by Gus Lee
Chang laughed sardonically. He spoke gutturally in Korean.
“He says the pig manure you throw smells very bad.”
“Then,” I said, “your men can die Chinese deaths. If you do not want this offer, we leave you here. The KCIA will imprison you and your men. No mudang che chub medicines, but probably torture, which we cannot stop. A televised trial to embarrass your beloved leader Kim II Sung and the Inmingun. Death by rope or firing squad, your bodies buried without memory or honorable cremation, your faces down, forever breaking your family lines from rituals and reports.”
Levine looked at me and licked her lips. She translated.
“I sojer,” said Chang. He had no fear.
Inside the house, the drums began again.
“Ask Chang what he wants.” I stood and she spoke. Chang looked at her, studied her, thinking about an answer, then watching me.
I walked to the garden's blind area to the far right. Seated on a retaining wall were the two missing Korean GIs, Both were normal-sized men. They saw me and came to attention.
“Identify yourselves, please.”
“Sir, PFC Arnold Kim, Ninety-eight Juliet, electronic warfare/signal intelligence interceptor, Second Intel.” The other private was Private E2 Paek, Seventy-five Bravo, personnel admin specialist, HHC, First of the Seventy-second Armor Admin Center.
“What's your connection to these men?”
“Sir, they just invited us up here. Don't know why.”
It meant two Tiger Tails were loose, running in the snow after Jubala and Dr. Death. The radio had not squelched; blood and shrapnel were in the snow of the Ninety-five Mike bivouac area; someone had died and the bombs were still out. The outcome in a fire-fight between two Tiger Tails and fourteen Iron Mikes should not be a matter of conjecture. But we had heard nothing.
Maybe there was another Tiger Tail team. Or two.
Levine and Chang were talking. The mudang was watching me. I took the radio into the villa. Under the cover of the drums and cymbals, I turned up the volume and squeezed the hand mike to break squelch four times, warning Foss and Magrip that bogeys were loose.
The radio was dead. I opened it—the mag batteries were gone, the terminals cut out. I swore, but it didn't help.
Levine. “Mudang asked me to come in. It's stalemate. Chang says it's a mistake, that if they were Inmingun, they wouldn't be clumped together. Says that if Inmingun were here, they'd have several teams in the field. Jackson. These guys are going to die anyway. Think of it; they've given their lives to this mission. They're not afraid of the KCIA or of you.”
I felt the truth of it. He was more committed. This was his country, and I was a foreign soldier of the hated tiger. His people would be the first to feel the nuclear fire that already devoured him. He had already sacrificed all that he had.
“That's the good news,” I said. “Bad news is the radio's been tubed.” I pointed. I told her that two Tiger Tails were loose. “Foss and Magrip have to know that already. They don't know that more Tiger teams might be out there. And division has to be told. You need to run for a radio.”
Levine shook her head. “Leave it to you to ask a woman to run down a mountain in wet jump boots and without carbos.”
“Fd do it, but I'm slow and it'd kill me.”
She punched me on the chest and looked at the girls, hard at work, trying to influence events with percussion. She was looking at their feet; they wore tennis shoes.
I realized that Purvis was gone.
In a back room, I found him and Catalina trying unsuccessfully to wrap a huge man in a thick, quilted yo. Patrick McCrail.
40
YOU SENT HIM TO ME
He looked like he had been run over by a tracked vehicle and dragged through a bog. He was upright against the wall, vast legs stretched along a small cot, his head sepa-rated from the wall by a stack of small bean pegae, bean pillows, his great, Promethean face slack, covered in sweat, soot, burns, and suppurating cuts, the sweat from his immense back staining the wall, his chest laboring rapidly, the blanket falling from him.
Purvis withdrew a needle from McCrail's arm. “Morphine, Sergeant Major, to relieve the chest and arm pain. You're having an acute anginal episode to go with exposure and hypothermia. We'll have you up in a few days.” Purvis smiled warmly at him.
The sergeant major bore the elements of the earth. The rifleman, the mud soldier, imbedded in the fertile ecology of his profession. He smelled bad, premiering his own death.
“I need that radio,” said Purvis. “It's on the fritz.”
He cursed. “I have an impending M.I. and no IV, and now no dustoff, medevac or ambulance. God!”
“I'll get it for you,” said Levine, lacing tennis shoes. “By running?”
“It's what I do.” She moved to McCrail. He smiled at her. Levine knelt. She squeezed his great paw, stood and left.
Purvis leaned against the wall and held his bandaged head as he looked at his immense, shuddering patient. “Sergeant Major, you smoked too many damn cigars. Had too many beatings and no exercise.” He touched him. “Kan's here now.”
McCrail nodded. He looked like the grandfather of all boonierats and the patron saint of lost men, at the edge of his own sad end. Catalina caressed McCrail's broad forehead.
“Gimme another pill,” whispered McCrail.
Purvis shook a pill bottle. “You've had four sublingual nitros and you can't take any more. Your heart's under a load.” He turned to me. “He made it up here on foot, dragging something. How are you doing out there?”
“Not worth a damn.”
We considered the consequences of failure. I had to get back to Chang. “You get well, Sergeant Major,” I said. “That's a direct order.” He sighed. I stood. Catalina looked up at me.
“I lost him.” It was a thin voice, never before heard from such cavernous lungs. McCrail, struggling to speak.
I leaned forward to listen, his chest laboring, slick sweat bright on his massive head. “Warehouse. Same one I used. Southside. Filled with Russkie guns. Plastique” He rested, lips moving. “Wizard had green det cord. Yella time cord. Silver blastin’ caps.”
He closed his eyes. “Cut time cord, lit, timed it. Followed the book.” He was reporting to me.
“Made a pyramid of his stash. Threw red marker smoke at Southside. Freaked all the hookers. Everyone bailed.
“I lit it. A fine, big blast.” Exhalation. “Doncha think?”
“I saw your fire. They heard the detonations at Fort Belvoir. The Wizard knows he's lost his arsenal and his war.”
“Ay, lad. ‘Twas the idea.” He fought for breath but it expired, hydrogen from a dirigible.
“Strange, bein’ here. Of all places. Meant to bring her flowers.” His eyes closed. “In summer, we'd walk at Chinhae. She'd pick flowers. For me.” A fat, hot tear. “I miss her, lad.” He cleared his throat, his eyes clamped tightly shut, trying to stop the emotion. “Miss summer. Gotta see the sun.”
I clasped his hand. “We'll get you there. Where'd the Wizard go?”
A savage grimace. “Hong Kong. But the rat, he goes there to hide. I'll catch ‘im there. I know… his brand a cheese.”
Purvis shook his head silently: no way.
I took a breath. “Sure is good to see you.”
His smile was a shuddering rictus, the lips blue, his skin sweaty, thin, colorless, a sight to break hearts. “And ta lay eyes on you, lad. How I look? Are we… squared… away… for parade?”
He looked like plague death. “Sergeant Major, you look like autumn in New York, the sun on orange maples and the blue Hudson, the old Twenty-fourth Infantry singing ‘Garry Owens’ capably, to the shamrocks and to the green.”
He nodded and faded, a great purple tongue lolling on slack lips, the chest heaving and shuddering at the same time. Saliva ran down his great chin, his snow-white hair gray, thin, and greasy with the final efforts of a prematurely ancient man. My head sank.
Purvis put the blood pressure cuff
on him, barely able to close it around the great arm. He pumped it, read it, looked at his watch. He opened the sergeant major's mouth and slipped a small white pill under his tongue.
“How bad is he?” I whispered.
I had never seen Purvis angry. He bared his teeth. “Where the fuck's that medevac? Can't that woman run at all?”
I knew that tune. The drums deepened. I wanted them to stop, as if each beat stole a pump from McCrail's dying heart. But the drummers were working for a higher salvation. They were calling on their ancestors and the collective goodwill of their honored dead, trying to save their land and their people from nuclear fire.
Against this, a dying man's comfort could not be weighed.
I felt the desire to stay with him and the need to go.
McCrail mumbled. I leaned closer, bringing up my good ear.
“Can't hear you, Sergeant Major.”
“… world's got the lad by his curlies… he canna see you.” He stopped to gasp unevenly. An eyelid fluttered above a blind eye. “Needed ‘im. You sent ‘im to me. Let the lad have his young life… ta save the squirts, … and become a stinkin’ general.”
I had a job to do. I released his hand and placed it on his chest. I stood. Fingers scrabbled at my arm. I leaned over and he whispered. I nodded.
“Sergeant Major wants everyone out of this room, now,” I said.
Purvis stood. He offered his hand to Catalina, who tenderly kissed McCrail's ashen cheek. They left.
McCrail's chest worked. He made the sounds of a little girl, humming aimlessly. I gritted teeth, looking at the Samsung watch.
Under the drums and cymbals, I heard the sounds of the distant upper Yangtze, felt the old deck and smelled fish. I saw the girl on the prow of a great red slipper Hung River oil boat with a hundred men, five fair cooks and a hundred tons of number-one cargo. BaBa was pointing at her.
“Third daughter of Merchant Wong Fa-gwo. Is arranged. She is your wife, Hu-chin. Very good deal. Good for the jia”
She was round-faced, pink-cheeked, pigtailed in a red satin jacket, ten years old. She looked at me solemnly. I tried to see a girl who could become Ma. I smiled at her and she smiled back, her shoulders twisting, pretty in the light.
My brothers ran on deck, chewing summer long bean. Hu-chien tripped and fell, and the girl laughed gaily behind small fingers as I helped him up, both of us looking at her, shading our eyes from the afternoon sun.
“Wongs,” said BaBa, “Soochow, city of beautiful women. She will give good sons and docks on the Da Yuhe.”
McCrail drew air, gathering faint strength. “We alone, lad?” he wheezed.
“Affirmative, Sergeant Major.”
“Laddie,” he whispered. “Got debts to pay. You'll do Hong Kong for me, if I can't, won't you?… take me boys into their day in the sun?” Pause. “Tickets are right next ta me. Say aye.”
“Aye.”
He smiled, then fought for breath. “Lad, he's gone sour, the Wizard has. In his ditty bag, I found a bloody surprise. Brought it with me.” His chest spasmed and he licked his lips. “Outside… west wall, snug to a sharp boulder, under snow…. Secure it, lad.”
Purvis and Catalina were on the back porch. I exited the front door. Along the west wall was a sharp boulder and uneven piles of crudely shoveled snow. I scraped the snow to find two customized, long-range, combat-load, steel-frame rucksacks. They had industrial-strength webbed support straps adorned with looped high-grade civilian nylon braided rappelling rope.
One pack held a big cargo. I lifted it, the snow falling from it; it was compact and ponderous, the weight of a male adult with a density that exceeded solid lead. My bad back spoke to me and I grounded it, using my legs. The second pack was lighter by a hundred pounds, and I knew what they were.
I moved slower, an apprentice touching a for-bidden textbook. Steel-rimmed pack flaps with a broken lock. With primitive fear, I opened the large pack, heart slugging in synchronization to solar flares and timeless superstitions.
The smooth steel container under the flap was snugged with field-stained Styrofoam and painted in flat naval gray.
The side bore a thirty-two-digit alphanumeric code in military black stencil. A quick take-off plate exposed what I presumed was the detonation shaft for the mate fuze. I looked into the narrow machined recess: the gate to hell.
My fingers trembled as I relocked the plate and closed the packs as red-and-white-faced Chinese ghosts ran sprints up and down my spine. The wind gusted through denuded trees, limbs moving in mockery of winter skeletons.
Pluto and Goofy, atomic death. I put my hands on the bomb as if it were a sentient alien, as if touching a cold container of an unimaginably fiery horror could rationalize the inexplicable and defuse its indiscriminate threat.
The Wizard had snatched a SADM tactical nuke from a highly trained, professional Ninety-five Mike sapper team. I felt like spitting. Lawyers who break the law can use the color of authority to generate havoc, sow disruption, spread misery, steal souls and even snatch the power of a small sun.
The sergeant major had toasted the Wizard's arsenal, liberating Pluto and Goofy, and dragging them up Jungsan, destroying his old and burdened heart.
A noise. Up, feet spread, hands out: nothing. I covered the packs with snow, taking time to do it right. The bomb and its detonator were safer here.
McCrail was breathing poorly, his color shot with broken blood. I thought of Doc. I remembered him shooting dextran blood expander into the dead girl on my orders; I saw Carlos as he looked at me in infinite sadness.
In the monsoon summer of 1967, two days before Doc's nineteenth birthday, he had been decapitated by mortar shrapnel, going down in a lump without pain.
Miss you, Doc. I shut my eyes. I was sweating.
I knelt by Patrick McCrail and wiped his forehead, a drop of my sweat staining his torn shirt, his vast chest thumping as he panted for cheap, shallow breaths.
Red, gray eyes opened.
I told him I had secured his packs. It took three tries for him to ask me for another little white pill. “Don't have them. I'll send the doc.” “Nah,” he wheezed. “Lad. Where'd that lass kiss me?” He meant Catalina. “On the cheek.” Treacherous, whistling breaths. “Lad… which one.” “Your right.”
He moved his burly arm to touch the cheek, and missed.
I guided his fingertips to the exact place, where they scrabbled at mottled skin. He sighed and tried to smile. I held them there, helping him revive the magic of a woman's kiss on his old and noble face.
41
KARMA
The garden was quiet. I stepped onto the porch, the smell of McCrail's effort and adhesive winter Korean mud in my nostrils. Purvis and Catalina stood by me.
I forced myself not to listen for the whumping of the absent dustoff. It was now my job to save men I was supposed to kill, and to remove bombs that could do us all.
The kids were quiet, eating red-spiced vegetables and drinking black-market milk in gender-segregated clumps. Boys watched men. Girls looked at the mudang, seated at the picnic table. Hoon Jae-woo gazed at me. Aboji, father, she had said.
To the left, the ten Inmingun were in a patrol line in overcoats and hats beneath the trees, their medication procedure completed, ready for route march or for combat. The two other troops were several paces back, looking at watches, late for duty.
The little boy with brown hair gazed at Chang, who stood between the mudang and his men.
“Miss Oh, come with me.” We walked to Private Chang.
He faced me, confident, buttoned-up, overbuilt and in no mood to talk. He frowned painfully at Catalina.
“Sir,” I asked, “what are your plans?”
“I PFC, sir.” (He said “Pee-Effee-Shee.”) “We go Camp Kay-shee. Work.” He looked at his watch. “Lunchee time gone. Inventory, must. Numbah-ten, late, have sergeant mad at Private Chang.”
“You must stay here,” I said. Catalina translated.
“No ‘fraid KCIA,
” said Chang. Some of his men stirred. “KCIA know we no kanchop” Spy. Chang smiled, the victor.
The mudang, her bright yellow-and-red robe catching the winter sunlight, flowed toward us. The shaman took Chang's hand and spoke to him urgently, pointing to the children, the North Koreans and the sky.
Chang bristled, then feigned indifference, but the mudang‘s voice was modulating, rising, deepening, controlling the environment and influencing emotion.
The children stopped eating to listen to the wang mansin s powerful, rasping voice, the ancestors of Korea providing chorus. Catalina interpreted quietly, frowning in concentration.
“She say even dumbass paksu know in-sam bigger than biggest honcho man.” In-sam, the natural law of harmony, inevitability, repayment. “Her medicine is same-same. Bigger than all big man. Chang, he hurt her in-sam—he say her kids not true Korean people—then her in-sam che chub medicines no can help him. She say his hate too muchee big for his pants.”
I looked at Catalina. She nodded. The plan had not been rejected because the North Koreans did not trust us. It had failed because Chang did not want to help raise children who were not of pure Korean heritage, who were sullied with black, white and brown Western bloods.
It was the way of the world.
“Dude has the same problems we do,” said Purvis.
“Small world,” I said.
“Small minds,” he corrected.
“She say,” continued Catalina, “Chang hate her kids, then other men, they hate his kids.” Her eyes were wide, her chest rising and falling. “She say his hatred eat his in-sam big time. Like, no leftovers, no style. She say, he catchee no hiding from in-yon up north.”
I could hear Mrs. Fan saying, “Yeh has its way.” In English, it was karma. The Koreans called it in-yon.
Chang, his jaw tight, crushed and field-stripped his cigarette, looking at the mudang as she spoke, his red eyes swollen with emotion, angry that she was in his decision-making cycle, making perfect theological sense against his military mission.
Still the mudang spoke, and Miss Catalina Oh of the Vegas translated more freely as the cigarette paper floated away.
