“That road to the border, it goes through the town?”
“It looks like it, yes!”
“We gotta lose these guys before then!”
The two-lane road was rising now, following the path of the river winding through the hills. Ahead were low mountains. The jeep kept pace beside them, as if the two vehicles were attached.
Up ahead was a truck, moving south down the slope. “Simon!”
“That’s their problem!” He stomped on the gas pedal. The truck’s horn blared. The jeep slowed and backed off, then pulled in behind them just as they hurtled past the truck.
Simon negotiated a twisting turn, a dip, another climb. Their pursuers clung to their tail. Around a curve, a long stretch of road climbed the hill, straight and empty. The jeep pulled alongside the trunk of their car, then moved closer.
“They’re going to ram us!” Mia yelled.
“Hang on!”
The whole car jolted as the jeep knocked into their back panel on the driver’s side. Mia screamed, gripping the edges of the seat. The car spun counterclockwise, rotating in a circle. Then they were straight again, still heading north. Her body was plastered to her seat, every muscle tense. Simon gunned the engine and they shot ahead.
“Yes!” He was leaning forward, his knuckles white from gripping the wheel. The jeep pulled alongside them again.
“Okay, their turn.” He turned to look at the men in the jeep and raised his left shoulder, as if he were moving to ram the jeep. The driver reacted, jerking the wheel and swerving left onto the shoulder of the other lane. Mia’s head swiveled to watch the jeep as Simon surged ahead.
“They’re coming back across the road — they can’t stop — they hit the guard rail!” she called. “They’re not moving!”
She saw the men get out and stand by the hood of the jeep, examining it. The scene retreated, growing smaller and smaller as they sped ahead. Then the road turned again, blocking the view.
“Omigod, Simon! You did it!” Mia flopped back against the seat, totally spent, grinning. “I can’t believe you did it!”
“I saw that move on a cop reality show,” Simon called over the noise of the engine and the shaking car. He was grinning too, his eyes focused on the road, holding their speed. “We’re not out of the woods yet. They may fix it, and they’ve probably got a radio or cell phone or something. So we don’t have long. We’ve gotta get as close to the border as we can and find a place to ditch this car. How far is — what was it, Chonma? — from the border?”
She held up a bent index finger, measuring the map. “Twenty, maybe twenty-five miles or so.”
“Are we near that place you showed me in the guidebook?”
“Uiju? Where One-Step Crossing is? I think we’re just about due south of it.”
“Plan B it is. We’ll get as close as we can, then ditch the car someplace hidden.” He paused, then glanced over at her. “That okay with you, pardner?”
She met his teasing smile with a grin. “Great plan, pardner!”
The road twisted and turned alongside the mountain brook. Water spilled in falls between large, dark boulders, gathered in pools, then spread out between banks of gray stone. Mia kept glancing at the side mirror, watching the road they were leaving behind. Every falling leaf, every branch shifting in the wind, set her heart racing.
She had seen no sign of their pursuers, in fact no sign of anyone at all, by the time they reached the outskirts of what must be Chonma. A strip of rice fields ran along the riverbed. The car slowed as they came to a split in the road. The main route turned to the right alongside a schoolyard. To the left was an unpaved turnoff. No road signs.
Mia looked again at the map. She checked the position of the sun, low in the sky, the lengthening shadows.
“Turn left,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s the right road or not, but it goes north.”
Simon glanced over at her with a half smile. Despite the anxiety that filled her, she felt warm.
Through the dimming light they sped along a valley road following another riverbed, foothills and mountains crowding in on either side. They passed isolated rural dwellings and small villages, an occasional lone farmer in a field or someone riding a bicycle along a path. Mia kept glancing back, searching for headlights.
Simon had slowed to a normal pace so as to not attract more attention. But vehicles must appear so infrequently on these remote rural roads, especially government cars. Any person they passed would remember the black car that had gone by late in the afternoon on National Workers’ Party Foundation Day. They were leaving a trace, a trail of crumbs, marking their escape route. Their only hope was that the holiday would slow the processing of information. Then it might take until tomorrow for the soldiers to come this way, asking questions.
Several times they came to a crossroads where Mia had to guess which route would take them north — left, right, or straight. Every time they approached a town, she took a breath. Simon had his black cap on, hiding his hair, but anyone who got a good look at him would be able to see that he wasn’t Korean. But each time, mercifully, the streets were deserted.
The road, now unpaved, began to rise, winding and twisting around in switchbacks up a bald mountain. Though the sky above was still bright, the southern slope they were climbing was shadowed in dusk. The road got steeper, and then they were atop the crest.
“Wait, Simon, slow down. I need to see where we are.”
He pulled the car to a stop. The mountain they had just climbed was the slope of a much taller peak to the west. Beyond, in a line of bright light, the sea reflected the just-setting sun.
“Look! That’s Dandong!” Mia cried, pointing at the shining skyline, tiny in the distance. With her finger, she followed the narrow curving thread of the river to the east, to what looked like a concentration of buildings directly ahead. “So that must be Uiju. One-Step Crossing has to be nearby. Tiger Mountain in China should be right across the river, about there.” She turned to her brother, grinning. “We did it! We got the right road!”
“Problem is, it’s all open now. And we’ve got to get rid of the car before we need headlights,” Simon said as they started forward again. “Given that we’ve been the only car on this entire road, it would be easy for them to spot us. Someone could see the light, even from the air.”
They wound slowly down the mountainside as the sky turned orange, the landscape silhouetted in black against the dying light. The river plain spread out in a nearly flat expanse of terraced rice fields. Spindly trees lined the road at regular intervals. There was no place to hide.
Pinpricks of light ahead marked Uiju, but all around them it was darkening into twilight. Once again Mia thanked their lucky stars that North Korea wasn’t brightly lit at night.
They came to a T in the road.
“Okay, gotta find a place to hide this soon,” Simon said. “Like now.”
“Let’s go right, away from the town.”
“And here’s our best shot,” Simon said a few moments later, slowing and pulling off the road onto a dirt path just wide enough for the car, in a gully twisting between two low hills. A few moments later, he slid the car into a patch of dirt under some scraggly overhanging trees and stopped.
He got out of the car and stood on the path, looking back in the direction of the road.
“Can’t see the road, at least not much, so I don’t think anyone will find the car till morning.”
Mia opened the car door and stretched her legs, feeling the tightness in her muscles.
“Let’s search the car before we leave, see if there’s anything we can use,” Simon said.
They found nothing but papers in the glove compartment. But the trunk held two bottles of water, a rope, and a sack.
“Think they were going to use this to tie us up?” Simon asked, holding up the rope, then coiling it and stuffing it into his pack.
“Not the guys who caught us. Maybe the ones at the roadblock, though.”
Simon
opened the sack. He pulled out a screwdriver, passing it to Mia to put in her pack. He added a pair of pliers, a utility knife, and a roll of tape to his. Then a flashlight. He switched it on and lifted the sack, shining the light into the trunk.
Mia gasped and started back, her hand to her mouth. There, lying on the floor of the trunk, was a rifle. Simon gave a low whistle, handed the flashlight to Mia, and leaned in, reaching his hand toward the weapon.
“Simon, careful.” Mia’s voice wavered. She wanted to slam the trunk lid down, locking the gun out of sight. She backed a few steps away.
Simon lifted the rifle out of the trunk. Then he turned to the hillside and with a forceful motion, jammed the barrel deep into the soft dirt. He pulled it out again and examined the muzzle. “It’ll be a while before that works properly,” he announced, tossing it back into the trunk and closing the lid.
In the dusk, they started off along the gully, then up a hill to a cluster of trees, black against the dark sky, where Simon stopped. “Let’s wait until it’s really dark,” he said.
Mia settled on the ground next to him. The evening was still and quiet. A light breeze picked up. She pulled the collar of her jacket snug around her neck. Long minutes passed. She felt her body relax as the extraordinary tension of the day fell away. For the first time since their capture, she had time to think about what had happened.
“Simon, I’m confused.” She kept her voice low, nearly a whisper. “Those guys in the black cars had a gun, but they made it so easy for us to escape. And why are soldiers chasing us now?”
“I’ve been trying to work it out,” Simon said. He was quiet for a moment. “Maybe we did get caught between two groups, like the regular police and the secret police, like we were talking about earlier. Maybe Colonel Pak is leading one faction — if so, I’m guessing it would be the secret police, the SSD.”
“So the guys who caught us might be with the regular police? The MPS?”
“It seems likely, if the two groups are working against each other, with conflicting ideas about how things should be done.”
“That’s what Daniel told me.”
“Yeah, well, Dad said it was one of the most difficult things about his work — one ministry would say yes to something and another one would say no, just to contradict the other,” Simon said. “Then there’s the soldiers at the roadblock, but they’d just be following orders from Colonel Pak’s side, I’m guessing.”
Mia shivered, remembering the standoff with Colonel Pak. The phone flying into the air with the prison camp photos. It had all been brushed out of her mind by their escape and flight. But it hurt to think about the loss now, about all the ways they weren’t going to be able to help anyone else.
“You’re positive the phone landed in the water, right? That the soldiers couldn’t have gotten ahold of it?”
“I’m absolutely positive that the soldiers didn’t get ahold of it,” Simon said. The tone of his voice said he didn’t want to talk about it. It must be bothering him too. Everything they’d tried to do had failed. In fact, people might have been beaten or tortured or sent to labor camps because of them. Mr. Shin, if anyone had seen him drop them off. Soon-ok. The man with the scarred hand and his partner who let them escape, whose car they stole. The soldiers whose jeep got wrecked in the chase. The tour guides — Mr. Lee, Miss Cho, Mr. Kim. She and Simon were like a contagious virus. They endangered everyone they met.
Someone must have risked their life to take those photos. Now they were gone. At least they were at the bottom of the river, not in the hands of officials who could use them as an excuse to hurt more people.
Now she and Simon were only trying to save themselves. Mia hoped they didn’t meet anyone else between here and the border.
When the sky had turned midnight blue, they started across the spine of the hill, keeping the city lights of Dandong to their left. The clusters of houses and factory buildings were all on level ground, so staying on the crest was a good way to avoid any people who might be out at night. At the edge of the ridge, they climbed down, crossed a stream, and picked up a path that passed through wide fields, then over railroad tracks.
Mia gazed up at the stars. She traced the line from the Big Dipper to the bright North Star, their guide. In the west, a half moon was high in the sky.
The path ended at the road, at a large boulder. Ahead, the land dropped to the river basin. To their right, the tall smokestack of a factory made a black pencil stroke against the sky.
Then they came to the river.
They both stood and stared.
The stretch of water before them was wide, gleaming in the moonlight. Not as wide as the section between Sinuiju and Dandong, but five or six house lengths across. It was far too deep to wade across, and way too cold to swim.
So much for Plan B.
“Mia … I thought you said that the river was shallow near Uiju.” Simon spoke slowly and deliberately. “That we could walk across?”
“The guidebook said —” Her brain felt numb. Simon swore.
“Could we have made a wrong turn?” Mia felt panic rising. Simon had trusted her. He’d gone this way because of the information she’d given him.
“No way. As you pointed out, we can see Dandong right there. Just where it should be.”
“But there’s a river in the way.” How could this be? Mia closed her eyes and opened them, as if she could blink the river away. Nothing in the guidebook had warned them that a lot of water might block the route to One-Step Crossing and Tiger Mountain on the other side of the border.
“Lemme see the guidebook.” Simon’s voice sounded compressed.
“It won’t do any good. The map of this area isn’t that detailed.” Mia looked up and down the river, studying the lay of the land, trying to understand what she was seeing. Dad had said the guidebook was ten years old — but a stream you could step over didn’t become a wide river in just a decade. Don’t panic; figure it out.
“I think that might be an island” — Mia pointed to the dark shape on the far side of the river — “that’s still part of North Korea. There are hardly any lights, not like China. So maybe One-Step Crossing is on the other side of the island?”
They stood and stared some more. To their left was a wide sandbar. To the right, the water lapped against the bank.
Mia reached out and grabbed Simon’s arm. Even though she appeared to have totally screwed up, he wasn’t blaming her. At least not out loud.
He let out a sigh.
“So what do we do now?” He sounded like he was asking himself the question.
“Find a boat?” It was a joke. The awful kind of joke you make when you feel like you’re about to start screaming.
But Simon responded seriously. “Yeah. That’s it. C’mon.”
They moved west along the shore of the river, toward the lights of Dandong on the far side, away from the factory and houses. Mia kept turning to look behind them. At any moment the jeeps and black cars could come roaring up. They had to find a way across.
They came to a small wooden dock. There in the moonlight was their miracle: a wooden boat, tied with a single length of rope. Mia stared, feeling as if she were in a fairy tale, as if she could make something appear simply by wishing it.
“It’s a ferry landing. Look.” Simon was pointing across the river. Mia could just make out another dock on the far shore.
The boat was old and worn, but it looked as if it would survive a river crossing. Simon shoved the boat into deeper water at the end of the dock, then lowered himself into it. Mia clambered in after him. A long pole lay in the bottom of the boat. He picked it up and stuck it into the water, pushing against the sandy bottom to propel them out into the river.
The stretch of inky water lengthened between them and the dock. Mia wished the boat would go faster. At any moment she expected shouts and running feet as someone discovered the theft, or the whine of a police boat speeding toward them. She shivered as the wind rose off the water.
/> Out in the center, the current caught the boat. Simon had to work to keep them on course. At another time Mia would have laughed to see her brother struggling with the pole. But every piece of their journey had taken on a desperate urgency. Colonel Pak and his soldiers could be right behind them.
And everyone — even the guys who might be trying to help them — had guns.
Overhead, the blue-black expanse seemed endless, shimmering with tiny crystals, the half moon tiny in the hugeness. Compared to all that, Mia thought, they were like specks of dust. Tiny people. Tiny problems.
All they needed was a few more tiny miracles.
She focused on one of the pricks of light among the thousands in the glittering dome. Stars were made to light the darkness; that was their job. They did it not just one by one, but together with millions and billions of others.
Yet in its own galaxy, each star could be a sun. And each star mattered to the place where it was planted. Beautiful Star.
Then they were across the river, pulling up to the dock on the far shore. The boat thunked against the planks at the base of a small hill. Mia flinched; in the distance to their right she could see the dark outline of tiled roofs on top of the rise. She hoped that everyone was shut in for the night.
Simon jumped out and tied up. Mia stepped onto the dock, trying not to topple into the water as the boat rocked beneath her.
They crept to the top of the riverbank. In the light of the moon, they could see a line of houses to the east, a stretch of fields to the west. Straight ahead, a double-humped shape rose in the distance, dark against a glow in the sky. It must be the lights of the town behind the mountain. In China.
“Aim for that tall hill. I think — I hope — that’s Tiger Mountain,” Mia said. “We still have to cross the river — the shallow part — at the border.”
They followed a path going north across stubbly fields. Moonlight caught on patches at the edge of the fields — the plastic covers of a line of greenhouses, low to the ground. Mia’s heart was drumming again.
In the Shadow of the Sun Page 22
