Joy Brigade (28 page)

It took us the better part of that day and into the late evening to make it back to the first guard post surrounding the Manchurian Battalion. I’d lost a lot of blood. All I remember is being carried by stretcher up a steep pathway. Then I passed out.

Il-yong sat on the floor next to me, playing with a ball of yarn. Doc Yong squatted next to my bedding, holding my scribbled notes in her hand.

“I can make out some of the numbers,” she told me, “and some of the words, but do you think you’re well enough to decipher it now?”

I held the paper unsteadily in my hand, staring at it. My eyes wouldn’t focus.

“Never mind,” she said, taking it from me. “We’ll try again after you rest.”

In the distance, an artillery round boomed.

“They’re getting closer,” I said.

“Never mind. You rest now.”

I did.

It had only been a shard of rock that hit my leg, kicked up by the round fired by the sniper. Fortunately, an artery hadn’t been severed, and what with antibiotics and the bandages being replaced regularly by Doc Yong, I felt alert by the next day.

The artillery rounds now fired almost every minute. I rewrote the entire order of battle, explaining it to Doc Yong as I did so. She seemed worried.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “This should help us.”

“Yes.” She nodded. “But the Red Star Brigade has made quicker progress than we hoped. Most of these places,” she said, pointing at the slip of paper, “have already been overrun.”

Nevertheless, she took the newly reprinted order of battle with her and told me she’d be back. While she was gone, I slipped into my clothes. Il-yong looked up at me and gurgled—as if he knew more than I did.

I was ushered into Bandit Lee’s presence. He wasted no time.

“We need ammunition,” he said.

I sat before him on a simple wooden chair, Doc Yong next to me.

“You must enter the tunnel,” Bandit Lee told me. “Our good Doctor Yong In-ja has memorized every word of the ancient manuscript. She will be your guide. It will be very dangerous. You might die. But if you survive, you must ask the Americans for resupply: ammunition, medicine, food. We will accept that from them, but we will accept nothing from the Japanese collaborators.”

To Bandit Lee, the Japanese collaborators were the colonels and generals, including President Park Chung-hee, who now ran the South Korean government. In fact, many of them had been young officers in the army of the emperor when the Japanese had ruled Korea. Bandit Lee might have been engaged in a deadly competition with the Dear Leader, the son who would replace his former comrade, Kim Il-sung, but he was mortal enemies with the men who ran South Korea. Americans, although enemies in the past, could be negotiated with.

“I have allies throughout the country. They are silent now, and afraid to act, but if the Americans help us, they will rise up and support the Manchurian Battalion. We will take over this government and a peace treaty will be signed. We will renounce Soviet-style communism and create a democratic socialist government with free elections. Then we will cooperate with the Western world. But only if you help us now, in our hour of need. That is your mission. You must convince the Americans to help us, or die trying.”

I bowed to the inevitable. He ordered us to depart within the hour.

As Doc Yong and I stood to leave, artillery roared in the distance. Units of the Manchurian Battalion were already on the attack, assaulting elements of the Red Star Brigade in the lowlands before they could fully deploy.

The entrance to the cave on the side of Mount O-song was well hidden. “This is why it has remained intact so long,” Doc Yong told me.

We had to climb for an hour to reach it and even then it was concealed by a rocky overhang no sane person would have any reason to explore. But the ancient manuscript, the one Doc Yong had memorized, gave exact directions to the cave.

Crawling flat on our bellies, we entered. I carried the heavier backpack, with a full day’s ration of beef jerky and my favorite traveling food,
ddok
. Doc Yong and I each held a flashlight and I had two spares in my pack, along with spare batteries and extra clothing wrapped in plastic. We didn’t carry water. According to the manuscript, there’d be plenty. Maybe too much. Doc Yong carried the most precious cargo strapped to her back: our son.

He was quiet as we entered the cave, his eyes wide, studying everything. Doc Yong and I also had claw hammers, looped metal nails, and ropes tied to the front of our chests.

We had left the compound of the Manchurian Battalion alone, no escort. Bandit Lee wanted the secret of the tunnel held closely.

The first part of the tunnel was fairly easygoing. It was about four feet high, sloped downward gently, and by crouching and watching our footing, we descended what I estimated to be a couple hundred feet. At the bottom, we had to scale a ten-foot-high cliff, crawl across shale, and then slide through an opening that was filled with a universe of freezing air. Doc Yong stopped and pulled out an extra blanket to cover Il-yong and ordered that we both slip on canvas coats we’d brought along. When we were warmed, I aimed the flashlight at the opening beyond.

It was a vast cathedral, with twenty-foot stalactites and stalagmites projecting like dragon’s teeth. It was so vast that the light didn’t reach the far end. We sat quietly for a moment. In the distance something rumbled, like the voice of a giant.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The underground river.” Looking worried, she adjusted Il-yong on her back.

“Will we have to cross it?”

“We’ll only be in the water for a short distance. We will have to swim. That’s why we brought the extra clothing wrapped in plastic.”

Doc Yong was a brilliant woman who’d risen from poverty in South Korea to become a medical doctor by dint of her quick thinking and ability to anticipate all possible scenarios. I had no doubt that she’d thought of everything we’d need.

I rose to my feet and held out my hand to help her to stand. I lifted the edge of the blanket and kissed Il-yong on the forehead. He gurgled with delight. Still holding hands, we started across the floor of the cathedral.

The river was more formidable than I imagined.

“The runoff is greater than described in the manuscript.” Doc Yong played the beam of her flashlight over the rushing waters. “The wild man and his pursuers must’ve come when the flow wasn’t as violent.”

I imagined they had. This river was a raging torrent. There was no way I was going to allow Doc Yong and Il-yong to enter it. I’d rather face the wrath of the Red Star Brigade artillery than face this.

We searched along the rocky shore, looking for a narrow spot to cross.

Finally, the river disappeared into a tunnel.

“Here,” Doc Yong said. “This is where we must enter.”

“What do you mean?”

“You assumed that we’d cross. I never said that.”

“If we don’t cross it, then what will we do?”

“We dive in here, as the wild man did when he was being pursued.”

“Dive in? Are you out of your mind?”

“I’m not out of my mind,” she snapped. “We must reach the Americans in the South. You’ve seen the Manchurian Battalion, you’ve seen how desperate we are. You’ve seen that we are willing to lay our lives on the line to oppose the tyrant who has taken over our country. Only you can testify to what you’ve witnessed. Only you can convince the Americans to send us ammunition. To send us what we need to fight and to win. If we don’t go now, the people of the Manchurian Battalion will perish.”

“If we go now, we all might perish.”

“Maybe.”

I swiveled on her. “What do you owe them?”

“Everything. My education. My life.”

“Your parents were members of the Manchurian Battalion,” I said.

“Yes. But what difference does all that make now? If we turn back, without American assistance, we will die anyway.”

I wasn’t so sure of that. When the fighting broke out, I thought there might be enough confusion for Doc Yong and me to slip south with our son, and with luck, make our way across the minefields of the Demilitarized Zone. If I could just reach one South Korean patrol, we’d be safe.

I was about to tell her all this, to reveal my plan, when somewhere behind us rocks clattered. We turned. From her belt beneath her jacket, Doc Yong pulled out a Russian-made pistol. Without hesitation, she fired into the darkness.

“Come on,” she said, and pulled me to shelter.

The voice that emerged from the darkness was that of Senior Captain Rhee Mi-sook.

“Where are you running away to?” she asked in Korean. “Why are you so anxious to leave your homeland behind? Have you no loyalty?”

Crouching behind rock, Doc Yong clutched my arm. “Did you tell her about this tunnel?”

I lowered my eyes. “I started to. They were torturing Moon Chaser.”

She nodded solemnly and then tilted my head back up
with her hand and stared into my eyes. “There was something between you two, wasn’t there? That’s why you were naked.”

“I had no choice.”

I expected her to be angry and she was, but not at me. “She’s notorious. And now she follows us down here. But not for her country.”

“She’s a North Korean officer.”

“Yes. But she never does anything for her country. Not if she can help it.”

“Then why did she follow us?”

“Because she wants to escape too.”

“Into South Korea?”

“Yes. Or better yet, America. She will use you. Do you understand that?”

I did. There was no need for her to tell me.

“And she will kill me. Do you understand that too?”

“I won’t let it happen,” I said, suddenly angry.

“And,” she said, gesturing toward Il-yong, “she will get rid of him.”

“Never,” I promised. “Not while I’m breathing.”

“Neither one of us will be breathing, once she knows the way out of here.”

“Surrender, Captain Rhee shouted, “or we will attack!”

Armed men scurried from boulder to boulder.

“They will take us,” Doc Yong said. “We must swim. Now!”

“Right,” I said. “I’ll take the boy.”

Doc Yong hesitated but quickly realized that I was the stronger swimmer. She untied Il-yong from her back and strapped him to me, spread-eagle, facing my chest.

“Keep his head above water,” she said.

“Okay.”

“You go first. I will cover you.” She still held the pistol.

I slipped down behind rock to the edge of the water. It was freezing. Quickly, we rubbed black grease on our faces, arms, and the lower calves beneath our pants. Doc Yong gently slathered Il-yong’s face and arms and hands. We should’ve covered our entire bodies but there wasn’t time.

A rifle shot pinged above us. We crouched. She kissed Il-yong and then shoved me forward into the water.

The shock of the cold sucked all breath out of me. It had the same effect on Il-yong. He leaned away from me as far as he could, his eyes wide open, but he didn’t cry. There wasn’t enough air left in his lungs for him to cry. I floated on my back, keeping Il-yong’s head above water, the current carrying me quickly toward the tunnel. Another shot rang out, water splashed as we entered enveloping darkness. Safety. But now I was worried about the stone ceiling above me. Only about three feet of clearance, then two, and now one. Suddenly I realized that the entire tunnel was flooded. There would be no air. We would drown. But the current was much too strong for me to resist. I’d never manage to swim back. I focused on what Doc Yong had told me. The tunnel stretched for maybe fifty yards, and I’d already covered half that distance. Once we were underwater, if we could just hold our breath long enough to traverse the rest of the distance, we might survive. Before I could think about it further, my skull bumped rock, I took my last long breath and went under.

Il-yong squirmed in panic. I craned my neck and pulled
him up and placed my mouth on his. Gently, I breathed air into his lungs. He sputtered and coughed but then came back for more. We were still drifting downstream but not fast enough. I started grabbing rock outcrops above me to pull myself along. Il-yong wanted more air. I kept hoping that we’d reach the end of this tunnel any second, but when I realized that we wouldn’t, I bent forward and tried to blow more air into his mouth. It didn’t work. He was squirming now in total panic. The last of my air escaped upward and bubbled away. I clawed forward—cursing the people who’d written that ancient manuscript, cursing Il-yong’s mother for taking me down here, cursing Eighth Army for sending me to North Korea—and then finally, grasping forward for the next handhold, I missed. No rock. I panicked, but then I realized that there was nothing left to grasp. The tunnel had ended.