Joy Brigade

by Martin Limon

  Someone had entered the tomb.

  Were they behind me? I didn’t think so. If they were, they obviously weren’t using light. Most likely, rather than venture into the tomb, they’d backed out and were waiting for me outside. Who were they? Commissar Oh’s men? Or maybe Senior Captain Rhee Mi-sook’s fixers? Either way, I couldn’t afford to be taken now, so close to escape. Was there another way out of this tunnel? The bats and the rodents managed to survive down here; there must be another way out. In fact, there might be a network of caves connecting one ancient tomb to another, and Hye-kyong had mentioned bomb shelters. But I didn’t have time to explore. The car would be waiting outside for me. I had to get there, somehow. Barging out of this door and trying to fight my way to safety with just a wooden club wasn’t going to work. And then I had an idea.

  Bats.

  I knelt and carefully pulled open the door of the tomb just far enough to free the wooden branch. Hooking the crooked tree limb to the edge of the door, I slowly pulled the door open and let it swing free, backing away quickly into the darkness. By the time the door was fully open, I was crouched around a bend in the tunnel, out of sight.

  I listened. Nothing. Even though a car would be waiting for me soon to transport me out of this hell, I had to force myself to be patient. Five minutes later, maybe ten, footsteps sounded on the stone walkway. Men in boots, two of them. As they cautiously entered the tomb, I backed even further into the darkness. Their footsteps seemed to speed up, as if they’d heard me.

  After a few yards, I reached the darkest place, the place that smelled of musty fur, swathing myself in blackness so thick I could almost hear it breathe. A beam of light flashed around the corner. I waited a few more seconds, and then, when the men were almost on me, I lifted the wooden branch and started beating it against the roof of the tunnel. Tiny soft things pelted my arms and my legs and then the air was full of dust and fluttering and an eerie squeal filled the night. Bats. Millions of them. Like an enormous cloud, they soared toward the light. Keeping low to the ground, I started to run back toward the open door of the tomb. Ahead, I heard a man scream and fire a shot blindly into the darkness. I crouched reflexively but kept moving. And then I was on them, ramming my body into one of the men, slapping the wooden branch against the head of the other. An AK-47 clattered to the ground but I didn’t stop for it. I couldn’t. I was being shoved toward the open door by the swarm.

  When I reached the big wooden door, I grabbed the edge, turned, and slammed it shut. I pulled the key from my pocket, jammed it home, and twisted until it locked.

  Inside, furry bodies pelted the door. The bats that had escaped continued to swarm, swirling around me, then flew off toward the promise of juicy insects at the limpid ponds nearby.

  I hurried up the walkway, wiping filth off my face, straightening my tunic. When I rounded a corner, she was standing there. Alone. Waiting for me. From her hand, a pistol was pointed right at my gut. She was beautiful in her high boots and long leather coat cinched at the waist. Her white face was luminescent, like the moon glimmering above, but grim and determined. I was defenseless against her, but I didn’t allow myself to think of that.

  Instead, I kept walking.

  There comes a moment when you have to decide whether to live or to die. You have to decide whether it’s better to raise your hands in surrender and enter a world of interrogation and torture—a world so full of pain that soon even death would seem preferable—or to take a stand and die.

  I decided to die.

  I kept walking, straight into the pistol pointed at me. I’d had enough. Enough of running and hiding and lying and living with constant physical agony and the unrelenting tension of thinking that every breath might be my last. I was finished. I’d done all I could do. If she pulled the trigger, it would be over quickly. There’d be no lingering minutes and hours and days and weeks of unbearable pain. It would just be done. I marched toward Senior Captain Rhee Mi-sook resolutely, staring right into her eyes, daring her to pull the trigger. In the glow of moonlight, she stared back impassively. Did I see a tightening in the arm holding the pistol, or was it my imagination? I kept waiting for the hot steel to rip into my stomach, for the jolt to knock me backward, but nothing happened. I was less than two strides away—it was now or never. I took one more step and reached out, viciously slapping the pistol out of her hand. It bounced on the stone steps.

  And then I grabbed her.

  She clawed at my eyes.

  A man should never hit a woman. And I never have. I believe it to be cowardly, and the many men I’ve known who slapped their girlfriends or wives around were always—without exception—cowards. When faced with someone who can fight back, a man of equal strength and determination, they’d rather negotiate than fight. But when they’re alone with a woman—or worse yet, with children—they’re tough guys.

  So I don’t like fighting a woman. But Senior Captain Rhee Mi-sook left me no choice. Now that her pistol was gone, she leaped at me like a cornered Siberian tigress.

  She hadn’t shot me, I believed, because a dead Warsaw Pact officer would have been hard to explain. She’d have been the one on the defensive—the one put on trial. And no matter how convinced she was that I was not who I appeared to be, could she be 100 percent sure? What if she were wrong? It wasn’t worth it to pull the trigger and find herself sent off to die in a North Korean gulag. So she hesitated, and that hesitation saved my life. But she wasn’t hesitating now.

  I dodged her sharp nails just in time, grabbing her wrists and twisting, but she responded in exactly the way a person of less weight and inferior upper body strength should respond. She became dead weight. She fell to the ground, yanking me down with her, and when she landed she started kicking me with her high-heeled boots. Off balance, I managed to avoid a vicious kick aimed at my groin, but it missed only by inches, slamming into my inner thigh. I cursed and stepped aside, still holding onto her wrists. I dragged her along the pathway, twisting her arms behind her torso and forcing her to flip over, and then rammed my knee down on her spine. She screeched and spit and I hoped to God no one could hear us out here. But she wasn’t yelling for help. There was a rage in her, a viciousness I’d seen in few people—men or women—and I believed that she wanted only to win. Finally, pinning down her squirming body, I managed to loosen her leather belt. At the stone monolith, I pulled her into a sitting position and belted her arms securely around the stone. Quickly, I pulled off her boots and ripped off her socks, shoving one into her mouth. She almost managed to bite off one of my fingers. Luckily, I pulled my hand back in time. Before she could spit out the sock, I pulled off the other sock and used it as a gag, tying it securely at the back of her head.

  Now she was helpless.

  Her long black hair was in disarray, some of it mushrooming out of her gag, some of it hanging loosely in front of her face. I knelt and stared directly into her eyes. Hatred looked back at me.

  In Korean, I said, “When you’re angry, you’re beautiful.”

  Her entire body jerked forward, but the bindings held. I touched my forefinger to the brim of my cap and saluted. Then I stood, turned my back on Senior Captain Rhee Mi-sook, and hurried off through the still, deserted grounds. The soldier at the First Corps headquarters checkpoint stood at attention. His eyes were wide—he didn’t see many foreigners. I marched toward him, glowering, fists swinging at my side. The smooth flesh of his face quivered with indecision.

  All armies are the same. After beating unquestioning obedience into their soldiers, they still expect them to make informed independent judgments. Usually, it doesn’t work. I made my face even fiercer as I approached the guard. Finally, when I was only a few feet from him, he raised his right hand in salute. Smartly, I saluted back and strode past.

  He didn’t move and I didn’t look back.

  A complex of cement buildings stretched before me—the First Corps headquarters. I entered a side door and walked down a long hallway. Even at this late hour, there w
ere signs of human activity.

  I was in a fairly busy area now. The hallway was lined with offices with names that I didn’t fully understand but that contained words such as “logisticals” and “security” and “explosive ordnance.” Most of the people working here, both men and women, wore military uniforms and looked haggard, as if they’d been working many extra hours. Remembering Hye-kyong’s admonition, I marched down the center of the hallway as if the whole world would soon bow to my will. When I reached the main entranceway, I stepped through two double wooden doors and stood at a semicircular driveway that was the drop-off point in front of the First Corps headquarters.

  Two soldiers eyed me nervously. “Where’s my car?” I barked.

  They looked befuddled. I stood with my feet planted broadly in the center of the entranceway, hands on my hips, staring about impatiently for a car that I could only pray actually existed.

  After what seemed like eons, an engine rumbled in the distance. As the car approached, I recognized it immediately. The same old Russian sedan Hero Kang had used to bring me here in the first place. White gloves gripped the wheel. Could it be Doc Yong? But my hopes were dashed—it wasn’t a woman at the wheel, it wasn’t even a chauffeur. It was Hero Kang. He was driving the sedan himself. In a country where human labor is dirt cheap, why did he drive himself? Probably, I thought, because he didn’t trust anyone else.

  The sedan pulled up to the front of the First Corps headquarters. A small flag of the DPRK fluttered in front. The armed guards saluted.

  I pulled open the passenger door with a great feeling of relief and was about to climb in when I realized Hero Kang had shoved the sedan into park and switched off the engine.

  “Where is she?” he asked. When I didn’t answer, he said, “Where is my daughter, Hye-kyong?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “But you saw her earlier this evening.”

  “Yes.”

  “Has he been at her again?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Ashamed, I turned away.

  Hero Kang’s face flamed bright red. He climbed out of the car, shouting, “Wait here!”

  And then he was running up stone steps, ignoring the salutes of the armed guards, storming through the front door of the First Corps headquarters. I waited for a second but knew I couldn’t just stand there. I ran after him.

  I followed him down a corridor that was new to me. At the end, a door was open. It led into the darkness of the surrounding gardens. After a few yards, hanging paper lanterns guided me along a winding flagstone walkway.

  The thirty-foot bronze statue of the Great Leader was the most well-lit part of the grounds. Beyond, I spotted Hero Kang’s hunched back, moving purposefully to the far side of the garden. Ahead, a group of men had paused in front of a fountain surrounded by hanging red lanterns. They looked back at Hero Kang. One of the men I recognized. Commissar Oh. The other men were military officers and I could only surmise that they were the men who’d been in the meeting below ground in the secure area. Apparently, they’d waited upstairs while Commissar Oh had finished his assignation with Hye-kyong.

  Hero Kang never slowed his pace. He marched right up to Commissar Oh and did exactly what I would’ve loved to do. He punched him right in the snout. The commissar reeled backward. The other men protested, reaching their hands out to stop Hero Kang, but nothing short of a Mack truck could’ve slowed him down. He leaned over Commissar Oh, who had now retreated to the edge of the fountain, and punched the hapless apparatchik again. Kicking him, Hero Kang started screaming that Commissar Oh was the worst son of a bitch who’d ever defiled the uniform of the people’s revolution.

  Then Hero Kang grabbed Commissar Oh’s throat, squeezed, and shoved the red-veined face into the scum-laced water of the fountain.

  I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. It was illicit sex with his daughter that Hero Kang and Commissar Oh were discussing at the moment. A one-way conversation, to be sure, since Hero Kang’s massive paw was wrapped firmly around Commissar Oh’s scrawny throat. The commissar’s half-burnt cigarette floated in green slime, and his face was beginning to turn purple.

  The other men flitted around Hero Kang, like bear cubs pawing at a grizzly.

  Every now and then, he swung a fist backward, warning them off.

  I thought of the car back at the entranceway, of our getaway, but if Hero Kang murdered Commissar Oh, I didn’t see how escape would be possible. I stepped forward and grabbed his shoulders.

  “Let’s go,” I said in Korean. “Leave him. We must go.”

  He didn’t hear me.

  The ambient light from the hanging red lanterns rippled on the water of the fountain. About six inches below the surface, Commissar Oh’s eyeballs were as wide and round as a frog’s. In seconds he’d be dead. If I punched Hero Kang, I could maybe stop this, but then what? Hero Kang was my only lifeline. My only chance of escaping from this place and my only chance of staying alive. As I pondered what to do, a figure launched from the shadows. Hye-kyong. She rammed into the back of Hero Kang, knocking him over, forcing him to release his grip.

  “Abboji,” she said. Father. “We must go.”

  When she received no response, she reached down and grabbed him by the lapels of his tunic. “The car,” she said. “Now. You must go. And take him,” she said, motioning toward me. “Now, Father. Now!”

  Hero Kang seemed stunned, confused by what he’d just done. “What about him?” He glanced down at the spitting and coughing Commissar Oh.

  I realized that the other men, the commissar’s lackeys, had disappeared. Sensing more trouble than they ever wanted to be involved with, they’d all faded discreetly into the night. We were alone.

  “You’ve ruined everything!” Hye-kyong screamed. “I was to stay here, monitor their plans. Now that’s not possible. First, you go! I will follow.” When Hero Kang hesitated, she said, “I will take care of him. Leave him to me.”

  Befuddled, Hero Kang seemed to agree. “You must come,” he said.

  “Yes,” Hye-kyong agreed. “This changes everything. Go to the car. I will follow. Go now.”

  She turned her father around and shoved him hard. Like an enormous child, Hero Kang stumbled down the walkway, returning toward the entrance of the First Corps headquarters. I glanced at Hye-kyong. She motioned for me to follow her father.

  As I hurried along the flagstone walkway, I glanced backward. Hye-kyong had lifted Commissar Oh slightly out of the water. She slapped him. Hard. The noise reverberated through the deserted garden.

  Hero Kang and I wound through shrubs. When I looked back again, Hye-kyong was leaning over the edge of the fountain, facing down, like a woman at a stream churning laundry. As if she were soaking soiled rags, expunging them of filth. She stood like that for what seemed a long time.

  9

  Although, just moments before, the corridors of the First Corps office complex had been teeming with life, now they were deserted. Word must’ve spread like fire in a rice granary: trouble in the headquarters. People of great power were fighting, flinging lightning bolts like gods on Mount Olympus, and mere mortals had to flee for their lives.

  Hero Kang’s footsteps pounded down the tile hallway. I kept looking back, hoping that Hye-kyong would appear. She didn’t. In front of the headquarters, the black sedan sat undisturbed. The guards had disappeared, except for one who crouched in his open-windowed shack. Hero Kang clambered behind the wheel of the sedan and started the engine. I opened the passenger side door but hesitated.

  “Where is she?” he asked.

  “Not here yet,” I replied.

  Hero Kang gunned the engine impatiently.

  He was just about to reenter the building when footsteps clattered down the long corridor. Hye-kyong appeared, hopping down the stone steps, the sleeves of her uniform sopping wet, tears running down her cheeks. There was no time to talk. I opened the back door and she dove in. I climbed i
nto the passenger seat and then we were off with a great lurching and grinding of gears.

  There wasn’t much internal security in North Korea, not of the type we’re used to in the modern world. Not the type that responds to emergencies if someone is hurt or feels threatened, or the type that stands guard at the front gate of a government building. At first I wondered why. Gradually it dawned on me that the small trappings of security in the West were mainly there to protect people: the government worker from a terrorist attack, the average citizen from assault by a burglar, the middle-aged man from the threat of a heart attack. Those things weren’t deemed necessary in the People’s Republic. The entire country, in a very real sense, was a prison. Everyone was assigned a workplace or a place of study, and once the prisoners were securely locked away—and spies were in place to make sure they didn’t plot against the Great Leader—they were otherwise ignored.

  Hero Kang rolled onto the wide expanse of the central road leading past the Great Monument to the Victory of the People Against Foreign Imperialists. The statue of striving workers and farmers and soldiers holding up hammers and sickles and Kalashnikov rifles was as brightly lit as the red carpet at a Hollywood premiere, but the street was deserted. We zipped past, no one commenting on the waste of electricity.

  Hye-kyong cried softly in the backseat. Hero Kang gripped the wooden steering wheel as if he were trying to strangle it.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  Although it was cold inside the car, sweat poured down Hero Kang’s big forehead.

  “Which brigade is it?” he asked. At first I didn’t understand the question, so he repeated it. “Which brigade has been assigned to attack the Manchurian Battalion?”