Back at the edge of the plaza, all was quiet. I waited ten minutes until I was certain there was no movement before stepping out of the alley. When I was halfway across the plaza, beneath the branches of the withered elm, someone off to my left shouted. Before I could react, armed men poured out of dark apertures. An electric torch sliced the night, shining brutally into my face. I raised my hands to cover my eyes. Heavy boots tromped toward me and soon I was surrounded. One of the men shoved me back toward the elm tree and others grabbed my arms. Within seconds they’d cinched my wrists behind my back with a wire cord. I cursed myself for being so careless. Before anyone could say anything, a man wearing a full-brimmed cap with a gold-backed red star in the center pushed his way toward me.

The beam of the flashlight was lowered. In front of me stood Commander Koh, the man who had led the boarding party on the Star of Tirana this morning and the man in charge of the Port of Nampo. How had he become aware of me so quickly? Had Zarkos talked? Once they’d taken the young sailor into custody, he’d have been so frightened he would have told them anything, traded any tidbit of information, no matter how inconsequential, to regain his freedom. I was the odd duck aboard the Star of Tirana. He’d have told them about me. It was only natural. Still, I had my cover story and I was determined to stick to it.

Commander Koh raised a cigarette to his lips, his eyes narrowing. He didn’t ask me anything, he just stared.

Finally, he stepped back. As he did so, another man armed with a rifle sprang forward. Before I could prepare myself, the butt of his AK-47 slammed into my stomach. My knees gave way and, finding nothing to break my fall, I tumbled headfirst to the ground. My tied arms prevented me from clutching my stomach, but I brought my knees up as far as I could in a vain effort to ease the pain. In seconds, I was vomiting my dinner onto the cobbled ground: komtang, coarse brown rice, and three glasses of barley tea. I must’ve passed out briefly because when I came to I heard a roar, as if the Minotaur of Greek legend had entered our stone ring.

Doctor Yong In-ja was the most exciting woman I’d ever met.

“A bookworm,” was my CID partner Ernie Bascom’s opinion. But Ernie didn’t have much time for the intellectual side of life. He was too busy living, which for him included fighting, drinking, and chasing women, not necessarily in that order. To him, a book was a waste of precious time, time when he could be carousing.

We’d met Doc Yong because she was the chief of the Itaewon branch of the Yongsan District Public Health Service. As such she was in constant contact with the “business girls” who serviced the American GIs-young, impoverished women from the countryside of South Korea who gathered in Itaewon, the red-light district of Seoul. The business girls were constantly appearing on the Eighth Army blotter report-victims of rape, robbery, assault. These reports were routine, and Doctor Yong In-ja at the medical clinic often received the complaints first and passed them on to us.

Doc Yong was the most intelligent person I’d ever met. Through thick-lensed glasses, her serious dark eyes sized you up as soon as you were fortunate enough to step into her realm. I fell for her probably the first time I met her, and I felt awkward around her, but I wasn’t able to get to know her until we worked on a murder case together. It was a cold case dating back twenty years, to just after the end of the Korean War. We’d become close, very close. When it was over, she had to flee to the homeland of her ancestors, to North Korea. I wasn’t sure, but I had indications that she was pregnant at the time. So when I received the message, months later, I realized that it was her calling me to join her.

She was smart enough to know that in order for the Eighth Army brass to release me, and to risk having an American soldier enter communist North Korea, they had to have an incentive. That’s what the ancient manuscript was all about. It had supposedly been written in the fifteenth century under the reign of Sejong Daewang, the Great King Sejong. It told the story of a chase for a man who had been considered dangerous by the authorities at the time. This “wild man” was extremely resourceful and managed to elude his pursuers on horseback by entering a network of caves in the Kwangju Mountains. Upon entering the caves, the officials discovered a network of tunnels that took them much farther than they imagined, beneath what in modern times is known as the Korean DMZ. Some scholars thought the manuscript was a myth. Now, by hiring a merchant sailor to contact me in the port city of Pusan and place a wrinkled fragment of the ancient parchment in my hands, Doc Yong had offered physical proof, confirmed by experts, that the narrative actually did exist. All this was lovely from a historian’s perspective, but to the military, the manuscript had a much greater importance. Specifically, it offered a ready-made pathway beneath the Demilitarized Zone. The honchos at Eighth Army had swallowed the bait whole. And since Doc Yong had further insisted, through the merchant marine who relayed her instructions, that I was the only messenger she would trust, I was selected for the mission. In order to provide the remainder of the manuscript and the information it provided, Doc Yong wanted something in return. What that was, we weren’t quite sure yet, but Eighth Army seemed ready to pay a very high price.

“There’s not much time,” Major Bulward told me. “When the rice paddies freeze, the terrain near the DMZ will become solid and therefore passable for the North Korean armored battalions. Tanks, personnel carriers, self- propelled guns-they’ll find traction on the ice and won’t have to worry about getting bogged down in mud. This winter, after the snows come, that’s when the North Koreans will attack.”

Kim Il-sung had publicly and repeatedly vowed to reunify Korea before he retired. Eighth Army believed him. The time for that to happen was now. This winter.

Here in Nampo, the leaves were off the trees. Cold winds were already blowing out of Manchuria. Soon, Old Man Winter would rouse himself from his snowy home in Siberia, lumber across the Asian landmass, and find his way into the long-suffering peninsula known as Frozen Chosun. He’d bring with him ice and snow and, it was believed, war.

I was still doubled over from the butt of the AK-47 that had been rammed into my gut. Commander Koh still puffed on his cigarette, studying me as if I were some sort of vermin that had to be stomped into submission. But even he seemed startled by the roar that emanated from the man in a brown felt army uniform who stood at the edge of the plaza. What he said was incomprehensible, but he left no doubt that he was enraged. The man was enormous for a Korean. He stormed across the plaza, shoving armed soldiers out of the way, and within seconds he stood toe-to-toe with Commander Koh.

“Weikurei!” he bellowed. What the hell are you doing?

The voice was as deep and as full-throated as any voice I’d ever heard. His bulging cheeks turned red and shook as he spoke, spittle erupting from moist lips. He leaned so close to Commander Koh that their noses touched.

Like Commander Koh, the enraged man wore a cap with a gold-backed red star in the center, but his was a soft cap, the cap of a workingman. He also wore the ubiquitous broach with a picture of the smiling face of the Great Leader pinned to his chest. Something dangled from a lanyard around the big man’s neck, flickering in the light of nervous torches: a photograph, apparently of this man, standing next to and shaking the hand of the Great Leader, Kim Il-sung himself. It was the type of photo that in the West we’d have tacked to the wall of our office.

Commander Koh held his own. He squinted up at the taller man, pointing at me, hollering back that I had escaped from the Port of Nampo and therefore I was his prisoner.

The bigger man’s eyes bulged, and, like a great torrent unleashed, words rushed out of his mouth, washing away any argument Commander Koh was trying to make. The big man pointed at me, waggling his forefinger. He was shouting that it was ludicrous beyond belief that Command Koh should think that he in any way had any jurisdiction here, outside of the port, or any reason in the great wide world to be arresting a man who was clearly the responsibility of the People’s Police of the City of Nampo.

Or at least that’s what I thought he said. The words came out so fast and furious, tumbling over one another; they were like a crowd in a burning theater rushing for the exits.

Commander Koh protested.

The big man leaned into him until their foreheads touched, shoving the rattled Commander backward even further, screaming at the top of his lungs. He would brook no argument. I don’t believe I’d ever seen a person so outraged. In America, we would’ve long since been exchanging blows, or gunshots.

Koreans believe that throwing a punch reflects poorly on the person who throws it. The person who does such an uncouth thing reveals himself to be an uneducated oaf and his victim wins the argument, at least in the public mind, by default. The greatest fear, much greater than the fear of physical harm, was the fear of losing face.

Gradually, the big man’s argument concerning jurisdiction seemed to be gaining traction. Between shouts,

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