WW III wi-1

by Ian Slater

  They heard Lana come in and then go out again.

  “What’s she up to?” he asked.

  “Go to sleep. Honestly, you’re like an old woman.”

  “Ah — you see? Discrimination. I’ll take you to the Supreme Court.”

  An hour later Lana woke them up to show them the engagement ring — Catherine said the diamond was the biggest she’d ever seen. John held his temper, just wanted her to know, he said — and he broke for a moment before going on — just wanted her to know that he’d loved her from the first moment he’d held her as a baby and always would, no matter what happened. As long as she was happy. She threw her arms about them both.

  “Thank you, Daddy,” she said, and they were all in tears.

  * * *

  In her bed, Lana dreamed her dreams of the exciting life that lay ahead, while in her parents’ bedroom, John Brentwood struggled to control his temper as Catherine hushed him, ordering him, imploring him, to keep his voice down.

  “But goddamn it!” he said in a hoarse whisper. “He never even asked me. Goddamn it, I don’t even know the man.”

  “I know, I know,” said Catherine, ever philosophical, trying to calm him. “I’m sure he intends to. But I agree — it wasn’t very thoughtful. But what’s done is done. The main thing is, she’s happy. Besides, that’s the whole idea of an engagement. A trial period.”

  “For what!” John Brentwood asked darkly.

  “To give her time to think.” There was long silence between them. “It’s a beautiful ring,” said Catherine.

  “Goddamned thing’s big as a missile.”

  “Well, I’m sure it won’t kill anyone.”

  * * *

  That had been eighteen months before, and since then Lana had jet-setted about the world, on the society pages from The New York Times to England’s Country Life—it seemed that Jay T. La Roche had an interest in horses after all, at least in buying and selling them, and had acquired some of the best stables in Europe. His ownership of stables, however, was not confined to horses — it also extended to a mistress in Paris and others “flown in” upon request, a shattering discovery that Lana had made only when, being mistaken for his umpteenth secretary, she had been given a telephone message to give to Herr La Roche that Fraulein Bader was vollig gesund— “perfectly clean.” Perfectly clean, Lana discovered through a private detective whose assurances that she was doing the “correct thing” only made her feel dirty herself, meant that Jay’s one-night stands were carefully screened by one of a bevy of doctors, retained solely by La Roche to insure that whoever he was bedding aboard his Lear jet at twenty thousand feet was free of AIDS and/or associated viruses.

  Believing he still loved her, Lana had tried to tough it out, hoping he would settle down. She even performed for him in ways disgusting to her but which he insisted upon. He kept upping the ante during the foreplay, an extended ploy which, though she didn’t realize it at the time, was a vicious psychological game he couldn’t lose. If she refused to debase herself further, he told her he could claim sexual incompatibility, a label he made it clear he was personally unconcerned about but one that he could easily use with his army of lawyers to smear her in every scandal sheet and tabloid he owned, and even in some of those he didn’t. It was a label, a potential smear campaign that, for her family’s sake, Lana dared not risk. The very idea of having such things revealed in public was unthinkable to her, so that suing for divorce was simply not an option.

  Not long after Mrs. La Roche had left Shanghai, Lana told him she was leaving. While Mrs. La Roche had been there, her son had reined in his more outrageous sexual habits, such as having everything from young schoolchildren to “perfectly clean” whores flown in from Tokyo and Hong Kong.

  For Lana, things deteriorated when Mrs. La Roche returned to the States. Jay seemed bent on a catch-up orgy of sexual indulgence the likes of which she had never even imagined and which, she now understood, was one of the reasons why he favored Shanghai and Hong Kong. The Communist police were in his pocket, and the Beijing government needed his hard foreign currency as much as any of his other customers. So confident was he that no challenge she could make would stand up in court unless she was prepared to debase herself in the witness box as well, that he became increasingly contemptuous of her protestations. Her fear only drove him to further cruelties. He had all the money, all the power. He told her he would sue for libel if she said a word, and ruin her family as well in the process.

  The end of the marriage came late one night when he had returned home high on a mixture of cocaine and booze, taking her into the bathroom and insisting she do what she could not do, and the beating began. In the morning, still drunk but knowing he’d gone too far, that if she was seen in public like this, his business might suffer, probing questions asked, he had his best cosmetician brought in — the one who had worked on a lot of film stars in his virtually tax-free Hong Kong studios, where his tax loophole umbrella of production companies churned out films for the Chinese market, all about upstanding Communist heroes of the revolution overcoming corruption. The cosmetician spent six hours on Lana, so that by the time the dark-windowed Mercedes took her to Shanghai Airport, her transit through customs and past a sleepy PLA guard merely a formality guaranteed by Jay’s power, Mrs. Lana La Roche, with sunglasses and high scarf to hide the rope burn, was looking none the worse for wear.

  He had said he’d send her enough that she could live well on condition that she keep her mouth shut. She said she didn’t want his money.

  “All right,” he’d told her. “Then you won’t get it. But—” and then he’d lifted her chin with his lily-white, perfumed hand “—remember this, Lana. You say a word, one word, I’ll have Mommy and Daddy Admiral in the National Enquirer. I’ll make it look like you left me but I wouldn’t eat your shit.” He dropped her head. “Bon voyage. I love you.”

  It was even more disgusting than what he’d made her do. Yet, hateful as he was, she somehow knew that the moment he had said it, he had actually meant it.

  * * *

  She stayed by herself in the Manhattan apartment to give herself enough time for the bruises to disappear but knowing she was going to need a lot more time before she made any contact with her parents, with anyone she knew. Unable to sleep, she went to see a doctor, who prescribed sleeping pills. It was the darkest period of her life, and more than once she had the vial of Seconal in hand, staring at the person in the mirror she no longer recognized. Even so, a faint voice, from where she did not know, always stayed her hand.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Panmunjom

  On Major Tae’s calendar hanging on his Quonset hut office wall, beneath the old black-and-white of him as a young ROK lieutenant in the honor guard for JFK, Major Tae had marked the next day, August 15, in red: Liberation or Independence Day for the South. Apart from Chusok (Thanksgiving), Independence Day was the most important holiday of the year, full of parades, color, and pride as dancers in traditional costumes, exotic dragons, and military march-pasts celebrated not only the republic’s birth in 1945 after thirty-five years of Japanese occupation, but also South Korea’s astonishing progress in the league of industrial nations.

  Turning his gaze from his sector of the two-and-a-half-mile-wide demilitarized zone that snaked for 152 miles west to east, the small, slim, immaculately uniformed ROK intelligence officer for Panmunjom pushed the “play” button on his VCR to watch a rerun of the day’s meeting, the 917th between the North Koreans and the UN delegation since the cease-fire way back in 1953. Flipping open his notepad, he prepared to take direct quotes from the North Korean delegation, part of his daily report to ROK-U.S. HQ in Seoul.

  The meeting had started badly, the tension from the long-forgotten war in which fifty-four thousand Americans and three million Koreans had died as palpable as the muggy summer heat that hung low and sullenly, smelling of dung, in the valley around Panmunjom. As the first frames flickered on the TV screen, the North Korean delegation was alre
ady in the process of accusing the UN commission of the “ninety-eight thousand one hundred and fifty-third ‘violation’ “ of the DMZ. Apparently a child’s kite, its string broken, had been found by the North Koreans on their side of the DMZ twenty-five miles east of Panmunjom, near what on the Americans’ map was called Pork Chop Hill. The aides to the head of the North Korean delegation, Major General Kim, were charging that a microcamera had been found mounted under the kite “to take pictures of ‘militarily sensitive areas’ in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”

  “That is ridiculous,” replied the UN head of the commission, U.S. Army Gen. George C. Cahill, who sat in the middle on the south side of the long, emerald-baize-covered truce table, his arms folded, right forefinger hooked about the stem of a briar pipe. Unlike the red and blue circle of the South’s flag, its halves joining, a symbol of harmonious duality between opposites— the um and the yang, male and female, night and day, fire and water — everything in the negotiating room stood in hostile opposition to one another. The uniforms alone were strikingly different: The NKA’s — North Korean Army’s — General Kim and his four-man contingent, sitting rigidly on the northern side of the table, were in stiff, high-necked white summer uniforms with red and yellow collar tabs. Kim was unblinking, his only discernible movement a short, studied ejection of a Sobrainie cigarette butt from a white bone holder before lighting another, acrid bluish smoke rising and curling back off the ceiling. Opposite him, on the southern side, the UN uniforms were of a mix. The American general, Cahill, a tall, thick-set man, appeared more relaxed, smoking his pipe, sitting back in open-necked and short-sleeved summer khaki. His South Korean compatriot on his right, more formal-looking, wore the ROK’s light blue air force uniform with tie, while to Cahill’s immediate left a British brigadier sat resignedly in dark green summer drill. The green-baize-covered table between the two sides was itself marked by division, an inch-wide white ribbon running its full length, the line continuing as a meticulously painted strip up each wall.

  Even the beverages were different, the North Koreans’ stony expressions during the long, strained silence broken only when they sipped steaming glasses of hot green tea, the UN delegation taking ice-cold water from a silver decanter carefully placed the same distance away from the ribbon as the North Koreans’ tea. Directly opposite the North’s red-starred flag stood the gold-fringed blue of the UN standard, again both equidistant from the ribbon. The strained silence continued, and Major Tae could see a number of visiting U.S. officers outside the viewing windows of the hut growing restless, pacing on the white cement strip, cameras dangling forlornly.

  It was then that General Kim, breaking the silence, leaned forward, crisp white uniform creasing against the edge of the green baize, his malevolent smile, Tae noted, a rare departure from his usual carefully practiced stare.

  “All Americans are taught to lie!” Coming from outside the hut there was the sound of armed soldiers, North and South, heels clacking on the concrete as the guard changed. The NKA officer to Kim’s left was tacking up black-and-white photographs on a map stand, purportedly showing the “violated area” on their side of the DMZ as the North Korean general continued his accusation. “On the southern side,” said Kim, “you have allowed all vegetation to grow wild to camouflage your flagrant acts of aggression against the Democratic People’s—”

  “I unequivocally reject these charges,” cut in Cahill, “as do my fellow members of the United Nations Commission.” He indicated them with a wave of his pipe.

  “We are not charging the United Nations with violation of the territory of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” Kim spat back. “We are charging the United States of America for its imperialistic warmongering…”

  “The United States,” Cahill replied, his tone controlled, un-flustered, “has no intention of—”

  Now it happened. Kim leaned forward again, smiling. “Be careful,” he cautioned Cahill, stabbing the air with his cigarette, his eyes like dark glass, “or all you Americans will end up like the Kennedys — shot down like dogs in the street.”

  This was a favorite phrase of Kim’s. To Tae’s relief, Cahill, who had only been on the job for two months, refused to take the bait, calmly asking instead what evidence the NKA had for their accusation about the kite.

  “I will show you,” replied Kim confidently. With this he rose. Immediately there was a loud scraping of chairs as he was followed by the entire North Korean delegation. A second later the three Chinese PLA — People’s Liberation Army — officers who had been sitting in the rear as observers also rose, the yellow shoulder boards of their new “ranked” uniforms catching the light. Wearily Cahill and his colleagues followed suit; it was part of the ritual, both sides heading outside to the enclosure of hard, mustard-colored earth within the joint security area, where they were to examine the “evidence.” In the background a voice, one of the visiting U.S. officers, was asking, “Why do we have to take that shit? That rotten insult about President Kennedy and…”

  For Tae it was the most frequently asked question by Americans who had bothered to come to Panmunjom, and he didn’t even mention it in his report. Before the video jerkily followed the two delegations out of the room, Kim’s parting shot was, “You Americans do not realize the effect of your defeat in Vietnam. Now everyone in the world knows you can be beaten.”

  Privately, Tae conceded that Kim had a point. The danger, as Tae saw it, was that the United States had tried so diligently to forget the war, it was apt to forget its lessons as well. What had Santayana said? — those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Most of the Vietnam vets were now dead or too old to pass on, to anyone who even bothered to listen in America, the know-how of fighting a war in Asia.

  For the next two minutes Tae advanced the video, as there was not much to see, the North Korean and UN delegations standing for over half an hour in the broiling sun. The North Koreans apparently didn’t mind, or if they did, weren’t showing it, taking what General Cahill later described as a “typically petty satisfaction” in keeping the UN team sweating and waiting in the stifling, fly-infested heat. Kim was the only man Cahill had ever seen who could tolerate swarms of flies crawling all over his face, across his lips, in and out of his nostrils and eyes, without once allowing himself to blink.

  “Have you got something to show me or not?” said Cahill. “If not, my colleagues and I propose an adjournment until…”

  Some signal that Tae didn’t see must have been given by Kim, because the evidence, or rather a battered-looking, carp-shaped kite, a dirty orange color, about four feet in length, four to five inches across, was carried solemnly into the cordoned-off compound by two NKA soldiers, two lines of North and South Korean guards grimly facing each other.

  “Where’s this camera?” Cahill demanded sharply.

  “It is being analyzed,” said Kim. “It is made in Japan.”

  “May we see it?”

  “I said it is being analyzed. The film, which we have now developed, shows it was a blatant act of imperialist aggression upon the sovereign territory of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea by U.S. aggressors and…”

  Cahill turned to his aide, a Captain Jordan from the joint U.S.-ROK command. Jordan rolled his eyes skyward. Ignoring Kim, Cahill took a handkerchief from his pocket and proceeded to wipe beads of sweat from his forehead, asking Jordan, “Haven’t I heard this somewhere before?”

  “Word for word, General. On Pyongyang radio. All this week.” When Kim had finished his diatribe, Cahill poked the carp’s ugly, gaping face with the toe of his boot. “This…”

  Kim stepped forward menacingly, as did his entire delegation. “Do not touch the evidence!” he shouted.

  Suddenly the entire compound was electric, both lines of border guards stiffening at the ready. Hands on holsters. Each man fixing his opposite number. Cahill smiled, having forced Kim to react.

  “Evidence?” snorted Cahill. “It’s a child’s kite.”


  “Yes!” shouted Kim’s aide, shifting his gaze from Cahill to the ROK officer, General Lee. “And made in the U.S. lackey state of South Korea.”

  “A child’s kite,” repeated Cahill contemptuously. “Blown over to your side by the wind. Why, it’s not big enough to hold a camera, and besides…”

  “We have the spy machine!” Kim shouted, pointing his finger. “You cannot deny…”

  “Spy machine? You’ve got nothing,” said Cahill, turning on his heel, leading the UN delegation out of the compound.

  “We have the evidence!” Kim shouted after him. “We have the film showing that…”

  “Showing,” said Cahill, still walking away, “the photos you’re busy taking today so you can fabricate a case.”

  “You be careful!” Kim shouted after him. “Be careful, you Americans. You will end up like the Kennedys. You—”

  “You be careful,” said Cahill, but in a voice he knew neither Kim nor the North Korean delegation could hear. “Go back to Pyongyang, you running dog turd!” Cahill turned to his aide. “Christ! I’m getting too old for this nonsense, Jordan. I’d like to shoot that son of a bitch.”

  “Me, too,” put in the South Korean general.

  * * *

  The video over, Tae dragged the day’s SIGINT — Signal Intelligence — and IR — Interrogation Reports — toward him. There were several Blackbird American infrared SR-71 reconnaissance photos taken from eighty-five thousand feet. No change in the NKA’s unit dispositions except for another surface-to-air missile site being built in the Taebaek Mountains that ran like a spine down Korea’s east coast.

  Tae made himself a cup of coffee and for a moment sat admiring the desk photo of his children. Mi-ja, eighteen, was resplendent in a watermelon-pink chima, the traditional flowing, high-waisted skirt, with matching chogari, or short jacket. Dyoung, eight, stood proudly in the loose, white, pajamalike uniform of Taekwondo, the ancient Korean hand and foot combat sport of self-defense. It was their future he was most worried about.