Joy Brigade (9 page)

“She’s a fixer,” I said.

“Who told you about them?”

“Hero Kang.”

She nodded at that.

“What do you suppose they’re looking for?” I asked.

“A Romanian officer,” she replied, “who can’t speak Russian.”

“Or an Albanian sailor who escaped from the Port of Nampo.”

“By now,” she said, “they know you were traveling on a Peruvian passport.”

“And you know too.”

“Yes. I know too.”

“We can’t just sit here,” I said. “They’ll find us.”

Doc Yong shook her head vigorously. “A full door-to-door search will attract too much attention. I don’t believe they’ll do that. Attention is what they’re trying to avoid, to make sure that the superiors of the authorities at both the Port of Nampo and the Pyongyang Train Station are not alerted to their miserable failure.”

“You mean their miserable failure in allowing me to enter the country.”

“Yes. What they’ll do is sit tight and hope that you’ll become frightened and poke your head out. Instead, we must wait for Hero Kang. He’ll know how to get us out of here.”

“You could leave,” I said. “They’re not looking for you.”

Doc Yong shook her head again. “Not yet.”

She grabbed the canvas pack that had been strapped to her back, untied it, and pulled out a large bag. It was rectangular, wrapped in water-resistant oil paper. Beneath the paper were the tattered remnants of a leather binding, reinforced with varnished bamboo slats. A book, not bound at the spine but rather shot through with half a dozen brass rivets that held the thick sheaf of yellowed paper intact. What scholars call a codex. The paper I recognized—it was the same thick vellum as the scrap that had been given to me by an
Eastern European sailor in the Port of Pusan. Doc Yong thumbed through the pages.

“Here,” she said. “Here is the section I cut out. We must replace it.”

“We will,” I said. “It’s in Seoul, in a safe place.”

Actually, the fragment had been stolen from me by a homicide investigator of the Korean National Police known as Mr. Kill. As part of the deal for me to come up here, I demanded that he return the fragment. He did. Now it was locked in the CID safe at Eighth Army headquarters.

Gently, I touched the rough leather of the codex. “Tell me about it,” I said.

Outside, we heard the abrupt shouts of soldiers. We froze for a second, listening as their footsteps passed.

Doc Yong turned back to the manuscript. For years, she explained, scholars thought that the codex was nothing but a myth.

“Supposedly,” Doc Yong said, “in the early fifteenth century, during the rule of our Great King Sejong, a strange man was spotted in the mountainous precincts of Hamgyong Province. A ‘wild man,’ he was called, and some said he was not a man at all but a beast. A court official was appointed to track him, an inspector of the king’s, a man who held the rank of Five White Horses.”

“A cop,” I said.

“More like what the Europeans call an ombudsman.”

“A what?”

“Somebody appointed by the government to investigate anything unusual. Or anything that seems to have gone awry.”

“Okay,” I replied. “So this inspector of the Five White Horses starts chasing this wild man through the mountains. What happened?”

“He was accompanied by a scribe who wrote it all down. His name was Clerk Yi.” Doc Yong placed her hand on the codex. “That’s why we have this manuscript. It’s difficult for me to read not only because the writing is archaic but also because Clerk Yi had a very fluid style of penmanship, a style the Chinese call ‘grass writing.’ ”

In ancient times Koreans had no written language of their own. Educated people learned to read and write Chinese. If they were well off enough, they traveled to China to continue their studies. Indeed, some of the most revered poets in Chinese literature were Koreans.

“I’ve managed to translate about half of Clerk Yi’s manuscript so far,” Doc Yong said.

“Into English?”

“Both modern Korean and English,” she replied.

I shook my head, never failing to marvel at her brilliance. “So did they catch the beast?”

“I haven’t gotten there yet.”

“What was it? A man or an animal?”

“I’m not sure,” Doc Yong replied. “But I did get to the part about the tunnels, where the beast was being chased by the inspector and his minions and eluded them by entering ancient caverns.”

“The ones that tunnel beneath the DMZ.”

“Yes.”

“You got their attention at Eighth Army,” I said.

“I thought I would. And that’s why you’re here.”

“No. That’s not why I’m here.”

She waited, holding her breath.

“I’m here for you,” I said.

It was at that moment, while she gazed into my eyes, that someone kicked the door in.

4

S
hards of wood erupted into the room, and a brown boot followed. A pair of hands grappled with the small door, ripping it off its already twisted hinges.

I grabbed the short table, dumping rice bowls and porcelain and pickled vegetables. Doc Yong clutched my bicep instinctively but was forced to let go when I rose to my feet and charged. Speed is everything in a fight—speed and unbridled aggressiveness. The small table was my shield; I rammed it full force into the face of the startled man who’d kicked our door in. He reeled backward under my onslaught. As he fell, I kneed him in the gut and he went down with me and the table on top of him. He let out a grunt and a whoosh of air, then lay very still.

I scrambled to my feet, searching for more enemies,
but the hallway was empty. Doc Yong reacted quickly. She tossed my shoes to me and as I slipped them on and my uniform tunic, she put on her hooded cloak and grabbed the canvas bag that she’d packed in preparation for just such an emergency.

“Let’s go,” she said in English and ran past me toward the stairwell. As she did so, I knew that something was not right. The man lying at my feet wore a military-type uniform, even though these “fixers” were not a regular military unit. They wouldn’t have sent him alone; they might be shorthanded, but surely there had to be someone backing him up. Before Doc Yong reached the stairwell, I lunged forward, grabbed her elbow, and jerked her to a stop, just in time. A club whistled from around the corner in a vicious arc, missing her head by inches and slamming with a thud against the wall.

I leapt past her and grabbed the club, turning my back against the hand holding it. I pinned the arm against the wall and twisted, elbowing the backup man in the face. He released his grip on the club, but I kept twisting his arm until he bent forward at the waist. I grabbed the back of his head with both my hands, braced him there, and slammed his nose and teeth against my knee. As he collapsed, I lost my grip and he tumbled, arms flailing, down the steps.

Doc Yong shrieked.

I clasped my hand over her mouth. Wide-eyed, she nodded that she was okay. I straightened my tunic and cap and, hand in hand, we trotted down the steps. The second fixer lay in a heap at the bottom. I checked his carotid artery.

“Strong pulse,” I told her.

She nodded, looking relieved. We crossed the short entranceway and peeked out the double doors. All clear. The fixers, apparently, traveled in pairs, not squads. As we stepped outside, Doc Yong glanced around, getting her bearings. I followed her down a dark alleyway, watching as she adjusted her backpack. The terror of what had just happened to us was gradually draining from my body, making me want to throw up. I fought the feeling and instead glanced at Doc Yong. We were both frightened but overjoyed to be free.

At least for the moment.

Boot heels surrounded us. Giant cement boot heels. We’d hidden in the middle of a massive megalithic monument. A group of revolutionaries—a soldier, a factory worker, a farmer, and a woman holding a rifle—rose thirty feet above us. A circle of light illuminated the outside of the heroic structure, but here, in the center of the monument, it was dark.

“What’s it called in English?” Doc Yong asked.

“A fallback position.”

“Right. A fallback position. Hero Kang told me to come here if something went wrong.”

And it had gone wrong. The fixers had somehow gotten wind that a foreigner was staying in that particular room. They hadn’t searched any of the other rooms in the building. If they had, I would’ve heard boots pounding and doors slamming throughout the thin wooden structure. Probably the two men had sniffed out a lead and
rather than informing their superiors they’d tried to take us on their own. If they’d been more patient, and merely put us under surveillance, a larger group of fixers could’ve been summoned and then we would’ve been caught. As it was, we were lucky to be free. And now I knew something more about the fixers than I had before. They were undisciplined. Undisciplined can be good, sometimes, but it can also be dangerous.

I rose from my squatting position and peeked at the empty streets radiating from this monument like spokes from a hub. No sign of the fixers. But nor any sign of Hero Kang.

“Be patient,” she said. “He will be along.”

“When?”

“At dawn.”

The fixers had probably found their injured comrades by now. Although we were over a mile away, it wouldn’t take them long to include this area in their search.

And then it started to snow. Doc Yong and I huddled together, she doing her best to cover me with her hood, I wishing I had some good old-fashioned GI-issue winter gear to keep us warm. Doc Yong used the time to complete my briefing—partially, I’m sure, to keep our minds off our misery. I listened patiently, enjoying the nearness of her, and at the same time keeping a weather eye out for approaching fixers.

She told me of a group of people called the Manchurian Battalion, of which she was a member. They were one of the original units of the Korean People’s Army, she whispered, snuggled next to my neck. The Manchurian Battalion had started in the thirties, long before the
founding of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as a ragtag group of bandits and malcontents who fled to the mountains to avoid the heavy boot of the Japanese Imperial Army’s occupation of their country. They’d fought back sporadically, but it hadn’t been easy. The Japanese formed special antiguerilla task forces that hounded them through the northern provinces of Korea and into the vast wilderness of Manchuria. The peasants whom they relied on were harassed mercilessly, rounded up, not allowed to grow crops. Starvation was rampant. Despite heavy losses, the Manchurian Battalion survived and kept fighting. Finally, at the end of World War II, the Japanese were defeated and forced to withdraw from all of their conquests in the Far East, including Korea.

Kim Il-sung, the Great Leader, had been comrades with the leaders of the Manchurian Battalion, and in later years, even through the chaos of the Korean War, the Manchurian Battalion maintained a certain level of autonomy. Now, they guarded the passes that led to Mount O-song in the Kwangju range, flush against the northern edge of the DMZ’s Military Demarcation Line.

“There is much pressure on the Manchurian Battalion,” Doc Yong told me. “Kim Il-sung is consolidating power, preparing for the transition to his son’s leadership. His advisors tell him that his old comrades in the Manchurian Battalion are untrustworthy, that they will not accept his son’s leadership, and will attempt to take power themselves. This is a lie. Still, we believe the Manchurian Battalion is marked for destruction. The forces arrayed against us are overwhelming, but Hero Kang has devised a plan that can save us.”

“And you trust him?” I asked.

“Completely.”

That was good enough for me. She took my hand in hers. The skin was no longer soft, as it had been in Seoul; now there was an extra layer of roughness.

“We need information,” she told me. “Information that Hero Kang will guide you to. But only a foreigner can gain final access.”

“Only a foreigner?” I asked.

“Yes. There is a man, a well-connected apparatchik, his name is Commissar Oh. Our information is that he and the commander of the Army’s First Corps have been tasked with dealing with the Manchurian Battalion.”

“Dealing with them?”