Rodgers rose, saw that Ki-Soo was all right, that most of his men were shaken, a few bloodied, but were also unhurt.
The American saluted the Colonel, and now it was Shakespeare who seemed appropriate:
'For never anything can be amiss,
When simpleness and duty tender it.'
CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX
When Rodgers was able to make Ki-Soo understand that they had a team in the hills, the Colonel sent a truck up to collect the men. Most of the Americans were edgy as they arrived in the camp, but Squires was glad to see Rodgers and Puckett was happy to see his radio. The Lieutenant Colonel left it with him as the North Korean medic saw to his shoulder wound.
'Glad you held your fire,' Rodgers said as he took a drink from Squires's canteen. 'I was afraid you might try snapshooting the men on the guns.'
'I might've,' Squires said, 'if they hadn't been firing all the guns at once. Took a second, but I figured out what they were doing.'
Puckett was the one who answered when Hood called from Op-Center. Rodgers and Squires had been standing off by a jeep, with Moore's covered body in the back; when the call came through, Rodgers rushed over, followed by Squires.
'Yes, sir,' said Puckett. 'The General is right here.'
He handed the headphones to Rodgers.
'Morning, Paul.'
'Good evening, Mike. You guys pulled off a miracle there. Congratulations.'
Rodgers was silent for a moment. 'It cost us, Paul.'
'I know but I don't want you second-guessing anything you did,' Hood said. 'We lost some good people today, but that's the lousy price of the business we're in.'
'I know that,' Rodgers said. 'But that isn't what you tell yourself when you put your head on the pillow at night. I'll be replaying this for a good long time.'
'Just make sure you factor in the lives you saved. The other soldier Charlie said was wounded—'
'Puckett. Shoulder wound, but he'll be fine. Listen, I gather that Colonel Ki-Soo wants to escort us to the pickup point so we'll be leaving here soon.'
'It seems a little strange,' Hood said, 'this sudden detente.'
'Only a little,' Rodgers replied. 'Robert Louis Stevenson once advised his readers to try the manners of different nations firsthand before forming an opinion about them. I've always felt he had something there.'
'Something you'd never sell to Congress, the White House, or any other seat of government on the planet,' Hood pointed out.
'True,' Rodgers said. 'Which is why Stevenson also wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I guess he didn't think human nature could change either. Paul, I'll contact you when we're heading back from Japan. I want to hear what the President has to say about all this.'
Hood snickered. 'Me too, Paul.'
After asking Hood to check with Martha Mackall on a specific word, Rodgers and his men climbed into two of the four trucks that were to take them and Ki-Soo's party into the hills.
As they drove, Rodgers had his hand on the small staplerlike device he'd showed Squires earlier. Every two hundred yards or so, he pushed a small plunger on the back, and then released it.
'That's the EEC locator, isn't it, sir?' Squires asked.
Rodgers nodded.
'What are you doing?'
'Blowing them up,' he said. 'Trust is nice,' said Rodgers, 'but caution is good too.'
Squires agreed as the open-top truck rumbled through the uneven terrain.
The Sikorsky S-70 Black Hawk flew into the Diamond Mountains as scheduled, the pilot expressing surprise when Squires told him to fly right in and land.
'No ladders, no quick turnaround?' he asked.
'No,' Squires said, 'set her down. We're leaving like proper gentlemen.'
The eleven-seater landed on schedule, the M-60 machineguns ominously silent on the sides. While the men boarded, Rodgers and Ki-Soo made their farewells while Squires looked on.
Ki-Soo made a short speech to the American officers, the words foreign but the meaning clear: he was thanking them for all that they'd done to protect the integrity of his homeland.
When he was finished, Rodgers bowed and said, 'An-nyong-hi ka-ship-shio.'
Ki-Soo seemed surprised and delighted, and said in response, 'Annyong ha-simni-ka.'
The two men saluted one another, Ki-Soo holding his bandaged hand stiffly at his side, after which the Americans turned and left. As they boarded the helicopter, Squires checked on Puckett, who was lying on a stretcher on the floor. Then he sat heavily beside Rodgers.
'What did you two just say, anyway?' Squires asked.
'When I was on with Paul, I had him ask Martha Mackall how to say, 'Good-bye and may your home be well' in Korean.'
'Nice sentiment.'
'Of course,' Rodgers said, 'Martha and I don't get along too well? for all I know, I may've just told him I'm allergic to penicillin.'
'I don't think so,' Squires said. 'What he answered sounded pretty much like what you said. Unless you're both allergic.'
'It wouldn't surprise me,' he said as the chopper door was shut and the Black Hawk rose into the gradually clearing sky. 'Each day that I live, Charlie, less and less does.'
CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN
Kim Hwan sat on the bed, the back of the mattress raised and the pillow having fallen to the side. He wanted it, though after the physical and emotional upheavals of the last few hours, he seemed to lack the ambition and energy to reach over and get it.
The man who would save the peninsula was unable to lift his arm and recover his pillow. There was probably an irony in that, though he was in no mood to look for it.
The dull pain in Hwan's side kept him from sleeping, and the tight bandages made it difficult to breathe. But it was the events of the past few hours that kept him alert. The death of Gregory Donald held him like a nightmare he couldn't shake, yet while it still seemed unbelievable, it also seemed oddly inevitable. Donald's life had ended when his wife was killed— was it really less than a day before? — and at least now they were together. Donald wouldn't have believed that, but Soonji would have and Hwan did. So he was outvoted. The atheistic old goat was an angel whether he wanted to be or not.
As Hwan lay there, staring at the brick wall outside his window, Bob Herbert phoned to tell him about the events in the Diamond Mountains, and of the other men involved in the plot— the two the Striker team had killed at the Nodong site. Hwan knew that it wasn't likely the South would get the bodies of those men back soon, though the North was sure to send them fingerprints for identification.
'We haven't heard a peep out of anyone else,' Herbert told Hwan, 'so either we got the group or they've pulled in their claws to try again another day.'
