Hunt the Dragon

Chapter Twenty

He was on his hands and knees, using the lid of the PRS kit to dig a hole about a foot away from a modest-sized tree, which would help to disperse the smoke. A gust of wind blew up his back and he shivered. Akil sat six feet away, gently rubbing blood into Dawkins’s arm. He saw Crocker staring at him and stopped.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“You hear something, boss?”

“No. Did you?”

He couldn’t remember what he had determined about their present location, but he thought it must have been acceptable, because they were still there, and he was digging.

He’d constructed so many Dakota fire pits that he could make one in his sleep, which was essentially what he was doing now. He saw Jenny at two and a half, standing in a wading pool in the backyard holding her arms out to him. He tossed a beach ball, which sailed between her outstretched arms and bounced off her nose.

He started laughing.

“What’s so funny, boss?” Akil asked.

“I was remembering something.”

He blinked and looked down, and was surprised as how much progress he’d made. The main hole was about fourteen inches deep and eight inches wide. He’d already completed a narrower outlet hole at a slight angle on the windward side that intersected with the bottom of the pit. This would provide the fire with oxygen and keep it burning. Now all he had to do was fill the pit with the kindling he’d gathered and light it.

Which he did now, using the ferrocerium rod and rubbing his knife into it at a thirty-degree angle. The spark produced by the metal lit one of the open packets of treated cotton tinder. He tossed it into the pit and covered it with kindling, then set progressively larger sticks over the little flames.

They grew larger. The hotter the fire got, the more oxygen it sucked into the tunnel.

“You can laugh to yourself all you want, as long as you get shit done,” Akil remarked.

“Thanks, douchebag.”

Together they carried Sam closer and huddled around the fire. Akil cleaned the metal PRS kit holder in a nearby stream and filled it with fresh water. Crocker heated it over the fire, poured some into the lid, and passed it to Dawkins, who sipped some, then passed it to Sam.

“You’re a fucking genius,” Akil said as he refilled the lid and passed it to Crocker.

The water warmed Crocker’s insides. “No, I’m a frogman.”

“Same thing, only different.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

Akil’s wide face creased into a grin. “It means you’re feeling better. Later we’ll go looking for some Korean babes to keep us warm.”

“You’re crazier than me, and always have been.”

“Crazy keeps me sane.”

Now that Crocker’s mind was clearer, he realized that he’d forgotten to examine Sam. In the reflected light from the fire he cut away the right leg of Sam’s wet suit. His ankle was completely dislocated, and the fibula and tibia had both sustained compound open-wound fractures. The pain had to be excruciating, yet as far as he knew, Sam hadn’t swallowed any medicine, nor had he complained.

Most of what Crocker found in the med kit were Israeli bandages, tourniquets, tape, QuikClot, and triangular bandages-more suited to dealing with combat wounds. At the bottom of Suarez’s pack he found a universal SAM splint and a vial of extra-strength Motrin.

He fed Sam two pills, cleaned the wounds, and stabilized his ankle by placing the splint around the bottom of his bare foot, wrapping it around both sides of his ankle and securing the aluminum alloy bands with a bandage and tape.

Crocker slept for thirty minutes and woke up remembering Suarez, Naylor, and Hutchins. He asked Akil, who was still awake, to watch the camp and keep the fire going while he went back to look for them.

“Is that smart, boss? You want the pistol?”

“You keep it. Guard the camp.”

At the beach he looked out over the bay and saw that the Ung-do complex was no longer burning. Patrol boats and helicopters with searchlights traversed the seas south, west, and even east of the island. None of them bothered to look north.

Eventually they’ll turn this way, he said to himself, trying to be realistic. Their current vulnerable state afforded no margin for error. Nor could they rely on hope.

He searched up and down the beach along the east side of the peninsula, then along the little area that jutted south, then west, making sure to walk along the water’s edge so as not to leave footprints.

No sign of Suarez, Naylor, or Hutchins. No wreckage from the SDV, either. He gazed south one last time, praying that they were still alive and hadn’t been captured.

Then he searched the beach again and tried not to feel sad.

He awoke stiff from his neck down and squinted into the sun shining through the leaves. The air carried the scent of burning wood. He saw Akil cleaning and drying his SIG Sauer by the fire pit. Sam lay beside him, sleeping. As Crocker stretched, he noticed that the skin around Sam’s ankle was purple and swollen.

“How long did I sleep?” he whispered. “Where’s Dawkins?”

“He went to the stream to wash himself.”

“This isn’t a fucking camping trip. You shouldn’t have let him go alone.”

“He insisted. I think he shit himself.”

“Which way’d he go?”

Akil pointed to his left-generally east.

Crocker pushed through bushes still wearing the smart suit and Merrell boots. Past a patch of honeysuckle, he saw Dawkins naked except for a gray T-shirt, with the water midway up his thighs-pale, vulnerable, and lost in his own thoughts. He was the kind of guy Crocker had passed hundreds of times in the mall and never given a thought to. He was the quiet, smart, physically meek student he used to terrorize in school.

Crocker had never asked him about the circumstances of his captivity, but wanted to. Now, as he stepped down the embankment toward the six-foot-wide stream, he saw something move up ahead on his right. The flash of a blue shirt, and then a boy of maybe seven holding a bamboo fishing pole. The kid turned right when he reached the stream and walked away from them, disappearing around a bend.

Back in the clearing, Crocker knelt beside Akil and said, “There are people living nearby, which means of one of us has to recce this end of the peninsula. You know anything about it?”

“From what I remember reading, it’s sparsely populated. Small family farms and swampland. The population centers are farther south.”

“The other thing we’ve got to do is locate an exfil site big enough to land a helicopter,” Crocker said. “If we find one that’s far enough from civilization, we’ll signal tonight.”

“Sounds like you’ve been thinking.”

“If we don’t find one, we’ll keep moving and searching, which won’t be easy with Sam. But if we follow the stream and use the purification tablets, we should have plenty of water. We also need to start looking for food.”

“Prime rib?”

“Fish heads and rabbit balls. I’ll set some traps.”

An hour later, while Crocker was boiling water, a Russian-made Mi-14 helicopter passed overhead, then banked left back over the bay and returned. They hid under the thickest foliage they could find and waited. After a half-dozen passes it moved on.

After the sun went down, they feasted on two large trout Akil had speared in the stream, drank water, and rested by the fire. Shortly after midnight they broke camp, covered the fire pit, and hiked three-quarters of a mile northeast, picking their way through pine trees and swamp to a camping area that had been cleared near the beach with two rotting picnic tables. The overgrown narrow dirt road that fed it from the north looked like it hadn’t been used in months.

While Akil, Sam, and Dawkins waited in the woods, Crocker stood in the clearing and activated the Emerson GPS distress marker for a full minute, then flashed it three times according to the prearranged emergency signal. He repeated the process three more times and waited. When an hour passed and no one came, he signaled again.

Crocker repeated the same sequence for the next three hours, while Akil sat with Sam and Dawkins. Straining his ears for the sound of an approaching helicopter, he grew frustrated. The signal from the Emerson distress marker wouldn’t last forever, and they had no extra batteries.

Figuring that there was a possibility that the North Koreans had picked up the signal, he joined the others and they hiked as fast as they could two miles north along the beach, skirting several huts, until he found what he thought was a suitable clearing. They made makeshift beds of twigs and dried grass to elevate their bodies off the cold ground. Then Sam, Dawkins, and Akil slept while Crocker kept watch.

As the sun spread its fingers across the sky Crocker considered the possible reasons why the Carl Vinson’s rescue team hadn’t responded-weather, mechanical problems, North Korean air patrols. He decided there was no reason to lose hope. They would try again tonight and every night after that until the battery wore out. Then he’d think of something else.

Three nights later, Davis sat in the Tactical Operations Center (TOC) on the Carl Vinson, positioned approximately eighteen nautical miles from the Hamgyong Peninsula, staring at the large digital map of North Korea in front of him, praying for a red beacon to appear. Even though the clock on the wall read 0213 hours, the dark room was still crowded with more than a dozen male and female techs sitting before screens and computer terminals, monitoring nearby ships, aircraft, and weather.

Davis had spent the past several nights and mornings right here, watching in frustration as the emergency beacon moved north up the east side of the peninsula, and the Air-sea Rescue Team (ART) failed to respond. He had volunteered to be part of the four-man team that would fly on the specially designed stealth Blackhawk helicopter-the same one used in the Bin Laden raid-that waited fully fueled and geared up on the Vinson’s flight deck. All he, the other three members of the team, and the 160th SOAR Night Stalker pilot and copilot needed was a go order from the carrier’s commander, Vice Admiral Stanley Greene, who had been granted final authority by the commanders at SOCOM in Tampa, and they’d be aloft.

The first night the emergency beacon had showed on the screen, Greene ordered the rescue team to stand down because of the number of North Korean air patrols in the area. The second night he used the excuse of unstable weather. Last night he’d explained that the survivors on the ground were signaling close to a populated area. Davis had pointed out that the latest satellite imagery and heat signatures indicated that it was only a collection of small farms about four miles from the site.

Now Davis willed so hard for the beacon to appear that his head hurt. Those were his teammates on the ground. All of them alive and uninjured, he hoped. Even though he had a wife and two young children waiting at home in Virginia Beach, part of him remained with his teammates, in enemy territory, looking for a way out.

The first satellite images of the destroyed Ung-do facility, received a day and a half ago, had filled him with an enormous sense of pride. That was quickly giving way to frustration and anger. Davis considered himself thoughtful and reasonable-the kind of person who saw all sides of a dispute. But now he couldn’t understand why officers on the Carl Vinson weren’t willing to take the risks and launch the rescue.

Last night he’d tried to convince the Blackhawk pilot to disobey orders. When that failed, he had unleashed his frustration on the ship’s operations officer, calling him “a disgrace to his uniform” and “a fucking coward.”

He apologized later, at breakfast. That wasn’t like him, he explained. He was usually the mellowest guy on the team, referred to by his teammates as “surfer dude” because of his laid-back demeanor and blond hair.

Now the same operations officer looked back at him and shrugged. Davis glanced up at the clock. Another ten minutes had passed, and the beacon still hadn’t appeared. His stomach roiled and he started to sweat as he realized that it was growing too late to launch a rescue tonight.

One of the technicians squeezed Davis’s shoulder as he headed for the exit.

“Maybe tomorrow night,” he said. “Don’t give up hope.”

The twenty-two men and two women who made up North Korea’s military and political leadership had been stunned by the attack, which completely disabled Office 39’s operation, resulted in the death of its leader, the Dragon, and set back their nuclear program five to ten years. As they waited in the plush red velvet seats in the beige marble conference room under military headquarters in downtown Pyongyang, they knew they should expect reprisals.

They had been sitting for two hours now, waiting for their thirty-two-year-old Supreme Leader to appear and rail at them. All of them secretly wanted that. They hoped for a catharsis, a cleansing, followed by a call to action. That they could accept. It would help them map the future. What they were hearing instead was that the Supreme Leader had literally become sick with humiliation. So sick, in fact, that he couldn’t fathom a response to the attack.

He had reputedly told an aide, “There’s no point trying to cover the whole sky with the palm of your hand,” a variation of a Korean proverb. What the Supreme Leader had meant by it was the subject of much speculation. Maybe he was saying they had been deluding themselves into believing that they were a strong country, and this attack had revealed that they were weak. Maybe that’s why he was allowing himself to feel humiliated.

The men and women in the room-with one or two exceptions-shared a deep sense of insecurity. They weren’t ignorant people. All of them had traveled to China, Russia, and Japan. They’d seen smuggled videos and DVDs from the United States and Europe. They knew their country was essentially backward. If they had any chance of remaining in power and continuing to enjoy the special perks they had been given, they knew they needed to be ruthless, vigilant, and clever.

Still, five days after it had occurred, little was known about the attack. No bodies had been discovered, no equipment had been found, and no surveillance video had survived the devastating explosion. None of their radar installations had reported violations of North Korean airspace, and no foreign ships or submarines had been detected by sonar. The only evidence that had been found were small, unmarked pieces of some kind of underwater vehicle that had washed up near Munchon. Some speculated that the attack was a South Korean response to the sinking of its Pohang corvette two years earlier. Others suspected that there had been some inside collusion, perhaps supported by the United States and South Korea.

The red light flashed near the door above the Supreme Leader’s chair, and the room grew still and silent. But in place of Kim Jong-un, it was Dak-ho Gun-san, the wizened interior minister, who descended the steps and took his place behind the podium. The skin under his right eye was swollen and blackened, and a bandage covered the side of his face. According to rumor, the night Dak-ho reported the attack and death of General Chou to the Supreme Leader, a pajama-clad Kim Jong-un had grabbed a brass figurine of his grandfather from his desk and thrown it at Dak-ho, hitting him in the face.

Now Dak-ho’s voice quivered with outrage as he read a list of the names of those present who the Supreme Leader had declared enemies of the state. As these men and woman heard their names, they slumped in their seats and wept. Soldiers in tan uniforms quickly handcuffed them and led them away. They left in unimaginable anguish, knowing that their careers were over and that their wives, husbands, and children had probably been arrested, too. All of them, including former minister Dak-ho Gun-san, would spend the rest of their lives in one of the country’s political prisons, scavenging for food like animals.

A light rain started to fall as Dawkins watched Crocker and Akil standing outside the primitive shelter they had constructed from the two Kevlar blankets, tossing leaves over the top so they wouldn’t be visible from the air. Six days had passed since his liberation. During that time, he was sure he was either going to die or be recaptured and put to death.

In the moments when he wasn’t numb with exhaustion and fear, he sometimes resented what these brave men had done. Maybe, he thought, it would have been better had they left him alone in his cell to be blown up with the rest of the underground complex. That way, he wouldn’t face almost certain torture, and his wife and daughter would be left alone.

Yet the more time he spent with Akil, Sam, and Crocker, the more he started to believe in them and to adopt their the-only-easy-day-was-yesterday approach. Crocker fascinated him. He was a man who never showed fear or disappointment. Even now that the batteries in the emergency beacon had died, he seemed to take it in stride and remain optimistic that they would be rescued or find their way to safety. From the way the men casually joked with one another and went about the business of hunting for food, collecting wood, finding water, and walking through enemy territory at night carrying Sam and never complaining, you would have thought they were on a camping trip in an American national park.

“I love danger,” Akil had confided to him. “It turns me on.”

When he first said it, Dawkins thought he was just trying to boost his spirits. Now Dawkins believed him. Today the Egyptian American had entertained them with stories of moving to the States when he was six, joining the marines, and the many women he had pursued and bedded-Dutch twins in Mexico who kept him up all night and left in the morning with all his clothes, the Jewish stripper from Boston he had run into in Dubai, the female diving champion who would make love only underwater. He talked about them all with so much enthusiasm and affection that they became real. He remembered their scents, eccentricities, the way they walked and the sounds they made in bed.

The more Akil talked about women, the closer Dawkins felt to Nan. He realized that his modesty and shame about his body had caused him to miss a lot. Life was richer than he had realized. People were filled with pathos, humor, courage, and some kind of magic.

When he asked Akil how he remained so centered and optimistic, the rough man responded by pointing to his head and said, “It all comes from here. What we achieve inwardly changes outer reality.”

“Is that a Muslim belief?”

“No, I think it came from a guy named Plutarch.”

“Plutarch the Roman philosopher. Did you study him in college?”

“No. Never went.”

“Then where did you come across that concept?”

“I read it on the shitter door of a yoga studio. It’s stuck in my head ever since.”

Crocker might have appeared untroubled, but in fact he spent most of his time trying to figure out how they were going to make it to safety, given their dwindling supplies. Now that the juice had run out of the batteries in the GPS tracker, their chances of being rescued were almost zero.

What he didn’t know was that the morning after the batteries ran out, an enraged Davis walked into the Vice Admiral Greene’s office and punched him in the face, breaking his jaw.

A half-moon peeked through the branches of the Japanese red pines as they trudged, Crocker and Akil carrying Sam on the jerry-rigged stretcher and Dawkins walking on his own. Sam’s ankle had become infected and they’d run out of Motrin, so the Korean American had to suck it up, which he did without complaint. Since they had run out of disinfectant as well, Crocker lanced the infection every day and cleansed the wound with boiled water.

After six nights of walking, Crocker and company had reached the top of Hamgyong Peninsula. The closer they drew to the mainland, the more farms and clusters of huts they saw. So far they hadn’t run into barking dogs, which was odd. Akil joked that the North Koreans had eaten them all, and Crocker thought he was probably right.

They were roughly 110 miles north of the South Korean border. On a good night they managed to progress from eight to ten miles over footpaths through forests, swamps, and fields. It helped that the streams that ran down the peninsula to the bay provided a steady supply of food and water. Crocker expected both to become harder to secure now that they approached denser population centers along the southeast coast. According to the map, the terrain ahead was mountainous, and they would have to cross at least two major rivers before they could continue south to the cities of Munchon and Wonsan.

The terrain and climate reminded Crocker of woods of New Hampshire. He’d camped in them often-intimate days and nights with his mother, father, sister, and older brother dining on grilled chicken and baked beans, followed by his dad pointing out the constellations and telling jokes and stories.

Crocker recalled a story his father told about a widow who fell in love with a rich nobleman. The nobleman wouldn’t marry her because he didn’t want to raise another man’s offspring, so the widow drowned her children in a nearby river. When she told the nobleman what she had done, he was horrified and wanted nothing more to do with her. She went to the river hoping to retrieve her children. Unable to find them, she drowned herself and was condemned to wander the waterways of the world, searching for her children and weeping until the end of time.

Akil, leading the way, entered a clearing alongside a stream and stopped. They set down the stretcher and looked for a place to cross. Crocker checked his watch-0314 hours. The stream was about twenty feet wide, and there were no bridges in sight.

“What do you think?” Akil asked.

“Let’s try to cross here, and look for a place to sleep on the other side.”

“Okay, boss. You wait here while I test it.”

Akil handed him his web belt and holster with the SIG Sauer with two remaining mags, waded into the ice-cold water, and came out shivering and raising his thumb.

Seconds later they entered together-Akil and Crocker carrying the stretcher with Sam, and Dawkins beside them. Crocker held the stretcher over his head and was concentrating on his footing when he heard Dawkins cry “Look!”

On their right, past a bend downstream, a brown bear was in the water, presumably looking for fish. It stopped, turned, rose up on its rear legs, and roared. The noise startled Dawkins, who slipped and fell. In the moonlight, Crocker saw that the current was hurling Dawkins back toward the shore they had come from, about twenty feet ahead, and was moving so fast that when he tried to slow himself by grabbing a boulder, he smacked into it chin first and went under.

“Wait!” Crocker said to Akil. “I’m going after him.”

Akil seemed to intuit exactly what he wanted him to do, taking the stretcher and balancing it over his head.

Crocker dove into the current, which carried him past the boulder as if he were on a ride at a water park. He used it to push off, and tried to locate Dawkins by his pale shirt. Eight feet ahead he saw an arm and let the powerful current take him until he was able to reach up under Dawkins’s shoulder and neck, and pull his head out of the water.

Dawkins coughed up water, and the bear roared again. But the current was strong and they had no way to stop. When Crocker glanced to the right he saw the bear watching from thirty feet away. Dawkins spotted him, too, and started to panic and pull away.

“Relax!”

He held Dawkins tightly to his chest with his right arm and let the current carry them past the bear, to a bend in the stream where the water was shallow and they could easily walk ashore. The roaring bear was so close they could smell his rancid breath.

“Run,” Dawkins whispered.

Crocker reached out and stopped him. “Unwise.”

The bear rose with a fish clenched in his left paw like a trophy, spun, and ambled off into the woods.