Warriors

CHAPTER 8

She could feel a thousand eyes upon her, and she knew not one of them shone with pity.

Kat Chase walked, stumbled, and was dragged relentlessly toward the killing ground. Her torn camp shift was ragged and bloody from the beating she’d received upon waking. When they bored of routine torture, they dragged her kicking and screaming from the cell. She knew where they were taking her. Had accepted finally that, after years of hell in a North Korean labor camp, finally, this was the end.

There was to be no heroic last-minute rescue. No white knights in black helicopters. No. And no U.S. Cavalry at dawn, fast-roping down from the sky to save her.

The guards, who stank of fried peppers and onions, screamed at her incessantly, telling her to stop dragging her feet. She was so emotionally numb she barely registered the fists pummeling the crown of her head. She thought her nose may have been broken. It was easier not to even try to breathe through it, so she breathed through her mouth.

There were sharp stones underfoot. Her shoes had disintegrated months ago, and her bloody feet were bound with filthy rags that offered no protection. It was very near dawn, and countless torches flared in the darkness at the bottom of the hill. She could see the heaving black range of mountains rearing up on the far horizon, the sky turning a faint pink beyond them.

Her last sunrise.

At least she could take refuge in the notion that she wasn’t going to hell. She was already there.

Through her tears of rage and frustration Kat could see all she needed to see: three guards were pounding a stout wooden stake into the hard stony earth. It was a wheat field, lying high near the edge of a cliff top a few hundred feet above the banks of the Yalu River. The river that marked the border with China.

A large group of ragged, emaciated but excited prisoners had gathered in a semicircle, perhaps a thousand or more, all come to witness the execution. It was a rare treat for the inmates of hell.

The camp commandant’s idea of a class play.

The labor camp laws, the “Ten Commandments” laid down by “Babyface” as Kat had come to call the chubby, sadistic, cherubic commandant, forbade any assembly of more than two prisoners. This commandment was waived only for certain festive occasions like this one. Attendance was mandatory. Public killings in the labor camp and the fear they generated were considered teachable moments. Murder for the sake of the public good. She’d been in the audience many times before. Cheering and laughing lest she be shot on the spot.

Now she was the center attraction. The doomed star of the production. And a Caucasian to boot. This was a rare moment not to be missed.

As she drew near the rough-hewn post where she would die, she could hear the despicable little man in charge of the event warming up the crowd.

“This prisoner,” he shouted, “this stupid woman about to die, has been offered redemption through hard labor by our dear commandant. But she has proven unworthy of his offer of mercy. She has rejected even the benevolence of our Dear Leader and the great generosity of his North Korean government…”

He went on in that vein, but she had stopped listening. She was determined to focus her last thoughts elsewhere. Her husband, William, whom she had loved upon first sight. Her two children, Milo and Sarah, whom she adored beyond measure. In the beginning, in the first few months, they’d allowed her regular contact with them. In the later years, none at all. She had no idea if either of her kids were still alive. Much less her husband.

Since the night long ago, the night of her goddamn fortieth birthday, when they’d all been snatched off that foggy street in Georgetown, she really knew nothing of her family. Since they’d been bundled into a black van by Chinese thugs, drugged, and secreted out of the country… her family had ceased to exist for her.

She’d see pictures of the two children, every so often, grainy black-and-whites, shot in a camp that very well could have been this one. They did that, she supposed, kept Milo and Sarah alive, only to force compliance with their demands. The pictures were almost worse than nothing. She hardly recognized her children anymore. Thin, hollow-eyed ghosts…

A few years ago, she’d managed to steal a picture of Bill from a desktop while she was being interrogated. No idea when it had been taken, but he had more grey hair than the night they’d been abducted. His stomach more paunch than washboard.

He stood out on the deck of an aircraft carrier at sea, demonstrating something or other, surrounded by Chinese naval officers who were laughing at something he’d said. She’d lost fifty pounds. But Bill hadn’t changed. If anything, he looked healthier than when he’d been working himself to death back home in Washington.

A thought so horrible it made her sick came unbidden into her mind.

Had her husband defected to China? Had he known about the black limo waiting outside the restaurant the night of her birthday? The van?

She shoved the notion aside for the delusions caused by malnutrition, physical and psychological abuse, and the simple paranoid insanity that it was. And then she blessed her beloved family, each one of them, one at a time, in her heart, and said her final good-byes.

She was tied to the stake, her arms and feet bound behind her. One of the guards pried her jaws apart while another stuffed her mouth full of pebbles from the Yalu River. This was in the revered tradition of preventing the condemned from cursing the state that was about to take her life.

Her head was covered with a filthy burlap sack that still stunk of rotted hay and the human feces they used for manure in the fields…

Kathleen Chase had spent the last eleven months of her five-year imprisonment in a space reserved for the lowest of the low. An underground prison within the prison. Her stinking windowless room with no table, no chair, no toilet. This was her “punishment” for refusing to admit to her crimes against the state. Admit that she was an American spy. An agent for the CIA come to sow discredit on the government and engineer revolution against the Dear Leader.

The underground prisons were built to blindfold the prying eyes of American satellites. But not hers. She’d kept her eyes open just in case she ever managed to escape. She memorized the guards who tormented her, their names, their faces, their habits.

She’d learned that for all the prisoners publicly executed in these prisons each year, thousands more were simply tortured to death or secretly murdered by guards in the underground facility where she lived. Rape was a given at any time of day or night. Most prisoners were simply worked to death. Mining coal, farming, sewing military uniforms, or making cement. All the while subsisting on a near-starvation diet of watery corn soup, sour cabbage, and salt.

Issued a set of clothes once a year, prisoners worked and slept in filthy rags. There was no soap in her cell, no socks, no gloves, underclothes, or even toilet paper. Twelve- to fifteen-hour days were mandatory until death.

Over time, if they live long enough, prisoners lose their teeth, their gums turn black, their bones weaken. All this by the age of forty, and none had a life expectancy beyond the age of fifty.

In December, she would turn forty-five…

She felt the rough hands all over her body. The guards getting in one last good feel, squeezing her breasts painfully. Then she was alone at the stake. She heard their boots clomping away from her. She heard the low keening noise of the crowd beginning to reach a fevered pitch.

She took a deep breath, knowing it was her last. Finally at peace, she waited for an eternity or more for the lead slugs to pierce her flesh and find her heart.

She heard the guard captain scream the order to fire.

Fire!

Fire!

Fire!

The crowd saw her head pitch forward, her chin on her chest. A roar went up. Deafening.

But there had been no blood, no twitching corpse riddled with bullets. They’d all fired above her head. She’d heard the rounds whistle above her. She had simply fainted.

This was not the first mock execution the joyous crowd of prisoners had witnessed. They’d seen hundreds. And so they knew the appropriate response. They laughed. Wildly and insanely, letting the guards know they were in on the joke, that they appreciated the entertainment.

“Write the letter!” her tormentor screamed at her. She was back in the basement in a private room on the lowest level of hell. Kang was in rare form today, practically frothing at the mouth. He was the only one who spoke enough English to be trusted with interrogation of such a prize as the valuable American woman Kathleen Chase.

“You write! Tell your husband what happened this morning. About our Dear Leader’s beneficence in sparing your life. His mercy. Tell him about your good health. About how well you are being treated here, you and your children. Hot food, good beds. If not—”

“Show me my children, damn you! Show them to me!”

“Your children are alive, we keep telling you. But they will die if you do not obey. They will watch you die before we decapitate them. They will suffer before — tell him. You write the letter now!”

“You write it, Kang. Sign it, too. And then go fuck yourself.”

“Bitch!” he screamed. The he raised his fist and slammed it down, the ballpoint pen in his grip piercing her hand, nailing it to the wooden table.

She howled in pain, unable to stop it, but her cries were no longer enough for him. He started slapping her viciously across the face, whipping her head around until she thought she’d pass out again…

She no longer believed her two children were alive. She had not seen them in so very long…

She had only one hope now.

That next time, the bullets would not miss.