Hunt the Dragon

by Don Mann

  Davis zipped up his thin nylon jacket and shivered.

  “You okay?” Crocker asked, the chicken with spicy garlic, green chili, and ginger sauce turning in his stomach.

  “That deep-fried carp didn’t agree with me.”

  “You probably didn’t like the fact that its mouth and gills were still moving.”

  “Not really. No. The waiter recommended it.”

  “Could be he’s working for the MSS.”

  Neither stars nor moon were visible through the low clouds. The temperature hovered in the middle fifties. No wind. Only the deep gurgle of the river.

  “How many guys we expecting?” Davis asked, pulling the collar of his jacket up around his neck.

  “One, I believe.”

  Two hundred feet away, on the opposite side of the river, Crocker watched as someone drew a large O in the air with a red laser marker.

  He drew one too, about shoulder width.

  “You playing tic-tac-toe?” Davis asked.

  “No, dude. That’s the signal. Here he comes.”

  “Where?”

  Crocker peered through the compact night binoculars he carried and made out two individuals dressed in hoodies and shorts. They entered the water, stopped to look behind, and started to cross.

  Crocker pointed. “There, and I stand corrected. It’s two pax, not one.”

  “Whatever.”

  They watched them pick their way through the river that at the deepest part came up to their waists.

  “Fucking cold, I bet.”

  “One of them is named Choi. He’s our man,” Crocker reminded him.

  The two men, both about five foot five, emerged from the river, shook the water off their legs, then stopped in front of them and bowed. Crocker bowed back and said, “An-nyung-ha-se-yo.”

  “An-nyung-ha-se-yo,” the young men responded. They seemed delighted and surprised to be seeing two large Western men. The stouter of the two said something in Korean that Crocker didn’t understand.

  He grinned and shook his head. “I don’t speak Korean.”

  The same man reached into the backpack he carried over his shoulder and handed Crocker a large envelope wrapped in plastic.

  Davis offered them the two large bundles of thumb drives. They slipped them in their backpacks and bowed again.

  “Choi?” Crocker asked.

  The slightly stouter of the two nodded.

  “Here.” Crocker reached into his pocket and handed him 6,000 Chinese yuan, which came to about $1,000 U.S.

  Choi stuffed the money into the backpack and without saying another word turned and waded back into the river with his partner. Soon they became dark shadows.

  “That was easy,” Davis said.

  “Sure was.”

  Seconds after Crocker took a step back toward the car, he heard something above the rush of the river that sounded like a helicopter. He stopped and listened.

  “You hear that?”

  “Yeah, boss,” Davis answered. “We’d better split.”

  Then he caught it out of the corner of his left eye, coming in fast and low over the river. It was small and snub-nosed, with twin turbine engines mounted overhead.

  “Looks like a Polish-made Mi-2,” Davis said.

  Crocker was hoping it was only an observation craft when he heard the 23mm rip through the air.

  “Stand back!”

  Through the night-vision binos Crocker made out one of the dark figures veering right and scrambling to shore, while the other seemed to turn back as the helo passed. He ran about fifty feet until he was near the middle of the river, then stumbled and fell.

  “Fuck.”

  “What?” Davis asked.

  “I think one of them got hit.”

  The young man was up again and struggling forward. When he stopped and went down again, Crocker handed the binos to Davis.

  “Hold these.”

  “Boss…What are you doing?”

  He was already running into the river, trying to keep his balance on slippery rocks and locate the downed kid in the water. He thought he saw him ahead when he neared the center, but it turned out to be a pile of rocks. Then, thirty degrees to his left, he saw a splash and an arm sticking up, fingers spread. Crocker pushed toward it, found the kid, and pulled him up like rag doll. Saw a large splotch of blood starting on his chest, about four inches from his armpit. Quickly checked his pulse—he was alive.

  Tucking him under his arm, he turned and pushed through the water, barely aware of the roar of the helo returning for another pass. It was coming in even lower this time. He felt the downdraft from the rotors slapping the top of his head and went under with the kid. Counted to sixty and came up.

  The kid was coughing up water. The red light on the helo tail blinked and disappeared around a bend. He hurried forward to the Chinese side, where Davis had waded out to help.

  “Where’s he hit?”

  “Left shoulder and chest. Passed right through. We’ve got to get him to a hospital.”

  When they reached the shore and carried him up, Crocker saw two men in black watching from under a celtis tree, probably MSS officials. They didn’t move or lend a hand. In their heads, Crocker imagined, they were already writing their report.

  Sara looked alarmed when she saw the young man and the blood. “What’s he doing here? What happened?”

  “The kid got shot.”

  “Choi?”

  “No, I think it’s the other one.”

  “Holy fuck!”

  She turned and gunned the BYD down the road while Crocker checked the kid’s vitals on the backseat and held his balled-up shirt over the wound. It appeared that the two bullets that entered his back had missed the arteries around the heart. “Lucky guy.”

  He wrapped his belt under the kid’s arm and over the T-shirt and tightened it.

  “Where’s the closest hospital? He’s lost a lot of blood.”

  When they reached the outskirts of Dandong, Sara stopped in front of the first taxi stand she could find. “Have the driver take you straight to the airport. I’ll take care of him.”

  “You better move fast!”

  “Okay. Call me from Beijing, Shanghai, or wherever you land!”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.

  —Dr. Seuss

  It was a beautiful late-March night fragrant with the first scents of spring, so Nan Dawkins decided to fire up the barbecue and dine outside—chicken, strips of red pepper and zucchini, and new potatoes. It reminded her of James, who often sat outside alone in the summer looking at the stars. Astronomy was one of his passions. The Celestron CPC 1100 XLT computerized telescope that he had bought recently sat under a plastic cover in his home office.

  After dinner she sat sipping chardonnay and half listening to Karen talk about the poems they had read that day in school. One of them was Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” Normally, anything having to do with literature was a favorite topic of discussion, but tonight Nan seemed drawn to the stars trying to break through the city haze. She wondered if James was looking at them, too, wherever he was.

  Her current theory was that he was working somewhere on a top-secret government program and would return soon. Maybe he had wanted to tell her but couldn’t. Maybe he’d forgotten, which was characteristic of James. He kept different aspects of his life in separate compartments.

  “Mom?” her daughter called.

  She drifted to their wedding day and his shy, handsome face, and returned.

  “Yes, ‘Annabel Lee’ is a beautiful poem…” Nan started, and then stopped. When she looked for Karen’s oval face across the table, she found an empty chair. Turning, she saw her back passing through the gap in the sliding glass doors. She was carrying dirty plates.

  “That’s very kind of you, darling,” Nan said. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, Mom.”

  Wonderful girl, she thought. Cleaning up…b
ecause she sees I’m preoccupied. Where would I be without her?

  Karen’s emotional steadiness through the ordeal continued to amaze her. Nan refilled her glass with wine and looked up at the stars. James, she knew, would be able to name them and recount the legends behind them. She located the Big Dipper and remembered that James had showed her how to connect the outer stars in the bowl and use them to locate Polaris, which marked the end of the Little Dipper’s handle.

  During a summer vacation in the Adirondacks ten years ago, he had explained that the Big Dipper was actually an abbreviated version of the constellation Ursa Major—the Great Bear. The three stars that made up the bowl were thought to be hunters chasing the bear. The constellation served as both a calendar and storybook. In the fall the hunter would catch up with the bear. According to the Iroquois, it was blood from the dead bear that colored the autumn landscape.

  As Nan lowered her gaze, she noticed something gold flickering. At first she thought it was a reflection off the sliding glass door, but when she looked closer she saw that it originated inside the house. Then she noticed smoke wafting out of the crack between the sliding glass doors.

  Alarmed, she called, “Karen?”

  Hearing a cry from inside that sounded more like a wounded cat than a child, she let go of the wineglass and sprang. As she squeezed through the doors, smoke and the smell of burning plastic stung her eyes. To her right, red and orange flames rose from the living room rug and sofa.

  “Karen, oh my God! Where are you?”

  A strangled sound resounded from the front hall.

  Turning, she spotted a can of lighter fluid on the wooden end table and a box of matches. A picture of what had transpired flashed in her head as flames danced three feet away.

  “Karen!”

  She grabbed hold of the can, screamed as the heat seared her hand, and running back three steps, tossed it out the door onto the patio.

  “Karen, sweetheart! Where are you? Say something!”

  The smoke made it very difficult to see. When Karen shouted “Mommy, help!” Nan turned right and saw her daughter rolling on the wooden hallway floor, trying to extinguish flames at the bottom of her pants.

  She threw herself on her daughter like a wild animal, then attacked the fire furiously with her hands. The flames were stubborn, but Nan smothered them out. Ignoring the burns on her hands and the seething, tightening sensation in her throat and lungs, she scooped up her daughter and ran out the front door, collapsing on the lawn.

  She was still lying there in the same position when the paramedics revived her minutes later. She saw flashes of firemen passing, lights, smoke, and hoses. Rough hands lifted her onto a stretcher. She looked up at someone but had trouble getting the words out.

  “My dau…”

  A male voice said, “Relax, ma’am. You’ll be fine.”

  “My daughter. Where’s Karen?” She felt panic.

  “She’s okay, ma’am,” the man said in a reassuring voice. “We’ve got her. We’re taking you both to the hospital now.”

  “I want to see her. I’ve got to see her!”

  “Hold on, ma’am. You will.”

  Her panic grew with every face they passed and jostle of the stretcher. Blue, red, and white flashed across the front lawn and driveway. Neighbors stood in silence and watched.

  In the back of a red ambulance, she blinked into the bright light. To her left she saw Karen seated on a gurney. An EMT was using scissors to cut away the right leg of her pants.

  “Karen, is that really you?” Nan shouted.

  As soon as Karen saw her mother, she started to cry.

  Restraints prevented Nan from sitting up, so she reached out and touched her daughter with the back of her injured hand. “It’s okay, darling. The doctors will take care of us now.”

  “I’m sorry, Mommy,” Karen cried. “I’m so sorry. I started the fire, Mommy. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay, darling. I don’t care about that. But…why?”

  Karen’s chest heaved and tears poured down her soot-covered cheeks. “I thought that maybe if Daddy heard about the fire on the news…he’d come home.”

  Dawkins shuffled down the drab, cold hallway with Kwon behind him, trying to convince himself that he had accomplished something, which brought him a step closer to freedom. The new platform shroud that had been machined in a nearby shop under his supervision fit perfectly around the gyro compass and torque motors. Another couple of months and the GSP system would be fully functional and ready to insert into the Unha-3 missile. Allowing for several more months for testing and adjustments, he figured the process would be complete by September, at which time his service wouldn’t be needed anymore.

  The seventeenth of September was Nan’s birthday. Maybe, just maybe, Dawkins thought, he’d make it home by then. As soon as he did, he’d contact the FBI and CIA, and brief them about the underground facility and the progress the North Koreans had made in their nuclear missile program. He’d spill all the information and impressions he’d stored in his brain.

  He told himself that under the circumstances, informing U.S. authorities was the best he could do. He wanted to believe that the North Koreans were still a year or more away from building a nuclear missile that could hit the mainland United States. He based his estimate on the numerous other engineering problems they still had to solve, including miniaturizing the warhead, finding the right mix of fuel, and engineering the warhead housing so it wouldn’t burn up on reentry into the atmosphere.

  Back in his room, he sat at the square wooden table as Sung prepared his dinner in the kitchen down the hall. He opened the journal he kept on the shelf that he assumed was read daily by NK officials, and wrote. “Day 25. Milestone day. The shroud fits…Goal accomplished! Tomorrow we begin testing. No. Tomorrow is my day off. Looking forward to another walk with Sung. Hope to see more red-crowned cranes. The fresh air gives me energy.”

  Sung entered quietly in a dark blue tunic and matching pants, and slid the plastic plate in front of him. It was ton-yuk-kui, rice with pork strips, and banchan, spicy cabbage and cucumber. As she had explained, a good meal was one that harmonized warm and cold, spicy and mild, rough and soft, solid and liquid. This seemed to accomplish that.

  “You like, Mr. Dawkin?” Sung asked. She had her hair pulled back and held with a rubber band. The skin over her high cheekbones was pulled tight. No makeup to conceal the brown circles under her eyes.

  “Yes. Very good.”

  “You watch movie after?” She pointed to the new videos the honored general had given him, stacked on top of the box of pornos from Japan, Thailand, South Korea, and the Philippines.

  The North Korean films he’d watched so far were stagey, propagandistic tropes with names Sung had translated as Order No. 27, The Kites Flying in the Sky, and The Respected Supreme Commander Is Our Destiny.

  “No thank you,” he responded.

  When he finished, she took the plate and chopsticks away and waited for Kwon outside to inspect them. Nothing that could possibly be used as a weapon was allowed to remain in the room. Every morning he had to request a razor. Kwon would carry it in and watch Dawkins while he shaved, and then take it away.

  “I think I’ll meditate a little, then get ready for bed,” Dawkins said.

  Sung had taught him how to sit quietly on the chair with the lights out and monitor the thoughts and images that floated into his head. Pushing away the negative ones, she said, would give him a healthier mind and body.

  Dawkins sat quietly. He found the time between dinner and bedtime to be the most difficult, because he had nothing to engage his mind. He wasn’t allowed music to listen to, or books to read, and the videos were awful. The first thoughts that drifted into his minds were concerns about Nan and Karen. It felt wrong to try to will them away.

  Three mornings after the op in China, Crocker hopped a cab from Honolulu International Airport to Pearl Harbor. During the drive he listened to the balding driver talk excitedly about
how he had driven a famous pop star named Iggy Azalea back to her hotel last night and how she had tipped him twenty dollars. Crocker pretended to care, even though he didn’t know who she was. He was thinking about how he had missed Easter dinner and had to call Jenny.

  Even at 0740 the sun was blinding. He got out at the entrance to the base, stretched, and looked out over the harbor, which still seemed filled with ghosts. His grandfather had passed through here on his way to Guam back in ’43. His dad had billeted here often while serving on various destroyers and aircraft carriers in the Pacific fleet.

  Inside, he found a mess where he fortified himself with a cup of coffee and scrambled eggs, then hustled over to the CINCPAC building, where he checked through security again and was escorted to a third-floor conference room.

  Anders looked up from some papers, saw Crocker in his customary black jeans and T-shirt, and said, “You’re on time. Good. How was China?”

  “Strange.”

  “How come you can’t execute a mission without causing complications?”

  “Shit happens. How’s the kid?”

  “Alive. Still in Dandong. Interesting that you inquire about some North Korean boy you barely know before you ask about the intel.”

  “People come first. You got a problem with that?”

  “No. But the Chinese aren’t happy.”

  “They’ll get over it. Choi get you the intel you wanted?”

  “He did. Thanks. Our guests should be here any minute. Get yourself some coffee and a muffin and relax.”

  He didn’t want coffee or a muffin. He’d rather be running along Waikiki Beach, which he spied out the window on the left. Staring at the breaking surf, he remembered his honeymoon with Holly and happier times—the two of them splashing one another, the time he broke a surfboard in two on a monster wave while he was showing off.