by Ian Slater
“I’m glad you did,” said the NKA major, walking over and smiling down at him. “It was one of your allies.”
Tae did not believe him until he was dragged back into the cells again for refusing to identify any of the KCIA section chiefs. He knew that the NKA guards, as UN troops had discovered in another Korean War long ago, were regarded as the cruelest possible captors, surpassing even the brutality of the Japanese. Still, he was not prepared for what he saw. A white man, limbs tied to an upright mattress frame that was propped against the shell-pocked remains of the Uijongbu Catholic church, was being used for bayonet practice — the man still alive. It turned out that the man was not one of the Swedish UN observers from the DMZ but a young American from a signals corps captured near Uijongbu. What Tae remembered most about the man was how long it had taken him to die. A squad of NKA militia, having cut a crude U.S. of A. flag on his stomach, had bayoneted him again and again, literally disemboweling him, then, once he’d been cut down from the frame, hacked him to death, in the same way as in the 1979 “incident” when NKA troops had stormed across the DMZ and murdered two Americans who had been trimming a tree for a better view across the line.
The next evening, Tae had been taken back to the dimly lit interrogation tent. He would never forget the cloying smell of the flickering paraffin lamp, the enormous shadows of the interrogator and the guard, or the fragrance — of something so sweet, so familiar, that even in the semidarkness, heavy with terror, he knew it was his daughter.
The North Korean officer had asked Tae once more for the names of the KCIA agents. Tae said nothing and tried to smile at his daughter, but when she saw what they’d done to him, she began to cry. The NKA major gave an order and the guard jerked Tae’s head back against the chair, gagged him, and taped his eyelids back so that he was forced to watch his daughter.
Tae gave him the names and the NKA major raped her. After, as the NKA major stumbled breathless, satiated, back from her discarded form, Tae, in an agony the likes of which he had never known, heard his daughter whimpering like a dog in the far darkness of the tent, huddled in the corner, clutching her muddied clothes.
The NKA major gave her to the troops to do as they would.
It was the last Tae had seen of her. The NKA major was one of those reported killed during Freeman’s raid on Pyongyang, the name of the young American soldier who had shot him, Brentwood, one that Tae would never forget-But it was not satisfaction enough. With the madness that turns sorrow to rage, all Tae wanted to do now was to find Mi-ja and to kill every NKA he could find. Most of all he wanted to kill Jung-hyun, who had betrayed his daughter. And though he had already had more search-and-destroy missions in the last week than anyone else in I Corps, he had particularly wanted to go on this mission. Intelligence had received information that the company of NKA the air cavalry was now engaging was led by officers formed from the South Korean chapters of the Students for Reunification.
Ahead, through wafts of acrid white smoke beyond the slight rise of an irrigation ditch, Tae could see the wooden stock of a RPK 7.62 machine gun, surrounded by concertina wire, sweeping through a wide field of fire. Their bursts were too long — the barrel would overheat But it you rushed the wire alone and tried to go through it, it would wrap itself around you faster than any concertina. And too far for a grenade. The choppers had all gone. If the air cavalrymen didn’t move now, they would lose the advantage of the smoke screen.
Tae checked to make sure that the barrel of his SAW wasn’t clogged with paddy mud. He waved for two air cavalrymen to come up to his position. One man, steadying his helmet with his left hand, mouth parched with fear, drew level with him behind the ditch.
“Thought we were gonna get some F-14s up here,” the American said, eyes squinting skyward. “Off the carriers.”
“They’re busy,” said Tae. “Carriers have all been called up North.”
“Fuck!” said the cavalryman. “We’re up north!” Despite the heat of the battle, it struck Tae that the American private would never speak to an American officer like this. But he didn’t mind — all he cared about was the NKA.
“Russians are moving against the Aleutians,” Tae explained.
“Fuck the Aleutians. Send the Tomcats here.”
“They don’t see it that way,” said Tae. “I want you to cover me.”
“Where are you goin’?”
Tae indicated the machine gun still stuttering away.’ “They’ll have to change a drum soon.”
“Yeah—” said the cavalryman. “That’ll take ‘em about two seconds flat.”
“You ready? “asked Tae.
“Down!” yelled the cavalryman. The air filled with a shooshing noise, then an explosion that shook the earth, a hole blown in the wall of the irrigation ditch, a spume of dirty-colored water rising high in the air. Tae pulled the two smoke grenades from his pack and threw them upwind — the smoke cover the Cobras had laid almost gone.
“Ready?” asked Tae again. “We’ll have to do it without the Tomcats.”
The cavalryman nodded, his mouth too dry for him to speak.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Malle knew there was nothing she could do but submit to the corporal. Neither her daughter-in-law nor son had returned from the docks, and she, like everyone else in the Mustamäe apartment complex, had heard the tearing sound of machine-gun fire down near Viru Gate, and feared the worst.
Unable to closet her grandson, Edouard, in any of the other apartments for fear of Party informers in the building — there was always at least one on each floor — Malle had tried to explain it to Edouard, telling him that for now, until the nightmare was over, whenever the corporal “called by,” he would have to be ready to go straight up to the crawl space above the double bed in her son and daughter-in-law’s room.
Malle had tried to lead the corporal away into her room, but he said he liked lots of room “to move about,” raising his eyebrows in unison like a gypsy, meaning to convey an all-knowingness and sexual prowess he did not have; his impatience, his ripping and slobbering whenever he mounted her and took his pleasure, reminded her of hogs she had seen out on the collectives. Above all, she despised his cowardice — not simply the bullying rape in exchange for not launching a search for her grandson, but the cowardice evident in his gasps for “Raza! Raza!”—his wife’s name. For Malle, it wasn’t that she was a stand-in for Raza that angered her— thinking of someone else while making love to one’s partner was a common enough thing, she thought. What did disgust her whenever he called his wife’s name was that it clearly wasn’t a cry of separation from his wife so much as a primitive ploy for absolution — that somehow the utterance of her name while he was raping another woman would lessen his culpability.
Before the corporal had “called by” the second time, Malle had sat down, feeling unclean, contaminated, but determined and with a sense of obligation to explain it all as best she could to young Edouard — yet how could he understand that she had no option?
To her surprise, he said he understood very well. Then, his eyes burning with hatred, he told his grandmother that next time he’d kill the corporal.
“No—” she begged him. “Edouard, no — no. Don’t you see he’ll — Edouard, he is the only one who knows you haven’t been taken in for questioning. He doesn’t care about searching for you as long as I—”
She was talking to him now as one adult to another, the hatred in his eyes having evicted the innocence of childhood forever.
“Edouard—” She clasped his hands in hers, his coldness frightening her. “Edouard, if you do anything—” She closed her eyes at the horror of it, shaking her head, wishing it away, holding him close. She felt him draw away from her. “If you do anything like that, they will kill you,” she told him. “And your mother and papa.”
“They already have,” said the boy, speaking in a tone so seemingly detached from his body that he seemed to be talking to someone else. It was a voice she had never heard before.
“We don’t know that,” Malle said quickly.
“You heard them outside,” he said evenly, looking straight at her. “You heard them screaming, Nana.”
Nana! She seized upon the word of endearment as a desperate soul grasps for the slenderest hope. “Edouard,” she pleaded, squeezing his hands, which were still cold and unresponsive. “They will take your Nana and you — all of us.” She tried to smile, the smile of the brave, showing that if she could accept it, then surely—
“Be patient,” she told him. “Soon they will find who it is they’re after and leave us alone.”
He said nothing for a moment, and his silence was thick with accusation. Finally she could bear it no longer, her head bowed, shaking from side to side, her age at once ashamed and prostrate before his youthful impatience. “You must see we have no choice. They would go to your school, your friends, until they found you, then—”
There was a knocking on the door.
Edouard, the muscles taut in his face, looked from her to the door and back at her from the precipice of decision. “Go!” she whispered hoarsely, then walked out into the hall through the kitchen toward the door, her eyes frantically searching again for anything that might betray Edouard’s presence in the apartment, catching her breath as she spotted one of his socks, having dropped from the dirty wash basket. She snatched it up and stuffed it back into the basket beneath slips and lace underwear — of various designs which the corporal had insisted on her wearing to make it “different” each time. He had complained bitterly of her “peasant” attire, and she had been forced to borrow some of her daughter-in-law’s more daring lingerie to keep him happy.
One hand at her throat, the other on the doorknob, she steadied herself for a moment. Putting on what she shamefully called her “collaborationist” grin, she opened the door.
He said nothing — the moment the door was closed, his hands were already under her skirt, bunching it about her waist, where he used it to pull her toward him, his lips smothering hers wetly, his garlic breath so strong, it made her want to throw up. He mumbled for her to try and stop him. She tried to push him away but couldn’t, his game becoming her panic, yet knowing she must yield. Backing her up against the hallway wall, he pushed against her so hard that the mirror of the hallway hutch shook, throwing their reflections in a quivering embrace. “Pull it!” he told her. She closed her eyes, buried her face into his neck, which he took as arousal. “You like it, eh?” He smiled, looking down at her, feeling her trembling. “Excited, eh?”
Surely, she thought, he must know how repulsed she was, that no amount of force could ever change her hatred for him and his kind.
“Come on, Malle,” he said, smacking her bottom. “To bed, eh? Turn around!” When she did as he commanded her, he grabbed her left hand and held it between his legs. “Pull,” he said. “Hey! — Wait!” He laughed roughly. “You don’t know your strength, Malle.”
No, you swine, she drought, you don’t.
“That’s better,” he sighed. “Whoa — steady, horse!” He made her stop by the small refrigerator, opening the door and peering in. “No beer?”
“No. We haven’t been allowed out to buy—” She had completely forgotten that he had brought two cans the day before and that in her distraction, she had put them in the small freezer section, so that now the cans were distorted.
“Ah—” he said, annoyed, taking them out and setting them on the small kitchen counter. “Soon they would explode. Like me, eh?” he said, laughing.
She didn’t hear him — her eyes riveted on the slightly opened cutlery drawer. She couldn’t be sure, but it looked as if the big serrated bread knife was missing.
“Hey, Malle!” he bellowed. “What is it?”
“What — oh, I’m sorry. They’re frozen.”
“What? — oh, the beer.” He pulled her close to him again. “But I’m hot, eh, Malle?”
She stopped. His expression had changed. He was looking high up in the kitchen. She felt her carotid artery pounding like a taut cable. Had he seen something? Oaf that he was, he had a natural animal instinct. But he was looking above the counter at the meagerly stocked shelf. “Like honey?” he asked.
Suddenly she thought she heard Edouard moving in the crawl space above the master bedroom only a few meters away to the right of the hallway. “Yes — yes I do,” she answered hastily. “Why?”
He let go of her hand, walked over, and brought down the small can of Danish honey, turning to her with a leer. “I’ll bet you do.” It took her a moment to realize what he meant, but didn’t know how long she could go on debasing herself. For as long as it took, she supposed, for as long as it took him and his barbarians to find whom they were searching for and leave the apartment block. For as long as she could prevent them from searching for Edouard. As he levered the lid off the can of honey, Malle moved back toward the single drawer.
“What are you doing?” he demanded. For a split second she saw suspicion in his eye. It was the same look he’d given her a day before when she’d tried to lure him away from the master bedroom.
“Why,” she said, “getting a towel. The bedspread’ll—”
“All right, but hurry. I have to be back by four. It’s already three.”
As she took the hand towel hanging on the small chromium rack beside the refrigerator, she glanced quickly in at the cutlery drawer. The knife was gone. She closed her eyes, her breath caught in her throat. No, she implored Edouard, as if by the sheer power of her mind she could forestall him from protecting her honor, from getting them all killed.
“Malle!” the corporal shouted impatiently from the bedroom. She could hear him undressing, the sound of his suspenders thwacking the bedside dresser. Taking a deep breath, she walked into the bedroom. He had a pillow under his knees, and it was staring at her like a one-eyed snake, and she knew that directly above them was her grandson.
“You want it, don’t you?” he asked. It was part of the game. He knew she didn’t. How could anyone think she wanted to?
“Yes,” she said.
“Say ‘I can’t wait.’ “
“I can’t wait.”
He handed her the small, opened can of honey. “Put some on me.”
She dipped her finger in the honey — trembling. She could not have him here another day. Edouard was probably right— his look had told her he believed his parents had been executed by the Viru Gate. And she knew that even when the troops left the Mustamäe apartments, the corporal would not stop “calling” on her. Edouard would always be a hostage to the corporal. How many other women was he doing this to? She put the honey on him.
“All round the top,” he instructed her, guiding her hand, groaning with pleasure. She made her decision. She would be especially nice to him, then ask him to take her to Kadriorg Park, and put an end to it.
“Now,” he said. “Be a good bear, eh?”
She smiled quizzically at him. “A bear?”
“Lick your honey,” he explained.
Tossing her head to one side with an abandon the corporal had not seen in her before, Malle pinned her hair back so as to keep it out of the way, then, her tongue moistening her lips, her eyes closed, she lowered herself to him. She would make it the best he’d had.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Before the war, the kill ratio on the NATO books was six to one — that is, six Soviet combatants had to be killed for every NATO combatant if NATO was to hold. Within four hours of the Fulda Gap, becoming the Fulda “Gash,” the ratio changed dramatically to ten to one, the armored spearheads of the Soviet divisions, a half million men in all, first crossing the Polish plain with a speed that surprised even General Marchenko. He had long held that the “fatal flaw” in NATO’s armor would be the West’s bourgeois reluctance to engage “other elements,” by which he meant the West’s reluctance to kill civilians. And he believed it would work in the Soviets’ favor.
He was right. The army of refugees fleeing west of Fulda, and i
ndeed, all along the north-south axis that had been NATO’s central front, impeded NATO tank reinforcements. No matter how “hard-nosed,” as the Americans called it, NATO’s troops had been trained to be, most British, American, and particularly Dutch tank regiments found it unacceptable to fire point-blank into the human tide of refugees that clogged the roads. Some of the Allied tanks, seeing a blur of red, the treads of Russian T-90s mercilessly rushing and chopping through the screaming columns of refugees, did open fire. The belch of the M-1s and Leopards, their 120- and 105-millimeter guns sending white-hot, dartlike armor-piercing tungsten through the tightly packed refugees in efforts to stop the Russian T-90s, only added to the carnage. The air sleeve alone surrounding the armor-piercing needle, traveling and discarding its sabot, or shoe, at over forty-five hundred feet a second, was so hot that it alone seared people for distances up to two or three meters from the trajectory path. Even so, the molten discarding sabot rounds and the HESH — high-explosive squash heads — of molten metal that were deadly as tank killers, effective on both sloped as well as flat armor, were not the rounds that caused the major casualties among the refugees. This dubious honor was left to the high-explosive antipersonnel rounds which were favored by both sides, as much to destroy supporting infantry as the tanks that spearheaded them.
