Kim Dae-soon woke up at a time he called six in the morning. Quietly, to himself, where no-one else could hear it, he gave a brief prayer of thanks, when nobody could hear it. If the political officer found out he was religious...
He was thankful, so very thankful, to have received this job. He was a member of the Youth League, sure, but that was no guarantee of lucrative foreign employment. In fact, he didn't seem to have any connection at all that would suggest he, of all people, would be chosen for this job. Well, he had been working in an explosives plant previously, which wasn't a bad gig by North Korean standards. But still! This job might require him living without a look at the sun for a whole year, but he got $200 a month sent home to his family, after Kim got his cut. And while the work was hard, it was so consistently. He simply had to work twelve hours a day, every day, running the "day" shift.
His work, of course, was in producing armaments. Kim Dae-soon wasn't entirely certain what country he was in, per se, although he was aware he had forged Brazilian documents identifying him as "Eduardo Park". What he did know is that they seemed to have an unending appetite for weapons of some manner or another. Perhaps it was Russia he was in; it was impossible to say, though, really.
His home, under a refrigerated warehouse full of beef, held hundreds of workers like him, led by a few party bosses and guarded, inside, by North Korean veterans. For a year at a time, their whole life would be lived in these buildings, and the immediately adjacent plants. Massive Chinese-made furnaces and billeting machines thrummed with raw power as they turned steel into a smorgasboard of weaponry. While the existence of these factories was not a secret, nor the fact that they produced weapons, including ammunition and artillery shells, the details of their operation were a closely guarded secret in the Al-Thani royal family. They were manned by North Koreans under false documents, their pay moved home in various cryptocurrencies. And they didn't just produce artillery shells, either.

In fact, as more Chinese machinery comes in and the massive "Sheikh Tamim Armaments City" comes online, the plant will produce:

• Type 88 rifle
• Norinco CQ clone
• Zastava M76 sniper rifle
• Type 64 LMG
• Type 82 GPMG
• DShKM
• KPV
• RPG-7
• SPG-9
• RPG-29
• Kornet ATGM
• 122, 130mm, 152mm gun barrels
• 122mm, 130mm, 152mm ammunition
• 122mm rockets
• 120mm and 82mm mortar bombs
• Laser designators
• Night vision devices
• Body armor
  

Of course, the vast majority of this equipment will rely heavily on foreign-made explosives and subcomponents, from the steel to the kevlar fabric of vests, but final point of assembly of these dual-use materials will be in this Armaments City, a project costing an estimated $500 million dollars by the time of its completion, building a plant that can produce 600,000 rounds of various Soviet artillery calibres annually [350,000 122mm shells, 75,000 130mm and 175,000 152mm].