Star of the North

by D. B. John

  “Gently. Please,” said Dr. Chung with a reproving laugh.

  Cho puffed out his chest, and pulled himself up to his full height, wishing he could scrub his face with snow and rub color into his cheeks and lips.

  The doctor stopped in front of the man immediately to Cho’s right. “How old are you, father?”

  “Forty-three, sir.”

  The doctor moved on a step, and he was in front of Cho.

  His eyes scanned Cho’s face, and in that moment Cho pictured his own appearance through the doctor’s eyes. He hadn’t seen his own reflection in a year, but he could clearly imagine the yellow, hollow-cheeked ghost man. The human ruin with the deep stink of the long-term prisoner. The musty, sweetish odor of the camp.

  The doctor moved on.

  Moments later another selection was made. A young lad who couldn’t have been in the camp more than a few weeks was pulled from the line.

  The whistle sounded again, and the unselected went back to work.

  Later, Cho described his day to his mother in the hut as she stirred the rice for dinner. He thought she’d be pleased to know he had easier work, but she kept her back toward him and said nothing, and he attributed her silence to her depression.

  They ate without speaking. The meal was barely three mouthfuls. Then she snuffed out the candle and got under the blanket.

  He was almost asleep when she spoke. In the dark, her voice sounded unnervingly calm.

  “If that doctor comes again, you must hide. If you can’t hide, have a coughing fit. The guards will think you got black lung in the mine and you won’t be selected.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  Cho turned over and stared in her direction but she had returned to silence.

  47

  Camp 22

  North Hamgyong Province

  North Korea

  After a week laboring in the sunlight and open air, Cho’s skin stopped weeping pus. He felt stronger. His day divided into day and night, rather than endless dark. He was no longer in the perpetual delirium of exhaustion he endured in the mine. His forearm was healing in the makeshift splint, though it was sorely sensitive to the touch, and the bone was not setting straight. He had to lift and carry with his right arm.

  A stoic man in his thirties had shown Cho the ropes at the construction site, orientated him, warned him which guards were killers and which would turn a blind eye. Cho marveled that natural human kindnesses endured, even in this place. The man’s name was Jun. His back was bent in half, so that he had to crane his head up to look at Cho. His skin was leathery and stretched tightly over his bones like all the prisoners, but to Cho’s astonishment his eyes were blue. He was the grandson of an American POW from the Korean War, he said. He had been born inside the camp and had never left it.

  After the mine, the temperature on the surface almost stopped Cho’s heart. Sweat on his brow turned icy in the lacerating wind that swept down through the narrow valley. The air seemed to crystallize in his nose. The bare skin of his fingers stuck to the steel cart he pushed. His day became a minute-by-minute battle to stay warm, but again Jun helped, showing him how to steal empty burlap sacks when the guards weren’t looking and wrap them around the body beneath the thin nylon prison clothes.

  Once again Cho could not believe his good fortune. The building had to be completed at such breakneck speed that the prisoners were fed two cups of food each day, one of mixed grains and one of boiled corn, double what Cho had received in the mine, though here on the frozen surface he’d found no grubs or rats for protein.

  The guards had never risked venturing down into the mine shafts, but here they stayed close to the prisoners, with rifles on their backs and rabbit-fur hats pulled low around their ears. He was becoming a veteran prisoner, he realized. He never looked the guards in the face but had an instinct for when their eyes were upon him. He kept his ears open and an eye out for the smallest detail that could give him an edge, and keep him alive.

  And as he worked, Cho noticed a most curious detail.

  They were pulling cement sacks from the train wagon when he whispered to Jun.

  “The guards … Why don’t they enter the lab complex?”

  Jun barely moved his lips. “They’re afraid.”

  He fell silent as one of the snitches passed into earshot.

  Jun lowered a sack onto Cho’s handcart, close enough to his face to speak almost inaudibly. “… The place was heavily guarded until a year ago. Then a guard’s wife gave birth. The baby had no arms or legs. Another was born blind.”

  Jun flicked him a look of warning. Gossip was a dangerous commodity in the camp.

  It was Sunday and snowing hard, but trains still arrived with building materials and departed laden with coal; trucks had to be unloaded. The prisoners worked under a barrage of oaths and blows. The guards kicked and whipped the prisoners as if they were lower than animals. “Move it, you traitors, you sons of bitches!”

  They’d been at work since 6:00 a.m., and Cho had eaten no more than a mouthful of rice for breakfast, and some cabbage leaves his mother had smuggled out in her apron. He watched Jun pick up a heavy cement sack from the train wagon and heave it onto his crooked back as lightly as if it were a pillow. Cho, his arm still in a splint, pushed the cart with one arm, his wooden clogs slipping on the frozen black mud.

  Suddenly his feet slid from under him and he landed hard on his wounded arm on the ice. Before he knew it a rifle butt had smashed into his shoulder. Pain shot down his spinal cord like a lighting strike.

  “What’s this? Sabotage? GET UP!”

  Cho scrambled painfully to his feet, and had just got himself upright when the kick of the boot struck the base of his spine. For a moment the agony made his vision go white, and his eyes watered. He’d been shivering all day but now felt a sudden fire burning through him. Even his fingers on the cryonic cold of the iron handcart were suddenly hot and sweating.

  The snowstorm was blowing up into a full blizzard. Fine grains stung his face and eyes. He could barely see two meters ahead. The prisoners carried their loads in a single file. He could just make out the bent-over shape of Jun lugging the cement sack. They were approaching the entrance of the annex.

  Suddenly they were in a full whiteout. Zero visibility, an empty dimension. He heard a sharp yelp, and through a clearing in the swirls of snow saw Jun lose his balance. The sack tumbled from his back, hit the ground, and split wide open. Pale-gray, ashy cement lay across the road like a cremation. Jun dropped to his knees, took off his cap, and went dead still, head lowered, awaiting his fate.

  Three guards ran to him and surrounded him, staring at the spill. The prisoners stopped moving.

  “You, son of imperialist scum, how long have you been here?”

  Jun was trembling violently. “Thirty-two years, sir. All my life. Please.”

  The guard turned to the others. “Thirty-two years in Camp 22 is long enough, wouldn’t you say?”

  He drew his revolver and shot Jun at point-blank range in the head.

  The noise echoed off the steep valley sides, and the small body flopped to the ground like a child’s toy. The line of prisoners turned to stone, and something inside Cho broke.

  It seemed to happen in slow motion. He heard a voice roaring. It was his own. He was lunging at the guard, with his good arm extended like a spear. He caught the look of surprise on the guard’s face. The other two reached to their holsters. Cho grabbed the man’s wrist, which still held the revolver, but a starving, emaciated prisoner was no match for three fed, trained killers.

  He felt himself being yanked violently backward and his legs kicked away. Next his view was of the gray-white sky, and the faces of three guards. A boot covered in ice and mud pressed down on his windpipe, as the revolver was aimed in his face.

  Cho closed his eyes. For a delirious moment he saw his wife and son bathed in light, somewhere far away and happy. He saw his mother, as a young woman. He saw Jenna across a candle-lit dinner table, gi
ving him her radiant smile.

  The revolver cocked with a fluid click. The finger squeezed.

  “Oh-ho, hold on there,” said a high, clear voice. A patter of rubber-booted feet was approaching at a run. “Not so fast, comrades. This one’s fighting fit, isn’t he?”

  In the periphery of his vision Cho saw blue lab overalls and a white, gloved hand extended toward him.

  “Come, sir. Let me help you up.”

  48

  Department of Homeland Security

  Nebraska Avenue Complex

  Washington, DC

  Jenna’s breakthrough came by pure chance.

  Her time was up at the CIA’s liaison in Homeland Security. In three months she had not turned up a single clue—nothing that might link a young migrant entering the United States with the children of the Seed-Bearing Program, with that villa in Pyongyang. Fisk told her the Agency had other priorities. “Wrap up there tomorrow. We need to discuss your next op.” One by one she took down the passport photos and visa copies pinned to her board. All were of half-Asian young adults who had been briefly held by US immigration because of some anomaly in their backgrounds or documents. All had been allowed to enter the country. She’d put a strike mark through every one of them.

  It dismayed her to think she’d wasted her time, and even now it was a wrench to give up. All she’d needed was a clue, a crib to unlock the puzzle, but it had never come.

  “Bailing out, huh?” The overweight young guy in the cubicle next to hers was making a daisy chain out of paper clips. At first she’d attributed his stale odor to lax hygiene, but she soon started to think of it as the smell of low morale. It seemed to pervade this whole place.

  She shuffled the passport pages into a neat pile and stared at it thoughtfully for a minute. She knew that if any of the children from that villa had been infiltrated into the United States they would have carried passports that disguised their country of origin and traveled via a transit country. And that transit country would have to be on the exceedingly short list of North Korea’s friends in the world, countries whose security services did favors for each other. Cuba she’d rule out—almost no one from Cuba arrived through normal immigration channels. China, too, she thought very unlikely. Beijing wouldn’t want to get involved in Kim’s covert ops. That left Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, Russia, and Vietnam. Arrivals from the first four of those countries were monitored closely by the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center for any links to Al-Qaeda or Hezbollah, and several times she had tagged along with CIA officers to Dulles, Logan, and JFK airports to observe some wide-eyed, sweating student being interrogated by Homeland Security behind a one-way mirror.

  At first she’d assumed North Korea would use false passports: after all, they’d been forging everything from hundred-dollar bills to erectile dysfunction medication. She’d made exhaustive interagency cross-checks for any young adult caught at immigration bearing a false passport from a country on that list. But after three months without a lead she began to suspect that these kids may be entering the country with fraudulently issued valid passports. And that made her task impossible. With a valid passport from Syria, Russia, or Vietnam, there was nothing stopping a young adult applying for legitimate visas for work, tourism, study. They would not be detected. Background checks, biometric data, profiling would have nothing on them. Trying to solve this by herself now seemed absurd. The task required an international team effort with the CIA station chiefs in all those countries, and she knew that senior figures at Langley harbored doubts about the Seed-Bearing Program. Indoctrinated young adults who look foreign? Trained as spies and assassins? Some days she had simply given up on the task and had returned to Langley to monitor the spysat traffic. Simms showed her the latest worrying images of the secret lab in Camp 22, which appeared to be expanding. A second building was in the process of construction.

  Her phone rang, and her spirits sank when she saw it was Hank from Counterterrorism, a morose divorcé whose offers of dinner she’d twice declined. She’d accompanied him to the airports half a dozen times.

  “Got another one at Dulles, if you’re interested? Arrival from Malaysia.”

  She cast a forlorn glance at the pile of passport photos on her desk, ready for the shredder, and heard herself say, “Sure thing, Hank. Why not?”

  At Washington Dulles International Airport they were greeted by a tough-looking young female immigration officer Jenna had not met before. She explained that she herself was of Malaysian-American descent.

  “Never had one like this before,” she said, “it’s like the kid’s … some kind of ghost.”

  Perhaps it was the spooked look on her face but the skin on Jenna’s back was suddenly chilled to gooseflesh.

  In an interrogation room behind a one-way mirror sat a young woman whom Jenna knew without a doubt was mixed race, and half East Asian. Her eyes were almond shaped and bright, her skin tan colored; her glossy black hair was tied into a long braid. The detainees she’d seen in that room invariably sweated or fidgeted, exhibiting the full range of nervous symptoms. But this one sat bolt upright, cool and comported, utterly expressionless. There was a curious neutrality to her clothing: new Cargo hooded top, new Gap baseball cap, new white sneakers—the kind of look an older generation thinks a teenager wears.

  “Name is Mabel Louise Yeo,” the immigration officer said, “Aged eighteen; speaks perfect American English; valid Malaysian passport; genuine student visa. Enrolled at George Washington to study applied physics in September. Said she just returned home for a few days for a family occasion. Provides a home address in Kuala Lumpur. Everything checks out. But … there’s something off about her.”

  “Her body language,” Jenna said.

  “Actually, it’s her language. She doesn’t speak a word of Malay. I said hi to her and told her I knew her home neighborhood.” The officer ran a palm down her face. “Total blank. So then I questioned her in English. But it’s like she sticks to a script. The moment we go off script she clams up. Wherever this kid’s from … it’s not Malaysia.”

  “May I speak to her?” Jenna said.

  “Ghost kid,” Hank said. “I like that.”

  Jenna opened the door. The instant the girl saw Jenna’s face she gave a yelp of surprise and leapt from her seat. Before any of them could react, she had thrown her arms around Jenna in an embrace.

  In her astonishment Jenna found herself pressing the girl’s cheek to hers, stroking her hair, as if she were a little girl who’d got separated from her parents.

  In North Korean dialect she whispered, “You must be tired after your long journey.”

  49

  Camp 22

  North Hamgyong Province

  North Korea

  Mrs. Moon made her way through the fruit orchard toward the laboratory complex, carrying the pan of boiled cabbage leaves. The guard behind her kept flicking at a cigarette lighter. To the left she saw a work unit hacking at the ground, their bodies black against the pristine snow. Another pit amid the trees. They’ll run out of room, she thought, and imagined, not for the first time, the faces of the faraway consumers of these fruits, their reactions if they knew what made the apples and plums so extravagantly lush. And each time, the same thought followed: the secret was safe. No one left Camp 22, even as a corpse.

  Inside the complex she waited while the cabbage leaves were taken away and treated. She would soon be working here, Chief Science Officer Chung had assured her. The new annex, almost completed, was a staff refectory with kitchens. And she would be the kitchen block leader, responsible for its prison workers and given a coupon for soap and a new set of clothing. This news, which guaranteed she would survive the winter and have enough to eat, simply completed her depression.

  Dr. Chung was in high spirits. Mrs. Moon sensed the growing importance of his work, and of this facility. Pyongyang was sending inspectors every week. A political agitation team had visited, and festooned the laboratory and the corridors with slogans on long red
banners. LET US MAKE OUR COUNTRY A FORTRESS! SCIENCE IS THE ENGINE OF SOCIALIST CONSTRUCTION!

  Half an hour later the pan of cabbage leaves was returned to her by a scientist wearing a full white bodysuit with goggles and respirator mask. She angled her head away from the fumes and stood behind Dr. Chung in the entrance to the chamber while he delivered his address to the prisoners. The guards would not enter the laboratory itself, so the process was kept orderly with a deception.

  “On behalf of this facility’s administration I bid you welcome. Just as we scientists work to defend our country against its enemies, so you are being given a chance to redeem yourselves, and help secure the welfare of a stronger Korea. We will feed you and look after your health, and in return you will help us test new vaccines. Before we take the first blood samples, please eat these cabbage leaves and digest them, as they have been soaked in vitamins, iron, and glucose. If any of you are diabetic and not allowed sugar, make yourselves known …”

  Mrs. Moon entered, holding the surgical pan of cold boiled cabbage leaves.

  Smile at them, woman, Dr. Chung mouthed to her, miming a smile with his fingers.

  She could not look at them. They were sitting naked around a drain in the floor in a bright tiled chamber watched by security cameras. Not all of them were fooled, she knew.

  Hungry, suspicious eyes turned toward her. She moved from one to the other, robotically forking a large cabbage leaf into their cupped hands. Even the smell of it was warning enough. This test held eleven prisoners, all male, seated on the tiled bench, holding their hands in their laps to protect their modesty.

  The sight of a forearm in a splint made her raise her head, and she found herself looking into the eyes of her son.

  Mrs. Moon was paralyzed. The security camera was trained on her from the ceiling corner. Suddenly the pan slipped from her fingers to the floor with a clatter. She muttered an apology and picked it up, taking a moment to bend up straight, then forked a leaf into Cho’s hands. She forced herself to turn to the next prisoner. She focused all her effort into not looking at Cho.