Rings of Fire

by Gregory Shepherd

  Patrick set down his tea on the low calligraphy table in the middle of the room and went over to where the boy lay. As soon as Patrick approached him, the boy’s eyes opened, and he reached out his hand and said, “Appa?” (Daddy?). When Yumi tended to him, he would say “Omma?” in the same questioning tone. It was all he ever said. Patrick chalked up his muteness to his ongoing recovery from malnutrition, although one of the doctors had mentioned possible autism. It was too early to tell.

  Patrick extended two fingers, as was their little ritual. The boy held them tight, closed his eyes, and fell back asleep. Patrick signaled Yumi for his tea as he lowered himself down onto the futon. Even in the early stages of sleep the boy held firm. It wasn’t until a half hour later that his breathing got deeper and he relinquished his hold on Patrick’s fingers. Patrick rose from the futon.

  “He’s definitely a fighter,” he said, kissing Yumi on the head.

  “Just like his new adoptive father.”

  “Well, not officially yet.”

  Although Patrick didn’t let on to Yumi, he was terrified at the prospect of fatherhood, by adoption or otherwise. His self-doubt increased as he considered the great sacrifices his own parents had gone to in raising him. Kiana Miyamoto, of a well-off family from the island of Kauai in Hawaii, was fourteen years younger than Daniel Featherstone, who wooed the pretty young Eurasian college student when she was attending a seminar on Shakespeare at the University of Tokyo. She was on a full scholarship from the University of Chicago, but abandoned her academic career to stay with the mysterious older man who invited her for coffee and proceeded to win her heart.

  Daniel Featherstone had arrived in Japan years earlier as part of Douglas MacArthur’s occupation force and found the country fascinating enough to remain in beyond his two-year tour. His easy fluency in Japanese caught the attention of the head of the CIA’s front organization, the Joint Advisory Commission, and he went on to serve in an elite commando unit known as the Special Mission Group (SMG) which engaged in a yearlong campaign of destruction of North Korean coastal railroad tracks and bridges, as well as the planting of landmines and booby traps and the caching of weapons in the cave systems near the city of Kaesong. After the Korean War he taught English at the University of Tokyo where he met Kiana Miyamoto. Both of Patrick’s parents came from predominantly Irish families, although one of Kiana’s grandfathers was ethnic Japanese. They had hoped to have a large family like the ones they came from, but by the time they got around to having Patrick, her womb was all but depleted. Instead of having their own large family, they both dropped their academic careers and became codirectors of Kamakura’s Yukinoshita Orphanage.

  Yumi and Patrick had been engaged to marry several years before her abduction. But then Patrick turned to Zen Buddhism as a means of quieting his mind of the endless loop of mistakenly shooting a five-year-old Serbian boy on a Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) sniper mission. His mind took an impression like wax and it instantly turned to marble, which was a blessing for an artist but a curse for someone with depressive tendencies, as he was. The only way he could clear his mind of the image of the child he had shot was through deep meditation. Before long he broke off his engagement to Yumi to pursue the life of an ordained monk.

  After rescuing Yumi from Senghori, Patrick realized that she was the love of his life after all, but Yumi was still bitter over being tossed aside for Patrick’s prospective life as a monk, a vocation he later decided against. His love for her went unrequited, but she eventually relented, and they moved back to Patrick’s hometown of Kamakura. With the help of sympathetic contacts in the Japanese government, they were allowed to bring with them little Dae-ho, one of the most fragile of the North Korean orphans who had been found wandering in the forest half dead from starvation after the Rising Tide revolution that had toppled the Kim regime.

  With the boy fast asleep, Patrick sat down at the low calligraphy table where Yumi had set out their supper. She had prepared his favorite dish of tonkatsu, deep fried pork cutlets topped with her signature homemade sauce made from vegetables from her garden along with soy sauce, vinegar, and sugar. Patrick picked up a large bottle of Sapporo draft and poured them each a glass which they clinked together before starting the meal. Patrick ate in silence, staring off into space and preoccupied with what had happened that morning at the stadium. She nudged his knee with hers under the table. “Anybody home?”

  Patrick lowered his eyes and smiled. “Sorry. I was just thinking about the next three weeks.”

  “Any chance you could include me in your thoughts?” she teased. “You’re my only contact with the real world until Dae-ho gets better.”

  “The Olympics aren’t the real world. It’s a fantasy that happens every four years where everyone pretends to like each other while they march in the Parade of Nations. Have you ever heard the story about the British and German soldiers during World War I who played soccer with each other on the battlefield on Christmas Eve? Then the next morning they went back to shooting each other.”

  Yumi shook her head and winced. “So cynical. The Parade of Nations is my favorite part. It’s so nice to see everyone smiling, unlike you.”

  Patrick rocked his head noncommittally as he slurped sauce off a strip of tonkatsu. “I suppose.”

  “Do you think Japan will show its best face as the host country?”

  “I can’t think of a better host in terms of hospitality, and Japan always shows its best face. Face is what this country is all about. It’s what lies beneath the face that’s sometimes a bit problematic.”

  “You could say the same about any country. It’s not like I’m some kind of cheerleader for Japan, but it’s got its good points.”

  “Oh, I agree totally,” Patrick said, taking a sip of beer. “I’m sorry if it seems like I’m dragging the country down, but I think as a foreigner who was born here and still can’t get citizenship, I see things that other people don’t.”

  “You know the solution to that,” Yumi said while demurely dipping a strip of deep-fried pork into the sauce. Patrick nodded.

  “Sure. Us getting married. But you’d think that my being born here would count for something at least.”

  “Tell me again why you felt you had to accept this job. I’m not getting on your case here, I just don’t understand why you take things on that you later regret.”

  “I don’t regret it, I just recognize the responsibility it entails, that’s all.” He left out a major factor: although he felt more content than he ever had in his life, he missed the excitement that the consultant’s job promised.

  Yumi took a sip of beer and pulled a strand of hair over her upper lip, mustache-like. “I wonder if I would have made a good spy.”

  “It’s not too late, you’re not even forty. Hey, maybe you could sign up to be a honey trap.” Crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes creased into a smile.

  She let go of her “mustache” and her eyes widened. “What’s that? It sounds dishonorable.”

  “A honey trap lures enemy spies into her net with the promise of sexual favors. You get to carry a gun in your bra in case there’s any trouble.”

  “No way! I’m a respectable Japanese girl.” She fluttered her eyelids, and they both laughed.

  They ate in silence for a few minutes. “Any word from over there?” she asked after a while. Over there was their code for North Korea.

  “Actually, I’m pretty sure I heard from someone personally today.”

  “Really? Who?” She sat up straighter and her head went forward.

  Patrick proceeded to tell her of the assassination of the two security officials at the Olympic stadium and his strong suspicion that the shooter had been North Korean. When he had accepted the job as chief security consultant for the Olympics, Patrick had stipulated that his role would be advisory only. Then today happened, hence his target practice earlier in the afternoon.


  “That’s terrible!” Yumi said.

  Patrick saucered his eyes and nodded vigorously. “Yup.”

  “Do you think anyone in the pachinko parlors is involved?” she asked. Her own father had been a proprietor of one such parlor in Tokyo, which had been the source of his problems with Comrade Moon. He had used the parlor as a transshipment point for pharmaceutical-grade methamphetamine coming in from Pyongyang.

  “That’s a good point, I hadn’t thought of that angle,” Patrick said, crunching on a mouthful of tsukemono pickled vegetables. “If drugs are involved, I’m sure the parlors are somehow connected. But something tells me this is different. More political somehow.”

  Yumi lowered her eyes and began to pick at her own vegetables. “When will you be leaving?” she asked in a quiet voice.

  Patrick looked closely at her, investigating her eyes and body language. “Tomorrow, remember? I have to stay in Tokyo during most of the Games as part of my contract.” He sipped his miso soup and set the bowl down again. “I’m just a consultant, though. No rough stuff this time, don’t worry.”

  But part of him, a big part, missed being an active participant in the “rough stuff.” The urge to hunt. The thirst for revenge slaked only by the blood of the guilty. And despite the vow of nonviolence he had taken when he contemplated becoming a Zen monk, he had to confess that he’d never felt anything quite so instantly gratifying as peering through a sniper’s scope and sending 1.5 ounces of hot lead hurtling at the speed of sound at someone who had forfeited the right to continue among civilized humanity. The only problem was, a case could be made that he himself had done something in North Korea which quite possibly forfeited his own right. Yumi said nothing when he promised no rough stuff, but stared at him with skeptical eyes. And Patrick knew why. When they were working at the shelter near the DMZ, he had gone looking for the commandant of Senghori Prison. What happened next was something that Patrick had unsuccessfully tried to rationalize to himself as a manifestation of PTSD. He forced the memory from his mind.

  Later in the evening, after Dae-ho had awoken and been fed, Patrick and Yumi settled into their comfortable routine of quiet conversation during their calligraphy practice while the boy doodled silently with his little brush on scrap paper. The narcotically meditative scent of the camphor-based black ink filled the room like incense. Patrick looked over at Yumi who was sitting on the floor absorbed in her practice and smiled to himself. When she sat this way she was the model of fluid grace, but when she sat in a chair, she would cross her legs and arms and suddenly turn into human origami. A sense of peace and fulfillment came over him until the assassinations at the stadium once again intruded into his consciousness. He found his brush almost guided to the character for “crisis.” He dipped his brush into the suzuri inkwell and compulsively drew the character over and over for a full fifteen minutes. At seven o’clock, he glanced at the clock on the wall and stood.

  “I told Yasuhara Roshi [roshi is an honorific title reserved for a thoroughly accomplished Zen master] that I’d drop by. Do you want to bring Dae-ho and come with me?”

  “That’s okay, you go ahead,” she said. “There’s something I need to look for, and it’s easier to find things when you’re not in the way.” He smiled at her and brought his head down. She looked up and they kissed…chastely for now, for Dae-ho was watching them. Maybe later when the boy was sound asleep.

  “I’ll leave you to your search, then,” he said as he went out the door, smiling at her as he left. “I love you,” he added quietly.

  “Me too,” Yumi said. He smiled at her but crimped his lips in dismay over the fact that she didn’t also use the words “I love you” and hadn’t since before he had broken off their engagement several years earlier.

  CHAPTER 6

  Toyama Storage

  Yokohama

  As Patrick was getting ready to pay a visit to his Zen teacher, the privileged North Korean Bonghwajo youths from Pyonghattan were hurriedly summoned from their upstairs rooms at the incognito corpse hotel in Yokohama.

  “Everyone assemble in the viewing room!” Mr. Pung shouted from the bottom of the stairs. His voice had taken on an added layer of resonance after his shooting of the two security officials at the Olympic stadium.

  Immediately after the last of the Bonghwajo had taken their places in front of Comrade Moon’s coffin, the front door of Toyama Storage opened and Mr. Lee barreled in as quickly as a man with a limp could be said to barrel. A few of the North Korean youths discreetly looked down at his feet, not having realized that the leader of Chosun Restoration had a disability. At their initiation ritual a few days earlier he had already been seated at his place. Now, with the youths assembled around him, Lee’s penetrating gaze took in each boy in turn. Then he abruptly turned his back to them.

  “What does the year 1923 mean to you?” he demanded. The youths looked at each other in puzzlement. Lee wheeled around and glared at them. “What? Nothing?”

  After an excruciating minute of silence, one of the boys timidly raised his hand. Lee lifted his chin.

  “The Great Kanto Earthquake, sir?”

  Lee nodded vigorously. “Exactly! And what happened then?”

  Several of the other Bonghwajo began to breathe normally. They were now on familiar ground, for they had been told this story since they were young children. A different boy raised his hand, this time with full confidence. Lee recognized him with another upward jut of his chin.

  “The Japanese murdered six thousand Korean people, sir.”

  “Correct!” Lee shouted. “And why did they murder our people?”

  The boys were now in open competition to be recognized. Lee pointed at the one at the far end of the assemblage.

  “They claimed that our people had poisoned their wells, sir.”

  “Correct! And who was behind these murders?”

  “The Japanese army, sir,” several boys shouted in unison.

  “Correct! And where are the ashes of these murderers interred?”

  All twelve boys were now vying to outdo each other as they answered Mr. Lee’s rapid-fire questions.

  “And who are the military descendants of these murderers?”

  The sinister Socratic dialogue went on for several more minutes, at the end of which Lee announced that a reinforcement cohort of ninety-four members would be arriving in two days from the DPRK. But the advance guard of a dozen Bonghwajo assembled on this night would have the honor of drawing first blood. Tomorrow.

  Later that evening Mr. Pung chose six of the twelve and told them to prepare for their missions. The following day they would have the opportunity to prove themselves on the field of battle. All of the youths held Pung in the highest esteem, both for the double assassination he had carried out at the Olympic stadium and for his impeccably sinister background, which they had learned about when they were recruited into Chosun Restoration….

  An only child, Pung was actually born in Osaka in 1970 of North Korean parents. His father died of alcoholism when he was still a young boy, and his widowed mother raised him as best she could with her meager earnings as a seamstress. He was a dutiful son whose devotion to his mother was commented on favorably by the neighbors, but his peers at school thought him a mama’s boy and ostracized him. Growing up friendless is traumatic for any young child, but especially so in Japan where one’s position in a group determines the better part of one’s identity: no group, no self. Especially for an ethnic Korean.

  When he was thirteen he began associating with a gang of fellow young Koreans who rejected the Japanese society that had rejected them first and embraced Kim Il-sung of North Korea as their heroic surrogate father figure. At the age of sixteen he broke his mother’s heart by dropping out of school and moving out of the house. He found lodging with a few of the older Koreans who had a cramped apartment in the seedy Juso section of Osaka. They didn’t
charge Pung any rent at first, but he earned his keep by joining the others on their all-night excursions in the back alleys of Osaka where they would transport small quantities of methamphetamine to different parts of the city. They would sleep all day at the apartment and then smoke the bingu for the night’s work ahead.

  Seeing potential in the young recruit, the head of a local yakuza family with ties to North Korea challenged him to make his bones and join the family by taking out a wakagashira, or first lieutenant, in a rival family. He gave Pung a pistol for the job, but Pung, showing an early flair for the dramatic, opted instead for a switchblade which he purposely left at the scene so that his fingerprints could be recovered and his reputation assured. Since he was only sixteen at the time, he was given a four-year sentence followed by probation. But by the end of his hard time, he had attracted the attention of the talent scouts of Bureau 39 and had been persuaded to come live in the land of his ancestors. Before not too many years he became Comrade Moon’s right-hand man and main enforcer in the drug trade.

  For the first mission of Chosun Restoration involving the Bonghwajo youths, Pung divided the six selected Bonghwajo into two teams of three each to escalate the Phase One attacks that he had begun with the double assassination at the Olympic stadium. The remaining six members would keep a low profile at the corpse hotel, planning the next attacks. The Phase One attacks were specifically aimed at military personnel, and to that end, he would take his six young charges to an area outside of Tokyo where they would hone their shooting skills in preparation for two simultaneous attacks later in the week. All of the young men had had training in firearms as members of the Sarochong, or Party Youth, in North Korea, so the shooting drills they would engage in in the forest would just be a tune-up. Theoretically.

  CHAPTER 7

  As Patrick got ready to leave for his visit to his Zen teacher, his mind wandered back to when Yumi had last said the words “I love you” to him…