

"Now, now, Doctor. For the moment, we're immediately installing the prototypes we've produced on aircraft first."

"They're taking off as soon as they're installed, right? We don't have time to test and verify them."

"Yes. However, we're hearing reports of intermittent instrument errors and radio failures during flight."

"That can't be helped."

From 11:00 a.m. on April 4 to 4:00 p.m. on April 5.

Just twenty-nine hours.

The reason the Republic of Korea had effectively vanished from the world's map during that brief period wasn't due to a single factor.

North Korea had executed a strategy against the Republic of Korea that had been meticulously planned for a very long time.

That strategy struck precisely at the problems South Korea had been warned about for years but had ultimately failed to correct.

First, North Korea paralyzed civilian and military communications networks. Malicious code that had been lying dormant for years inside internet networks, the military intranet, and the servers of major telecommunications companies was activated simultaneously at the outbreak of war.

Civilian telecommunications in South Korea were effectively monopolized by three major corporations, commonly called the three major carriers.

Although countless base stations and data centers appeared to be scattered throughout the country, in reality, seizing just a few critical points could paralyze all communications in an instant.

South Korea's telecommunications companies paid employees who devised creative and predatory pricing plans more than they paid outstanding security specialists. Paralyzing such companies had been merely the easiest stage of this strategy.

The real problem was that the military wasn't much different. South Korea's defense network was supposedly isolated from the internet, but the reality was otherwise.

Through unnecessary maintenance work, equipment updates, and the careless transfer of data into and out of the network, its supposedly complete physical isolation had long since broken down.

Those small exceptions accumulated over the years and became enormous security holes. Malicious code that entered through a single opening spread rapidly, becoming a cancer waiting for the outbreak of war on April 4.

In truth, the first factor wasn't particularly significant. The second reason was far more serious. Satellite-based radio and frequency attacks.

Hundreds to two thousand kilometers above the Republic of Korea.

The region we call space.

More than ten thousand satellites launched by numerous countries were orbiting there.

And among those satellites, China alone possessed more than 1,500 launched since 2000. Including estimated unofficial launches, the number was at least 2,500.

Those satellites carried the Satellite-based Radio/Frequency Jamming System (SRFJS), which China had secretly completed developing in 2028.

Conceived as the exact opposite of Starlink, which transmitted communications down from satellites, this radio weapon system used hundreds of satellites passing over the Korean Peninsula to relentlessly disrupt the frequency bands used by military and civilian systems.

Satellite communications, GPS, UHF, VHF, FM, AM, and so on.

Almost every radio frequency band used in South Korea was simultaneously buried beneath enormous amounts of interference.

Normally, radio attacks of this magnitude were effective only against specific facilities or limited areas because of power-output constraints.

But what if the attack came not from one satellite, but hundreds or thousands? Then the situation changed. Drastically.

More than a thousand satellites divided their roles and passed continuously over the Korean Peninsula, and the radio attacks emitted by each one ravaged South Korea as though the entire country had been placed inside a microwave oven.

The failure of the 2028 Defense Reform program also played a major role in why communications equipment that had been confidently advertised as protected against electronic warfare was rendered completely useless.

The official announcements had been impressive. The plan was to replace existing components with lighter, faster, and superior next-generation parts. But the actual project was different.

To pocket the difference between operating expenses and procurement prices, certain officials had used large quantities of inexpensive Chinese-made components whose performance looked impressive only on paper.

Dr. Ju Jo-myeong quickly surveyed the military leadership gathered in the underground bunker at Gyeryongdae. The conference room was engulfed in heavy silence.

"We'll deal with responsibility later."

He turned a page in the documents he was holding and continued calmly. Right now, they needed to decide quickly what to do next rather than spend time assigning blame.

#

"What matters now is rapidly mass-producing the 'Electronic Warfare Countermeasure Device' and distributing it throughout the entire military. Its structure is simpler than you'd think. Take the prototypes and blueprints and get yourselves to the defense contractors and military supply factories."

Dr. Ju Jo-myeong rapidly issued instructions to the staff officers from the various branches of the military. Not one of them questioned why a civilian was giving them orders.

"Yes. We'll depart immediately."

"Speed is everything. Don't waste time thinking about how far we've been pushed back. Let's get this done first!"

The moment the government issued a wartime mobilization order, every state-designated factory and production facility would switch to wartime production.

That was why the strength of a country's manufacturing base during peacetime greatly determined its ability to wage war.

In that regard, the Republic of Korea could be considered exceptionally strong.

Thousands of designated wartime contractors and cooperating factories existed throughout the country. Production lines that normally manufactured semiconductors, ships, and electronic products could rapidly switch to producing military electronics, artillery shells, and missile components.

The essential component all those production lines now needed to manufacture was the 'Electronic Warfare Countermeasure Device,' which the doctor had developed by dismantling dozens of communications devices and radios captured from frontline North Korean units.

It had been twelve hours since North Korean communications equipment and radios sent from the front lines had arrived at the laboratory inside the Army Headquarters bunker at Gyeryongdae.

Dr. Ju Jo-myeong and his research team had dismantled and reverse-engineered them, hastily creating a device that transmitted radio waves matching the wavelengths of those being emitted by the satellites.

Communications still dropped intermittently, and transmission speeds were unbearably slow, but they worked. That fact alone had completely transformed the atmosphere inside Gyeryongdae.

Furthermore, something he had prepared in advance was proving tremendously helpful.

Ever since his time as an adviser, Dr. Ju Jo-myeong had insisted that perfectly clean PCs that had never once been connected to a network, along with unopened spare communications devices, should be stockpiled in shielded storage rooms.

Insisting that anything worth doing had to be done properly, he submitted a budget proposal worth no less than 300 billion won. The Minister of National Defense and the Army Chief of Staff barely managed to dissuade him, saying it was excessive, and after several adjustments, the budget was reduced to approximately 150 billion won, half the original proposal.

But the budget was cut again during the National Assembly's review process. Ultimately, the final amount allocated to Dr. Ju Jo-myeong's project was 80 billion won.

"What the hell do left and right have to do with national security! This is so fucking ridiculous I can't take it anymore! I quit, you bastards!"

He even pulled out his resignation letter, declaring that he would immediately step down as an adviser. In the end, the president personally intervened to persuade him to stay. It was decided that the missing 70 billion won would be secured by adjusting the budgets of other defense projects.

Only then could the stockpiling project proceed with a budget of approximately 150 billion won, close to the original plan. At the time, everyone had thought it somewhat excessive, but now those supposedly excessive supplies were being transported ceaselessly from Gyeryongdae to front lines across the country.

Each piece of clean communications equipment taken from the shielded storage rooms was fitted with the Electronic Warfare Countermeasure Device developed by Dr. Ju Jo-myeong, and those devices were restoring the Republic of Korea military's communications networks, which had been crippled and destroyed by electronic warfare, one by one.

Without this man, the war would have been over.

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