“Thank you,” Lee said, his voice shaking. He held his right hand by the wrist, afraid to touch the hand itself, unsure how much of the surging pain would return.
The medic slumped away from him, exhausted by the effort. He pushed his back against the bars on the far side of his cage. Cell was too nice a term for the filth they squatted in, Lee decided. These were animal cages.
Already, his head was clearing. He was still in agony and his hand throbbed, but just that tiny sliver of compassion and help from the medic lifted his spirits and helped him focus.
“What a clusterfuck, huh?” the medic said. Above his head, boots marched by, crunching on the gravel.
“Will we ever get out of here?” Lee asked.
“Do you mean here?” the medic replied, pointing at the ground, “Or here.” He circled his hand, indicating all around them, which Lee supposed was representative of North Korea as a country.
“Either,” Lee replied. “Both.”
“I don’t think they’ll keep us here long, as in, here in these cells. These are holding cells at best. I think they’re normally used to shelter animals during winter. As for here in this camp, I suspect we’ll be taken to Pyongyang before too long. There’s nothing the US public hates more than seeing its soldiers dragged through the streets of some foreign capital. They’ll keep us alive till then, at least. It’s too good a PR opportunity to miss. From there, who knows? Maybe we’ll spend a decade as pawns on a chessboard until some kind of trade can be arranged.”
Lee was silent. He doubted the North Koreans would be so hospitable to someone from South Korea. More than likely, they’d kill him to avoid any complications. As far as anyone from the south would ever know, he died in the helicopter crash and his body was never recovered. In some ways, that might be the better option for his parents, as it would avoid putting them through a living hell for the next decade, giving them a chance to grieve once and not for years on end.
“And as for your hand,” the medic continued. “That’ll be a wound sustained in the crash, or they'll offer some other plausible scenario.”
Lee nodded.
“As far as getting out of North Korea,” the medic said, “I don’t care how we leave, so long as it’s not in a body bag.”
Lee’s head dropped. There was silence for a few moments.
“You were the pilot, right?” the medic asked.
“Yes.”
“What have they figured out?”
“Uh,” Lee began, not sure where to begin. “I don’t know. What a nightmare! This should have been a textbook run up the coast, drop you guys offshore and then back to Incheon for breakfast.”
He laughed, lost in thought as he spoke, “I was supposed to be playing golf today. Oh, to walk on a carefully manicured lawn taking my frustrations out on a small white ball. What bliss that would be!”
Lee held up his mutilated hand, saying, “Bit of a handicap, wouldn’t you say?”
The medic grinned.
“I thought they were after a young girl,” Lee continued. “Took three bloody fingers to convince them I was as stupid as I am.”
Lee turned to face the medic as the temperature outside plummeted and a chill crept into their prison.
“I hope that boy is worth it, or a lot of good men died for nothing.”
The medic was silent, nodding in response, letting Lee talk.
“He recognized me,” Lee said. “I don’t know how or why, but he did. Freaked me out!”
“Did you see anyone else on the run out there?” the medic asked. “Did anyone else make it to shore?”
“No. No one,” Lee replied. “Wait, there was someone, but they caught him. A pack of dogs ravaged him on the beach. I washed up on the rocks, just north of him. I saw him die.”
The medic nodded. He turned and crawled to the cell door and struck at the bars with a clump of wood, calling out in Korean, saying, “Open up. I’m finished here.”
Lee was confused. He didn’t understand what was going on. He scrambled over by the medic, reaching through the bars with his one good hand.
“What are you doing?” he asked quietly.
Suddenly, the realization that he had been betrayed swept over him, chilling him more than the cold of night. The Navy SEALs had all been wearing black wetsuits, not army fatigues. The medic’s eyes had the classic epicanthal fold characteristic of people throughout Asia, but his accent was from the American midwest, Lee was sure of it. And he was wearing boots! Lee had been stripped of his boots. All the clues were there, but he’d missed them.
A guard stepped down and opened the adjacent cell door. His keys rattled as he fought with the old, rusted lock.
“I don’t understand,” Lee called out, still reeling mentally from all that had transpired. He trusted this man. “Why?”
The medic turned, speaking in English as he said, “We had to know if you were telling the truth.”
The door opened and the medic crawled through, getting to his feet and dusting himself off.
“But ...”
“Oh,” the medic replied, stepping in front of Lee’s cell. He crouched in front of Lee, smiling and pointing across the courtyard as he added. “You thought that was the interrogation over there? No, that was the prelude. This was the interrogation, and you did admirably. You told me what little you knew.”
Lee sunk to his elbows.
The medic left, laughing with the guard as they walked off, their boots crunching on the gravel as they crossed the driveway.
Lee was devastated.
He looked at the weeping stumps on his right hand and sobbed, feeling worse than when he was thrown in the cell. As much as the physical pain had crippled him, he’d somehow endured that, perhaps only by holding onto the moment, waiting for the passage of time to provide relief, but the cruelty of those last few words from the medic cut deeper than the loss of his fingers. That laugh, the ignominy of knowing he’d freely given up what little information he had, and the humiliation of his trust being betrayed broke his heart. Lee felt a pain like no other eating away within his chest. His hand throbbed, his muscles ached, but it was the mental anguish that crushed his soul.
He lay there in a fetal position for the next hour, rocking gently, trying to stay warm on what little straw covered the concrete floor. Outside, the routine crunch of boots passed every fifteen minutes. A sentry was walking a set path, walking along the gravel road at regular intervals.
Shortly after the sentry passed, another set of boots crunched on the gravel, only these were more hurried. They stopped outside his cell. The abrupt silence seized his attention and he turned to see nothing more than a set of legs beyond the bars.
Moonlight lit the courtyard, highlighting the soldier's legs in silhouette. Something dropped on the ground and was kicked through the bars, landing not more than a few feet from him.
Lee didn’t move.
He lay there looking at the small box no larger than a pack of cigarettes. When he looked up, the legs were gone. He hadn’t noticed the sound of boots on the gravel, so whoever it was had approached from across the courtyard but then exited along the side of the building on the grass, before disappearing god knows where.
Slowly, cautiously, Lee picked up the cardboard packet, examining it in the soft light flooding in from outside. He didn’t recognize the label on the front, and the writing on the back was too small to make out in the faint light, but one Korean word caught his eye: painkiller.
Frantically, he ripped open the cardboard with his teeth. There were two strips of ten tablets sealed in plastic. It could have been poison. It could have been yet another cruel hoax by the North Koreans, but Lee couldn’t help himself. He tore open one of the strips and tossed four or five white tablets in his mouth, crunching them beneath his teeth.
The tablets tasted disgusting. They were bitter and dry, breaking up into a powder in his mouth, making them hard to swallow without water.
As nearly as he could tell, they must have b
een the North Korean equivalent of ibuprofen.
Lee was surprised by how the sense of taste engaged his mind, drawing it away from the aches and pains, refocusing his world.
Who had given him these tablets?
Had the medic been merciful?
Lee was tempted to take more tablets, but decided it was better to let these take effect and save the rest for later. He'd need them, and he knew it.
Lee stashed the remaining tablets in his socks on the inside of his ankle, feeling paranoid about being searched and losing the painkillers. They were still in their plastic case, so he folded his socks inward, tucking the hem over the tablets, knowing they wouldn’t be seen and feeling as though he’d won a small victory over his captors. That he had something hidden returned a sense of power to him. He took the cardboard packet and forced it between the grates of a drain, getting rid of any evidence.
Lee wasn’t sure how effective the painkillers actually were and how much of a placebo bounce he was getting out of suddenly having a sense of purpose, but the pain subsided.
As he moved back by the door he noticed a scrap of paper lying on the straw. It must have fallen out of the packet as he'd ripped it open with his teeth. He unfolded the paper and read one word scrawled hurriedly in pencil: Midnight.
Chapter 10: Questions
“I don't understand,” Jason said, getting off the motorcycle inside the back of the semi-trailer, surprised by how much his legs were shaking. For a moment, he thought his legs were going to give out beneath him. With the swaying of the truck, Jason felt clumsy, and had to reach out for the inside of the trailer to steady himself.
Lily put the motorcycle on its kickstand and hopped off of it.
“Jason,” she said, gesturing toward the professor. “This is my father, Captain John Lee of the South Korean National Intelligence Service.”
“Am I dreaming?” Jason asked. “Tell me this isn't real. None of this. None of this can be real.”
“Please,” Professor Lachlan said, pulling a thick folder from under his arm and gesturing at a crate loaded against the wall of the trailer. “Have a seat. There is a great deal we need to tell you.”
“I ...” Jason was speechless.
Lily scooted up onto the crate, leaving room for him beside her. She patted the wooden surface, signaling for Jason to sit next to her.
“It's OK. I don't bite,” she said. “Well, at least, not on good days.”
Given all they'd just been through, her small joke seemed almost normal, bringing a smile to his face.
The truck swayed and Jason lurched. He widened his stance, fighting to keep his balance as the truck rounded a corner. He reached out and grabbed the edge of the crate, pulling himself closer.
“We have a ways to go,” the professor said. “We need to get well clear of the city before they have time to analyze the video footage and realize where we've gone. We chose Lexington for the switch because there are no traffic cameras in that block, only a few surveillance cameras mounted on ATMs. That should buy us a few hours.”
“What's going on?” Jason asked, raising himself up on the crate and leaning against the thin sheet metal wall of the semi-trailer.
Lachlan held up his mutilated hand, displaying the stumps of three fingers, saying, “You don't remember, do you? No, you wouldn't. You were young, too young, and so much has happened since then.”
Jason pursed his lips. For him, the strangest thing that had happened so far was not the insane motorcycle ride flying across a lake, or riding up into the back of a moving truck, or even running into his physics professor in the middle of the night in the back of a semi, it was the sense of calm that swept over him as Lachlan spoke. There was something familiar about the professor's words, as though he'd heard them before. The professor had always had a calming effect on him, and now more so than ever. Jason didn't understand why, but he trusted Lachlan implicitly.
“None of this was our doing,” the professor continued. “For decades, we lobbied against the subterfuge, but DARPA insisted. They felt the best way to get information from you was to allow you to be free. Your subconscious seemed to be providing them with the answers they wanted, so they allowed you to live a normal life while they collected the data they needed, but progress has been slow. In the last few weeks, there's been a change of administration. The presiding general decided it's time to bring you in and extract the knowledge that's buried in your mind. They're tired of waiting and they don't care if they break you.”
“I don't understand,” Jason said. “None of this makes any sense.”
“They were coming for you,” Lily said, cutting through the explanations and going straight to the heart of the issue.
“Me? Why me?” he asked.
Lachlan raised his hand, scratching at his forehead. Jason could see he was struggling to decide where to begin and what to explain. Jason had never seen the professor flustered before.
“What about the UFO?” Jason asked, turning to Lily.
“You fell for that?” Lily asked, punching him playfully on the arm. “I can't believe you fell for that. I thought it was too corny.”
“Smoke machines and wires,” Lachlan replied. “A disco ball and strobe lights, nothing more. Just like Hollywood.”
“And the projector in my bathroom?” Jason asked incredulously, nonplussed at hearing these revelations about a murky world that existed in parallel with what he perceived as reality.
“It's the only place inside your apartment that's not under constant surveillance.”
“What? But why?” Jason protested. “Why me?”
Professor Lachlan held up Jason's research paper, but he was holding up the reverse side covered in Jason's doodles and speculative calculations.
“Because ever since you were a child, you've been drawing these equations.”
Jason went silent. Lily held his hand, squeezing his fingers. Initially, he wasn't sure what to make of her touch. On one hand, her support was welcome. On the other, this wasn't the Lily he knew. The Lily he'd known had never existed. She'd never been more than an actor on a stage playing a role for the crowd. Yet there must have been a genuine connection between them, as she seemed to feel something for him. He squeezed her fingers gently in reply, letting her know he was doing OK.
Lily turned to him, saying, “You don't know just how special and unique you are.”
Her comment took him off guard. She wasn't trying to flatter him or appeal to his vanity. He could tell that from the sincerity in her voice. She was speaking as though this was something he didn't understand about himself.
Rain lashed the outside of the truck, pelting the trailer with what sounded like hail. It probably wasn’t hail, but the thin sheet metal magnified the sound of the torrential downpour that had begun to fall.
Jason felt as though the night were a dream. He looked into Lily’s eyes and saw her compassion for him. To her, this whole scenario apparently seemed quite ordinary, and as bizarre as that was, he was drawn to accepting her position. Her demeanor was relaxed, as though her blistering bike ride was nothing, as though sweet, little, lost Lily had returned to sit beside him. In his mind's eye, he saw her again asking something quirky about the torn, tatty posters in his rundown apartment. She may have been acting for the past few days, he thought, but even knowing that, he felt he understood those points at which the real Lily had shone through.
Between the demeanor of Lily and the familiarity of Lachlan, Jason felt accepted, as though this twisted reality that had caught up with him was the norm. While he was tempted to freak out, they set him at ease with their matter of fact handling of the bizarre tempest breaking around him.
Lily was Lachlan’s daughter! As strange as that was, that was perhaps the easiest thing to believe so far. In the back of his mind the notion that someone had been shooting at him was disturbing.
Lachlan must have sensed his distraction. He flipped through a thick folder as he spoke.
“The NSI has been work
ing with DARPA for decades, trying to figure out what these equations mean,” Lachlan continued. Jason wondered if he should think of him as Captain John Lee? But that name meant nothing to Jason. To him, this was Professor Lachlan. As surreal as his world had become, the professor was a link with reality, with sanity.
“Do you remember these?” the professor asked. He held an old piece of crumpled paper marked with crayon. The formulas weren't as advanced and the handwriting was childish, but Jason remembered them. Somewhere in the back of his mind, that sheet of old, brittle paper looked strangely familiar. “You've been drawing these equations ever since you were a child. Haven't you ever wondered why?”
Why?
No, he hadn't ever stopped to think about why he scribbled.
For Jason, abstract thinking was as unconscious as humming a tune or chewing on gum. He'd never wondered why he doodled, he just did, in the same way some people chewed their nails when lost in thought. It was more than being absentminded, he knew that. Time would drift. Hours would pass, but he was content, at peace. Nothing else mattered, nothing other than those equations. Slowly, they'd take different forms. Each time, his perceptual awareness enlarged, and he found himself with a deeper appreciation of the universe.
Most of the equations were common, having been derived by others like Bohr or Schrödinger, but Jason had arrived at them himself, having reasoned through the math alone, and he found that intensely satisfying.
Why did he scribble physics equations? Was there a reason beyond his own simple whim and want? He could see Lachlan was giving him time to think this through for himself. He thought he knew, but clearly there was more for him to learn. He pursed his lips, leaning forward intently, listening carefully as Lachlan explained.
“Twenty years ago, a meteor streaked across the Russian Federation, entering the atmosphere over the region of Krasnoyarsk. US EarthSat picked it up over Lake Baikal. It should have struck somewhere in Mongolia, but the meteor conducted a course correction.”
Feedback Page 14