Joy Brigade

12

Senior Captain Rhee Mi-sook set the whip aside and reached into the deep pocket of her leather coat, pulling out an ivory-handled knife. She pressed a button and the blade popped up with a snap. Heels clicking, she crossed the brick floor and stood in front of me.

“You’re filthy,” she said, loathing in her voice. “Stand!” she ordered in Korean. I did. She didn’t move away. Our bodies were practically touching. I was a head taller but she gazed up at me angrily, her soft lips curled in disgust. Deftly, she sliced my hemp tunic and pantaloons. With the long nails of her left hand she ripped the clothing off me. Finally, after she’d peeled off the last of my undergarments, I stood naked.

With the gleaming tip of the blade, she touched my chest. Pressing only hard enough to slice the first few layers of skin, she ran the tip of the blade down my body, across my stomach, stopping just as she reached my pubic hair. As she held the point of the blade there, ready to jab, she gazed into my eyes-searching, I believe, for fear.

She found it. Then she stepped back and hollered for the guards. Two men entered, both carrying wooden pails sloshing with water. Without hesitation they tossed the water on me. It was freezing. Before I could regain my breath, more men entered. They doused me with more water and rubbed my back and chest with some sort of harsh-smelling soap. Someone produced a thick-bristled brush, scrubbing my flesh, scratching it, almost peeling it off. I tried to shove them back, but there were too many of them.

They kicked the straw-covered cot out of the way and I fell to my knees. When they were done, I lay in a bloody mass of suds on the cold stone floor.

When I awoke, it was night. A metal lamp with a soft red bulb had been brought into the chamber. The tip of an insistent boot roused me awake. With a start, I sat up.

Senior Captain Rhee Mi-sook gazed down at me. She wasn’t wearing her uniform now but rather a loose blue smock made of some sort of diaphanous material.

“Irrona,” she said. Get up.

I did.

She stepped closer and in the dim red glow examined the bruises and scratches on my body.

“Did they hurt you?” she asked. “No,” I replied.

Since my capture, she’d spoken only Korean to me. I wasn’t yet ready to admit that I understood English. It was foolish, I suppose. Eventually she’d find out that I didn’t speak Romanian and she’d figure out who I was, but all my training told me to stall for time, to give away nothing until I had to.

She stepped closer to me.

“You smell like lye,” she said in English.

I didn’t reply.

She leaned in so close to me that the tip of her nose was almost touching my chest. “But you’re clean,” she said in Korean.

Again, I didn’t respond.

Her lips parted, a moist tongue slithering out. And then she was kissing me, starting at my neck, working her way down.

Upstairs, a man screamed.

“Who’s that?” I said.

“Your friend,” she replied dreamily.

Moon Chaser.

He screamed again. And it was indeed him.

As the soft lips and probing tongue of Captain Rhee Mi-sook explored every part of my body, Moon Chaser’s screams of agony grew louder.

“You’re torturing him,” I said.

“Yes,” she murmured.

“You must stop.”

“When I’m ready.”

“When will that be?” I asked.

“When you tell me everything.”

I didn’t answer. Moon Chaser kept screaming. Captain Rhee Mi-sook’s soft tongue kept probing.

In the morning they fed me noodles. That night, a bowl of rice laced with turnip greens. In between, I was allowed all the barley tea I could drink. The purpose, I believed, was to keep me healthy. Captain Rhee and I engaged in two sessions a day, for three days. I told her nothing. All the while, during each assignation, Moon Chaser was tortured. It was a technique the North Koreans had used before: torture one man and let the guilt grow in another. Eighth Army had taught me to keep my feelings compartmentalized. Never blame yourself for what someone else was doing, in this case torturing a man who had risked his life for you. I tried, but it didn’t work. After one particularly hideous session, I broke down.

In English, I said, “That’s enough. You hear me? That’s enough!”

Captain Rhee’s eyes widened in mock surprise.

“I want you to stop torturing him.” When she didn’t respond, I took a deep breath and said, “I’m from Eighth Army.”

Unconcerned, Captain Rhee toyed with the sparse hair on my chest. “I know that,” she replied.

“Will you stop torturing him if I confess?”

“I’ll think about it.”

Moon Chaser was still screaming, so I confessed. Rapidly. Most of what I said bored her. About Hero Kang and Commissar Oh and Hero Kang’s daughter, Hye-kyong, and how they’d both died heroically. About the Manchurian Battalion and how they were seen as being too independent and how the Dear Leader was set on destroying them. All the while, she tried to distract me with her long fingers and her nibbling at various parts of me. I wondered what they’d done to her to make her this way. And then she told me.

She’d been selected from among thousands of girls, for being smart, for being pretty. A cadre of apparatchiks had traveled around the country, checking school records, listening to talent recitals of little girls singing and dancing and praising the glorious work of the Great Leader.

“I played the violin,” she said. “A composition written by the Great Leader himself, although my music teacher let slip once that it had actually been written by Bach. At the time, I didn’t believe him. I was only fourteen. They took me to Pyongyang for training and more education. When I was seventeen, the Great Leader visited me himself.”

“Alone?”

“Very alone. I didn’t know he was coming. He appeared suddenly in my room. Everything was quiet. I believe the entire dormitory had been evacuated. Outside, a ring of cars and soldiers protected the area.”

I studied her, looking for signs of outrage or sadness or even pride. I saw nothing. But she answered my unspoken question.

“I was a virgin,” she said. “He was old. Things didn’t work out so well.”

“You were expelled from the Joy Brigade?”

“Put in the army. The Great Leader wanted to make sure that if I talked, I knew I would be shot.”

“Did you talk?”

“Never.”

“Then why are you talking to me?”

“You are a foreigner. No one understands you and no one believes you. You don’t count.”

“Also,” I said, “I will die soon.”

“Yes. That’s another reason.” She stared up at the stone ceiling, lost in thought. Then she said, “In the army, every man used me.”

I waited, not moving.

“All the old colonels first, they each had their turn, with their weak bodies and their cold hands. And then the junior officers. I was lost, not knowing what to do. Shocked that I, who had dedicated my life to the Great Leader, was being betrayed like this. I knew that if the Great Leader were aware of their treachery, he would stop them and punish them all. But he wasn’t there. I was alone.”

“You had no one to turn to?” I asked.

“No one.” She seemed slightly astonished. “A woman alone in the army, purposely kept away from other females. I was told to follow orders, to keep my mouth shut, that was all. I thought of killing myself. Of pulling out my pistol and ending it all, but I knew that would be seen as a direct insult to the Great Leader and my family would be punished. I couldn’t do that. Finally, I found some inner strength from somewhere and I decided to change. Not to change the men who were using me but to change myself. If they loved me, if they loved my face, my hands, my body, I would use that as my power. Once I made that decision, I felt free-and strong. I became more aware of my surroundings and started to search out the men who made the real decisions, the men with power, the men who could protect me.”

“The commissars,” I said.

“Yes. And that’s when I started to get what I wanted. Better working conditions, promotions, jobs with more authority.”

“And now you’re a fixer,” I said.

“Who told you that?”

I shrugged.

“No matter,” she replied. “Someday, I will be a commissar myself.” She turned to me and smiled, her sweet, beautiful smile. “But first, you will help me take down the Manchurian Battalion. All the things you’ve told me so far, I already know. I need you to tell me more. Why did the Manchurian Battalion bring you here? Who was your initial contact? What are their plans?”

Most of the questions she asked, I wouldn’t have been able to answer even if I wanted to. But I also knew that in the intelligence business a little information from one source could be pieced together with information from another source to create a comprehensive picture of the whole. When I claimed ignorance, sometimes honestly, she used the whip on me. I did my best not to cry out.

They were still torturing Moon Chaser. His screams had been reverberating through my skull for days. It was my fault he’d been caught. It was my fault he was suffering. Finally, I couldn’t take it any longer. I broke down and told Captain Rhee about the manuscript of the wild man. She sat up as I spoke. I knew I’d caught her interest.

“Stop torturing him now,” I said.

She snapped her fingers. A guard came in. She barked the order, and two minutes later the screaming stopped.

“Tell me,” she commanded.

I told her of the tunnel through the Kwangju Mountains, impossible to discover except by the “wild man” who seemed to have some sixth sense that guided him through the bowels of the earth.

“It leads where?” she asked me breathlessly.

I was about to tell her when a bomb went off.

Quickly, she slipped back into her clothes, pulled on her boots, and ran outside. I sat on the metal bench, listening to the gunfire all around me, men shouting in anger and in terror.

A half-hour later, armed men burst into the dungeon. Some of them were spattered with blood. All of them were dirty and perspiration dripped from their foreheads. One of them held a ring of keys and he knelt and unshackled me. I was still naked.

Doctor Yong In-ja, holding a Kalashnikov rifle across her chest, strode between the men. “Find him some clothes,” she ordered. “Then bring him.”

Without saying a word to me, she swiveled and returned to the fight.

The redoubt high on the edge of Mount O-song was carefully camouflaged. Canvas netting strewn with weeds covered most of the buildings and some of them were sheltered beneath natural rock overhangs.

Doc Yong personally supervised my recovery. It didn’t take long. Most of my wounds were superficial. The avaricious Senior Captain Rhee Mi-sook had merely exhausted me. It was Moon Chaser who’d been methodically ripped to shreds. The soldiers of the Manchurian Battalion rescued him from the Eastern Star Commune but he hadn’t survived the retreat up into the Kwangju Mountains. His body was carried the rest of the way and buried, with honors, within one of the grave mounds reserved for the martyrs of the Manchurian Battalion.

When I was well enough, Doc Yong introduced me to Il-yong, the First Dragon, my son. My first glimpse of him was like an awakening in my soul. Now I lived for him, not for myself. He was a bright-eyed boy who loved to smile. I thought he looked like her. She said he looked like me. He noticed everything and I told Doc Yong that that part was definitely like her. I prayed that he’d inherited her brains.

The raid on the Eastern Star Commune had killed a few North Korean soldiers and chased the rest away, including, presumably, Senior Captain Rhee Mi-sook. Immediately, I told Doc Yong everything I knew about the plan to deploy the Red Star Brigade first to a village near Hamhung, and then from there up into the Kwangju Mountains for the assault on the Manchurian Battalion. She nodded gravely. That matched intelligence they’d already gathered.

I spilled my guts about the order of battle and the notes that I’d taken in the catacombs of the Joy Brigade. Somehow, in all the madness since then, the notes had been lost.

“Here,” Doc Yong said, sitting me at a wooden desk and handing me a pencil and a pad of paper. “Put down everything you can remember.” She poured me a cup of barley tea and left the room. The silence grew. I remembered Beikyang and the red star hitting the butt of a white goat, but after that, not much.

Eventually, I gave up and found Doc Yong.

“Keep trying,” she said. “Maybe in your dreams some of it will come back to you.”

I also told her about Hero Kang and his daughter, Hye-kyong, and the holding action of assaulting the petroleum transport convoy.

Another ceremony was held, honoring them. A single carved memorial was erected.

At night, Doc Yong and I lay in bed together. Beside us, on a small mat, Il-yong breathed softly. I lay awake, staring at the moonlight seeping through an oil-papered window, my happiness complete. Or almost. Thoughts of Senior Captain Rhee Mi-sook remained, like a she-demon stalking me.

During the day, with Il-yong strapped to Doc Yong’s back, she gave me a complete tour of the grounds. To the north, twin peaks protected the mountain valley from the cold winds. To the south loomed Mount O-song. Thus sheltered, the valley had a surprisingly temperate climate that allowed the men and women of the Manchurian Battalion to work the land and raise many of their own crops. Not rice but cabbage and turnips and carrots and even a small grove of pear trees. The streams provided some fish, and for the rest of their sustenance, they traded with the collective farms in the valley below. Sometimes, when out of political favor, they had to travel far afield to purchase the rations that the central government supposedly provided free. But they had allies everywhere; people who secretly admired not only the valiant history of the Manchurian Battalion but also their independence.

Everywhere I went, people bowed to me and smiled. Doc Yong had been raised in South Korea and knew the truth about the government down there. It was corrupt and had its faults, and the southern economy was still suffering from the devastation of the Korean War, but fundamentally people were free. Doc Yong had spoken of these things at village meetings and reassured the leadership that the Americans were no longer the enemy of the North Korean people. Compromises could be reached. Peace negotiated. The United States, she promised everyone, was reasonable. Most importantly, the U.S. might be able to help the Manchurian Battalion maintain their independence.

That’s why I received so many smiles.

I thought of these things as I lay in bed next to Doc Yong. My belly was full with roast mackerel and kokktugi, pickled turnip, and heaping white bowls of steamed rice. I was satisfied, for once in my life, worried only about how I could provide help to these people. And how I’d be able to get Doc Yong and Il-yong back to South Korea.

Outside, wood clumped on stone. Rhythmically. I sat up in bed. Carefully, so as not to wake Doc Yong, I stood and slid open the small wood-paneled window.

A dark figure stalked away, like a fat blackbird with long, skinny legs. I stared at the figure in the glimmering moonlight, figuring that my eyesight must be going. Had Captain Rhee Mi-sook hit me so hard that she damaged my ocular nerve in some way? I rubbed my eyes and looked again. Still the same husky figure with stick-like legs. Then it rounded a corner and disappeared in shadow.

When I slid shut the window, Doc Yong, wearing her cotton nightgown, sat on our sleeping mat, eyes wide, waiting for me. I sat down next to her.

“What was that?” I whispered.

“Our leader,” she said.

“Your leader? That was a man?”

“Very much a man,” she said. “Tomorrow you will meet him.”

Bandit Lee, the commander of the Manchurian Battalion, wore his wool uniform draped with metals from the campaigns against the Japanese colonialists and the war against the Yankee imperialists. His name had been acquired when he fought the Japanese Imperial Army in the vast wilderness of Manchuria and in the northern mountains of Korea. In those days, his enemies had thought of him not as a revolutionary but as a bandit.

He had broad shoulders and a thick waist, but at the knees his legs stopped. He stood on two wooden stumps. Doc Yong had told me earlier that he could’ve replaced the wooden stumps with more expensive prosthetics, or simply covered them with his trouser legs, but Bandit Lee eschewed both options. He wanted the world to see what had been done to him.

But the worst damage was not done to his legs. After all, war veterans without limbs were commonplace throughout the world. The most hideous part of his body was his face. Every inch of flesh had been charred, melted by American-manufactured napalm. North Korea-from coast to coast, from the DMZ to the Chinese border-had been saturated with the burning chemical during the Korean War. Bandit Lee had been one of its tens of thousands of victims. One who had survived. His face was not capable of expression. His nose was like a charred lump of coal, his mouth a wrinkled ebony slit. Red eyes stared out at the world as if from behind a mask. When he spoke, the words seemed burnt, escaping from a charred throat. His tongue flicked red, like a serpent emerging from a blackened hole.

“Beikyang,” he said

The sound was so rough, like a reptile hissing, that at first I didn’t understand him. He repeated the word and then said, “According to your report, the Red Star Brigade will rendezvous there prior to the final assault.”

I nodded.

“We need to know which units will be proceeding where so we can attack them after they leave Beikyang. Have you been able to remember anything else?”

I had, and I pulled the notes out of my pocket. The names of a few petroleum refueling points and which units would be using them.

“Are you sure of this?” he asked.

“The petroleum points, yes,” I replied, “but not of which units will be where.”

Bandit Lee turned away and started giving orders to his waiting officers. Reconnaissance units would be sent out to gather information. Doc Yong was one of the officers who’d be going. The meeting was about to end when I spoke up.

“I will go with her,” I said.

“No,” Bandit Lee said. “You are too important. When the time comes, we will need you to relay information to the Americans.”

I knew better than to argue with him directly. Instead, I said, “My memory is coming back to me gradually. If I can see the units, if I can see the terrain, maybe I will remember more.”

One thing we all knew for sure was that if an order of battle was devised in Pyongyang, the Red Star Brigade would not dare to deviate from it. In the North Korean Army, commanders are given no discretion for independent action. The guidance of the Great Leader is everything.

“If you can remember,” Bandit Lee said, “that would be helpful.” He turned to one of his subordinates. “See that he’s properly outfitted.”

It was an infantry unit with a few armored personnel carriers. They were refueling at a North Korean Army depot two kilometers outside the village of Jong-chol. Doc Yong and I stayed low, hidden behind rocks and shrubs on a hill overlooking the narrow valley. We had been traveling all night across rough terrain, and although Il-yong had been left behind in good hands, Doc Yong seemed more worried about him than she was about the enemy. Now, just after dawn, we counted the soldiers and the vehicles.

“Three platoons,” I said.

Doc Yong stared through binoculars. “With climbing gear,” she said. I took the binoculars from her. She was right. Two soldiers were pulling metal hooks and ropes out of the back of one of the vehicles, checking them, and stuffing them back inside.

“That’s why they have so little armor,” I said, “and no big guns. They’ll try to assault the Manchurian Battalion from the rear.”

Doc Yong jotted down a few notes. “Maybe this is the 7044th Mountain Platoon you mentioned.”

“I’m not sure about the number.”

“Don’t worry. The point is we will have someone waiting for them when they make their way behind Mount O-song.”

We pulled back from our position. We were halfway over the hill when the first shot rang out. I dived for dirt. Doc Yong did the same, landing beside me. We low-crawled toward nearby boulders.

Another shot rang out.

“Sniper,” I said.

I peeked around the boulder, searching for someone on the promontory above us. I saw nothing. Doc Yong looked. After she pulled her head back to safety, she said, “There, at the very top. Beneath some shrubs.”

I looked where her finger pointed and saw him. Just as I pulled back to safety, a third shot rang out.

It was then that it all came back to me.

“Quick,” I said. “Paper!”

“What?”

“Paper! Pencil!”

Quickly, she rummaged through her canvas backpack and pulled out a short pencil and a pad of tattered pulp. I started jotting furiously. It was all there in my mind: unit designations, personnel strength, number of guns and armored vehicles, and, most importantly, which routes they would be taking up into the Kwangju Mountains.

Two more shots rang out.

“There’s more of them now,” Doc Yong said. “Come on. We have to go.”

“Fire back,” I said. “I’m almost done.”

Doc Yong unstrapped the Kalashnikov from her back, lay down next to the boulder, aimed, and fired. Then she sat back facing me. “Not even close. That won’t hold them long.”

I continued to scribble.

“You’ll be able to read that?” she asked.

“When we get back, I’ll recopy it.”

“If we get back.”

Finally, I was done. The firing had stopped.

“They’re trying to get closer,” I said.

We hurried off, crawling through the brush. Unfortunately, not being able to stand up, we weren’t sure where we were going. Only when it was too late did we discover that we’d gone in the wrong direction. A cliff loomed before us.

“We have to go back,” I said.

Doc Yong grabbed my arm. “Too late,” she said. “They’re too close.” She pointed through the shrubbery. In the early morning gloom, I spotted two dark shapes sliding down the slope behind us, no more than a hundred yards away. “If we crawl, it will take too long,” she said. “If we run, they will pick us off.”

I looked down over the cliff. After about twenty feet of rock, a sandy slope tapered steeply to the ravine below.

“We have to jump,” she said.

I glanced back at the snipers. They took turns changing positions, so the stationary one could provide covering fire.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll go first.”

“No, me.”

I wanted to argue with her, but before I could speak she was already over the edge. She dropped along the jagged rock and landed with a thump on the sand below, immediately tumbling down the hill. A shot rang out, missing me by a few feet. No time to wait. I slid over the edge. All I remember is slamming into about a thousand protuberances until I finally hit the sand. Fifty yards later, I rolled to a halt, stunned but still conscious. I sat up, searching for Doc Yong.

She hissed at me, waving her arm. “This way.”

I stood up unsteadily and staggered toward her. This time I didn’t hear anything. All I knew for sure was that someone must’ve swung an iron rod with all his strength, slamming it into the side of my calf and knocking me down.

And then Doc Yong was firing, her Kalashnikov on full automatic, and the next thing I knew, her hand was in my armpit and she was pulling and screaming at me to get up. I did, leaning on her, and we stumbled forward. Another round zinged past my head and then we were behind a rock.

It took us the better part of that day and into the late evening to make it back to the first guard post surrounding the Manchurian Battalion. I’d lost a lot of blood. All I remember is being carried by stretcher up a steep pathway. Then I passed out.

Il-yong sat on the floor next to me, playing with a ball of yarn. Doc Yong squatted next to my bedding, holding my scribbled notes in her hand.

“I can make out some of the numbers,” she told me, “and some of the words, but do you think you’re well enough to decipher it now?”

I held the paper unsteadily in my hand, staring at it. My eyes wouldn’t focus.

“Never mind,” she said, taking it from me. “We’ll try again after you rest.”

In the distance, an artillery round boomed.

“They’re getting closer,” I said.

“Never mind. You rest now.”

I did.

It had only been a shard of rock that hit my leg, kicked up by the round fired by the sniper. Fortunately, an artery hadn’t been severed, and what with antibiotics and the bandages being replaced regularly by Doc Yong, I felt alert by the next day.

The artillery rounds now fired almost every minute. I rewrote the entire order of battle, explaining it to Doc Yong as I did so. She seemed worried.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “This should help us.”

“Yes.” She nodded. “But the Red Star Brigade has made quicker progress than we hoped. Most of these places,” she said, pointing at the slip of paper, “have already been overrun.”

Nevertheless, she took the newly reprinted order of battle with her and told me she’d be back. While she was gone, I slipped into my clothes. Il-yong looked up at me and gurgled-as if he knew more than I did.

I was ushered into Bandit Lee’s presence. He wasted no time.

“We need ammunition,” he said.

I sat before him on a simple wooden chair, Doc Yong next to me.

“You must enter the tunnel,” Bandit Lee told me. “Our good Doctor Yong In-ja has memorized every word of the ancient manuscript. She will be your guide. It will be very dangerous. You might die. But if you survive, you must ask the Americans for resupply: ammunition, medicine, food. We will accept that from them, but we will accept nothing from the Japanese collaborators.”

To Bandit Lee, the Japanese collaborators were the colonels and generals, including President Park Chung-hee, who now ran the South Korean government. In fact, many of them had been young officers in the army of the emperor when the Japanese had ruled Korea. Bandit Lee might have been engaged in a deadly competition with the Dear Leader, the son who would replace his former comrade, Kim Il-sung, but he was mortal enemies with the men who ran South Korea. Americans, although enemies in the past, could be negotiated with.

“I have allies throughout the country. They are silent now, and afraid to act, but if the Americans help us, they will rise up and support the Manchurian Battalion. We will take over this government and a peace treaty will be signed. We will renounce Soviet-style communism and create a democratic socialist government with free elections. Then we will cooperate with the Western world. But only if you help us now, in our hour of need. That is your mission. You must convince the Americans to help us, or die trying.”

I bowed to the inevitable. He ordered us to depart within the hour.

As Doc Yong and I stood to leave, artillery roared in the distance. Units of the Manchurian Battalion were already on the attack, assaulting elements of the Red Star Brigade in the lowlands before they could fully deploy.

The entrance to the cave on the side of Mount O-song was well hidden. “This is why it has remained intact so long,” Doc Yong told me.

We had to climb for an hour to reach it and even then it was concealed by a rocky overhang no sane person would have any reason to explore. But the ancient manuscript, the one Doc Yong had memorized, gave exact directions to the cave.

Crawling flat on our bellies, we entered. I carried the heavier backpack, with a full day’s ration of beef jerky and my favorite traveling food, ddok. Doc Yong and I each held a flashlight and I had two spares in my pack, along with spare batteries and extra clothing wrapped in plastic. We didn’t carry water. According to the manuscript, there’d be plenty. Maybe too much. Doc Yong carried the most precious cargo strapped to her back: our son.

He was quiet as we entered the cave, his eyes wide, studying everything. Doc Yong and I also had claw hammers, looped metal nails, and ropes tied to the front of our chests.

We had left the compound of the Manchurian Battalion alone, no escort. Bandit Lee wanted the secret of the tunnel held closely.

The first part of the tunnel was fairly easygoing. It was about four feet high, sloped downward gently, and by crouching and watching our footing, we descended what I estimated to be a couple hundred feet. At the bottom, we had to scale a ten-foot-high cliff, crawl across shale, and then slide through an opening that was filled with a universe of freezing air. Doc Yong stopped and pulled out an extra blanket to cover Il-yong and ordered that we both slip on canvas coats we’d brought along. When we were warmed, I aimed the flashlight at the opening beyond.

It was a vast cathedral, with twenty-foot stalactites and stalagmites projecting like dragon’s teeth. It was so vast that the light didn’t reach the far end. We sat quietly for a moment. In the distance something rumbled, like the voice of a giant.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The underground river.” Looking worried, she adjusted Il-yong on her back.

“Will we have to cross it?”

“We’ll only be in the water for a short distance. We will have to swim. That’s why we brought the extra clothing wrapped in plastic.”

Doc Yong was a brilliant woman who’d risen from poverty in South Korea to become a medical doctor by dint of her quick thinking and ability to anticipate all possible scenarios. I had no doubt that she’d thought of everything we’d need.

I rose to my feet and held out my hand to help her to stand. I lifted the edge of the blanket and kissed Il-yong on the forehead. He gurgled with delight. Still holding hands, we started across the floor of the cathedral.

The river was more formidable than I imagined.

“The runoff is greater than described in the manuscript.” Doc Yong played the beam of her flashlight over the rushing waters. “The wild man and his pursuers must’ve come when the flow wasn’t as violent.”

I imagined they had. This river was a raging torrent. There was no way I was going to allow Doc Yong and Il-yong to enter it. I’d rather face the wrath of the Red Star Brigade artillery than face this.

We searched along the rocky shore, looking for a narrow spot to cross.

Finally, the river disappeared into a tunnel.

“Here,” Doc Yong said. “This is where we must enter.”

“What do you mean?”

“You assumed that we’d cross. I never said that.”

“If we don’t cross it, then what will we do?”

“We dive in here, as the wild man did when he was being pursued.”

“Dive in? Are you out of your mind?”

“I’m not out of my mind,” she snapped. “We must reach the Americans in the South. You’ve seen the Manchurian Battalion, you’ve seen how desperate we are. You’ve seen that we are willing to lay our lives on the line to oppose the tyrant who has taken over our country. Only you can testify to what you’ve witnessed. Only you can convince the Americans to send us ammunition. To send us what we need to fight and to win. If we don’t go now, the people of the Manchurian Battalion will perish.”

“If we go now, we all might perish.”

“Maybe.”

I swiveled on her. “What do you owe them?”

“Everything. My education. My life.”

“Your parents were members of the Manchurian Battalion,” I said.

“Yes. But what difference does all that make now? If we turn back, without American assistance, we will die anyway.”

I wasn’t so sure of that. When the fighting broke out, I thought there might be enough confusion for Doc Yong and me to slip south with our son, and with luck, make our way across the minefields of the Demilitarized Zone. If I could just reach one South Korean patrol, we’d be safe.

I was about to tell her all this, to reveal my plan, when somewhere behind us rocks clattered. We turned. From her belt beneath her jacket, Doc Yong pulled out a Russian-made pistol. Without hesitation, she fired into the darkness.

“Come on,” she said, and pulled me to shelter.

The voice that emerged from the darkness was that of Senior Captain Rhee Mi-sook.

“Where are you running away to?” she asked in Korean. “Why are you so anxious to leave your homeland behind? Have you no loyalty?”

Crouching behind rock, Doc Yong clutched my arm. “Did you tell her about this tunnel?”

I lowered my eyes. “I started to. They were torturing Moon Chaser.”

She nodded solemnly and then tilted my head back up with her hand and stared into my eyes. “There was something between you two, wasn’t there? That’s why you were naked.”

“I had no choice.”

I expected her to be angry and she was, but not at me. “She’s notorious. And now she follows us down here. But not for her country.”

“She’s a North Korean officer.”

“Yes. But she never does anything for her country. Not if she can help it.”

“Then why did she follow us?”

“Because she wants to escape too.”

“Into South Korea?”

“Yes. Or better yet, America. She will use you. Do you understand that?”

I did. There was no need for her to tell me.

“And she will kill me. Do you understand that too?”

“I won’t let it happen,” I said, suddenly angry.

“And,” she said, gesturing toward Il-yong, “she will get rid of him.”

“Never,” I promised. “Not while I’m breathing.”

“Neither one of us will be breathing, once she knows the way out of here.”

“Surrender, Captain Rhee shouted, “or we will attack!”

Armed men scurried from boulder to boulder.

“They will take us,” Doc Yong said. “We must swim. Now!”

“Right,” I said. “I’ll take the boy.”

Doc Yong hesitated but quickly realized that I was the stronger swimmer. She untied Il-yong from her back and strapped him to me, spread-eagle, facing my chest.

“Keep his head above water,” she said.

“Okay.”

“You go first. I will cover you.” She still held the pistol.

I slipped down behind rock to the edge of the water. It was freezing. Quickly, we rubbed black grease on our faces, arms, and the lower calves beneath our pants. Doc Yong gently slathered Il-yong’s face and arms and hands. We should’ve covered our entire bodies but there wasn’t time.

A rifle shot pinged above us. We crouched. She kissed Il-yong and then shoved me forward into the water.

The shock of the cold sucked all breath out of me. It had the same effect on Il-yong. He leaned away from me as far as he could, his eyes wide open, but he didn’t cry. There wasn’t enough air left in his lungs for him to cry. I floated on my back, keeping Il-yong’s head above water, the current carrying me quickly toward the tunnel. Another shot rang out, water splashed as we entered enveloping darkness. Safety. But now I was worried about the stone ceiling above me. Only about three feet of clearance, then two, and now one. Suddenly I realized that the entire tunnel was flooded. There would be no air. We would drown. But the current was much too strong for me to resist. I’d never manage to swim back. I focused on what Doc Yong had told me. The tunnel stretched for maybe fifty yards, and I’d already covered half that distance. Once we were underwater, if we could just hold our breath long enough to traverse the rest of the distance, we might survive. Before I could think about it further, my skull bumped rock, I took my last long breath and went under.

Il-yong squirmed in panic. I craned my neck and pulled him up and placed my mouth on his. Gently, I breathed air into his lungs. He sputtered and coughed but then came back for more. We were still drifting downstream but not fast enough. I started grabbing rock outcrops above me to pull myself along. Il-yong wanted more air. I kept hoping that we’d reach the end of this tunnel any second, but when I realized that we wouldn’t, I bent forward and tried to blow more air into his mouth. It didn’t work. He was squirming now in total panic. The last of my air escaped upward and bubbled away. I clawed forward-cursing the people who’d written that ancient manuscript, cursing Il-yong’s mother for taking me down here, cursing Eighth Army for sending me to North Korea-and then finally, grasping forward for the next handhold, I missed. No rock. I panicked, but then I realized that there was nothing left to grasp. The tunnel had ended.

I kicked forward and finally got my head above water. It was pure darkness, but at least I was breathing. I rolled on my back, floating. Il-yong wasn’t moving. Desperately, I swam toward the side of the current and finally hit rock again. I pulled myself up as far as I could, tilted Il-yong’s head back, and gently blew air into his mouth. Nothing.

Something splashed behind me. I stuck out my leg, a body rammed into it, and then hands clawed up my pant legs. I couldn’t see her face, but from the feel of her body I knew it was Doc Yong.

“Light,” I shouted. “Quickly. We have to get him on shore.”

She clambered over me, kicking and shoving, not worrying about hurting me. I heard her hands shuffling through her backpack and a light switched on. At first I was blinded, but I recovered quickly.

“Here,” I said, “take him.”

She reached down and pulled him up. I clambered after them and reached a gravel-strewn beach. I ripped Il-yong out of Doc Yong’s hands and held him by the ankles upside down. Water cascaded out of his throat. Then I cradled him in my arms and gently blew air into his lungs.

Nothing.

“Do something,” I said.

Doc Yong ripped him out of my arms, turned him over, and pressed her fist into his stomach. More water poured out. She blew into his lungs, again and again. After what seemed like a lifetime, he coughed.

Then he was crying.

Doc Yong hugged him and cried and finally reached out one hand and enveloped me with her arm around my neck and we were all crying.