Star of the North

by D. B. John

  Evergreen. Who thought up these names?

  Jenna’s hands idled in her lap. She’d been advised that this slot in the day was relaxation time, and had taken the hint, arriving without papers or laptop.

  She looked about at the book-lined study, silent except for the ticking of a brass ship’s clock. Titles on ancient history, philosophy. A Greek bust. The house, loaned for the season, belonged to a tech tycoon not much older than she was. Beyond the French windows, patches of light shifted and swayed across a lawn shaded by Scotch pines. At the far end she could make out a private jetty, a spit of yellow beach, and the dark-blue waters of Nantucket Sound, glittering like a spinning coin. Gulls swooped and cried.

  A burst of radio static issued from outside, heralding the rumble of a small motorcade. She listened as the leaden, bombproof vehicles circled the gravel forecourt, car doors opening, a deep, woman’s voice raised in greeting, a dog barking. Jenna stood, facing the door, and brushed the creases from her dress. A small, biscuit-colored dog came pattering in and jumped up to greet her, then sniffed about busily. It had a coat of tight, lustrous curls, like a Restoration comedy wig.

  Just outside the door, the same woman’s voice filled the cavernous hallway.

  “Too hot out there on the links today!”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The secretary of state entered the room, directing the oversized smile straight at her, hand outstretched.

  “So sorry to keep you waiting, Dr. Williams. My husband’s playing golf with the president. Us wives went to watch them tee off,” she said, for some reason adopting a southern accent.

  Jenna gave a polite smile.

  “Well, now.” The woman closed the door and paused, taking a moment to retrieve a mental note from a well-stocked mind. She was wearing a loose-fitting lime-green linen smock, as if she’d just been at the easel, or the potter’s wheel. “It was good of our friend in Pyongyang to celebrate July Fourth. Even if it was with a medium-range missile test …” She slipped off her shoes, and settled into the armchair opposite Jenna. “Which has brought your report back to my desk.” She gave a sour little chuckle, enough for Jenna to understand that there had been disagreement in the highest circles over her ideas. “Seems you’ve become quite influential.” The large blue eyes were turned on her like loaded shotguns. “I get it. Sanctions don’t work. If Kim has to tighten his belt, the rockets and nukes are the last things he’ll cut, right?” She clicked her fingers to get the attention of the dog, which jumped up onto her lap.

  A housekeeper entered and put down a tray with a pitcher of iced tea and two glasses. Jenna waited until she’d gone.

  “It’s not simply that they don’t work, ma’am,” she said. “Sanctions play right into Kim’s hands. The isolation they cause makes him more powerful, not less, and rallies his people to him in a kind of defensive nationalism. The deeper we isolate him, the more dangerous he becomes.”

  The secretary of state gave a little facial mime of frustration. “Sure, all right, but what you recommend is a full reversal of decades of policy. Have you thought about how I’m going to pitch that?” She held up the dog’s front paws, turning it into a puppet that moved as she spoke. “A complete lifting of all trade, travel, and banking restrictions on North Korea? Establishing diplomatic relations? Treating a vicious, totalitarian tyranny as if it’s a normal country—like Canada?”

  Jenna said, “With respect, nothing else has worked. I believe the only way to change that regime is to draw it out of its isolation. Start talking. Do everything we can to help build its economy. Empower those small-time market traders and turn them into wealth makers.”

  “That could take decades.”

  And Jenna knew then, as surely as she knew anything, that this woman had her sights set on a higher office.

  “In the end, ma’am, prosperity will sweep away that dictator. Isolation won’t.”

  The secretary of state put the dog down and took a sip of her iced tea, watching Jenna over the rim of the glass. “That last time we met,” she said sweetly, “you suggested killing him.”

  Jenna didn’t blink. “If you won’t do that, this is your next best option.”

  The woman turned to the window. A succession of thoughts seemed to play across her face like the shadows of fast-moving clouds in fall, and Jenna knew it was the exigencies of power she was thinking of—the flak she’d take from Congress, the media reaction, the reputational cost, the horse trading she’d need to start at the UN, the sheer psychological effort of it all—and for one spine-tingling instant, breathing in the smell of books, conscious of the ticking clock marking time, Jenna felt she was at the boundary of some powerful ley line that could change the future.

  The secretary of state made a small huff, as if she’d reached some long-put-off decision. She gave Jenna a formal smile. “I’m told you’re graduating soon. Feeling ready for active ops?”

  Jenna was in the final stages of her training at the Farm. She was not looking forward to the night parachute drops.

  “Actually, I’ve requested an assignment to the CIA’s liaison in Homeland Security. Not leaving Washington.”

  The secretary of state cast her a quizzical look, but nothing in Jenna’s gaze betrayed the image materializing unbidden in the front of her mind, like a darkroom picture developing on photographic paper. Of Soo-min surrounded by a classroom of half-Korean children.

  46

  Camp 22

  North Hamgyong Province

  North Korea

  First Week of December 2011

  The day had begun badly at Cutting Face Number 6. A snowfall overnight meant that some of the men had to be spared for clearing the coal-cart tracks, and the work unit was short as it was. Cho led the men in single file between the mountains of scree, thinking that next week was the anniversary of his arrest. He remembered the shock of his first day at the mine, thinking himself in a nightmare beyond his imagination. Soot-blackened skeletons and cripples whose skin dripped pus. A deep, sunless valley with mine shafts ventilating steam. Circling crows cawing above. “Don’t think,” they’d told him. “Just do. It’ll get easier.”

  As they entered the tunnel the men began whispering their prayers. Who they whispered to—the spirits of their ancestors, the Great Leader, God himself—Cho had never asked. They knew they might not end the day alive.

  Cutting Face Number 6 was high up on the valley’s slope. It cut into the side of the mountain rather than beneath it, following the meager coal seam through a long, unsupported gallery that ended in a vertical shaft; this connected to the next long gallery, and so on into the mountain, in a series of shallow, downward steps. Only in a place where life cost nothing, Cho realized, would such a mine be built. The natural shifting and settling of rock made the long galleries highly unstable. He had lost count of the times he had dug out corpses with his bare hands after a sudden collapse, or the times the men had clawed their way out after becoming trapped.

  He waited at the foot of the first shaft while the men climbed down the ladder. He’d organized them into teams of diggers, pulley operators, and cart pushers, which they would rotate after lunch. The stale, fetid air rose to greet them. Cho barely noticed it any more. This was the easiest part of his working day. It occurred to him that the nonstop hard labor and daily battle to obey orders, avoid beatings, and starvation had saved him. If he’d had the leisure to dwell upon his condition he’d have been dead months ago.

  But who was he fooling?

  His own mother had saved him. His real mother. Without her, he’d have died in the first week. Of all the surprises he’d experienced in his life, she was the greatest. He had never believed in miracles before.

  She had arrived in Camp 22 only three months before he had, but her years of working on a penal farm had prepared her well. She had acclimatized far quicker than most arrivals. From her he’d learned the camp’s internal workings, how teams were rotated, what trouble the guards themselves got into if quotas were not
met. He learned to exploit the control system in which some prisoners acted as assistant guards. He acquired a sixth sense for snitches. He’d learned which levers to pull to stay alive. And the more he learned the less impotent he felt. He had accepted what had happened to him, and it had given him a peace of sorts. Many prisoners did not survive the first few weeks, the crucial transitional period, because the shock was too great. He’d survived because of her. Because of her he no longer wanted to die.

  Cho had always believed that his adoptive mother had loved him. Now he was less sure. She was a remote and formal woman, devoted to the Party. Would she have cared for him, unhesitatingly, when he was as foul and cast down as he was now? He didn’t know. But his real mother, this woman Moon Song-ae: whatever she was feeling for him he sensed it was pure and it was unconditional. Though she barely knew him, it was love.

  A spasm of worry spread through him. Lately it seemed as if her will to live had completed its transfer to him, leaving her empty and wanting to die. Nothing he said could pull her out of it. He’d even offered to pray with her. She was troubled by something, like a sickness, that she would not speak of. After everything they’d shared, he sensed there was still something she was keeping from him, and it was gnawing away at her soul.

  Omma, don’t fade away now, not after all this.

  At the bottom of the third shaft they reached the new gallery they had been cutting all week. It was tiny and narrow and extended about thirty meters. They had no wood to prop up the ceiling so dared not make it too wide. As Cho entered, something made him stop. He held up the lantern and sniffed. The others seemed to sense it too. Overnight the air had changed. It had turned much colder … and it was damp. He ran his hand over the wall. It was glistening and wet to the touch, giving off the faint petroleum smell of anthracite.

  “This isn’t good,” said a man called Hyun, whom Cho trusted.

  “Probably spring water seeping through,” Cho said.

  The men looked at each other. It gave Cho an uneasy feeling, too, but it was too late to redeploy everyone now.

  “Damp coal is heavier,” said another. “We’ll make the quota faster.”

  Cho worked like an animal all morning, hacking at the glittering anthracite, shoveling it backward with bare hands. In the chill air the men were sweating freely. From behind him came the nonstop clinking of picks striking and the coughing of clogged lungs. Tar-black men glistening like worms. It was vital to keep moving. A loaded container had to be ready to go up the shaft the moment an empty one arrived, or the system broke down. If the system broke down, the quota was short. If the quota was short, food rations were cut.

  They rested a quarter hour at lunch to devour a handful of boiled wheat. Hyun had found a coiling white snake in one of the galleries, and they cut it up and divided it between them, tearing at the viscous, stringy flesh with their teeth, eating like men possessed.

  They resumed work, hacking onward into the seam, but the farther they mined, the wetter it became. Water was now trickling down the walls and pooling on the floor. Cho sensed the men’s fear, and decided to abandon the gallery. He was about to tell them to pack up, when something caught his eye. At his feet, wriggling and silver white in the light of the lantern, was a tiny, slender fish.

  Suddenly they heard a scream. Cho scrambled past the others toward the foot of the shaft. The unit’s youngest member, a nineteen-year-old boy, hadn’t loaded fast enough. Two empty containers had come down from the gallery above and one had smashed his hand.

  Cho pulled him out of the way. He tried to lift the container to hook it onto the pulley, but the wet coal was heavy and he was beginning to weaken and tire. His legs were wobbling. “Someone help me.”

  The next thing he knew a sound of falling, splashing water was coming from the gallery and the men were shouting.

  The change in air pressure was instant. He turned toward them to yell.

  Before he could make a sound the gallery dissolved in a thunderous, groaning roar. The men’s cries were snuffed out. A massive deluge of water blasted into the shaft like a jet thrust, knocking Cho off his feet, and smacking his shoulder against the wall. The lantern went out. One of the containers struck him hard on his forearm. Somehow he caught hold of the pulley rope, but couldn’t haul himself up with one arm. The torrent rose up over his head, engulfed him, and the world went black and silent. He was flailing his legs in complete darkness, clinging to the rope. Bubbles rumbled from his mouth.

  After what seemed like a minute he had the sensation of rising quickly, his body scraping against the side of the shaft. Suddenly he could breathe; a voice shouted his name, and he was being hauled from the water by the pulley operator in the gallery above. The water had risen forty meters up the shaft, and even as he was being dragged out he heard it subsiding behind him. He was laid on the floor, gulping in great mouthfuls of air, then blacked out.

  When he came to, he was icy cold and his teeth were chattering. He wanted to cough but could barely move. His body was so numbed and weakened he couldn’t tell for sure where the damage lay, but his shoulder didn’t feel too secure and his forearm had an unnatural-looking kink in it. He closed his eyes and groaned. A whimper he recognized sounded next to him in the dark. The teenage boy was saved.

  “Where’re the others?” Cho croaked.

  “Just me,” said Hyun. “The five inside the gallery didn’t make it.” He sat on his haunches and covered his face with his hands. “We were mining under a fucking lake.”

  Cho closed his eyes and focused on his breathing. The irony. The men had often joked that if they kept tunneling they’d reach the other side.

  Outside the mine Cho was laid down on the snow by his remaining teammates. He’d dislocated a shoulder. That could be fixed, but not the fractured forearm, unless a prisoner with medical training could bind it in the camp infirmary, which, as everyone knew, was death’s waiting room. If he’d been healthy and strong he’d have been in agony, but he felt only numbness and discomfort. Not even the cold was bothering him. Most likely he would be shot right here. He was no more use as a miner. Cho looked forlornly at the teenage boy, whose face was streaked with tears, and winked at him, to say Put it out of your mind.

  Two guards were trudging toward them and Cho’s heart sank. The larger one, a pig of a man who kept a whip in his belt, was in the lead, but the other was one of the older guards. The older ones, Cho had learned, were softer and less strict about the rules. Hyun removed his cap, fell to his knees, and lowered his eyes to explain what had happened, but to the men’s surprise the guard said, “This one healthy?” He was pointing to the teenage boy.

  Cho said, “Yes, sir.”

  The boy was pulled away by the arm toward an open-top jeep parked next to the coal-cart tracks below, which ran between the slopes of black moraine. Cho had only just noticed it. In the back sat four prisoners. Standing next to it were two men in blue overalls, with respirator masks and clear goggles hanging from their necks.

  The older guard leaned over Cho’s face. “Well, this is your lucky day, isn’t it?”

  Cho’s shoulder was fixed and his arm bandaged and put into a makeshift splint in the infirmary. Within hours he was assigned to lighter work, on a construction project two valleys farther along from the mine. He almost smiled when he understood he was to push a flat cart of loaded goods, which, with luck, he could manage with one arm.

  After the mine, this was a vacation. It was late afternoon. He felt sunlight on his face for the first time in months. At the entrance to the construction site a passing farm cart hit a pothole and spilled radishes all over the road, which had the line of prisoners dashing to and fro, grabbing the vegetables and devouring them on the spot, despite screams and kicks from the guards. Cho had never much liked radishes. Now they were the most heavenly things he’d ever tasted.

  The construction project, which lay at the head of the valley, and at the end of the railroad that ran through the entire camp, was an annex to a new labor
atory complex, he learned. His coworkers were cleaner and in better physical shape than the miners. He guessed they hadn’t been here as long. He was assigned to a unit of fifty prisoners, divided into teams of ten. Their task was to unload materials from the trains that arrived twice daily from the port at Chongjin, and goods from the trucks that came by road from the north, from China. He saw the unloading of massive stainless steel centrifuges from one; from another, desk computers, packaged in white boxes with an apple logo. Whatever this laboratory was, it had an extraordinary budget.

  Toward the end of his first day on the project, work came to a halt at the sound of a whistle.

  “Line up, heads up, you scum!” a guard screamed. A muzzled dog barked.

  The prisoners shuffled into a long line in front of the trucks with their heads lowered and their hands behind their backs.

  “I said a line!” The guard kicked an elderly prisoner who was too slow. The man’s skeletal body struck the side of a truck like a sheaf of straw.

  “No need for that, Sergeant,” said a light, clear voice.

  A man was inspecting the line, followed by a guard. He was dressed entirely in a white bodysuit with the tight hood circling his face. Clear goggles and a respirator mask hung around his neck. His rubber boots were also white.

  “I am Chief Science Officer Chung,” he said, smiling genially. “I’m looking for three healthy men to work for me inside the lab complex. You’ll be warm and well fed, and in return we may ask you for some blood samples …”

  Cho sensed a wave of desperation run along the line.

  The doctor was looking each prisoner up and down, as if he were a livestock auctioneer. “You, professor,” he said to a tall young man. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-six, sir.”

  The doctor lifted the man’s eyelid with the tip of a gloved finger and examined the inside his mouth. A nod to the guard, and the man was yanked from the line.