Joy Brigade (17 page)

I waited, afraid to speak. Hero Kang’s daughter was about to explode.

In her effort to control herself, her entire body shuddered. “It is
vile!
These things they ask us to do. Always for the glory of the state, always for the good of the loyal comrades who serve the people and the Great Leader. But it’s not right! We are women. We have pride. We have pride in ourselves, pride in our bodies, and pride in the husbands and children and families that we someday hope to have. And they ask us to do these
things!
”

And then she was crying, still standing at the position of attention, the tears rolling down her soft cheeks. After a few seconds I stepped toward her, my palm open, ready to pat her on the shoulder. At the last second, she backhanded my forearm away.

“No!” she said. “I don’t need your pity. I am a soldier. A comrade of the Manchurian Battalion. Come,” she said, pulling herself together, “we have work to do.”

Hye-kyong swiveled and marched down the tunnel.

I realized why Hero Kang had risked everything to get me in here. He wanted more than just state secrets. If he was any kind of father, and I believed he was, he’d also want Hye-kyong out of here. But to run away, to defy orders, would be tantamount to bringing a death sentence down upon herself and her family.

We’d have to escape quickly and we’d have to escape together. With the secrets and, if possible, with our lives.

At the end of the tunnel we reached a hatchway, a few feet up from the floor, probably designed for quick escapes. I studied it. No keyhole. Just then, we heard voices. I froze. One of the voices I recognized: Commissar Oh. Hye-kyong patted me on the shoulder reassuringly and then climbed up on a rock shelf that hovered just to the right of the door. She peered into something on the face of the wall, then pulled back and motioned for me to come forward. I did. It was a tiny hole, about half the width of a dime, slanting downward into a room a few feet lower than where we lay. It was a well-appointed room with overhanging fluorescent bulbs and maps and chalkboards mounted on stone walls. In the center was a long mahogany conference table, one end of which I could see clearly. Legs and feet were visible beneath the table, but I couldn’t see faces.

“Report!” a man barked. It was Commissar Oh.

Another voice I didn’t recognize started droning on with all the verve a detailed government report deserves, listing facts and figures: how many men in a unit, how many men out sick or on leave, a breakdown of artillery pieces and their state of repair. It was difficult for me to follow because many of the Korean-language nomenclatures were unfamiliar. Still, it was clear that they were talking about military hardware.

When the report was finally over, Commissar Oh asked another man if everything would be ready. Of course, he agreed that it would be. Even at Eighth Army, no officer in
his right mind ever admits, especially to the boss, that he won’t be ready—for anything.

After about a half hour, the meeting was adjourned. We heard feet shuffling and chairs scraping and then someone spent another five minutes tidying up. The door of a safe slammed shut with a reassuring metal clang. Finally the light was switched off and another door slammed. I climbed down off the ledge and squatted next to Hye-kyong.

“We must enter,” she said.

“How?” I asked.

“Tomorrow night, I will be serving at a logistical staff meeting.” She pounded on the metal hatchway. “When no one is looking, I will open this door from the inside. Then, you will enter.”

“What do you mean ‘when no one is looking’? Won’t they be watching you closely?”

“That is my problem,” she said. “Not yours. At the conclusion of the meeting, they will make sure I leave. That is why we need another person—you—to enter through the escape hatch. There is no one else in this place we can trust to take on this job, only you. Once the lights go out, you will enter the conference room.”

She briefed me on the information that was needed and the most likely places to find it. “Once you have what we need,” she said, “you must escape.”

“How?”

“Exit through the ancient tomb and head south toward the main entrance of the First Corps headquarters. There will be signs. Along the way, I will meet you.”

“Where will we go from there?”

“All has been prepared. You will bluff your way out. A sedan will be waiting.”

A sedan? Only one person could be so bold. Hero Kang. I knew it might be indiscreet, but I couldn’t stop myself. We were too close to a resolution now. Decisions had to be made. All our cards had to be on the table. “Your father,” I said, “he is Hero Kang.”

She stood rigid, glaring up at me, and even in this dim light I could see that her face was red. She spoke slowly, enunciating every word. “You don’t talk about that.”

I held her eyes. “Will you be escaping with us?” I asked.

“Enough!” she snapped.

But I refused to back down. “He’s your father. Regardless of what has happened, he will help you. You have one chance to escape, tomorrow night, and you must take it.”

Her face was a bright crimson now. She swiveled and marched down the tunnel toward the entrance. As she did so, she spoke over her shoulder without looking back. “Return now, before you are missed. Tomorrow you will join in athletic training with the others. At night, when food is served, you must feign illness and slip away. Come here. Wait. You have the key!”

8

I
consider myself to be in fairly good condition. In preparation for this mission, in addition to the intelligence briefings and the Korean-language drills and the survival, escape, and evasion training, I also embarked on a rigorous regime of physical exercise. But that was measuring myself against normal people. People like U.S. Army Green Berets and U.S. Navy Seals. Not North Korean athletes.

East of Pyongyang, dirt roads wound through beautiful rolling hills. The sun rose red and assertive, burning off the morning fog, as if it too had bought into the “long live Kim Il-sung” propaganda. The men running in front of me glanced back and smirked. I was staggering. We must’ve run three or four miles already, at a blistering
pace, almost a sprint. It was impossible for any normal human being to keep this up. But somehow they did.

I remembered what an old NCO had told me about South Korean soldiers: “You can outwalk ’em, but you can’t outrun ’em.” Maybe it’s their diet—or not growing up in the East L.A. smog—but young Korean men seem to have an endless capacity for aerobic exertion.

None of the Korean soldiers had broken rank. They were pulling away from me, inexorably. Finally, the leader barked an order and, like a gigantic centipede, the formation of forty highly trained athletes turned around in the road and came back. The men chanted something as they passed. Two of the taller, stronger men in the front ranks grabbed me by the elbows and started pulling me along at their pace. I stumbled forward, wanting to be let go so I could plop down in a puddle right there in the middle of the road, but their grips were unbreakable. Somehow I kept my legs moving forward, one agonizing lunge at a time.

We rounded a hill. The red sun was at our backs now; we were heading home, to the Joy Brigade. I’d only been there one day, but already I was starting to think of it as home. I’d started as a prisoner being tortured in a dungeon, risen to a partially-accepted participant in a liquor-and-sex orgy, and now I was an athlete in training. Tonight, if everything worked out all right, I’d become a thief.

After morning chow, Commissar Oh called me into his office.

An officious young woman stood next to him, wearing
a cloth cap with a red star that was pulled so far down on her head that it looked like a helmet. Apparently he’d found an interpreter. He spoke Korean to her; she spoke Romanian to me. I understood the Korean much better than the Romanian—which I understood not at all—but I let the charade play out.

“Your embassy will be missing you,” he said.

“Tomorrow,” I told him in Korean, ignoring the interpreter, “I must return to work.”

“When you return to your embassy,” he said, “we will expect results quickly.”

I kept my face impassive.

“Charges have been prepared,” he continued, “concerning your underhanded assault on First Corps champion Pak. If we file them, you will not leave Korea.”

I waited for the interpreter to finish her translation and then nodded.

“Don’t think of escaping on a Russian or Warsaw Pact flight,” he told me. “We inspect them all.”

I nodded again. “My first payment,” I said. “When will I receive it?”

Commissar Oh placed a cigarette in his ivory holder, lit it, and inhaled with an air of self-satisfaction. When he let the smoke out, he said, “When you make your first report, you will receive money.”

“Yen,” I said.

He nodded. “Yen.”

“When can I leave?” I asked.

“Not until this evening. Arrangements are being made. Until then, you are our guest.”

Some guest. I’d never worked so hard in my life. Later
that morning, I was scheduled for Taekwondo practice, and if I lived through that—which was by no means certain—I’d be participating in a soccer match that afternoon.

As I rose to leave, the interpreter said something to me in Romanian. None of the words seemed familiar, nothing like Spanish. This was a test, of that I was certain. Both the interpreter and Commissar Oh stared at me. Waiting. If I’d learned anything from Hero Kang, I’d learned that when you’re about to get caught red-handed, there’s only one thing to do. Get angry. Get very angry.

I strode toward Commissar Oh’s desk and leaned forward, looking down at him and the tiny interpreter.

“I want
money!
” I said in Korean. “A lot of it. Not a lot of lies. Not a lot of your silly nonsense.” Then I pointed at him, tapping my forefinger on his chest. “Do you understand?”

Somewhere, there must’ve been a silent alarm. Four armed guards burst into the room. They grabbed me and we started jostling. When they finally pulled me a few feet from the desk, Commissar Oh waved them off. He puffed furiously on his cigarette. It smelled of something vaguely familiar, maybe cherry wood, not the foul-smelling Korean tobacco I was used to.

“You will be paid according to your work,” he said. “And only after we see what you bring us.”

I shrugged the hands off me, straightened my Warsaw Pact tunic, and stormed out of Commissar Oh’s office.

Later, I thought about what the interpreter had said. I kept running the words over in my mind, comparing them to Spanish or English or the little bit of Latin I’d
studied in school. And then I figured it out. “Who are you really?”

Even the interpreter knew I was a fraud.

I managed to survive the Taekwondo workout. Apparently the word had gone out: I was working for Commissar Oh now and I was to be left alone. That was fine with me. As I stood on the sidelines, stretching and occasionally hitting the heavy bag, I watched the real experts go at it, one on one. I was glad no one ordered me to spar with them. In the afternoon we chose sides and were treated to a two-hour game of soccer. After about five minutes, the Koreans realized that I was hopelessly inept at a game that I’d never played before and they let me stand on the sidelines and pretend that I was interested in the outcome.

Finally, the workday was over. As I showered I wondered if the interpreter had worked up the nerve to tell Commissar Oh she didn’t believe I was in fact Romanian. Of course, telling him that would be tantamount to explaining to him that he was an idiot. Somehow, I didn’t believe she’d bother him with such impudent information. Still, doubts about me must have been growing. After all, they played soccer in Romania, didn’t they? No one would believe it was a game I had played as a child. I was much too hopeless at it. And Senior Captain Rhee Mi-sook had more than just doubts about me. She was certain that I was not who I claimed to be. How long until Commissar Oh picked up on all this? Probably not long.

What was keeping me afloat, I suspected, was the good work of the Manchurian Battalion. Obviously, they had a
mole in the Romanian Embassy, someone who had confirmed to the highest levels of the North Korean government that a certain Captain Enescu was indeed a member of their embassy and working in their employ. That, coupled with the manic level of mutual suspicion that pervaded the Joy Brigade, made it possible for me to survive. No one was willing to compare notes; no one was willing to express an honest opinion; no one was willing to admit that they—or, more importantly, their boss—might be wrong. Welcome to the efficient functioning of the worker’s paradise.