Robie let go of the skid and swung out into space. The cable motor was engaged and he slowly rose. When he reached the door, two men there, who were attached to cables so they couldn’t fall to their deaths, maneuvered the winch closer to the chopper and then helped him inside. They took off the harness and the winch was retracted to its original position. The chopper’s door slid shut and Robie managed to grab a seat right before the pilot pushed the bird to full throttle and they raced across the sky.
“Are you injured, sir?” asked one of the men.
“Nothing that’ll kill me. But I need you to get a message to Agent Reel. I don’t want her to—”
“Already done, sir. She was the one who sent for us to assist you. They have reached their RIB and are on their way back out to sea. We’re from the same carrier that will be picking them up in Korea Bay. USS
George Washington
. We’ll rendezvous there.”
“Exactly what I wanted to hear,” said a relieved Robie.
“Oh, and Agent Reel asked me to pass a message along to you.”
“What’s that?”
The helmet came off, revealing a sandy-haired young man of about twenty. He was grinning. “To quote, sir, you owe her a kickass dinner and a very expensive bottle of wine.”
Robie smiled back. “Yes, I do.”
U
SS
GEORGE WASHINGTON
WAS A
floating city carrying thousands of personnel, nearly eighty aircraft, and a massive missile payload. Its bridge rose over seventy meters from the surface of the water. It displaced almost a hundred thousand tons and was longer than three football fields. When the chopper’s skids landed on the carrier’s deck, Robie breathed a final sigh of relief. He climbed out of the chopper under his own power but gripping his injured leg. The young airman on the chopper put an arm under his shoulder, supporting him.
“We’ll get you down to sick bay, sir. They’ll fix you right up.”
“Can a guy get a cup of coffee on this boat?” asked Robie with a weary smile.
“Hell, sir, this tin can is nothing but a big coffee pot.”
The ship’s doctor was nearly done taping up Robie’s wounds when Reel walked in.
He looked up at her. “So you didn’t think I could get my ass out without help?”
She perched on the side of the bed and said, “No, I just figured the chopper guys needed some practice in land grabs on North Korean soil, and I know how accommodating you are.”
The doctor smiled and said, “I’m pretty sure I’m not cleared for this.”
“Then you better leave,” said Reel. “I need to talk to this guy.”
The doctor put one last strip of tape over the gauze on Robie’s thigh. “All done. Have your chat.” He walked off.
Reel held up a thermos she pulled from the pocket of her jumpsuit. “Thought you might need a refill.” She topped off his cup of coffee and then drank directly from the thermos.
“How are the others?” Robie asked.
“Sook is fine. A real trouper. Du-Ho and Eun Sun are still a bit shell-shocked, I think. But pretty damn happy not to be where they were.” She looked down at his bandaged leg. “I take it things got hairy back there.”
“A little. Well, more than a little. The North Koreans regrouped a lot faster than we anticipated. But for the chopper?” He held up his mug of coffee. “Let’s just say this ending was much preferred over what would have been.”
“It’s good to see you, Robie. It really is.” There was a catch in her voice.
He sat back against his pillow and studied her. “So Du-Ho and Eun Sun will be relocated and put into what, Witness Protection of some sort?”
Reel nodded. “That’s the gist of it. I think they’re going to engage Sook to help them with the transition.”
“Pyongyang will know exactly what happened.”
“Yes, they will. If we weren’t on the most powerful warship on earth right now, I’d be expecting incoming fire at us.”
“So we won the tactical battle.”
“But the strategic one is still out there.”
“They’re going to retaliate for sure. Pak was bad enough.”
Reel sipped from her thermos and nodded. “We struck on their home turf. They’ll feel they have to do the same.”
“But where?”
“And what? Or who?” added Reel. She gazed off, her features tired, spent.
He said, “Is the plan still to airlift us to Seoul and a private wing ride home from there?”
She nodded. “That’s the last I heard.”
“And then what?”
She looked at him. “Then we stand down until they call us back up.”
“Really?”
“What else?”
“You tell me.”
“You thinking of hanging it up?”
Robie cracked a smile. “I know a certain DCI who would be just thrilled if we did.”
“Isn’t that reason enough
not
to retire, then?”
Robie’s smile faded. “Is that what you want?”
“I don’t know what I want, Robie. I just know what I’m
supposed
to want.”
He lifted his hand and brushed a strand of hair from her face. “Well, you might want to take some time to figure out what it is you do want, Jessica. And leave ‘supposed to’ in the trash can. Because neither one of us is getting any younger.”
“So are you saying fifteen years ago you wouldn’t have needed the chopper ride to get away from the bad guys tonight?”
“Do you want the truth or what I’m
supposed
to say?”
“The fact is, Robie, we are highly trained and can do lots of amazing things, but we’re still only flesh and bone.” She tapped his chest. “And here we’re as vulnerable as anybody else. I certainly found that out, didn’t I?”
“Part of living. Part of dying.”
“The good with the bad?” she asked. “It’s hard to imagine we still live in a world where people live in concentration camps. Where they’re treated like animals.”
“You don’t have to go to North Korea for that, Jessica. Happens all over the world. Some places just aren’t as obvious. Which makes them even worse in my book.”
“I know.”
He reached out and took her hand, squeezed it, felt the strength there as she gripped him back.
She said, “I didn’t want to leave you back there.”
“But you did it right by the book. You don’t leave the people we’re guarding without coverage.”
“But it’s still going to stick with me, Robie.”
“You need to let it go. I made the call. You did exactly what you were supposed to. And on top of it you had the foresight to save my ass. I owe you my life, Jess. But for you I’m gone. Forever.”
She grazed his cheek with her hand and then leaned over and kissed him there. She settled against him as he wrapped his arm around her.
He didn’t know if she was weeping. It was nearly impossible to tell with Jessica Reel. What was inside of her never seemed to truly make it to the outside.
So he just held her, as the big carrier made its way south where the free part of Korea would welcome them briefly before their journey home.
C
HUNG-CHA WATCHED AS MIN
wrote out the symbols in the small lined notebook Chung-Cha had purchased for her. They were seated at the table by the window in Chung-Cha’s apartment. Min was dutifully inking the marks as best she could. Chung-Cha’s features did not betray what she was thinking.
At age ten Min could not really read and she could not really write. Her vocabulary was stunted, her breadth of thought constrained within the brutal limits of a concentration camp. She had seen more horrors than a soldier on a hellish battlefield. And for her, the war had been a decade long.
Min looked up after struggling with the alphabet. She searched Chung-Cha’s face for approval or disappointment.
Chung-Cha smiled and said, “We will continue to work on this each day. A little at a time.”
Min said, “I am not very smart.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because it is what they said back there.”
She did not refer to the place as Yodok, or Camp 15, or any of its myriad other names. She just called it “back there.”
“Back there, they lie, Min. That is all they do. To them you are nothing. Why bother with the truth for nothing?”
“Could you read, or write your letters, when you were free?”
“No. And they called me stupid too. Now I have this place. I have a car. I have a job. And…I have you.”
Min furrowed her brow as she thought about this. “What is it that you do?”
“I work for the Supreme Leader.”
“But you said you had never met him.”
“Most who serve him have never met him. He is a very important man. The most important of all. But we serve him well and he takes care of us like the father he is.”
Min nodded slowly. “But he doesn’t take care of people back there.”
“To him they are his enemies.”
“I did nothing to him,” Min pointed out.
“No, you didn’t. It is because of a philosophy.”
“What is that word?”
“It means an idea.”
“It was because of an idea that I was back there?”
Chung-Cha nodded and then worried that she was venturing into waters that would prove too deep for her. She looked at her watch. “It is time to eat.”
This remark always served to make Min forget whatever else she was thinking.
“I will help you. Can we have the white rice again?”
Chung-Cha nodded and Min walked to the little kitchen to begin her tasks.
As the pair worked away in the tiny space, Chung-Cha glanced out the window and saw the same man out there. He was always out there, or else someone just like him was. He worked, she believed, for the black tunic. The tunic had a name, but it was unimportant to Chung-Cha, and she had decided not to add it to her memory. The black tunic was a suspicious, paranoid man, which was one of the major reasons he had risen so high in the government. In some ways he was more influential than the capped and medaled generals with their tight, weathered faces where the potential for violence percolated just below the surface.
He was both her savior and her enemy, Chung-Cha knew. She would always tread cautiously around him. The approval for taking Min from Yodok had come through his good offices. But he could take Min away at any moment and for any reason. She was well aware of that.
For now, Min was with her. That was what mattered. That was all, really, that mattered.
She glanced at Min, who was very carefully cutting a small tomato into precise slices. Her lips were pursed in concentration and her hands, Chung-Cha noted, were rock-steady.
They reminded her of her own hands. But Chung-Cha was more likely to be holding a knife for the purpose of killing someone than for cutting up a tomato.
Chung-Cha said, “My mother’s name was Hea Woo.”
Min stopped slicing and looked at her, but Chung-Cha was still staring out the window.
“She was tall, taller than my father. His name was Kwan. Yie Kwan. Do you know what
Kwan
means?”
Min said, “
Kwan
means strong. Was he strong?”
“He once was, yes. Perhaps all fathers are strong in the eyes of their daughters. He was a teacher. He taught at a university. So did my mother.”
Min put down the knife. “But you said you could not read or write.”
“I went to Yodok when I was very young. I do not remember my life before. I grew up there. That is all I knew. There was nothing else before Yodok.”
“But didn’t your parents teach you when—”
“They taught me nothing,” said Chung-Cha sharply, as she closed the lid on the rice cooker and turned it on. She said more calmly, “They taught me nothing because it was forbidden. And by the time I could have learned…they could teach me nothing.”
“Did you have brothers or sisters?”
Chung-Cha started to answer, but then the image of the four hooded people tied to posts impacted her mind as suddenly as a rifle round.
Do you see the red circle drawn on their fronts? You will stick this knife inside the red circle
…
Do it now, or you will die here as an old woman.
Chung-Cha’s hand moved involuntarily. She was gripping not a knife but a teaspoon. Min watched as the spoon made thrusts in the air. Then Min gripped her hand and said, “Are you okay, Chung-Cha?” Her voice was fearful.
Chung-Cha looked down at her and put aside the spoon. She readily interpreted the fear Min held:
Is my savior, the one person who stands between me and “back there,” going mad?
“Memories are sometimes as painful as wounds on the skin, Min. Do you see that?”
The girl nodded, the fear slowly receding from her eyes.
Chung-Cha said, “We cannot live without memories, but we cannot live within them either. Do you understand that?”
“I think that I do.”
“Good. Now finish with that tomato. When the rice is done we will have our meal.”
An hour later they set aside their bowls and utensils.
“Can I work on my writing now?” asked Min, and Chung-Cha nodded.
The girl rushed to get the tablet and the pen.
But before she returned there was a knock at the door.
They never summoned Chung-Cha by phone. They came and got her. She knew why this was. Just to show that they could do so at any time they wanted. And she would have to drop whatever it was she was doing and obey.
Min’s face scrunched up as Chung-Cha rose to answer the knock.
The men there were not in military uniforms. They were in sleek slacks and jackets with white shirts buttoned up to the neck. They were young, nearly as young as she was, and their angular features were smug.
“Yes?” she said.
One of the men said, “You will come with us, Comrade Yie. Your presence is required.”
She nodded and motioned to Min. “I will leave her with my landlord.”
“You do what you must, but you will hurry,” said the same one.
Chung-Cha put a jacket on Min and walked her down to her landlord’s apartment. She spoke a few words, apologizing for the lack of notice, but the landlord observed the two men behind her and issued no protest. He simply took Min by the hand.
Min still held her tablet and pen. She looked up at Chung-Cha with wide, sad eyes.
Chung-Cha said to the landlord, “Can you work with her on her writing, please?”
The landlord looked down at Min and nodded. “My wife. She is good with that.”
Chung-Cha nodded, took Min by the hand, and squeezed it. “I will be back for you, Min.”
When the door closed behind Min the other man said sneeringly, “Your little bitch from Yodok, right? How can you stand the smell?”
Chung-Cha turned to the man and stared up at him. The look in her eyes caused the sneer to drain from his features. She could kill this man. She could kill them both with a teaspoon.
“Do you know what I am?” she said quietly.
“You are Yie Chung-Cha.”
“I did not ask if you knew my name. I asked if you know
what
I am.”
The man took a step back. “You…you are assigned—”
“I kill people who are enemies of this country, Comrade. That
little bitch
will one day do what I do now, for our country. For our Supreme Leader. Anyone who speaks ill of her I will treat as an enemy of this country.” She took a quick step forward, closing the distance between them by half. “Does that include you, Comrade? I need to know. So you will tell me. Now.”
These men were important, Chung-Cha knew. And what she was doing right now was very dangerous. But still, she had to do it. It was either that or her fury would cause her to kill them both.
“I am…not your enemy, Yie Chung-Cha,” the man said, his voice quavering.
She turned away from him, her disgust ill-concealed. “Then let us go to our meeting.”
She walked down the hall and the men hurried after her.