“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
