Star of the North

by D. B. John

  Cho’s cigarettes.

  It was a curious sensation that overcame her at that moment, as if she had suddenly seen a simple solution to an impossible equation.

  “I fear we’ve shocked you, Dr. Williams. You’re shaking. Sip your drink.”

  “Forgive me … a cigarette would help, if you’d permit.”

  “Of course.”

  She took the packet from her pocket.

  “Double Happiness,” he said with a note of regret. “China’s best brand. Another pleasure forbidden to me.”

  He pressed the button in the side of the table.

  She opened the packet and put a cigarette shakingly to her lips. She had no idea which of the two Cho had doctored. She was playing Russian roulette. The male attendant appeared with a thick glass ashtray and a chrome table lighter, which Kim Jong-il took from him.

  “A beautiful woman shouldn’t have to light her own.”

  He flicked the lighter and held it to the end of her cigarette.

  She took the tiniest of puffs, watching the tip glow a rose color. It had the unmistakable taste of tobacco, and she felt her shaking begin to calm.

  Then she committed herself to the act, fully and without a second thought.

  She offered him the second cigarette.

  The conflict played out on his face as he resisted temptation.

  “Alas. Doctor’s orders.”

  “A pity,” Jenna said, dropping her head back on the seat and exhaling the smoke. “It would have been a tale to tell my future children, that I shared a smoke with the most powerful man in Asia.”

  The delight on his face was almost childish, as if her remark had conferred all the license he needed. “In that case, it would be unsporting to refuse.”

  He slid the cigarette from the packet and put it to his mouth.

  Feeling a rush of destiny, she picked up the heavy chrome lighter and lit it for him, noticing that the lighter had been engraved.

  IN FRIENDSHIP, FROM V. V. PUTIN, 2001

  He took a deep drag, and closed his eyes in pleasure. “Tell me,” he said, with the smoke coming out with the words, “whose idea was it to rescue Cho from that wretched riverbank? Yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re a genius.” He chuckled again. “Your CIA operation was so swift it caught the Chinese napping …”

  Without taking her eyes off him she took another puff, a deeper drag this time. It had been years since she’d smoked a cigarette. She’d forgotten the light-headedness. The effect that was both calming and stimulating. She was watching his face intently for any sign of the crystal meth taking effect. An overdose, Cho had said. Big enough to kill.

  “I adore rescue stories,” he went on, taking another drag. “Especially in movies. Stories that grip the audience and define their emotional response.”

  “Except that this rescue ends in the death of Cho and the continued incarceration of my sister.”

  He seemed not to hear and turned back to the window, suddenly thoughtful. “This really could be a movie.” He was holding the cigarette up an angle next to his face, like a film siren. “The theme should be devotion to duty, and the innate goodness of the Korean soul …”

  She took another nervous puff. The smoke wasn’t burning her throat in the way she remembered. In fact, when she exhaled it looked more like a kind of mist …

  She felt her wrist.

  Her pulse was racing. And a light sweat had broken out on her brow. The faint nausea she’d felt since entering the compartment was intensifying, and mixed in with it was a thin but unmistakable ripple of euphoria.

  Oh, SHIT

  She stubbed the cigarette out frantically.

  Kim Jong-il was still talking away, gazing out of the window. Her face was becoming hot and flushed. How much had she smoked? Three, four drags …

  “Out of love for your sister, you crossed the world in search of her, and in doing so found your true calling—to serve the people. That will be the plotline. You did not have your sister’s advantages, of course, not having experienced the riches of socialism, the liberation of our ideology, the intoxicating thrill of a mass movement …”

  The drug’s latent power was kicking in. Her lungs were filling deeply as she breathed. She knew her pupils were dilating.

  “… But it is the Korean in you that triumphs over the baser race mixed in your blood …”

  Somewhere near the top of her diaphragm a tingling, kindling feeling of elation was threatening to flood her whole body.

  “I will give my screenwriters on-the-spot guidance for this script.” He turned back to her. “I will edit it mys—”

  He froze, caught by her transformation. He was seeing her eyes lit large and bright, her shoulders heaving like some powerful beast. She felt as if she were growing in stature in front of him. The feeling of nausea was evaporating, leaving her with an exhilarating clarity of mind, and a kind of hyperacuity—her senses felt alive to the tiniest detail. She could almost see the labored beat of his weak heart. She could hear the soldiers talking in the guardroom behind the far door.

  In a low voice she said, “You asked me if we have an understanding.” She began to rise slowly from her seat. “We do not.” Her eyes remained fixed on his. “There is no bridge I won’t burn … no earth I won’t scorch … to get my sister back.”

  Kim Jong-il watched her unfold to her full height, a distinct wariness in his eyes now, a look of alarm. His fingers still held the half-smoked cigarette. Suddenly his left hand moved to press something concealed beneath the table. A panic button.

  The door at the far end flew open and the two soldiers of the Guard Command came running to the Leader’s aid, holding AK-74s. For three seconds she was invisible to them. His need was all they answered. Both were tall and heavily built, like hundred-meter sprinters, but that did not concern her.

  In Newtonian physics, the power of a strike increases quadratically with the speed of the strike, but only linearly with the mass of the striking object.

  Kim Jong-il was pointing at her. Both turned toward her.

  In other words …

  The nearest one moved to grab her. She spun her body ninety degrees and shot out her leg in a devastating side kick to his cheek. The ball of her heel connected with a soft crack of bone.

  … speed generates more power than size.

  He went down like a tree, crashing to the seat next to Kim Jong-il. The second soldier moved to draw a handgun. In a lightning-fast movement she swiped the heavy chrome lighter from the table and pitched it with the full force of her arm. It struck him in the eye—with such impact that it broke in two and the lighter fluid splashed over the table and curtain behind him.

  For a moment the only sounds were her breathing and the groaning of the soldier whose eye she’d smashed. The other was unconscious.

  She felt a mantle of power settling about her shoulders. She was invincible.

  Their rifles were in fact AKSUs, she saw, as she pulled one off the unconscious soldier, the shortened version of the AK-74 designed for close-quarter firing. She liked its grip, its heft. She flipped off the safety catch.

  Kim Jong-il coughed. For an unreal moment she had almost forgotten about him. He was hammering his knuckle on the window, trying to draw the attention of the soldier standing guard outside, the top of whose helmet could be seen below. But the glass, vacuum sealed and blast proof, closed in all sound.

  He coughed again, a violent hacking cough, and unzipped his jacket at the collar. Blindly he felt for his glass. She picked up the crystal goblet of Baedansul that had been poured for her, eighty proof, and put it into his hand, watching with fascination as he gulped it down. His cough became a kind of hoarse retch, his face now turning a deep plum color.

  Jenna shook her head. She was being distracted. She had to find Soo-min.

  She was about to run in the direction Soo-min had taken when the door opened behind her. Two more soldiers were staring into the compartment in disbelief. They fum
bled for their sidearms.

  She leveled the AKSU at them. The carbine blazed in her hands on full automatic, pumping out rounds. It had a kick of a recoil. Wounds opened like poppies in their chests, knocking them backward. Another soldier appeared behind them. A burst of firing, and she cut him down, too.

  A wave of euphoria surged up from the toes of her feet to the crown of her head. She was Diana the huntress, a goddess shooting silver arrows. She swept the smoking muzzle of the AKSU back to the other end of the carriage.

  A radio earpiece had fallen to the floor, issuing a crackle of frantic radio traffic.

  Every soldier on the train was about to converge on this compartment unless she created a diversion. The dictator’s lit cigarette had fallen to the floor. She picked it up and flicked it at the lighter fluid dripping from the table behind.

  A whumpf of bright, pure flame raced across it. A second later, one of the window curtains caught fire, billowing an acrid white smoke.

  At once the klaxon blared along the length of the train, drowning out all other sound. Outside, the soldiers were running from their posts.

  She wasn’t sure why she took one last look at Kim Jong-il. Perhaps it was an awareness of a shared moment of fate, or simply curiosity. The desperation of his coughing was silenced by the klaxon. His breathing was constricted; he was suffocating, a man in a vacuum, and his eyes had begun to bulge like eggs. What little it was taking to squeeze the life from his diseased heart. A tiny, toxic mix of alcohol, smoke, and terror. His glasses had fallen to the table. For one instant his eyes met hers, as though imploring her. Die, she thought, as his body jerked from the convulsion in his chest. The large head shot back, then with a slow exhalation of breath slumped onto his chest.

  The two policemen were crouched either side of Cho. They had removed their gloves, caps, and jackets and were fully focused on inching him toward the stretcher.

  “That’s it,” Cho whispered through clenched teeth. “Keep going.”

  They were sweating profusely. He could see the pulse beating in their necks.

  Suddenly the blanket surged violently. As fast as a lizard Cho’s thin arms were out, his fists drawn back.

  One of the policemen turned to him, eyes bulbous with incredulity. The other fell forward onto all fours. A bubbling noise came from his throat.

  A syringe was plunged in each of their necks.

  One of them struggled with Cho’s fist and pulled the needle out. The syringe was empty. He’d received the full dose.

  Jenna ran, holding the AKSU at an angle to her body. She had boundless energy and a single desire: to find Soo-min.

  She sprinted toward the far doors and into a small deserted guardroom. To her left, the train door to the outside was opening, letting in a freezing wind. A helmeted soldier was clambering in. In two sharp movements she drove the butt of the AKSU into his face, and delivered a pushing kick to his upper chest, sending him flying backward. The door was massive, made of thick, blast-proof steel. She pulled it closed with both arms and pressed down the lock.

  A small corridor led past a restroom. The klaxon was amplified by the confined space. She opened the next door carefully and locked it behind her.

  The scene she saw might have stunned her, but in her altered state of mind she simply felt a radiant smile spread across her face.

  Soo-min was seated with a gathering of children. About seven or eight of them, boys and girls, hid their faces in the flowing folds of her blue silk hanbok dress or beneath her arms. A few of them had covered their ears against the noise. The blinds in the carriage were drawn. The only light came from a wall-mounted flat screen playing a children’s animation. The space was arranged like a comfortable living room, with sofas and armchairs.

  She knew that these were some of the half-Korean children she’d seen at the villa. One of the boys turned to look at her. He was East Asian, but with chestnut-brown hair—and she suddenly saw herself through his eyes. A drug-crazed armed Westerner in jeans who looked exactly like the woman protecting him.

  Still holding the AKSU at an angle, Jenna held out her left hand, shaking her fingers, urging her sister over the noise of the klaxon. “Soo-min, come!”

  A massive blow struck the door behind her—a boot kicking it in. The children began to cry and howl.

  Soo-min’s eyes sparked with terror. She got the children to their feet, and herded them to the far door of the carriage, away from Jenna. They clung closely to her as they ran.

  A shouting of soldiers’ voices and a thumping of boots sounded behind the locked door.

  Jenna went after her sister, but as Soo-min shepherded the last of the children out of the far door she closed it, and turned her back against it protectively.

  Jenna switched to English. “Susie, let’s go.”

  The exit Soo-min had closed was their only way out.

  Another massive blow struck the door Jenna had come through.

  Her sister was frozen to the spot, her expression hard to read. It showed fear and confusion and something else, something that disturbed Jenna, but at that moment she was distracted by the sudden lurch of the floor. The train was starting to move.

  Cho sat slowly up on his elbows, watching his captors writhe and gasp on the floor. Their motions were slowing. That sedative must be strong. Either that or they were going into some kind of shock, which, given their youth, was possible. For the first time he noticed that he was completely naked beneath the blanket. He stood upright on the mat and tested his weight on his heavily bandaged calf. He wasn’t feeling bad at all, and guessed it must be an effect of the oxycodone Lim had given him for the pain. What had happened to Lim?

  A gurgling noise on the floor distracted him. One of the men was reaching for his gun holster. Cho lunged toward him before he could pull it, tugged the man’s riot baton from his holster belt, and without emotion struck down on the man’s skull. Knockout blow. The other had already rolled onto his side. Cho waited a moment, baton raised, then heard a quiet snore coming from his throat.

  Without wasting a second Cho began to undress the unconscious policeman, who was about his own height, though Cho’s prison-camp body had nothing like the build of the man’s arms and shoulders.

  A short while later, a thin man in the navy uniform and boots of the Chinese state security police rode down to the lobby, disabled the elevator buttons with a hard blow from a riot baton, and emerged onto the slush-covered sidewalk. The icy street glowed like wet blood under the crimson neon signs. He checked the jacket pockets, finding a cell phone, which he flicked into a trash can, and vehicle keys. He pressed “unlock,” and watched as the indicator lights of a new, unmarked BMW minivan parked ten meters away flashed and pinged amid the dark line of parked cars.

  “Oh, yes,” Cho murmured.

  The compartment door was kicked wide open and three, four soldiers burst in holding semi-automatic rifles. Jenna did not hesitate for a millisecond. She opened up with the AKSU, cutting them down with a burst of bullets until she’d emptied the clip. Thick gray smoke poured in from the fire in the dining compartment.

  One soldier lay screaming on the floor from a stomach wound. She took his magazine from him and reloaded. Between the blasts of the klaxon she heard men choking and realized that the fire in the dining carriage must now be a blaze, stopping more reinforcements from getting through.

  She leveled the AKSU again and squeezed the trigger, firing into the smoke in the corridor. She could just make out the shapes of two bodies and the flickering orange glow of flames coming from the dining compartment.

  Jenna ran back and grabbed Soo-min by her arm, hauling her through the kicked-in door of the compartment, toward the heavy train door in the guardroom, holding the weapon in her other hand.

  The train door would not unlock while the train was in motion. Jenna motioned for Soo-min to stand back. She fired three rounds at the glass, which shattered in a thousand flashing, deafening fragments. A roaring, freezing air from outside took her breath
away as the door opened. The train was picking up speed.

  She clasped Soo-min’s hand tightly and shouted, “Jump with me.”

  “To where?”

  “Home.”

  Their eyes met, and in that briefest of seconds, as star and flame reflected in Soo-min’s eyes, Jenna knew that her sister was not lost to her.

  A large, powdery snowdrift approached. They jumped, and the burning train roared southward into the night.

  Cho fastened the safety belt and turned the ignition. The powerful engine engaged softly and the dashboard lit up. Full tank. Again the lapel radio crackled.

  “Wang, do you copy? Come in. Over.”

  Cho hesitated. The bumpkin Mandarin wasn’t so difficult. He pressed the button. “Eh, Wang here. It’s going to take us a while. The prisoner’s injured on a stretcher and the elevator’s bust. Over.”

  “Copy that. We’re sending support. Over.”

  “Uh, no, no, we’ll manage. We, uh, need the exercise. If I don’t get back to you it’s because we’re carrying the bugger.”

  He tore the radio clip from the fleece collar, opened the door, and dropped it into the flowing gutter. He was leaning over to the glove compartment to look for a roadmap when he noticed the glowing console set into the dashboard. Mandarin characters flashed ENTER DESTINATION. Puzzled, he touched the screen, then tapped, tentatively: S – H – E – N – Y – A – N – G.

  The display configured, showing him a route via the G1212 Jilin-Shenyang Expressway, and a large red arrow.

  DISTANCE: 717 KM.

  TIME: 7 H 44 MIN.

  He shook his head. Incredible. It was like witnessing magic. Then a soft, female Chinese voice nearly made him jump out of his seat.

  “In four hundred me-ters,” the voice commanded, “exit left on-to the G-1212 Expressway.”

  Jenna got the men out of the Volkswagen Bora by yelling for help. They were walking toward her holding flashlights—Leather Jacket, the two Chinese policemen, and the driver. She was holding up a stumbling, shivering Soo-min, dressed in nothing but a flowing silk hanbok. Behind Soo-min’s back, in the folds of her dress, Jenna held the AKSU. When they were close enough for her to see their faces she raised the weapon and fired a single shot over their heads. The men froze. The Volkswagen’s headlights were pointed away from the scene and the men’s faces were in shadow. Her objective was to reach the car. Her teeth were chattering now. From the sound of them, so were Soo-min’s. The temperature was falling fast.