Hunt the Dragon

Chapter Twenty-Two

They had camped in a thicket at the base of a hill and slept for several hours. As the sun started to rise, they were attacked by swarms of flies and mosquitoes, and a very foul smell that blew in from the west. Despite the discomfort, Crocker determined that it was too dangerous to move. Not until he scouted the area. So while Dawkins, Sam, and Akil covered themselves with the blankets and tarp and tried to rest, he set out alone.

It was an overcast spring day of moderate temperature with long streaks of gray in the sky-some dark, others taking on an almost lavender hue. The sweet smell of wildflowers and new leaves was blotted out by thick, disgusting rot whenever the wind blew. It caught in Crocker’s throat as he peered from behind bushes to look for signs of human life. Saw no houses, roads, or farms to the south or west. His view north and east was hindered by tall trees two hundred meters away.

Using whatever he could find for cover, he picked his way west to the base of a hill covered with the same red pines they had seen on the peninsula. The hill rose several hundred meters, with a rough, rocky base and no trails or roads leading upward.

As he used a branch to pull himself up, two jets ripped through the sky. He traced their dark profiles under the layers of cloud.

MiGs of some sort, he thought. Ridiculous fucking country.

Dang had explained that while the government spent most of its money on its million-man army, navy, and air force, a sizable segment of the estimated twenty-million-strong population was starving. He, his wife, and son were lucky, Dang said, because not only did he earn a modest salary as assistant manager of the local government farming cooperative, but they also grew crops of their own on their little plot of land. Especially in the northern part of the country, thousands of adults and children died each year from malnutrition. Thousands of others succumbed to dehydration and dysentery, which they got from eating roots, leaves, or cobs of unripe corn.

Sick, Crocker thought as he climbed three-quarters of the way up and started to circle south. Isn’t the first responsibility of any country to take care of its people? Sure, protecting them is important, but what’s the point of protecting them if they’re starving to death?

On the south side of the hill, the stench was stronger. Past the branches of some pines, he saw what looked like the tin roof of a guard tower below. He stopped, gathered himself, and, carefully proceeded west to a gap in the trees that afforded a better view.

What he saw took his breath away-a field stretching as far south as he could see, surrounded by a fifty-foot-high fence topped with barbed wire and guard towers. Scattered willy-nilly within the fences were very primitive lean-tos made from sheet metal and wood, and rusting shipping containers. Along the west fence stood a long warehouse-like structure with four large smokestacks emitting thick black smoke. Stacked at the far end were pyramids of tires.

When he looked closer, he saw that the men, women, and children carrying tires out of the plant were sticklike figures, so emaciated and gaunt that it was surprising they could even move, let alone lift or push anything.

Anger rose from the pit of his stomach. When he focused on the field of refuse that took up most of the camp, he was even more repulsed. Lying on the ground like clumps of garbage were people of all ages who appeared too weak to stand. Some had covered themselves with scraps of cardboard, paper, and wood.

Crocker was clenching his jaw so hard his teeth started to hurt.

How can people justify doing this kind of shit to one another? This is as evil as the most depraved images I’ve seen of the Nazi holocaust, and it exists today!

He wanted to do something-tear the fences down, or shout to the world about the camp’s existence. All he could do in the present was shake his head and ask, What the hell is wrong with mankind?

He had decided not to tell the others, so as not to dampen their spirits further. In fact, he wasn’t sure what to do with the information as he sat on his haunches between Dawkins and Akil, eating rice and sipping water, and thinking about home, and government, and why it was important not to vest power in any one party or individual. The founding fathers had gotten that right. You couldn’t trust anyone who wanted control over others.

Maybe the impulse itself was wrong. He felt a jittery uncertainty gnaw at the edges of his stomach as the sky turned dark and rain started to fall. What was a person’s responsibility when confronted with unthinkable evil like the one he had just seen? The answer involved some strange moral calculus that he couldn’t grasp in his current state. He had excuses-his responsibility to the men on his team, the fact that they were wanted men in an enemy country, their weakened condition and limited options. But none of them quieted his conscience, which twitched with outrage.

At least the rain diminished the smell as they packed their few belongings and continued south, across a field of knee-high corn and into the shrubbery along a ribbon of water. Frogs croaked, reminding him of summer. He and his brother loved catching fireflies. His brother had gone from precocious kid to long-haired drug dealer and user to responsible businessman and father. What is he doing now? What would he think of the camp I saw earlier? Would he tell me that as an American it wasn’t any of my business? If he said that, he’d be fucking wrong!

A light appeared in the distance and he stopped, knelt, and pumped his arm up and down to indicate to the others to drop, too. He heard gears grinding. In a field, a truck turned so that its lights faced northwest and stopped. The echo of men shouting reached their ears.

“You think they’re looking for us?” asked Dawkins at his elbow.

The rain hissed and splattered. He wiped the water from his brow and saw another truck approach and park parallel to the other one. The second truck appeared to be pulling a trailer. Both trucks left their headlights on and engines running.

“Don’t know.”

Men moved in front of the lights, casting shadows. He remembered Akil’s SIG Sauer, which he now carried tucked into a rope around his waist, and the fact that the mag in it had only six rounds.

“What should we do?” Dawkins asked with fear creeping into his voice.

He waited a minute to see if more trucks and soldiers would arrive. They didn’t. Thirty feet ahead, in the middle of the field, stood a mound of earth the size of a small car. Atop it was a dying tree, and surrounding it was dense foliage.

“Let’s hide over there,” Crocker whispered.

They hurried low to the ground. The trucks hadn’t moved, and the figures remained clustered around them. From where Crocker and company now waited, there was no cover to the south, only a fallow field of weeds and wildflowers that stretched half a mile.

“We’ll wait here until they leave,” Crocker whispered to the men huddled around him. Sam’s faced appeared twisted in pain. Crocker removed the last two aspirin from the vial Dang had given them.

“Take these.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Take one, at least.”

Akil tilted the bottle of water and helped Sam wash it down.

“While we’re here and it’s raining, we should capture more water in the tarp and pans. You guys stay low and cover yourselves with the Kevlar. I’m gonna to try to find out what’s going on with the trucks.”

“Boss, maybe that’s not so smart.”

Akil’s words glanced off Crocker’s back as he hurried west. When he closed within a hundred meters of the trucks, he stopped and squatted in a row of new corn. The headlights shone almost directly in his eyes. Squinting, he saw figures standing near the front of the first truck and what looked like shorter, thinner people unloading objects from the backs of the vehicles.

What the hell are they doing?

He continued another fifty meters, then pushed south in a long, wide arc until he reached a row of bushes. Here the thick smell of human decay entered his nose and throat again, and he thought for a moment he’d be sick. It was a smell he’d experienced before but never gotten used to-like the reek of a putrefying animal, only a hundred times worse.

From this vantage, perpendicular to the trucks, he saw frail, gaunt figures-short, like teenage boys and girls-unloading naked bodies and carrying or dragging them to what appeared to be a long trench. He counted twenty teenagers in rags, and as he did, his whole body started to burn with rage. He couldn’t even begin to count the number of bodies, because the trucks were large, and stacked high.

Sick, evil fucks…

From here he couldn’t determine the number of guards and drivers, so he continued west, past the front of the vehicles. Now he made out several uniformed guards standing beside the farther truck-the one without the trailer-holding AK-47s. One guard was wearing a rain poncho with a hood and had a cigarette clenched in his teeth.

As one of the teenagers passed him, dragging a corpse, the guard kicked the kid in the back so that he stumbled, let go of the body, and fell into the trench. The uniformed man threw his head back and issued a shrill, high laugh that hit Crocker in the face like a Mike Tyson uppercut.

His anger sent him scurrying closer on his hands and knees. The teenagers moved past like zombies, their knees, ribs, and cheekbones sticking out at sharp angles, while the guards with the guns made comments and cracked jokes.

Outrage, disgust, fury, and the conviction that someone had to pay for this motivated him to return the way he had come until he reached the back of the trailerless truck. Waiting until the coast was clear, then scooting under the rear axle, he removed the suppressor from his belt and screwed it into the barrel of the SIG Sauer thinking that his colleagues were far enough away to escape should something happen to him.

Crocker slowly crawled forward, located the legs of the guard wearing the poncho, and came up slowly. He was so close he could hear the guard clearing this throat, then spitting at the back of one of the teenagers.

The girl turned to face the guard. That’s when Crocker rose, aimed, and put a bullet in the base of the guard’s skull just below the green helmet. His head exploded and he fell forward, the sound drowned out by the noise of the engines. No one seemed to notice. Not even the girl, who turned away with dead eyes and continued pushing the body toward the trench.

The kids did their grim work silently. The rain hissed. Steam rose from the headlights to Crocker’s right.

Five more rounds.

He cut down the second guard with a shot between his shoulder blades that tore through his heart.

Four.

The driver of the truck saw the guard slump and leaned out of the cab to see what was going on. Crocker sprang out from under the truck and yanked the driver’s leg out from under him so he slipped and hit his head on the metal step. Finished him off with a swipe of his knife across his throat.

Thunder rolled in from the north like a reproach.

Two guards down, one driver.

He skirted around the front of the trailerless truck low to the ground, wet from head to toe, forgetting the smell, where he was, everything except the task in front of him. Crouched near the right front bumper, he saw the back of another guard, his AK propped on his shoulder. Crocker rose, aimed, and squeezed the trigger in one continuous motion.

The bullet entered under the guard’s chin and clanged as it hit the top of his helmet. Almost immediately another uniformed man at the front of the second truck lowered his AK and fired. The first shot tore through Crocker’s left shoulder and into his collarbone. The second whizzed past his chin as he dove into the man’s chest, causing him to fall backward and let go of his AK, which flipped and landed on the back of Crocker’s leg. Partly stunned, Crocker reached behind his back and grabbed the barrel as the guard reached for his pistol. Two kids dragging bodies stopped and stared in disbelief as Crocker drove the butt of the AK into the guard’s throat.

Behind him he heard footsteps, but was blinded by the headlights. Breathing hard, he circled left around the trailerless truck, then slipped and fell so that the AK he carried slithered into the trench and disappeared in a mound of twisted limbs and torsos. Glimpsing the horror frozen on a dead’s woman’s face, he decided not to go in after it, and felt for the SIG Sauer in the wet grass instead.

He found it but couldn’t remember if it had one round left or two. Covered with mud and blood, he spotted a driver forty feet ahead of him running in the direction of the camp. The rain had picked up, making it harder to gain traction, but Crocker pulled himself up and pushed. Got within twenty feet of the driver, and was trying to aim in the dark when the man turned and fired three shots in succession that barely missed Crocker’s head.

He shot back, then slipped and hit the ground with his chin. On his belly, he heard the sound of feet running past. Thought for a second that they belonged to soldiers, then realized it was the young prisoners running away.

Noticing the dark splotch of blood that had traveled all the way down his chest to the top of his pants, he limped back to the trucks. In the glove compartment of the first one he found a Type 54 Chinese military pistol and two egg-shaped Soviet F1 hand grenades. He ripped a web belt from one of the dead guards and tightened it under his arm as a makeshift tourniquet.

Then he hobbled away, hoping the teenagers would find sympathetic countrymen who would take them in and nourish them back to life. It was the best he could manage, he thought, but hardly enough.

Across the field where his colleagues were waiting, Crocker watched Akil smear QuikClot into the wound, then climbed back to his feet and led them south. He refused to answer Akil’s questions about what had happened. “No time to talk about that now,” was his reply.

Despite his loss of blood, the encounter seemed to fill him with determination. When the sun came up, the four men consumed the last of the rice, rested twenty minutes, and continued past farms and around hills, avoiding roads and any kind of structure, Akil and Crocker carrying the tarp containing Sam, and Dawkins following.

Crocker urged them on. “Faster. As fast as you can.” A grim, resolute aspect had come over his face, and his eyes seemed focused on a single objective. The rain proved equally relentless, resulting in slick paths and difficult mud.

Dawkins had no idea how Crocker was able to continue, carrying Sam with his injured right arm and shoulder, but somehow he did. When they stopped, which they did every two hours, he noticed that Crocker had difficulty raising either of his arms above his waist.

They had ample water but no food. Akil suggested that they wait in a forest stretching up a hill while he circled around it and recced.

Crocker refused. “No, no,” he said. “We can’t stop!”

“Why?”

He offered no reason. He seemed pushed by a relentless will to get to the border and safety, and to report on what he’d seen.

Sometimes he couldn’t remember if he was awake or asleep, especially when the sky turned dark and the rain fell in a steady whisper.

In a state of semiconsciousness, he heard Akil call, “Boss! Boss!”

“What now?”

When he opened his eyes and focused, he wondered how much time had passed, because Akil and Dawkins looked older and thinner, and both men’s faces were covered with beards.

“Boss, look.”

It hurt to even turn his head.

“Where?”

He saw headlights approaching through mist and rain, and was mindful enough to know that this wasn’t good. They were in a field with nowhere to hide. Instinctively, he felt for the grenades in his pocket and the pistol in his belt.

Fifty feet ahead was a little brook with a bridge over it. He lifted the tarp and continued walking.

“Boss!”

“Let’s go!” Somehow his legs responded and he broke into a sprint. In his right periphery, the headlights rounded the bend and reached the straightaway. The vehicle or vehicles were maybe sixty feet away and closing quickly.

Realizing that if the people in them were paying attention, they could be spotted, he lunged for the embankment and felt his feet slip out from under him. His legs hit water and the tarp holding Sam crashed into his right shoulder. He bit down hard on the urge to scream. In the background he heard an engine idling and music: “Like a Virgin” by Madonna, sung in Korean. When he opened his mouth to comment, Akil slapped a hand over it.

Next thing he remembered, he was on his feet again, walking up an incline. He saw a glowing yellow line in the distance. Wasn’t sure whether it was a mirage or not.

“What’s that?” It hurt to move his mouth.

“A fence, I think,” Akil answered. “Maybe it’s the border.”

“South Korea?”

“Fucking better be, or…”

“What?”

They left Dawkins and Sam in the bushes behind them and crossed the mist-covered field where rabbits scattered. Helped each other over a patch of gravel and railroad tracks, and stood before a twenty-foot-high fence. Crocker touched it to make sure it was real.

“Nicest thing I’ve seen in months,” Crocker said, emotion building in his chest.

They had no wire shears to cut through the links, only one eight-foot-long thin metal blade that Akil found in the PRS kit and started using.

Crocker asked, “You’re kidding, right?”

“You got something better?”

Crocker felt strangely giddy as he looked up at the fencing covered with curls of razor wire. Given his weakened condition, it seemed as challenging as summiting Mount Everest. But somehow he knew there had to be a way to reach the other side and the lighted two-lane strip of concrete road in South Korea.

“Get the tarp and blankets,” he said weakly.

He blinked and found himself halfway up the fence, holding on and reaching down for the covers, then tossing them over the razor wire one at a time. Next thing he knew, he was pushing the tarps and blankets down and watching Akil climb over like it was a dream.

But it wasn’t. Because when Akil was halfway down the opposite side of the fence and asked, “Now what?” he saw that his smart suit was a shredded rag.

“Wait there,” Crocker said.

He hobbled back with Dawkins, who muttered to himself as Crocker and Akil held down the razor wire as best they could and he clambered up and crossed over.

Despite minor cuts to his right thigh and arm, Dawkins didn’t complain. He just looked back at Crocker through the fence with tears in his eyes and asked, “Am I really standing in South Korea? Are you sure about that?”

“Sure as I’m standing here,” Akil remarked. “You’re a free man now.”

Crocker tried climbing the fence with Sam on his back, but when he reached the top, the pain in his shoulder was so intense his arms started giving out. They weren’t high enough for Akil to reach over.

Seconds after Crocker and Sam returned to the ground, sirens started to wail on their left and right.

“Let me try!” Akil shouted over the sirens, starting up the South Korean side of the fence.

“Fuck that,” Crocker replied. “Sam, get on top of my shoulders and we’ll pull up together.”

“We tried that already…You can’t.”

“Don’t tell me what I can’t do!”

Crocker took a deep breath and reminded himself of one of his favorite SEAL mottos: Pain was weakness leaving the body. He didn’t care if his body completely gave out. He was going to get Sam over the fence whatever it took, inch by excruciating inch.

All he felt was pain-not his hands on the metal fence, or his legs moving, or Sam atop his shoulders. The only way he could tell he was making progress were the encouraging words from Akil and Dawkins. The siren grew louder, until it sounded like mocking laughter.

“You’re getting there!”

“More, boss! Another four feet!”

He felt himself losing consciousness. Pain hammering his head, he willed himself a few links higher. It was just enough for Akil to grab hold of Sam, and help him down.

Still clinging to the fence, Crocker smiled at them on the other side. When he tried to move his arms and legs, however, they wouldn’t respond.

“Wait there, boss!” Akil shouted. “I’m coming to get you!”

Crocker knew he couldn’t last much longer. Out of his right periphery he saw a vehicle approaching behind him. Swinging his right arm over, he felt a strand of razor wire slice into his forearm. The new pain seemed to cancel out the old. He pushed off on his left leg.

With a reserve of energy he didn’t think he had, he swung his weight over and let go, scraping his face along the fence and hitting Akil, who helped break his fall.

Their eyes met and they smiled for a second-a moment he knew he’d never forget.

“We did it, boss,” Akil muttered.

“Fuck, yeah.”

Warm blood dripping down his wrist and thigh, he stumbled with Akil, Sam, and Dawkins across the road, up an embankment and into a cover of sweet-smelling eucalyptus.

He felt hands reaching under him and sliding his body onto a stretcher. He sat up and reached for the pistol. It wasn’t in his belt.

“Hey!”

“Easy. Easy, big guy.” A wide grin beamed down at him from the face of an Asian man in military garb. “You can relax now, sir. You’re in South Korea.”

He wasn’t sure whether he was seeing reality or dreaming. “Where’s Akil?”

“Sir, my name is Sergeant Minjoon Kim.”

“Sergeant Kim, where are my men?”

“Two have already been taken away in the first ambulance. The other is waiting for you.”

“Where?”

“Close by. You’ll see him soon.”

When they slid the stretcher into the ambulance, he saw Akil’s heavily bearded face ahead and thought he looked like a terrorist. Didn’t realize that he resembled one too, until he saw his reflection in the stainless-steel strip along the side panel.

“We look like shit,” he groaned.

“Where are the dancing girls to greet us?”

It hurt to laugh, but he knew exactly how Akil felt.

He still had a duty. He said, “Sergeant Kim, you said my men are okay. I need visual confirmation.”

“Sir, you’ll see them soon. You can relax now. You’re in safe hands.”