Chapter Six

Faced with the Koreans pointed guns at him, Miller felt that he had no choice but to raise his hands in surrender. Shooting it out with the pistol didn’t seem like an option against a handful of guerillas — or whatever these soldiers were.

“Lieutenant Commander Miller, United States Air Force,” he said, his hands raised high. He wondered what else to say, such as I surrender. He settled on, “Don’t shoot.”

One of the Koreans stepped forward. Small and lithe, but unarmed, the Korean had Miller’s full attention. He noticed long hair tucked under her billed cap and with a shock, realized that he was being confronted by a young woman.

“You are American?” she asked.

Miller’s shock increased, owing to the fact that she had asked the question in English.

Dumbly, he nodded, then added, “Yes.”

“Put your hands down,” she said. Over her shoulder, she said something to the Koreans, who lowered their rifles.

Upon closer inspection, Miller could see that the weapons were antiques. If he wasn’t mistaken, one of the rifles had a curved lock and a percussion cap, like a Civil War musket. He preferred not to be shot by it, all the same.

The soldiers didn’t wear uniforms, but only dirty and ragged clothes, some of which appeared to be cast-offs from Chinese uniforms. How these fellows had obtained Chinese uniforms was a matter of open speculation.

Finally, he saw that these soldiers were mostly boys — not a one of them had a bit of facial hair — the exceptions being the young woman and an older man with a wispy, gray beard and a savage expression.

“We have to hurry,” the young woman said. “The Chinese will be looking for you.”

“Hold on. Who are you people?”

“There is no time to discuss this now. We must go!”

He saw that the young woman did, in fact, appear quite agitated as she scanned the trees surrounding the clearing. His eyes went to the top of the stone wall, as if there might be enemy marksman gathering there even now.

“What is this place?”

“An old fort. Now hurry, we must go.”

The young woman and the other soldiers turned their backs on him and started toward the thicket. Miller had no choice but to follow.

After all, he didn’t know where he was, and he had nothing more to guide him than a small compass that was just this side of something you might get from a bubblegum machine. Going down in the parachute had been a disorienting experience, but some part of his mind had remembered to look around and get his bearings. He knew that he had seen some sort of friendly defenses, but those could now be several miles distant, off to the south.

Right now, lost in the Korean hills with a guerilla patrol, the UN line seemed about as close as downtown New York City.

His only equipment consisted of a tube of water purification tablets, a .45 caliber pistol with one clip, and a military-issue survival knife. He was grateful to have at least that much, but it was hardly enough to take on the Chinese army.

He soon found that he was struggling to keep up. Although none of them looked as if they could lift 50-pounds, they moved as if their legs were springs. Miller wrestled with the brush, forcing his way through, branches whipping at his face. Ahead of him, the others found their way without nearly as much trouble. If there was a path, however, Miller’s eyes couldn’t pick it out.

Soon, they came out on an old road — really just a cart track through the hills. Although weeds grew down the middle of the road, the ruts showed that the road had been used recently.

The road became more worn and less weedy. Off to the right, a tiny hamlet came into sight so suddenly that Miller was surprised by it.

Their arrival prompted a flurry of activity. Food and water containers were produced. Meanwhile, a knot of villagers gathered to look him over, like he was a monkey in a zoo.

“What’s the matter, haven’t you seen an American before?” he growled. “We’re the ones over here fighting for you people.”

Suddenly exhausted, Miller felt the need to sit down. The knot of villagers parted almost magically before him when he walked over to a section of log used as seating near a cooking fire and nearly collapsed onto it. The adrenalin from the dogfight, the grief at losing his pal and wingman Guzzle Walsh, the uncertainty of his situation, were all too much. He felt overwhelmed. Black dots swarmed in front of his vision and he felt shaky.

“We cannot stay,” the young woman said.

Miller tried to focus on her without much success. Her voice seemed to be coming through a fog. “I need to rest.”

“We are putting the entire village in danger.”

“Don’t you have something to drink?”

The young woman appeared exasperated, but her expression changed to concern when she looked at Miller’s face. He supposed that he looked pale — he certainly felt like a ghost and that this whole experience wasn’t real.

In rapid fire, she gave a string of commands in Korean. A cup of water was produced, and Miller drank it down greedily. A warm bowl was pressed into his hands. He looked down and saw that it was some kind of soup with some greenish leaves floating on top, like herbs. It smelled both sweet and pungent. There wasn’t any spoon, but no matter. He gulped it down.

Immediately, he began to feel better. The black dots in his vision faded. His heart rate returned to normal. He also felt more confident.

“Thank you,” he said and nodded, the tone of his voice conveying genuine gratitude, even if the villagers couldn’t understand a word. He turned to the young woman, who was watching the road anxiously. “Have you got a name?”

“My name does not matter.”

“You know mine. Lieutenant Commander Jake Miller.”

She took her eyes off the road long enough to respond. “I am Jang-mi.”

“Thank you for helping me, Jang-mi. Where are we?”

“This village is known as Kojang-ni.” For the first time, a smile crossed her face. “However, you will not find it on many maps. It is much too small to be noticed.”

“I’ll bet. Look, how far do I need to go to hoof it back to my own lines?”

“It is only a few miles,” she said.

“Just point me in the right direction and I’ll be on my way.”

She shook her head. “There is a problem.”

“Yeah?”

“The Chinese are much closer.”

“This is North Korea, sweetheart. There are always some Chinese around.”

“These are not just patrols. There is an entire army moving in this direction.”

That was news to Miller. He hadn’t heard anything about that. He thought about those tiny UN outposts that he had seen from the air. It didn’t seem like they knew anything about an entire army approaching, either.

“Doesn’t sound good.”

“No. That is why we must go now.”

* * *

Wu and his makeshift patrol raced in the direction where he had last seen the enemy pilot’s parachute.

“Hurry, hurry!” he urged them, wishing that he’d had time to assemble a better team. He had simply grabbed any available man with a weapon in his hands. There had not been time for anything else.

Of course, Wu was no tracker, but he knew the general vicinity where the parachute had gone down. Deng was much better at such work, seeming to make his way almost effortlessly through the bushes that grabbed and clawed at Wu’s legs and elbows. He recalled that Deng had grown up as a peasant, trapping rabbits and other game in the countryside. He was more than familiar with the outdoors.

Wu pushed Deng forward, indicating that he should lead the patrol. “Go!” he said.

Deng did not hesitate, but plunged ahead, leading the way. He found some sort of game trail, trotting down it, and the others fell into line behind him.

Wu was just behind Deng, but did not trust that the others would keep up. He waved his pistol at them in a threatening gesture, repeating, “Hurry!”

The game trail led to a larger path, and then to an old road with grass growing down the middle and deep cart ruts at the edges. Free of the brush, they continued to move at a trot.

Up ahead, Deng pointed. Wu spotted a trace of smoke in the sky. No Chinese soldier would have been foolish enough for that. Smoke brought the enemy planes with their bombs and Napalm down upon them, so any sort of campfires were expressly forbidden by the PLA officers. Could there be a village ahead? The hills were dotted with them.

Wu was too out of breath to question Deng about where he thought they were headed. They ran on.

Minutes later, the mountain road emerged into a clearing that revealed the small village that had been the source of the smoke. Deng pointed again, this time at group of figures scurrying through the fields beyond the village. The four figures disappeared into the wooded thicket, but not before Wu got a glimpse of a man who was clearly Caucasian and much larger than the slightly built villagers running beside him.

“This way,” Wu urged, and ran toward the village.

* * *

From the road, Miller heard a distant shout.

“What was that?”

“Go!” Jang-mi grabbed his hand. “They are here!”

Some of the young men who had made up Jang-mi’s patrol had shed their weapons and blended in with the other villagers. However, one young man and the old man with the wispy beard still held their rifles. They ran with Miller and Jang-mi out of the village, across a nearby field.

Miller realized that they had gotten out of Dodge not a moment too soon. He glanced back and saw a Chinese officer approaching the gathered villagers. Beside him was a soldier carrying a rifle with a telescopic sight. A sniper. He had not even been aware that the Chinese had snipers. That was just great. Miller kept his head down and two steps later he and the others were hidden by the dense thicket.

* * *

As Major Wu approached, he saw that the villagers stood in a group, as if they had either been expecting company — or had just greeted a visitor. There were about twenty people, dressed in various homespun outfits and one or two of the older men wearing the peculiar flat-brimmed straw hats of traditional Koreans. Their dress and simple dwellings spoke of poverty and hardship, while their faces betrayed nothing as they greeted Wu and his men.

Wu smiled. It was not a welcoming smile. With him, it was a facial expression that conveyed the opposite of happiness.

“The American pilot, where are you hiding him?” Wu demanded in passable Korean, a language that was a close cousin of Chinese. He was still panting from the effort of racing down the old mountain road.

He did not feel like running off after the trio they had spotted, and there was no guarantee that he and his men would have caught them, anyhow. Not with that head start.

Wu was sure that if these peasants were anything like the ones in China, that they had a designated place where they went in times of trouble. It was how villagers survived centuries of constant invasion and warfare. It was where they would have hidden the pilot.

The villagers looked at Wu, and then at one another. No one spoke.

Wu looked at Deng and nodded.

Deng raised his rifle and then seemed to hesitate, but he was only picking his victim. His muzzle settled on one of the old men wearing the ridiculous hats.

“You,” Wu said to the old man. “Tell me where the American pilot was taken.”

“Who?” the old man asked, his lined face like a mask of innocence.

Wu nodded at Deng, who pulled the trigger and shot the old man in the chest. He slumped down in the dirt, his silly hat rolling away.

“Where—“ Wu started to shout his question again, but the villagers were not staying around to answer. Instead, they scattered. Some ran into their huts, while others snatched up children and ran for the woods.

Deng shot one of the fleeing villagers between the shoulder blades.

The soldiers accompanying Wu looked on in stunned silence but made no effort to join in the slaughter.

“Shoot them!” Wu ordered. “Shoot them all!”

When the soldiers did not act right away, Wu reached over and smacked one in the head with the muzzle of his pistol.

That got the soldiers’ attention and they finally started shooting, but their hearts weren’t in it. Some fired over the villagers’ heads. Others fired directly into the air. They could not be ordered into being murderers.

Only Deng seemed intent on killing. He fired again, hitting a young teenage boy who had made the mistake of halting and staring back at the soldiers in defiance. He died clutching his chest in agony, then writhed on the ground.

The villagers had scattered like rabbits. In disgust, Wu ordered the shooting to stop. He would have liked to go from hut to hut, punishing the villagers for their insolence toward Chinese soldiers, but there was no time for that.

Wu walked over to the cooking fire, stepping over the body of the old man. He grabbed a burning stick from the fire and threw it into the thatch of the nearest hut. Tinder dry, the thatch smoldered for only a few moments before flames began to lick across the roof. From inside, he heard whimpers of fear. The flames spread, but no one came running out.

Wu had no patience for seeing how long the villagers could withstand the fire.

“Follow me,” he shouted, then started across the field toward where they had last seen the American pilot.

* * *

Cole and the kid hurried toward the distant sound of shooting as fast as they could. There I go again, Cole thought. Headed straight toward trouble. Grinning to himself, he reckoned that he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“What do you think is going on, Cole?”

“Sounds one-sided to me,” he said. “The gunshots all sound the same, like nobody is shooting back.”

“What do you suppose that means.”

“I don’t know, but we’re gonna find out.”

Lately, Cole had noticed that he didn’t hear as well as he used to. Well, that wasn’t quite true. He heard just as good, but there was a constant ringing in his ears whenever he was in a quiet place. An Army medic had told him it was tinnitus, caused by frequent exposure to loud noises like rifle shots, which was kind of hard to avoid as a soldier. Hell, half the artillerymen and tankers were just plain deaf, so he was way ahead of them.

They pushed their way through the brush, less worried now about the noise that they were making. Cole figured that any Chinese patrols in the area were doing the same thing that he and the kid were, which was to head toward the sound of gunfire ahead.

One thing about the Korean landscape was that it was just plain ugly. The hills and mountains were mostly barren, with the exception of scrub trees and brushy thickets. Back home, the Appalachian Mountains were lush with forests of chestnut, oak, and maple. God, he missed that, along with the smell of the fresh mountain air in summer or even the crackling leaves underfoot in the fall and winter. Down in the low places here, the air smelled mostly of the human excrement that the local farmers used to fertilize their crops of rice and cabbages.

A few more steps, and Cole emerged into a clearing. Signaling for the kid to stay put under cover, he crouched low and swept his rifle around, but they were alone. He waved the kid out.

“What is this place?” the kid asked.

Cole saw what appeared to be an ancient stone wall, half-covered in vines. The wall reached about ten feet high and it appeared to be several feet deep, with some sort of ruins hugging the top of the wall. In the shelter of the wall, a handful of actual trees had grown. They looked like hornbeams to Cole — a tree he hadn’t seen much of in these parts. The smooth bark rippled as if with huge corded muscles.

To the left of the wall there was a narrow road that stretched off into the hills to the north. Tufts of grass grew down the center of the road, but the wagon ruts looked fresh.

“I’ve seen these places before. It’s an old hill fort. People were fighting over Korea a long time before we got here.”

“I don’t know why.”

Cole guffawed. “That makes two of us.”

He moved into the clearing, his hunter’s eyes noticing at once that someone had been here recently. Some of the rough grass was trampled. Above, a few branches hung down where they had been snapped off. At first glance, it was puzzling to say what could have reached that high.

He looked into some of the bushes at the edge of the clearing and found what he was looking for. Reaching in, he dragged out a handful of silken material.

“Looks like our friend was here.”

“But where is he now?”

Cole nodded in the direction in which they had been moving. “I’d say he’s in trouble. Time to leg it, boy.”

They crossed the clearing and back into the endless thicket. The sound of gunfire had ended and the sudden quiet seemed ominous. When Cole looked up, he could see a column of thick smoke roiling into the sky. Not far now. In five more minutes of wrestling through the underbrush, they were close enough that Cole could smell the smoke. He heard someone sobbing, then a keening wail. The brush fell away and Cole found himself looking down on a village. What he saw down there made his jaw drop and his hands clench his rifle.

“God almighty,” he said.

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