Joy Brigade (20 page)

“Abboji,”
she said. Father. “We must go.”

When she received no response, she reached down and grabbed him by the lapels of his tunic. “The car,” she said. “Now. You must go. And take him,” she said, motioning toward me. “Now, Father. Now!”

Hero Kang seemed stunned, confused by what he’d just done. “What about him?” He glanced down at the spitting and coughing Commissar Oh.

I realized that the other men, the commissar’s lackeys, had disappeared. Sensing more trouble than they ever wanted to be involved with, they’d all faded discreetly into the night. We were alone.

“You’ve ruined everything!” Hye-kyong screamed. “I was to stay here, monitor their plans. Now that’s not possible. First, you go! I will follow.” When Hero Kang hesitated, she said, “I will take care of him. Leave him to me.”

Befuddled, Hero Kang seemed to agree. “You must come,” he said.

“Yes,” Hye-kyong agreed. “This changes everything. Go to the car. I will follow. Go now.”

She turned her father around and shoved him hard. Like an enormous child, Hero Kang stumbled down the walkway, returning toward the entrance of the First Corps headquarters. I glanced at Hye-kyong. She motioned for me to follow her father.

As I hurried along the flagstone walkway, I glanced backward. Hye-kyong had lifted Commissar Oh slightly out of the water. She slapped him. Hard. The noise reverberated through the deserted garden.

Hero Kang and I wound through shrubs. When I looked back again, Hye-kyong was leaning over the edge
of the fountain, facing down, like a woman at a stream churning laundry. As if she were soaking soiled rags, expunging them of filth. She stood like that for what seemed a long time.

9

A
lthough, just moments before, the corridors of the First Corps office complex had been teeming with life, now they were deserted. Word must’ve spread like fire in a rice granary: trouble in the headquarters. People of great power were fighting, flinging lightning bolts like gods on Mount Olympus, and mere mortals had to flee for their lives.

Hero Kang’s footsteps pounded down the tile hallway. I kept looking back, hoping that Hye-kyong would appear. She didn’t. In front of the headquarters, the black sedan sat undisturbed. The guards had disappeared, except for one who crouched in his open-windowed shack. Hero Kang clambered behind the wheel of the sedan and started the engine. I opened the passenger side door but hesitated.

“Where is she?” he asked.

“Not here yet,” I replied.

Hero Kang gunned the engine impatiently.

He was just about to reenter the building when footsteps clattered down the long corridor. Hye-kyong appeared, hopping down the stone steps, the sleeves of her uniform sopping wet, tears running down her cheeks. There was no time to talk. I opened the back door and she dove in. I climbed into the passenger seat and then we were off with a great lurching and grinding of gears.

There wasn’t much internal security in North Korea, not of the type we’re used to in the modern world. Not the type that responds to emergencies if someone is hurt or feels threatened, or the type that stands guard at the front gate of a government building. At first I wondered why. Gradually it dawned on me that the small trappings of security in the West were mainly there to protect people: the government worker from a terrorist attack, the average citizen from assault by a burglar, the middle-aged man from the threat of a heart attack. Those things weren’t deemed necessary in the People’s Republic. The entire country, in a very real sense, was a prison. Everyone was assigned a workplace or a place of study, and once the prisoners were securely locked away—and spies were in place to make sure they didn’t plot against the Great Leader—they were otherwise ignored.

Hero Kang rolled onto the wide expanse of the central road leading past the Great Monument to the Victory of the People Against Foreign Imperialists. The statue of striving workers and farmers and soldiers holding up hammers and sickles and Kalashnikov rifles was as brightly lit as the red carpet at a Hollywood premiere, but the street
was deserted. We zipped past, no one commenting on the waste of electricity.

Hye-kyong cried softly in the backseat. Hero Kang gripped the wooden steering wheel as if he were trying to strangle it.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

Although it was cold inside the car, sweat poured down Hero Kang’s big forehead.

“Which brigade is it?” he asked. At first I didn’t understand the question, so he repeated it. “Which brigade has been assigned to attack the Manchurian Battalion?”

“The Red Star Brigade,” I said.

He grinned. “I thought so. That son-of-a-bitch Yim has been chosen to betray his own people. A good man for it.”

I remembered the name in the material I’d reviewed in the secure briefing room: Brigadier General Yim On-pong, Commander of the Red Star Brigade. “You know him?”

“I know him. The bastard would sell his own daughter if it would earn him a promotion.”

And then Hero Kang realized his poor choice of words. I turned. Tears flowed down Hye-kyong’s face. We drove in silence. I watched Hero Kang’s tortured features, listened to Hye-kyong’s sniffling, and faced forward to watch the road for signs of trouble.

At dawn we ran out of gas.

As we had rolled through the countryside, there had been no roadblocks. Hero Kang explained to me that they wouldn’t bother. Word would just be sent out from
Pyongyang to the commanders in the field and the provincial police forces to keep an eye out for us and arrest us on the spot. They would wait for us to fall into their net. He went on to verify what I’d already surmised: A rapid response force, standing by armed and ready to do someone’s bidding, was not an institution that the Great Leader trusted. Armed men sitting around with nothing to do would inevitably turn their thoughts to sedition. Besides, nothing was a true emergency in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—except, of course, a threat to the Great Leader. Everything else could wait.

Hero Kang and I climbed out of the sedan and pushed while Hye-kyong—now admirably recovered from last night’s trauma—steered the car into the central road of a small farming commune. Although the sun was just coming up, work teams had already marched far out into the fields, carrying hoes and rakes balanced on their shoulders. Doors remained shut. Not only did no one come out to greet us, no one so much as peeked out a window.

“They’re frightened,” Hero Kang said. “Of such a big car. Of men in uniform.”

“And of a foreigner,” I said.

“Especially of that.”

Past the main buildings of the commune, the dirt road veered right and ran sharply downhill. Hero Kang and I stepped back and Hye-kyong steered around a bend into a narrow valley that held an old straw-thatched animal pen, except there were no animals inside. Momentum carried her halfway into the front entrance, and when we caught up, Hero Kang and I pushed her all the way inside the pen. After Hye-kyong climbed out of the car, we grabbed
pitchforks and tossed straw over the black sedan until it was mostly covered.

“You planned this,” I said.

Hero Kang’s eyes widened. “Of course. Everything’s been planned.”

I paused for a moment, studying his face. He was happy tossing the straw over the car, happy having something definite to do.

“You didn’t plan to attack Commissar Oh,” I said.

Hero Kang tossed his pitchfork into a pile of straw. “No. That came upon me suddenly.” He pulled a ring of keys out of his pocket and shuffled through them until he found the correct one, which he used to pop open the trunk of the old Russian sedan. Inside sat a wooden crate, next to it a crow bar. He pried the crate open and pulled out the equipment inside.

My breath caught involuntarily. I recognized it from my training. A Soviet-made RPG, a rocket-propelled grenade with a high explosive projectile.

“What are we going to use that for?” I asked.

Hero Kang grinned, hoisting the weapon to his shoulder. “To stop the Red Star Brigade,” he said.

Hye-kyong reached inside the trunk and pulled out two canvas satchels. One she strapped over her shoulder, the other she handed to me. It was heavy. Additional projectiles. Then she took the keys out of her father’s hand, relocked the trunk, and finished covering the car with straw.

Five minutes later, we were marching along a narrow dirt path through a pear orchard.

We spent the night in the open, shivering and squatting next to one another for warmth. Before dawn, we were up and walking again.

“We must stay on the ridgelines,” Hero Kang told me. “Away from the cultivated valleys. Unfortunately, the Red Star Brigade is stationed the farthest away from Pyongyang. In about thirty
li
we should be there.”

Thirty
li
, or about fifteen miles.

By midafternoon we lay atop a hill looking down on a military compound, which was surrounded by a wooden fence topped with concertina wire. A few trucks and armored vehicles were lined up near sheds, as if awaiting maintenance. Still, there wasn’t as much activity as I would’ve expected for a unit preparing to move out within hours, heading toward the eastern coast of the Korean peninsula.

“They haven’t received their petroleum yet,” Hero Kang told me.

Hye-kyong said, “Do you remember the part of the briefing about fuel requirements?”

“Yes,” I said. “That was the most boring part. Very precise calculations of how many kilometers per liter each type of vehicle could receive; how many kilometers to Hamhung; how many kilometers from there, by the various routes, to Beikyang. And then calculations on how many more kilometers it would be up the slopes of Mount O-song.”

“They want to issue just enough diesel fuel,” she replied, “to allow the Red Star Brigade to reach a refueling point outside Hamhung.”

“The shortage of fuel is that great?” I asked.

During my briefings in Seoul, I’d been told that the
Soviet Union was generous in providing the North Korean military with petroleum products.

“It’s not a shortage,” Hero Kang told me. “It’s part of the method of control. The Great Leader keeps each military commander on the shortest of leashes as far as how much ammunition he is provided and how much fuel he is allowed to move his unit throughout the country. He doesn’t want any commander getting any ideas about overthrowing the government.”

“As an additional precaution,” Hye-kyong chimed in, “their families, including their wives and children, are housed in Pyongyang, supposedly for the better schooling and more luxurious lifestyle. But actually they’re held as hostages so the commander doesn’t get out of line.”

“In Yim’s case,” Hero Kang added, “they even keep his mistress in Pyongyang.”

Hye-kyong turned her face as if stung.

Once again, Hero Kang realized his mistake. He clenched the binoculars he held in his hand so tightly I thought they might bust. Abruptly, he shoved them back up to his eyes and studied the compound below.

After a few minutes, in a timorous voice, Hye-kyong said, “The diesel fuel delivery will come through that pass. We must attack them there.”

“Us?” I asked.