by Don Mann
Figuring that there was a possibility that the North Koreans had picked up the signal, he joined the others and they hiked as fast as they could two miles north along the beach, skirting several huts, until he found what he thought was a suitable clearing. They made makeshift beds of twigs and dried grass to elevate their bodies off the cold ground. Then Sam, Dawkins, and Akil slept while Crocker kept watch.
As the sun spread its fingers across the sky Crocker considered the possible reasons why the Carl Vinson’s rescue team hadn’t responded—weather, mechanical problems, North Korean air patrols. He decided there was no reason to lose hope. They would try again tonight and every night after that until the battery wore out. Then he’d think of something else.
Three nights later, Davis sat in the Tactical Operations Center (TOC) on the Carl Vinson, positioned approximately eighteen nautical miles from the Hamgyong Peninsula, staring at the large digital map of North Korea in front of him, praying for a red beacon to appear. Even though the clock on the wall read 0213 hours, the dark room was still crowded with more than a dozen male and female techs sitting before screens and computer terminals, monitoring nearby ships, aircraft, and weather.
Davis had spent the past several nights and mornings right here, watching in frustration as the emergency beacon moved north up the east side of the peninsula, and the Air-sea Rescue Team (ART) failed to respond. He had volunteered to be part of the four-man team that would fly on the specially designed stealth Blackhawk helicopter—the same one used in the Bin Laden raid—that waited fully fueled and geared up on the Vinson’s flight deck. All he, the other three members of the team, and the 160th SOAR Night Stalker pilot and copilot needed was a go order from the carrier’s commander, Vice Admiral Stanley Greene, who had been granted final authority by the commanders at SOCOM in Tampa, and they’d be aloft.
The first night the emergency beacon had showed on the screen, Greene ordered the rescue team to stand down because of the number of North Korean air patrols in the area. The second night he used the excuse of unstable weather. Last night he’d explained that the survivors on the ground were signaling close to a populated area. Davis had pointed out that the latest satellite imagery and heat signatures indicated that it was only a collection of small farms about four miles from the site.
Now Davis willed so hard for the beacon to appear that his head hurt. Those were his teammates on the ground. All of them alive and uninjured, he hoped. Even though he had a wife and two young children waiting at home in Virginia Beach, part of him remained with his teammates, in enemy territory, looking for a way out.
The first satellite images of the destroyed Ung-do facility, received a day and a half ago, had filled him with an enormous sense of pride. That was quickly giving way to frustration and anger. Davis considered himself thoughtful and reasonable—the kind of person who saw all sides of a dispute. But now he couldn’t understand why officers on the Carl Vinson weren’t willing to take the risks and launch the rescue.
Last night he’d tried to convince the Blackhawk pilot to disobey orders. When that failed, he had unleashed his frustration on the ship’s operations officer, calling him “a disgrace to his uniform” and “a fucking coward.”
He apologized later, at breakfast. That wasn’t like him, he explained. He was usually the mellowest guy on the team, referred to by his teammates as “surfer dude” because of his laid-back demeanor and blond hair.
Now the same operations officer looked back at him and shrugged. Davis glanced up at the clock. Another ten minutes had passed, and the beacon still hadn’t appeared. His stomach roiled and he started to sweat as he realized that it was growing too late to launch a rescue tonight.
One of the technicians squeezed Davis’s shoulder as he headed for the exit.
“Maybe tomorrow night,” he said. “Don’t give up hope.”
The twenty-two men and two women who made up North Korea’s military and political leadership had been stunned by the attack, which completely disabled Office 39’s operation, resulted in the death of its leader, the Dragon, and set back their nuclear program five to ten years. As they waited in the plush red velvet seats in the beige marble conference room under military headquarters in downtown Pyongyang, they knew they should expect reprisals.
They had been sitting for two hours now, waiting for their thirty-two-year-old Supreme Leader to appear and rail at them. All of them secretly wanted that. They hoped for a catharsis, a cleansing, followed by a call to action. That they could accept. It would help them map the future. What they were hearing instead was that the Supreme Leader had literally become sick with humiliation. So sick, in fact, that he couldn’t fathom a response to the attack.
He had reputedly told an aide, “There’s no point trying to cover the whole sky with the palm of your hand,” a variation of a Korean proverb. What the Supreme Leader had meant by it was the subject of much speculation. Maybe he was saying they had been deluding themselves into believing that they were a strong country, and this attack had revealed that they were weak. Maybe that’s why he was allowing himself to feel humiliated.
The men and women in the room—with one or two exceptions—shared a deep sense of insecurity. They weren’t ignorant people. All of them had traveled to China, Russia, and Japan. They’d seen smuggled videos and DVDs from the United States and Europe. They knew their country was essentially backward. If they had any chance of remaining in power and continuing to enjoy the special perks they had been given, they knew they needed to be ruthless, vigilant, and clever.
Still, five days after it had occurred, little was known about the attack. No bodies had been discovered, no equipment had been found, and no surveillance video had survived the devastating explosion. None of their radar installations had reported violations of North Korean airspace, and no foreign ships or submarines had been detected by sonar. The only evidence that had been found were small, unmarked pieces of some kind of underwater vehicle that had washed up near Munchon. Some speculated that the attack was a South Korean response to the sinking of its Pohang corvette two years earlier. Others suspected that there had been some inside collusion, perhaps supported by the United States and South Korea.
The red light flashed near the door above the Supreme Leader’s chair, and the room grew still and silent. But in place of Kim Jong-un, it was Dak-ho Gun-san, the wizened interior minister, who descended the steps and took his place behind the podium. The skin under his right eye was swollen and blackened, and a bandage covered the side of his face. According to rumor, the night Dak-ho reported the attack and death of General Chou to the Supreme Leader, a pajama-clad Kim Jong-un had grabbed a brass figurine of his grandfather from his desk and thrown it at Dak-ho, hitting him in the face.
Now Dak-ho’s voice quivered with outrage as he read a list of the names of those present who the Supreme Leader had declared enemies of the state. As these men and woman heard their names, they slumped in their seats and wept. Soldiers in tan uniforms quickly handcuffed them and led them away. They left in unimaginable anguish, knowing that their careers were over and that their wives, husbands, and children had probably been arrested, too. All of them, including former minister Dak-ho Gun-san, would spend the rest of their lives in one of the country’s political prisons, scavenging for food like animals.
A light rain started to fall as Dawkins watched Crocker and Akil standing outside the primitive shelter they had constructed from the two Kevlar blankets, tossing leaves over the top so they wouldn’t be visible from the air. Six days had passed since his liberation. During that time, he was sure he was either going to die or be recaptured and put to death.
In the moments when he wasn’t numb with exhaustion and fear, he sometimes resented what these brave men had done. Maybe, he thought, it would have been better had they left him alone in his cell to be blown up with the rest of the underground complex. That way, he wouldn’t face almost certain torture, and his wife and daughter would be left alone.
Yet
the more time he spent with Akil, Sam, and Crocker, the more he started to believe in them and to adopt their the-only-easy-day-was-yesterday approach. Crocker fascinated him. He was a man who never showed fear or disappointment. Even now that the batteries in the emergency beacon had died, he seemed to take it in stride and remain optimistic that they would be rescued or find their way to safety. From the way the men casually joked with one another and went about the business of hunting for food, collecting wood, finding water, and walking through enemy territory at night carrying Sam and never complaining, you would have thought they were on a camping trip in an American national park.
“I love danger,” Akil had confided to him. “It turns me on.”
When he first said it, Dawkins thought he was just trying to boost his spirits. Now Dawkins believed him. Today the Egyptian American had entertained them with stories of moving to the States when he was six, joining the marines, and the many women he had pursued and bedded—Dutch twins in Mexico who kept him up all night and left in the morning with all his clothes, the Jewish stripper from Boston he had run into in Dubai, the female diving champion who would make love only underwater. He talked about them all with so much enthusiasm and affection that they became real. He remembered their scents, eccentricities, the way they walked and the sounds they made in bed.
The more Akil talked about women, the closer Dawkins felt to Nan. He realized that his modesty and shame about his body had caused him to miss a lot. Life was richer than he had realized. People were filled with pathos, humor, courage, and some kind of magic.
When he asked Akil how he remained so centered and optimistic, the rough man responded by pointing to his head and said, “It all comes from here. What we achieve inwardly changes outer reality.”
“Is that a Muslim belief?”
“No, I think it came from a guy named Plutarch.”
“Plutarch the Roman philosopher. Did you study him in college?”
“No. Never went.”
“Then where did you come across that concept?”
“I read it on the shitter door of a yoga studio. It’s stuck in my head ever since.”
Crocker might have appeared untroubled, but in fact he spent most of his time trying to figure out how they were going to make it to safety, given their dwindling supplies. Now that the juice had run out of the batteries in the GPS tracker, their chances of being rescued were almost zero.
What he didn’t know was that the morning after the batteries ran out, an enraged Davis walked into the Vice Admiral Greene’s office and punched him in the face, breaking his jaw.
A half-moon peeked through the branches of the Japanese red pines as they trudged, Crocker and Akil carrying Sam on the jerry-rigged stretcher and Dawkins walking on his own. Sam’s ankle had become infected and they’d run out of Motrin, so the Korean American had to suck it up, which he did without complaint. Since they had run out of disinfectant as well, Crocker lanced the infection every day and cleansed the wound with boiled water.
After six nights of walking, Crocker and company had reached the top of Hamgyong Peninsula. The closer they drew to the mainland, the more farms and clusters of huts they saw. So far they hadn’t run into barking dogs, which was odd. Akil joked that the North Koreans had eaten them all, and Crocker thought he was probably right.
They were roughly 110 miles north of the South Korean border. On a good night they managed to progress from eight to ten miles over footpaths through forests, swamps, and fields. It helped that the streams that ran down the peninsula to the bay provided a steady supply of food and water. Crocker expected both to become harder to secure now that they approached denser population centers along the southeast coast. According to the map, the terrain ahead was mountainous, and they would have to cross at least two major rivers before they could continue south to the cities of Munchon and Wonsan.
The terrain and climate reminded Crocker of woods of New Hampshire. He’d camped in them often—intimate days and nights with his mother, father, sister, and older brother dining on grilled chicken and baked beans, followed by his dad pointing out the constellations and telling jokes and stories.
Crocker recalled a story his father told about a widow who fell in love with a rich nobleman. The nobleman wouldn’t marry her because he didn’t want to raise another man’s offspring, so the widow drowned her children in a nearby river. When she told the nobleman what she had done, he was horrified and wanted nothing more to do with her. She went to the river hoping to retrieve her children. Unable to find them, she drowned herself and was condemned to wander the waterways of the world, searching for her children and weeping until the end of time.
Akil, leading the way, entered a clearing alongside a stream and stopped. They set down the stretcher and looked for a place to cross. Crocker checked his watch—0314 hours. The stream was about twenty feet wide, and there were no bridges in sight.
“What do you think?” Akil asked.
“Let’s try to cross here, and look for a place to sleep on the other side.”
“Okay, boss. You wait here while I test it.”
Akil handed him his web belt and holster with the SIG Sauer with two remaining mags, waded into the ice-cold water, and came out shivering and raising his thumb.
Seconds later they entered together—Akil and Crocker carrying the stretcher with Sam, and Dawkins beside them. Crocker held the stretcher over his head and was concentrating on his footing when he heard Dawkins cry “Look!”
On their right, past a bend downstream, a brown bear was in the water, presumably looking for fish. It stopped, turned, rose up on its rear legs, and roared. The noise startled Dawkins, who slipped and fell. In the moonlight, Crocker saw that the current was hurling Dawkins back toward the shore they had come from, about twenty feet ahead, and was moving so fast that when he tried to slow himself by grabbing a boulder, he smacked into it chin first and went under.
“Wait!” Crocker said to Akil. “I’m going after him.”
Akil seemed to intuit exactly what he wanted him to do, taking the stretcher and balancing it over his head.
Crocker dove into the current, which carried him past the boulder as if he were on a ride at a water park. He used it to push off, and tried to locate Dawkins by his pale shirt. Eight feet ahead he saw an arm and let the powerful current take him until he was able to reach up under Dawkins’s shoulder and neck, and pull his head out of the water.
Dawkins coughed up water, and the bear roared again. But the current was strong and they had no way to stop. When Crocker glanced to the right he saw the bear watching from thirty feet away. Dawkins spotted him, too, and started to panic and pull away.
“Relax!”
He held Dawkins tightly to his chest with his right arm and let the current carry them past the bear, to a bend in the stream where the water was shallow and they could easily walk ashore. The roaring bear was so close they could smell his rancid breath.
“Run,” Dawkins whispered.
Crocker reached out and stopped him. “Unwise.”
The bear rose with a fish clenched in his left paw like a trophy, spun, and ambled off into the woods.
Chapter Twenty-One
The only mistake in life is the lesson not learned.
—Albert Einstein
Crocker awoke with the sun directly above him in the sky.
“Boss?” Akil asked.
“Yeah. What’s up?” His right shoulder hurt and his leg muscles were sore and tight.
“I want to show you something.”
He relieved himself behind a tree and noticed that they were on a moss-covered outcropping of rock surrounded by tall pines. Sam and Dawkins slept beside each other under a blanket near the base of one of the trees.
He found the water bag and chugged purified water, then remembered that they had no food. It was something he would have to take care of soon, probably using the stainless-steel wire to fashion head-snare traps, which had been successful so far in catching squi
rrels and rabbits.
“What is it?”
As he followed Akil, he decided that they needed to set out earlier tonight—maybe a few hours after dark, start descending along the coast and turn south. The sky was clear, but gray clouds approaching from the north threatened rain.
Akil stopped on a rocky promontory that looked south over the bay. “Look. That’s Ung-do over there,” he said, pointing to the teardrop-shaped island to the southeast. It appeared peaceful in the pool of sunlight that shrank and faded.
“And that’s Munchon,” Akil said, moving his arm to a dark collection of structures in the southwest. A dark delta, a glowing river, and several tributaries bisected the space between where they stood now and the city in the distance.
“Yeah. Those rivers are gonna present a challenge.”
Back at camp, he tried to avoid thinking too far ahead, concentrating instead on the immediate tasks before him: setting the traps, gathering kindling, building the fire pit, and boiling water. He dipped a bandage in the water and applied it to a dark red spot on Sam’s ankle, then removed it and let it cool.
The sky had turned darker and the wind was whipping up the leaves around them. Crocker repeated the process three more times to draw the infection to the surface. Then he sterilized the blade of his knife by holding it over the fire, waited for it to cool, cut into the skin, and drained away the pus.
“How is it, boss?” Sam asked as Crocker rebandaged it.
He lied. “Better.”
He checked Sam’s forehead with the back of his hand and found it slightly hot.
“I think I’ve got a fever. Last night I dreamt I was attacked by a shark while surfing on Maui and lost my leg.”
“Your leg is fine.”
“The last thing I want is to be a burden. If I become too hard to carry, you can leave me behind.”
“That’s not going to happen. Keep drinking water. I’m gonna go check the traps.”
