Hunt the Dragon (21 page)

The men and women in the room—with one or two exceptions—shared a deep sense of insecurity. They weren't ignorant people. All of them had traveled to China, Russia, and Japan. They'd seen smuggled videos and DVDs from the United States and Europe. They knew their country was essentially backward. If they had any chance of remaining in power and continuing to enjoy the special perks they had been given, they knew they needed to be ruthless, vigilant, and clever.

Still, five days after it had occurred, little was known about the attack. No bodies had been discovered, no equipment had been found, and no surveillance video had survived the devastating explosion. None of their radar installations had reported violations of North Korean airspace, and no foreign ships or submarines had been detected by sonar. The only evidence that had been found were small, unmarked pieces of some kind of underwater vehicle that had washed up near Munchon. Some speculated that the attack was a South Korean response to the sinking of its Pohang corvette two years earlier. Others suspected that there had been some inside collusion, perhaps supported by the United States and South Korea.

The red light flashed near the door above the Supreme Leader's chair, and the room grew still and silent. But in place of Kim Jong-un, it was Dak-ho Gun-san, the wizened interior minister, who descended the steps and took his place behind the podium. The skin under his right eye was swollen and blackened, and a bandage covered the side of his face. According to rumor, the night Dak-ho reported the attack and death of General Chou to the Supreme Leader, a pajama-clad Kim Jong-un had grabbed a brass figurine of his grandfather from his desk and thrown it at Dak-ho, hitting him in the face.

Now Dak-ho's voice quivered with outrage as he read a list of the names of those present who the Supreme Leader had declared enemies of the state. As these men and woman heard their names, they slumped in their seats and wept. Soldiers in tan uniforms quickly handcuffed them and led them away. They left in unimaginable anguish, knowing that their careers were over and that their wives, husbands, and children had probably been arrested, too. All of them, including former minister Dak-ho Gun-san, would spend the rest of their lives in one of the country's political prisons, scavenging for food like animals.

A light rain started to fall as Dawkins watched Crocker and Akil standing outside the primitive shelter they had constructed from the two Kevlar blankets, tossing leaves over the top so they wouldn't be visible from the air. Six days had passed since his liberation. During that time, he was sure he was either going to die or be recaptured and put to death.

In the moments when he wasn't numb with exhaustion and fear, he sometimes resented what these brave men had done. Maybe, he thought, it would have been better had they left him alone in his cell to be blown up with the rest of the underground complex. That way, he wouldn't face almost certain torture, and his wife and daughter would be left alone.

Yet the more time he spent with Akil, Sam, and Crocker, the more he started to believe in them and to adopt their the-only-easy-day-was-yesterday approach. Crocker fascinated him. He was a man who never showed fear or disappointment. Even now that the batteries in the emergency beacon had died, he seemed to take it in stride and remain optimistic that they would be rescued or find their way to safety. From the way the men casually joked with one another and went about the business of hunting for food, collecting wood, finding water, and walking through enemy territory at night carrying Sam and never complaining, you would have thought they were on a camping trip in an American national park.

“I love danger,” Akil had confided to him. “It turns me on.”

When he first said it, Dawkins thought he was just trying to boost his spirits. Now Dawkins believed him. Today the Egyptian American had entertained them with stories of moving to the States when he was six, joining the marines, and the many women he had pursued and bedded—Dutch twins in Mexico who kept him up all night and left in the morning with all his clothes, the Jewish stripper from Boston he had run into in Dubai, the female diving champion who would make love only underwater. He talked about them all with so much enthusiasm and affection that they became real. He remembered their scents, eccentricities, the way they walked and the sounds they made in bed.

The more Akil talked about women, the closer Dawkins felt to Nan. He realized that his modesty and shame about his body had caused him to miss a lot. Life was richer than he had realized. People were filled with pathos, humor, courage, and some kind of magic.

When he asked Akil how he remained so centered and optimistic, the rough man responded by pointing to his head and said, “It all comes from here. What we achieve inwardly changes outer reality.”

“Is that a Muslim belief?”

“No, I think it came from a guy named Plutarch.”

“Plutarch the Roman philosopher. Did you study him in college?”

“No. Never went.”

“Then where did you come across that concept?”

“I read it on the shitter door of a yoga studio. It's stuck in my head ever since.”

Crocker might have appeared untroubled, but in fact he spent most of his time trying to figure out how they were going to make it to safety, given their dwindling supplies. Now that the juice had run out of the batteries in the GPS tracker, their chances of being rescued were almost zero.

What he didn't know was that the morning after the batteries ran out, an enraged Davis walked into the Vice Admiral Greene's office and punched him in the face, breaking his jaw.

A half-moon peeked through the branches of the Japanese red pines as they trudged, Crocker and Akil carrying Sam on the jerry-rigged stretcher and Dawkins walking on his own. Sam's ankle had become infected and they'd run out of Motrin, so the Korean American had to suck it up, which he did without complaint. Since they had run out of disinfectant as well, Crocker lanced the infection every day and cleansed the wound with boiled water.

After six nights of walking, Crocker and company had reached the top of Hamgyong Peninsula. The closer they drew to the mainland, the more farms and clusters of huts they saw. So far they hadn't run into barking dogs, which was odd. Akil joked that the North Koreans had eaten them all, and Crocker thought he was probably right.

They were roughly 110 miles north of the South Korean border. On a good night they managed to progress from eight to ten miles over footpaths through forests, swamps, and fields. It helped that the streams that ran down the peninsula to the bay provided a steady supply of food and water. Crocker expected both to become harder to secure now that they approached denser population centers along the southeast coast. According to the map, the terrain ahead was mountainous, and they would have to cross at least two major rivers before they could continue south to the cities of Munchon and Wonsan.

The terrain and climate reminded Crocker of woods of New Hampshire. He'd camped in them often—intimate days and nights with his mother, father, sister, and older brother dining on grilled chicken and baked beans, followed by his dad pointing out the constellations and telling jokes and stories.

Crocker recalled a story his father told about a widow who fell in love with a rich nobleman. The nobleman wouldn't marry her because he didn't want to raise another man's offspring, so the widow drowned her children in a nearby river. When she told the nobleman what she had done, he was horrified and wanted nothing more to do with her. She went to the river hoping to retrieve her children. Unable to find them, she drowned herself and was condemned to wander the waterways of the world, searching for her children and weeping until the end of time.

Akil, leading the way, entered a clearing alongside a stream and stopped. They set down the stretcher and looked for a place to cross. Crocker checked his watch—0314 hours. The stream was about twenty feet wide, and there were no bridges in sight.

“What do you think?” Akil asked.

“Let's try to cross here, and look for a place to sleep on the other side.”

“Okay, boss. You wait here while I test it.”

Akil handed him his web belt and holster with the SIG Sauer with two remaining mags, waded into the ice-cold water, and came out shivering and raising his thumb.

Seconds later they entered together—Akil and Crocker carrying the stretcher with Sam, and Dawkins beside them. Crocker held the stretcher over his head and was concentrating on his footing when he heard Dawkins cry “Look!”

On their right, past a bend downstream, a brown bear was in the water, presumably looking for fish. It stopped, turned, rose up on its rear legs, and roared. The noise startled Dawkins, who slipped and fell. In the moonlight, Crocker saw that the current was hurling Dawkins back toward the shore they had come from, about twenty feet ahead, and was moving so fast that when he tried to slow himself by grabbing a boulder, he smacked into it chin first and went under.

“Wait!” Crocker said to Akil. “I'm going after him.”

Akil seemed to intuit exactly what he wanted him to do, taking the stretcher and balancing it over his head.

Crocker dove into the current, which carried him past the boulder as if he were on a ride at a water park. He used it to push off, and tried to locate Dawkins by his pale shirt. Eight feet ahead he saw an arm and let the powerful current take him until he was able to reach up under Dawkins's shoulder and neck, and pull his head out of the water.

Dawkins coughed up water, and the bear roared again. But the current was strong and they had no way to stop. When Crocker glanced to the right he saw the bear watching from thirty feet away. Dawkins spotted him, too, and started to panic and pull away.

“Relax!”

He held Dawkins tightly to his chest with his right arm and let the current carry them past the bear, to a bend in the stream where the water was shallow and they could easily walk ashore. The roaring bear was so close they could smell his rancid breath.

“Run,” Dawkins whispered.

Crocker reached out and stopped him. “Unwise.”

The bear rose with a fish clenched in his left paw like a trophy, spun, and ambled off into the woods.

C
rocker awoke
with the sun directly above him in the sky.

“Boss?” Akil asked.

“Yeah. What's up?” His right shoulder hurt and his leg muscles were sore and tight.

“I want to show you something.”

He relieved himself behind a tree and noticed that they were on a moss-covered outcropping of rock surrounded by tall pines. Sam and Dawkins slept beside each other under a blanket near the base of one of the trees.

He found the water bag and chugged purified water, then remembered that they had no food. It was something he would have to take care of soon, probably using the stainless-steel wire to fashion head-snare traps, which had been successful so far in catching squirrels and rabbits.

“What is it?”

As he followed Akil, he decided that they needed to set out earlier tonight—maybe a few hours after dark, start descending along the coast and turn south. The sky was clear, but gray clouds approaching from the north threatened rain.

Akil stopped on a rocky promontory that looked south over the bay. “Look. That's Ung-do over there,” he said, pointing to the teardrop-shaped island to the southeast. It appeared peaceful in the pool of sunlight that shrank and faded.

“And that's Munchon,” Akil said, moving his arm to a dark collection of structures in the southwest. A dark delta, a glowing river, and several tributaries bisected the space between where they stood now and the city in the distance.

“Yeah. Those rivers are gonna present a challenge.”

Back at camp, he tried to avoid thinking too far ahead, concentrating instead on the immediate tasks before him: setting the traps, gathering kindling, building the fire pit, and boiling water. He dipped a bandage in the water and applied it to a dark red spot on Sam's ankle, then removed it and let it cool.

The sky had turned darker and the wind was whipping up the leaves around them. Crocker repeated the process three more times to draw the infection to the surface. Then he sterilized the blade of his knife by holding it over the fire, waited for it to cool, cut into the skin, and drained away the pus.

“How is it, boss?” Sam asked as Crocker rebandaged it.

He lied. “Better.”

He checked Sam's forehead with the back of his hand and found it slightly hot.

“I think I've got a fever. Last night I dreamt I was attacked by a shark while surfing on Maui and lost my leg.”

“Your leg is fine.”

“The last thing I want is to be a burden. If I become too hard to carry, you can leave me behind.”

“That's not going to happen. Keep drinking water. I'm gonna go check the traps.”

Nan woke up suddenly at one a.m. in the bedroom of her temporary apartment, looked at the clock, and sighed. Today was her husband's forty-seventh birthday, and she hadn't heard anything more from the FBI, except that they had passed on the information she had received to the appropriate authorities. They hadn't specified who those authorities were and what actions they were taking to rescue her husband.

The FBI had asked her to keep the information she had received to herself, which she had. It amused her now when friends, family members, colleagues at work, and neighbors continued to relate their theories of what had happened to James—he had run off with another woman, he had taken his life because he was suffering from depression, he had been abducted by a cult.

The questions she asked herself were more pertinent and troubling: Had the government demanded James's release from North Korea? If the North Koreans refused, what action was the United States going to take? And why were FBI agents guarding her and Karen? She wanted to trust her government and decided that she would, even though she was by nature skeptical.

Now she got out of bed in her cotton nightgown and walked on bare feet to her daughter's bedroom. She sighed at the sight of Karen sleeping with a stuffed rabbit clutched to her chest and a framed picture of James on the pillow next to her.

If there's a silver lining or a blessing in all this, she said to herself, it's that in a strange way this ordeal has pulled the three of us closer together.

Crocker felt sick to his stomach as he looked over his shoulder at the tin-roofed hut on the bluff. Forty feet in front of him, Akil stood on the shore of the bay trying to push a wooden post low enough to free the metal chain around it that was attached to a small boat. The chain grated against the wood, but he couldn't manage to push the post down far enough.

Stealing the boat had been Crocker's idea, but now he wondered if it was smart.

“Try not to make so much noise,” he said to Akil as he watched him struggle.

“You know a better way of doing this?”

Absent a metal saw or other tool to cut through the chain, which they didn't have, he didn't.

When Crocker cast his gaze back toward the dim light in the window of the hut, the muscles in his stomach contracted. The lion's share of the rabbit he had captured and cooked earlier had gone to Dawkins and Sam. Then he remembered how he had tried to preserve those last four water purification tablets by putting half, instead of a whole one, in the gallon bag he carried.

Bad decision!

He started to scold himself and then stopped. He needed to focus. It had taken them six hours to descend to sea level. All of them were tired and weak. Sam was running a fever.

Hearing the grate of the chain again, he turned and saw that Akil had manipulated the dock post to a forty-degree angle and was using the heel of his right boot to push the chain over the top. Crocker watched as Akil stopped, leaned over, and threw up into the water.

Fuck!

He crossed to help him, then turned to recheck the hut.

“Let's try together.”

The combined power of Crocker's arm and Akil's leg pushed the chain free. Akil stepped down into the open boat, stopped, and leaned over the side like he was about to get sick again.

“I think it's the water in the bladder. Don't drink it.”

“Too late.”

Together they fetched Sam and Dawkins. With them loaded into the boat, they pushed off and used the lid and bottom of the PRS kit to paddle into the bay. When they were a hundred meters out, Crocker couldn't hold in the contents of his stomach any longer. Half a minute later, his stomach muscles contracted and his pharyngeal reflex activated again.

This time nothing came up except a ribbon of bile. He rinsed his mouth with a handful of salt water and continued paddling.

“When are we gonna try the engine?” Akil asked, his face appearing greenish in the moonlight.

“Let's get out farther. How are you feeling?”

“Like shit. Why?”

Another two hundred meters out, he squirmed past Dawkins and Sam, both lying on the bottom and already asleep, and pulled the cord to start the little four-horsepower Chinese Seanovo outboard. It coughed and ignited on the third try. Steering the boat south, he wondered how far the percussive pop of the engine would travel.

A feverish feeling was coming over him. Minutes later, when Dawkins opened his eyes and reached for the water bag, Crocker stopped him.

“Wait.”

He reached into the pouch on his belt, retrieved a whole purification tablet, tossed it into the bag, sloshed it around, and handed the bag to Dawkins.

“Give it another minute. Then it should be good.”

He blinked into the sun that was starting to dip west, opened his eyes again, and shielded them. His body ached and felt hot, his head hurt, and his mouth and throat were dry. He drank from the two-thirds-full bag of water and looked around the boat. Dawkins sat in the middle, running a wet rag over Sam's forehead and neck. Akil slumped in the bow of the twelve-foot-long craft with his legs propped on the side.

How he could sleep or even rest in that position surprised Crocker. More importantly, the position of his body was pushing the little craft east. He corrected course south and tried to fix their position in the haze-filled bay. They appeared to be about a half mile east and three-quarters of a mile south of Ung-do. He made out the shape of the larger Ryo-do ahead, but couldn't see the mainland. Judging from the picture of the bay he held in his head, they were almost parallel to Munchon. Another twenty or thirty miles, and they'd reach the south end of Hamgyong Bay.

He lay with his back against the stern, holding the steering arm on the Seanovo to keep their course steady and let the sun draw the sickness out of his body. He dreamt he was riding his Harley down Route 29 past the town of Covesville in the Shenandoah Valley. Now he was passing some Monacan Indians, the tribe that had once mined copper from the hills nearby and tried to keep away from white settlers, who spread epidemics of smallpox and influenza.

Feeling sick himself, he awoke to the sound of the engine sputtering. Dawkins looked anxious as the engine coughed one last time and stopped.

“You want me to look at it?” Dawkins asked.

“No point. We ran out of fuel.”

It took some vigorous shaking to wake Akil. When he opened his eyes, he seemed disoriented. Crocker changed positions with Dawkins and fed Akil sips of water. He was running a fever, too, so he splashed cool water from the bay over his face and chest.

“Where the fuck are we?” Akil asked.

“Same place we were last night—Hamgyong Bay, North Korea.”

Hunger gnawed at Dawkins's stomach, Sam's, too. Crocker told them to take sips of water and hold it in their mouths before they swallowed. He and Akil paddled, singing in unison, descending from ten thousand bottles of beer on the wall to zero as the chop tossed the little boat from side to side.

They continued despite the wind, falling temperature, and lack of food. After the sky turned dark, Akil began humming an Egyptian lullaby over and over, and Dawkins and Sam fell asleep.

When Dawkins awoke hours later, he saw the two men still paddling with the lid and bottom of the PRS kit. He couldn't fathom how they had been able to continue this long. When he turned to ask Crocker how he felt, he saw his eyes were closed.

The SEALs paddled all through the next day and into the night before they both collapsed from exhaustion. One minute Crocker's arms and shoulders ached, and the next he was lying in bed with Cyndi, completely rested and pain-free, eating pancakes covered with butter and maple syrup from a wooden tray. Then the tray and bed shook as though the house they were in had been hit by an earthquake.

He heard the wood crack, which jarred him awake a split second before the front of the little boat shattered on a sharp rock. Bracing himself, he saw Akil struggling to hold on as the boat pitched right. The splash cooled his face, and a second later he was in the water, flailing his stiff, tired arms, trying to get them to work. Even in his weakened condition, he remembered why he was doing this—the mission, the freed hostage, their escape from North Korea. His feet touched soft silt and he relaxed. Cold surf slapped his chest. To his right, he saw Akil helping Dawkins to the shore.

As these impressions coalesced, he scanned the narrow ten-foot-long strip of beach and a cliff above it covered with foliage. A voice in his head told him to look for a structure or lights. Then he forgot.

They were lifting Sam and carrying him out of the water when Akil slipped. Crocker bent down to help him up, tasting salty water and resisting the impulse to drink it. They set Sam down on the sand. His head felt so heavy he could barely hold it up. In his mind he was reaching for something—the reason for being where they were, an idea of what to do next.

Someone asked, “Where are we?” in a weak, pleading voice.

He couldn't answer. Leaves rattled above him. Through them he made out stars.

Picturing Holly and Jenny standing over him, he awoke. The warmth of the sun felt good. An orange crab waited a few feet from his arm. He sat up and saw a man in a dirty shirt and black pajama pants squatting next to Akil and feeding him something from a ladle. He wondered if he was dreaming.

“Akil?” His throat was dry and caused his voice to crack.

The man with the ladle pivoted his head toward him. He looked old, withered, and Asian.

“Where are we?”

Crocker slapped a fly off his wrist. His body begged to sleep, but something told him not to. He fixed his eyes on the yellow bucket. The man kneeling beside it muttered something that didn't make sense.

He heard Akil moan “More.”

“More what?” he asked.

Akil turned and looked at him sideways. His eyes were red, his neck and face covered with thick, dark beard, and his forehead was chalky gray.

He thought he heard Holly say, “It's okay. You can rest now.” But when he blinked again, she wasn't there. Looking at his blistered bare feet, he pushed himself up.

“Akil, what's going on?”

He found his boots in the sand near where he'd been sleeping but couldn't find his belt.

“Akil, who took my weapon?”

“You didn't have one,” Akil replied weakly. His lips were badly cracked. “I did. Besides, he's friendly.”

“Who's friendly?”

The word didn't make sense.

He woke up in a dark place. Thin ribbons of sunlight peeked through rough boards. Someone handed him a plastic cup.

“Drink this. Drink it slowly.”

He didn't recognize the man's roundish face. The liquid brought his body alive, but it didn't feel good. Pain and nausea radiated from inside him.

“Drink.”

It tasted sweet. He wanted to be alert.

“Drink slowly. A little at a time.”

The man looked familiar. Wisps of brown hair fell over his high forehead.