I followed him down a corridor that was new to me. At the end, a door was open. It led into the darkness of the surrounding gardens. After a few yards, hanging paper lanterns guided me along a winding flagstone walkway.
The thirty-foot bronze statue of the Great Leader was the most well-lit part of the grounds. Beyond, I spotted Hero Kang’s hunched back, moving purposefully to the far side of the garden. Ahead, a group of men had paused in front of a fountain surrounded by hanging red lanterns. They looked back at Hero Kang. One of the men I recognized. Commissar Oh. The other men were military officers and I could only surmise that they were the men who’d been in the meeting below ground in the secure area. Apparently, they’d waited upstairs while Commissar Oh had finished his assignation with Hye-kyong.
Hero Kang never slowed his pace. He marched right up to Commissar Oh and did exactly what I would’ve loved to do. He punched him right in the snout. The commissar reeled backward. The other men protested, reaching their hands out to stop Hero Kang, but nothing short of a Mack truck could’ve slowed him down. He leaned over Commissar Oh, who had now retreated to the edge of the fountain, and punched the hapless apparatchik again. Kicking him, Hero Kang started screaming that Commissar Oh was the worst son of a bitch who’d ever defiled the uniform of the people’s revolution.
Then Hero Kang grabbed Commissar Oh’s throat, squeezed, and shoved the red-veined face into the scum- laced water of the fountain.
I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. It was illicit sex with his daughter that Hero Kang and Commissar Oh were discussing at the moment. A one-way conversation, to be sure, since Hero Kang’s massive paw was wrapped firmly around Commissar Oh’s scrawny throat. The commissar’s half-burnt cigarette floated in green slime, and his face was beginning to turn purple.
The other men flitted around Hero Kang, like bear cubs pawing at a grizzly.
Every now and then, he swung a fist backward, warning them off.
I thought of the car back at the entranceway, of our getaway, but if Hero Kang murdered Commissar Oh, I didn’t see how escape would be possible. I stepped forward and grabbed his shoulders.
“Let’s go,” I said in Korean. “Leave him. We must go.”
He didn’t hear me.
The ambient light from the hanging red lanterns rippled on the water of the fountain. About six inches below the surface, Commissar Oh’s eyeballs were as wide and round as a frog’s. In seconds he’d be dead. If I punched Hero Kang, I could maybe stop this, but then what? Hero Kang was my only lifeline. My only chance of escaping from this place and my only chance of staying alive. As I pondered what to do, a figure launched from the shadows. Hye-kyong. She rammed into the back of Hero Kang, knocking him over, forcing him to release his grip.
“Abboji,” she said. Father. “We must go.”
When she received no response, she reached down and grabbed him by the lapels of his tunic. “The car,” she said. “Now. You must go. And take him,” she said, motioning toward me. “Now, Father. Now!”
Hero Kang seemed stunned, confused by what he’d just done. “What about him?” He glanced down at the spitting and coughing Commissar Oh.
I realized that the other men, the commissar’s lackeys, had disappeared. Sensing more trouble than they ever wanted to be involved with, they’d all faded discreetly into the night. We were alone.
“You’ve ruined everything!” Hye-kyong screamed. “I was to stay here, monitor their plans. Now that’s not possible. First, you go! I will follow.” When Hero Kang hesitated, she said, “I will take care of him. Leave him to me.”
Befuddled, Hero Kang seemed to agree. “You must come,” he said.
“Yes,” Hye-kyong agreed. “This changes everything. Go to the car. I will follow. Go now.”
She turned her father around and shoved him hard. Like an enormous child, Hero Kang stumbled down the walkway, returning toward the entrance of the First Corps headquarters. I glanced at Hye-kyong. She motioned for me to follow her father.
As I hurried along the flagstone walkway, I glanced backward. Hye-kyong had lifted Commissar Oh slightly out of the water. She slapped him. Hard. The noise reverberated through the deserted garden.
Hero Kang and I wound through shrubs. When I looked back again, Hye-kyong was leaning over the edge of the fountain, facing down, like a woman at a stream churning laundry. As if she were soaking soiled rags, expunging them of filth. She stood like that for what seemed a long time.
9
A lthough, just moments before, the corridors of the First Corps office complex had been teeming with life, now they were deserted. Word must’ve spread like fire in a rice granary: trouble in the headquarters. People of great power were fighting, flinging lightning bolts like gods on Mount Olympus, and mere mortals had to flee for their lives.
Hero Kang’s footsteps pounded down the tile hallway. I kept looking back, hoping that Hye-kyong would appear. She didn’t. In front of the headquarters, the black sedan sat undisturbed. The guards had disappeared, except for one who crouched in his open-windowed shack. Hero Kang clambered behind the wheel of the sedan and started the engine. I opened the passenger side door but hesitated.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“Not here yet,” I replied.
Hero Kang gunned the engine impatiently.
He was just about to reenter the building when footsteps clattered down the long corridor. Hye-kyong appeared, hopping down the stone steps, the sleeves of her uniform sopping wet, tears running down her cheeks. There was no time to talk. I opened the back door and she dove in. I climbed into the passenger seat and then we were off with a great lurching and grinding of gears.
There wasn’t much internal security in North Korea, not of the type we’re used to in the modern world. Not the type that responds to emergencies if someone is hurt or feels threatened, or the type that stands guard at the front gate of a government building. At first I wondered why. Gradually it dawned on me that the small trappings of security in the West were mainly there to protect people: the government worker from a terrorist attack, the average citizen from assault by a burglar, the middle-aged man from the threat of a heart attack. Those things weren’t deemed necessary in the People’s Republic. The entire country, in a very real sense, was a prison. Everyone was assigned a workplace or a place of study, and once the prisoners were securely locked away-and spies were in place to make sure they didn’t plot against the Great Leader-they were otherwise ignored.
Hero Kang rolled onto the wide expanse of the central road leading past the Great Monument to the Victory of the People Against Foreign Imperialists. The statue of striving workers and farmers and soldiers holding up hammers and sickles and Kalashnikov rifles was as brightly lit as the red carpet at a Hollywood premiere, but the street was deserted. We zipped past, no one commenting on the waste of electricity.
Hye-kyong cried softly in the backseat. Hero Kang gripped the wooden steering wheel as if he were trying to strangle it.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
Although it was cold inside the car, sweat poured down Hero Kang’s big forehead.
“Which brigade is it?” he asked. At first I didn’t understand the question, so he repeated it. “Which brigade has been assigned to attack the Manchurian Battalion?”
“The Red Star Brigade,” I said.
He grinned. “I thought so. That son-of-a-bitch Yim has been chosen to betray his own people. A good man for it.”
I remembered the name in the material I’d reviewed in the secure briefing room: Brigadier General Yim On- pong, Commander of the Red Star Brigade. “You know him?”
“I know him. The bastard would sell his own daughter if it would earn him a promotion.”
And then Hero Kang realized his poor choice of words. I turned. Tears flowed down Hye-kyong’s face. We drove in silence. I watched Hero Kang’s tortured features, listened to Hye-kyong’s sniffling, and faced forward to watch the road for signs of trouble.
