by Adam Johnson
Gil lifted his hand. “There,” he said. “There’s somebody on the beach. A woman.”
Officer So backed off the throttle and took the field glasses. He held them steady and fine-tuned them, his bushy white eyebrows lifting and falling as he focused. “No,” he said, handing the binoculars back to Gil. “Look closer, it’s two women. They’re walking together.”
Jun Do said, “I thought you were looking for a guy?”
“It doesn’t matter,” the old man said. “As long as the person’s alone.”
“What, we’re supposed to grab just anybody?”
Officer So didn’t answer. For a while, there was nothing but the sound of the Vpresna. Then Officer So said, “In my time, we had a whole division, a budget. I’m talking about a speedboat, a tranquilizing gun. We’d surveil, infiltrate, cherry-pick. We didn’t pluck family types, and we never took children. I retired with a perfect record. Now look at me. I must be the only one left. I’ll bet I’m the only one they could find who remembers this business.”
Gil fixed on something on the beach. He wiped the lenses of the binoculars, but really it was too dark to see anything. He handed them to Jun Do. “What do you make out?” he asked.
When Jun Do lifted the binoculars, he could barely discern a male figure moving along the beach, near the water—he was just a lighter blur against a darker blur, really. Then some motion caught Jun Do’s eye. An animal was racing down the beach toward the man—a dog it must’ve been, but it was big, the size of a wolf. The man did something and the dog ran away.
Jun Do turned to Officer So. “There’s a man. He’s got a dog with him.”
Officer So sat up and put a hand on the outboard engine. “Is he alone?”
Jun Do nodded.
“Is the dog an akita?”
Jun Do didn’t know his breeds. Once a week, the orphans had cleaned out a local dog farm. Dogs were filthy animals that would lunge for you at any opportunity—you could see where they’d attacked the posts of their pens, chewing through the wood with their fangs. That’s all Jun Do needed to know about dogs.
Officer So said, “As long as the thing wags its tail. That’s all you got to worry about.”
Gil said, “The Japanese train their dogs to do little tricks. Say to the dog, Nice doggie, sit. Yoshi yoshi. Osuwari kawaii desu ne.”
Jun Do said, “Will you shut up with the Japanese?”
Jun Do wanted to ask if there was a plan, but Officer So simply turned them toward the shore. Back in Panmunjom, Jun Do was the leader of his tunnel squad, so he had a liquor ration and a weekly credit for one of the women. In three days, he had the quarterfinals of the KPA taekwondo tournament.
Jun Do’s squad swept every tunnel under the DMZ once a month, and they worked without lights, which meant jogging for kilometers in complete darkness, using their red lights only when they reached a tunnel’s end and needed to inspect its seals and trip wires. They worked as if they might encounter the South Koreans at any point, and except for the rainy season, when the tunnels were too muddy to use, they trained daily in zero-light hand to hand. It was said that the ROK soldiers had infrared and American night-vision goggles. The only weapon Jun Do’s boys had was the dark.
When the waves got rough, and he felt panicky, Jun Do turned to Gil. “So what’s this job that’s worse than disarming land mines?”
“Mapping them,” Gil said.
“What, with a sweeper?”
“Metal detectors don’t work,” Gil said. “The Americans use plastic mines now. We made maps of where they probably were, using psychology and terrain. When a path forces a step or tree roots direct your feet, that’s where we assume a mine and mark it down. We’d spend all night in a minefield, risking our lives with every step, and for what? Come morning, the mines were still there, the enemy was still there.”
Jun Do knew who got the worst jobs—tunnel recon, twelve-man submarines, mines, biochem—and he suddenly saw Gil differently. “So you’re an orphan,” he said.
Gil looked shocked. “Not at all. Are you?”
“No,” Jun Do said. “Not me.”
Jun Do’s own unit was made up of orphans, though in Jun Do’s case it was a mistake. The address on his KPA card had been Long Tomorrows, and that’s what had condemned him. It was a glitch no one in North Korea seemed capable of fixing, and now, this was his fate. He’d spent his life with orphans, he understood their special plight, so he didn’t hate them like most people did. He just wasn’t one of them.
“And you’re a translator now?” Jun Do asked him.
“You work the minefields long enough,” Gil said, “and they reward you. They send you someplace cushy like language school.”
Officer So laughed a bitter little laugh.
The white foam of the breakers was sweeping into the boat now.
“The shitty thing is,” Gil said, “when I’m walking down the street, I’ll think, That’s where I’d put a land mine. Or I’ll find myself not stepping on certain places, like door thresholds or in front of a urinal. I can’t even go to a park anymore.”
“A park?” Jun Do asked. He’d never seen a park.
“Enough,” Officer So said. “It’s time to get that language school a new Japanese teacher.” He throttled back and the surf grew loud, the skiff turning sideways in the waves.
They could see the outline of a man on the beach watching them, but they were helpless now, just twenty meters from shore. When Jun Do felt the boat start to go over, he leaped out to steady it, and though it was only waist deep, he went down hard in the waves. The tide rolled him along the sandy bottom before he came up coughing.
The man on the beach didn’t say anything. It was almost dark as Jun Do waded ashore.
Jun Do took a deep breath, then wiped the water from his hair.
“Konban wa,” he said to the stranger. “Odenki kesu da.”
“Ogenki desu ka,” Gil called from the boat.
“Desu ka,” Jun Do repeated.
The dog came running up with a yellow ball.
For a moment, the man didn’t move. Then he took a step backward.
“Get him,” Officer So shouted.
The man bolted, and Jun Do gave chase in wet jeans, his shoes caked with sand. The dog was big and white, bounding with excitement. The Japanese man ran straight down the beach, nearly invisible but for the dog moving from one side of him to the other. Jun Do ran for all he was worth. He focused only on the heartbeat-like thumps of feet padding ahead in the sand. Then he closed his eyes. In the tunnels, Jun Do had developed a sense of people he couldn’t see. If they were out there, he could feel it, and if he could get within range, he could home in on them. His father, the Orphan Master, had always given him a sense that his mother was dead, but that wasn’t true, she was alive and well, just out of range. And while he’d never heard news of what happened to the Orphan Master, Jun Do could feel that his father was no longer in this world. The key to fighting in the dark was no different: you had to perceive your opponent, sense him, and never use your imagination. The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.
From ahead came the body thud of someone falling in the dark, a sound Jun Do had heard a thousand times. Jun Do pulled up where the man was righting himself. His face was ghostly with a dusting of sand. They were huffing and puffing, their joined breath white in the dark.
The truth was that Jun Do never did that well in tournaments. When you fought in the dark, a jab only told your opponent where you were. In the dark, you had to punch as if you were punching through people. Maximum extension is what mattered—haymaker punches and great, whirling roundhouse kicks that took out whole swaths of space and were meant to cut people down. In a tournament, though, opponents could see moves like that coming from a mile away. They simply stepped aside. But a man on a beach at night, standing on the balls of his feet? Jun Do executed a spinning back kick to the head, and the st
ranger went down.
The dog was filled with energy—excitement perhaps, or frustration. It pawed at the sand near the unconscious man, then dropped its ball. Jun Do wanted to throw the ball, but he didn’t dare get near those teeth. Its tail, Jun Do suddenly realized, wasn’t wagging. Jun Do saw a glint in the dark, the man’s glasses, it turned out. He put them on, and the fuzzy glow above the dunes turned into crisp points of light in people’s windows. Instead of huge housing blocks, the Japanese lived in smaller, individual-sized barracks.
Jun Do pocketed the glasses, then took up the man’s ankles and began pulling from behind. The dog was growling and giving short, aggressive barks. When Jun Do looked over his shoulder, the dog was growling in the man’s face and using its paws to scratch his cheeks and forehead. Jun Do lowered his head and pulled. The first day in a tunnel is no problem, but when you wake on the second day from the darkness of a dream into true darkness, that’s when your eyes must open. If you keep your eyes closed, your mind will show you all kinds of crazy movies, like a dog attacking you from behind. But with your eyes open, all you had to face was the nothingness of what you were really doing.
When finally Jun Do found the boat in the dark, he let the dead weight fall into its aluminum cross members. The man opened his eyes once and rolled them around, but there was no comprehension.
“What did you do to his face?” Gil asked.
“Where were you?” Jun Do asked. “That guy was heavy.”
“I’m just the translator,” Gil said.
Officer So clapped Jun Do on the back. “Not bad for an orphan,” he said.
Jun Do wheeled on him. “I’m not a fucking orphan,” he said. “And who the hell are you, saying you’ve done this a hundred times. We come out here with no plan, just me running someone down? You didn’t even get out of the boat.”
“I had to see what you were made of,” Officer So said. “Next time we’ll use our brains.”
“There won’t be any next time,” Jun Do said.
Gil and Jun Do spun the boat to face the waves. They got battered while Officer So pull-started the motor. When the four of them were in and headed toward open water, Officer So said, “Look, it gets easier. Just don’t think about it. I was full of shit when I said I’d kidnapped twenty-seven people. I never kept count. As they come just forget about them, one after another. Catch somebody with your hands, then let them go with your mind. Do the opposite of keeping count.”
Even over the outboard, they could hear that dog on the beach. No matter how far out they got, its baying carried over the water, and Jun Do knew he’d hear that dog forever.
They stayed at a Songun base, not far from the port of Kinjye. It was surrounded by the earthen bunkers of surface-to-air missiles, and when the sun set, they could see the white rails of launchers glowing in the moonlight. Because they’d been to Japan now, they had to bunk apart from the regular KPA soldiers. The three were housed in the infirmary, a small room with six cots. The only sign it was an infirmary was a lone cabinet filled with blood-taking instruments and an old Chinese refrigerator with a red cross on its door.
They’d locked the Japanese man in one of the hot boxes in the drill yard, and Gil was out there now, practicing his Japanese through the slop hole in the door. Jun Do and Officer So leaned against the infirmary’s window frame, sharing a cigarette as they watched Gil out there, sitting in the dirt, polishing his idioms with a man he’d helped kidnap. Officer So shook his head, like now he’d seen it all. There was one patient in the infirmary, a small soldier of about sixteen, bones knit from the famine. He lay on a cot, teeth chattering. Their cigarette smoke was giving him coughing fits. They moved his cot as far away as possible in the small room, but still he wouldn’t shut up.
There was no doctor. The infirmary was just a place where sick soldiers were housed until it was clear they wouldn’t recover. If the young soldier hadn’t improved by morning, the MPs would hook up a blood line and drain four units from him. Jun Do had seen it before, and as far as he could tell, it was the best way to go. It only took a couple of minutes—first they got sleepy, then a little dreamy looking, and if there was a last little panic at the end, it didn’t matter because they couldn’t talk anymore, and finally, before lights out, they looked pleasantly confused, like a cricket with its feelers pulled off.
The camp generator shut down—slowly the lights dimmed, the fridge went quiet.
Officer So and Jun Do took to their cots.
There was a Japanese man. He took his dog for a walk. And then he was nowhere. For the people who knew him, he’d forever be nowhere. That’s how Jun Do had thought of boys selected by the men with Chinese accents. They were here and then they were nowhere, taken like Bo Song to parts unknown. That’s how he’d thought of most people—appearing in your life like foundlings on the doorstep, only to be swept away later as if by flood. But Bo Song hadn’t gone nowhere—whether he sank down to the wolf eels or bloated and took the tide north to Vladivostok, he went somewhere. The Japanese man wasn’t nowhere, either—he was in the hot box, right out there in the drill grounds. And Jun Do’s mother, it now struck him—she was somewhere, at this very moment, in a certain apartment in the capital, perhaps, looking in a mirror, brushing her hair before bed.
For the first time in years, Jun Do closed his eyes and let himself recall her face. It was dangerous to dream up people like that. If you did, they’d soon be in the tunnel with you. That had happened many times when he remembered boys from Long Tomorrows. One slip and a boy was suddenly following you in the dark. He was saying things to you, asking why you weren’t the one who succumbed to the cold, why you weren’t the one who fell in the paint vat, and you’d get the feeling that at any moment, the toes of a front kick would cross your face.
But there she was, his mother. Lying there, listening to the shivering of the soldier, her voice came to him. “Arirang,” she sang, her voice achy, at the edge of a whisper, coming from an unknown somewhere. Even those fucking orphans knew where their parents were.
Late in the night, Gil stumbled in. He opened the fridge, which was forbidden, and placed something inside. Then he flopped onto his cot. Gil slept with his arms and legs sprawled off the edges, and Jun Do could tell that as a child, Gil must’ve had a bed of his very own. In a moment, he was out.
Jun Do and Officer So stood in the dark and went to the fridge. When Officer So pulled its handle, it exhaled a faint, cool breath. In the back, behind stacks of square blood bags, Officer So fished out a half-full bottle of shoju. They closed the door quickly because the blood was bound for Pyongyang, and if it spoiled, there’d be hell to pay.
They took the bottle to the window. Far in the distance, dogs were barking in their warrens. On the horizon, above the SAM bunkers, there was a glow in the sky, moonlight reflecting off the ocean. Behind them, Gil began gassing in his sleep.
Officer So drank. “I don’t think old Gil’s used to a diet of millet cakes and sorghum soup.”
“Who the hell is he?” Jun Do asked.
“Forget about him,” Officer So said. “I don’t know why Pyongyang started this business up again after all these years, but hopefully we’ll be rid of him in a week. One mission, and if everything goes right, we’ll never see that guy again.”
Jun Do took a drink—his stomach clutching at the fruit, the alcohol.
“What’s the mission?” he asked.
“First, another practice run,” Officer So said. “Then we’re going after a special someone. The Tokyo Opera spends its summers in Niigata. There’s a soprano. Her name is Rumina.”
The next drink of shoju went down smooth. “Opera?” Jun Do asked.
Officer So shrugged. “Some bigshot in Pyongyang probably heard a bootleg and had to have her.”
“Gil said he survived a land-mine tour,” Jun Do said. “For that, they sent him to language school. Is it true—does it work like that, do you get rewarded?”
“We’re stuck with Gil, okay? But you don’t li
sten to him. You listen to me.”
Jun Do was quiet.
“Why, you got your heart set on something?” Officer So asked. “You even know what you’d want as a reward?”
Jun Do shook his head.
“Then don’t worry about it.”
Officer So walked to the corner and leaned over the latrine bucket. He braced himself against the wall and strained for a long time. Nothing happened.
“I pulled off a miracle or two in my day,” he said. “I got rewarded. Now look at me.” He shook his head. “The reward you want is this: don’t become me.”
Jun Do stared out the window at the hot box. “What’s going to happen to him?”
“The dog man?” Officer So asked. “There are probably a couple of Pubyok on the train from Pyongyang right now to get him.”
“Yeah, but what’s going to happen to him?”
Officer So tried one last push to get some urine out.
“Don’t ask stupid questions,” he said through his teeth.
Jun Do thought of his mother on a train to Pyongyang. “For your reward, could you ask for a person?”
“What, a woman?” Officer So shook his umkyoung in frustration. “Yeah, you could ask for that.” He came back and drank the rest of the bottle, saving only a swish in the bottom. This he poured, a dribble at a time, over the dying soldier’s lips. Officer So clapped him good-bye on the chest, then he stuffed the empty bottle in the crook of the boy’s sweat-soaked arm.
They commandeered a new fishing boat, made another crossing. Over the Tsushima Basin, they could hear the powerful clicks, like punches to the chest, of sperm whales hunting below, and nearing the island of Dogo, granite spires rose sudden from the sea, white up top from bird guano and orange below from great gatherings of starfish. Jun Do stared up toward the island’s north promontory, volcanic black, limned in dwarf spruce. This was a world wrought for its own sake, without message or point, a landscape that would make no testimony for one great leader over another.
There was a famous resort on this island, and Officer So thought they could catch a tourist alone on the beach. But when they reached the lee of the island, there was an empty boat on the water, a black Avon inflatable, six-man, with a fifty-horse Honda outboard. They took the skiff over to investigate. The Avon was abandoned, not a soul upon the waters. They climbed aboard, and Officer So started the Honda engine. He shut it down. He pulled the gas can out of the skiff, and together they rolled it in the water—it filled quickly, going down ass-first with the weight of the Vpresna.