Hunt the Dragon (22 page)

“Dawkins?”

“Yes.”

He saw a gray wolf staring at him. He stared back. It licked his face.

He sat leaning against something. Someone was running a wet cloth over his forehead. He opened his eyes and tried to focus.

A man said, “See if you can get more water in him. Then feed him some rice.”

“I'll try.”

He sat alone in a boat on a lake. Someone was calling him from a distance. He heard his voice skip over the water. A light blinded his eyes.

A candle was burning. In the glow he saw Sam's face. He was sitting up next to an Asian boy who was holding a red plastic rectangular device that looked like a Game Boy. The boy pushed the buttons at the bottom of the screen and the device made funny noises.

A wave of information hit his brain at once, causing his head to hurt. “Sam?”

“Yeah, boss. How you feel?”

“Better, I think. Where are we?”

“We're safe for the time being.” Sam pointed. “In that plastic bag in front of you is a bottle of water and a plate of food.”

“Yeah?”

“We got some into you earlier, but you need more.”

He untied the knot in the plastic bag, removed the bowl of rice and chopsticks, and started to shovel food into his mouth. When he took a long drink of water, his stomach felt like it was going to burst.

“Slow is better,” Sam said. He crinkled his eyes and then returned them to the little screen. Crocker thought he hadn't seen him looking this happy and healthy in a long time.

“How's your ankle?”

“Hee cleaned it up and rebandaged it. She gave me some ginseng and herbs to battle the infection.”

“Who's Hee?”

“Dang's wife. He's the guy who owns this little plot of land. He's away now working at a farming cooperative up the road. He and his son, Ju, found us yesterday.”

Crocker shoveled more rice into his mouth. “Where are we exactly?”

“About eighteen miles south of Wonsan, still in North Korea.”

It started to come back to him, the mission, the SDV, the crash. “How far are we from the border?”

“Somewhere between forty and fifty miles. We did good.”

“Akil and Dawkins okay?”

“They're in the main house helping Ju's sister with something.”

“How sure are you that we can trust these people?”

“About sixty percent. They're real nice, and they've been hospitable, but Dang confided to me that if we're still here when the soldiers come around, he'll have to report us. Otherwise they'll kill him and his family.”

“How likely is that to happen?'

“He said patrols come through here at least once a week. Sometimes as many as three times. It depends.”

“On what?”

“Rumors. Reports.”

Crocker finished the bowl of rice and fish and set it aside, then took another long gulp of water.

“How long have we been here?” he asked.

“A day, more or less.”

“We'd better leave soon.”

“You're probably right.”

The next night Crocker presented Dang with forty of the hundred dollars he kept in the sole of his boot. The four Americans thanked him and his family, and set off through a field of new wheat with the moon over their shoulders.

Dang had advised them to move farther inland and avoid the coast, which he said was more heavily patrolled. The KPN was constantly on the lookout for South Korean naval vessels and North Korean refugees escaping south. For that reason, the prospect of the Americans commandeering another boat and reaching South Korea by sea wasn't good. Furthermore, as Dang explained, the currents along this part of the coast were particularly strong and the waves high, because they were no longer in the bay.

So they walked slowly in single file, Sam for the time being hobbling on crutches Akil had made for him. Dang had also supplied them with a piece of canvas tarp that they could use as a makeshift stretcher when Sam got tired. Each man carried a plastic bag containing more plastic bags filled with rice and pickled fish, a large bottle of water, and something Dang had called
doraji
, which was bellflower root brined in vinegar.

It felt good to have a calm, full stomach and to be moving again. For these two things, Crocker was enormously grateful to Dang and his family. They were another example of a phenomenon he had experienced in war-torn parts of Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. In all of those places, he had come across generous, decent people who had no allegiance in the local conflict and whose basic humanity trumped religious, cultural, and political differences.

Now, as he walked, he asked God to bless them with abundance, happiness, and health.

T
hey had
camped in a thicket at the base of a hill and slept for several hours. As the sun started to rise, they were attacked by swarms of flies and mosquitoes, and a very foul smell that blew in from the west. Despite the discomfort, Crocker determined that it was too dangerous to move. Not until he scouted the area. So while Dawkins, Sam, and Akil covered themselves with the blankets and tarp and tried to rest, he set out alone.

It was an overcast spring day of moderate temperature with long streaks of gray in the sky—some dark, others taking on an almost lavender hue. The sweet smell of wildflowers and new leaves was blotted out by thick, disgusting rot whenever the wind blew. It caught in Crocker's throat as he peered from behind bushes to look for signs of human life. Saw no houses, roads, or farms to the south or west. His view north and east was hindered by tall trees two hundred meters away.

Using whatever he could find for cover, he picked his way west to the base of a hill covered with the same red pines they had seen on the peninsula. The hill rose several hundred meters, with a rough, rocky base and no trails or roads leading upward.

As he used a branch to pull himself up, two jets ripped through the sky. He traced their dark profiles under the layers of cloud.

MiGs of some sort,
he thought.
Ridiculous fucking country
.

Dang had explained that while the government spent most of its money on its million-man army, navy, and air force, a sizable segment of the estimated twenty-million-strong population was starving. He, his wife, and son were lucky, Dang said, because not only did he earn a modest salary as assistant manager of the local government farming cooperative, but they also grew crops of their own on their little plot of land. Especially in the northern part of the country, thousands of adults and children died each year from malnutrition. Thousands of others succumbed to dehydration and dysentery, which they got from eating roots, leaves, or cobs of unripe corn.

Sick,
Crocker thought as he climbed three-quarters of the way up and started to circle south.
Isn't the first responsibility of any country to take care of its people? Sure, protecting them is important, but what's the point of protecting them if they're starving to death?

On the south side of the hill, the stench was stronger. Past the branches of some pines, he saw what looked like the tin roof of a guard tower below. He stopped, gathered himself, and, carefully proceeded west to a gap in the trees that afforded a better view.

What he saw took his breath away—a field stretching as far south as he could see, surrounded by a fifty-foot-high fence topped with barbed wire and guard towers. Scattered willy-nilly within the fences were very primitive lean-tos made from sheet metal and wood, and rusting shipping containers. Along the west fence stood a long warehouse-like structure with four large smokestacks emitting thick black smoke. Stacked at the far end were pyramids of tires.

When he looked closer, he saw that the men, women, and children carrying tires out of the plant were sticklike figures, so emaciated and gaunt that it was surprising they could even move, let alone lift or push anything.

Anger rose from the pit of his stomach. When he focused on the field of refuse that took up most of the camp, he was even more repulsed. Lying on the ground like clumps of garbage were people of all ages who appeared too weak to stand. Some had covered themselves with scraps of cardboard, paper, and wood.

Crocker was clenching his jaw so hard his teeth started to hurt.

How can people justify doing this kind of shit to one another? This is as evil as the most depraved images I've seen of the Nazi holocaust, and it exists today!

He wanted to do something—tear the fences down, or shout to the world about the camp's existence. All he could do in the present was shake his head and ask,
What the hell is wrong with mankind?

He had decided not to tell the others, so as not to dampen their spirits further. In fact, he wasn't sure what to do with the information as he sat on his haunches between Dawkins and Akil, eating rice and sipping water, and thinking about home, and government, and why it was important not to vest power in any one party or individual. The founding fathers had gotten that right. You couldn't trust anyone who wanted control over others.

Maybe the impulse itself was wrong. He felt a jittery uncertainty gnaw at the edges of his stomach as the sky turned dark and rain started to fall. What was a person's responsibility when confronted with unthinkable evil like the one he had just seen? The answer involved some strange moral calculus that he couldn't grasp in his current state. He had excuses—his responsibility to the men on his team, the fact that they were wanted men in an enemy country, their weakened condition and limited options. But none of them quieted his conscience, which twitched with outrage.

At least the rain diminished the smell as they packed their few belongings and continued south, across a field of knee-high corn and into the shrubbery along a ribbon of water. Frogs croaked, reminding him of summer. He and his brother loved catching fireflies. His brother had gone from precocious kid to long-haired drug dealer and user to responsible businessman and father.
What is he doing now? What would he think of the camp I saw earlier? Would he tell me that as an American it wasn't any of my business? If he said that, he'd be fucking wrong!

A light appeared in the distance and he stopped, knelt, and pumped his arm up and down to indicate to the others to drop, too. He heard gears grinding. In a field, a truck turned so that its lights faced northwest and stopped. The echo of men shouting reached their ears.

“You think they're looking for us?” asked Dawkins at his elbow.

The rain hissed and splattered. He wiped the water from his brow and saw another truck approach and park parallel to the other one. The second truck appeared to be pulling a trailer. Both trucks left their headlights on and engines running.

“Don't know.”

Men moved in front of the lights, casting shadows. He remembered Akil's SIG Sauer, which he now carried tucked into a rope around his waist, and the fact that the mag in it had only six rounds.

“What should we do?” Dawkins asked with fear creeping into his voice.

He waited a minute to see if more trucks and soldiers would arrive. They didn't. Thirty feet ahead, in the middle of the field, stood a mound of earth the size of a small car. Atop it was a dying tree, and surrounding it was dense foliage.

“Let's hide over there,” Crocker whispered.

They hurried low to the ground. The trucks hadn't moved, and the figures remained clustered around them. From where Crocker and company now waited, there was no cover to the south, only a fallow field of weeds and wildflowers that stretched half a mile.

“We'll wait here until they leave,” Crocker whispered to the men huddled around him. Sam's faced appeared twisted in pain. Crocker removed the last two aspirin from the vial Dang had given them.

“Take these.”

“I'll be fine.”

“Take one, at least.”

Akil tilted the bottle of water and helped Sam wash it down.

“While we're here and it's raining, we should capture more water in the tarp and pans. You guys stay low and cover yourselves with the Kevlar. I'm gonna to try to find out what's going on with the trucks.”

“Boss, maybe that's not so smart.”

Akil's words glanced off Crocker's back as he hurried west. When he closed within a hundred meters of the trucks, he stopped and squatted in a row of new corn. The headlights shone almost directly in his eyes. Squinting, he saw figures standing near the front of the first truck and what looked like shorter, thinner people unloading objects from the backs of the vehicles.

What the hell are they doing?

He continued another fifty meters, then pushed south in a long, wide arc until he reached a row of bushes. Here the thick smell of human decay entered his nose and throat again, and he thought for a moment he'd be sick. It was a smell he'd experienced before but never gotten used to—like the reek of a putrefying animal, only a hundred times worse.

From this vantage, perpendicular to the trucks, he saw frail, gaunt figures—short, like teenage boys and girls—unloading naked bodies and carrying or dragging them to what appeared to be a long trench. He counted twenty teenagers in rags, and as he did, his whole body started to burn with rage. He couldn't even begin to count the number of bodies, because the trucks were large, and stacked high.

Sick, evil fucks…

From here he couldn't determine the number of guards and drivers, so he continued west, past the front of the vehicles. Now he made out several uniformed guards standing beside the farther truck—the one without the trailer—holding AK-47s. One guard was wearing a rain poncho with a hood and had a cigarette clenched in his teeth.

As one of the teenagers passed him, dragging a corpse, the guard kicked the kid in the back so that he stumbled, let go of the body, and fell into the trench. The uniformed man threw his head back and issued a shrill, high laugh that hit Crocker in the face like a Mike Tyson uppercut.

His anger sent him scurrying closer on his hands and knees. The teenagers moved past like zombies, their knees, ribs, and cheekbones sticking out at sharp angles, while the guards with the guns made comments and cracked jokes.

Outrage, disgust, fury, and the conviction that someone had to pay for this motivated him to return the way he had come until he reached the back of the trailerless truck. Waiting until the coast was clear, then scooting under the rear axle, he removed the suppressor from his belt and screwed it into the barrel of the SIG Sauer thinking that his colleagues were far enough away to escape should something happen to him.

Crocker slowly crawled forward, located the legs of the guard wearing the poncho, and came up slowly. He was so close he could hear the guard clearing this throat, then spitting at the back of one of the teenagers.

The girl turned to face the guard. That's when Crocker rose, aimed, and put a bullet in the base of the guard's skull just below the green helmet. His head exploded and he fell forward, the sound drowned out by the noise of the engines. No one seemed to notice. Not even the girl, who turned away with dead eyes and continued pushing the body toward the trench.

The kids did their grim work silently. The rain hissed. Steam rose from the headlights to Crocker's right.

Five more rounds
.

He cut down the second guard with a shot between his shoulder blades that tore through his heart.

Four.

The driver of the truck saw the guard slump and leaned out of the cab to see what was going on. Crocker sprang out from under the truck and yanked the driver's leg out from under him so he slipped and hit his head on the metal step. Finished him off with a swipe of his knife across his throat.

Thunder rolled in from the north like a reproach.

Two guards down, one driver.

He skirted around the front of the trailerless truck low to the ground, wet from head to toe, forgetting the smell, where he was, everything except the task in front of him. Crouched near the right front bumper, he saw the back of another guard, his AK propped on his shoulder. Crocker rose, aimed, and squeezed the trigger in one continuous motion.

The bullet entered under the guard's chin and clanged as it hit the top of his helmet. Almost immediately another uniformed man at the front of the second truck lowered his AK and fired. The first shot tore through Crocker's left shoulder and into his collarbone. The second whizzed past his chin as he dove into the man's chest, causing him to fall backward and let go of his AK, which flipped and landed on the back of Crocker's leg. Partly stunned, Crocker reached behind his back and grabbed the barrel as the guard reached for his pistol. Two kids dragging bodies stopped and stared in disbelief as Crocker drove the butt of the AK into the guard's throat.

Behind him he heard footsteps, but was blinded by the headlights. Breathing hard, he circled left around the trailerless truck, then slipped and fell so that the AK he carried slithered into the trench and disappeared in a mound of twisted limbs and torsos. Glimpsing the horror frozen on a dead's woman's face, he decided not to go in after it, and felt for the SIG Sauer in the wet grass instead.

He found it but couldn't remember if it had one round left or two. Covered with mud and blood, he spotted a driver forty feet ahead of him running in the direction of the camp. The rain had picked up, making it harder to gain traction, but Crocker pulled himself up and pushed. Got within twenty feet of the driver, and was trying to aim in the dark when the man turned and fired three shots in succession that barely missed Crocker's head.

He shot back, then slipped and hit the ground with his chin. On his belly, he heard the sound of feet running past. Thought for a second that they belonged to soldiers, then realized it was the young prisoners running away.

Noticing the dark splotch of blood that had traveled all the way down his chest to the top of his pants, he limped back to the trucks. In the glove compartment of the first one he found a Type 54 Chinese military pistol and two egg-shaped Soviet F1 hand grenades. He ripped a web belt from one of the dead guards and tightened it under his arm as a makeshift tourniquet.

Then he hobbled away, hoping the teenagers would find sympathetic countrymen who would take them in and nourish them back to life. It was the best he could manage, he thought, but hardly enough.

Across the field where his colleagues were waiting, Crocker watched Akil smear QuikClot into the wound, then climbed back to his feet and led them south. He refused to answer Akil's questions about what had happened. “No time to talk about that now,” was his reply.