“You look good in your new uniforms,” said Na-yung. Her voice reminded me of the old woman who’d screamed at me in Kazakhstan, frail but determined, and for a moment I feared a hallucination. “Almost like Russian volunteers for the People’s Army.”
Although others at the table laughed, I didn’t understand the joke; I smiled anyway and said, “Thank you.”
“The word has gotten out,” she continued, “that you sprinted through deep snow, under fire, to attack an armored monster. One of the new Russian abominations.”
A man across the table, his uniform threadbare but his eyes hard and cold, cleared his throat. “Excuse me, Dear Leader, but don’t our Chinese brothers field these same abominations? You spend so much time in their mountains, I often wonder if your last name is Ch’ang, not Ch’o. I’m sure you have seen a Chinese version of these creatures before.”
Nobody looked up. A tension descended over the table so that the air felt charged, and I waited for someone to say something. Anything.
“General Kim,” Na-yung finally said to me, “thinks we should all be Russian puppets, like the original Kim of old. That Russia is our home, and that our allegiance should therefore be to Moscow.”
Yoon-sung stared at me when she finished the translation, and grabbed my wrist, squeezing it hard. It was a prearranged signal:
don’t say a word
.
“Not to Russia,” the general said, chuckling with some of the others. “Allegiance to humanity.” He pointed at me then. “One shouldn’t admire these things, and certainly not the one they killed today. We should exterminate them all, any we find.”
Na-yung looked at me for a moment. “I wonder what you think about the general’s idea?” she asked.
There was no guidance from Yoon-sung, who had turned pale. She pulled her hand from my wrist and waited with everyone else for my answer.
“I would kill me,” I said.
Na-yung sounded shocked. “What? How could you say that?”
“Because,” I explained, staring directly at the general. “We are bred to destroy, and the one we met today is no
different. There is no fear of death for us, at least for the ones new to the battlefield, and we are as machines, with only one purpose: to attack. Besides”—I paused while a young girl lowered a plate to the table in front of me—“Now that I know the general’s intentions, I will surely kill him the first chance I get.”
Na-yung laughed hysterically at that, as did three-quarters of the table, but some, the ones sitting closest to the general, sat silently. They looked to him for a response. But the general said nothing, both of us glaring at each other until he finally looked away.
“You,” Na-yung said, “are welcome in our little community. What is your name?”
“Catherine.”
“Thank you, Catherine, for saving my loggers.”
From the corner of my eye I saw her pick up a spoon and start on her soup, followed by the rest of the table. My soup looked thin. Watery. I lifted some to my mouth, hoping it would taste better than it looked, but was disappointed when I found that it was little more than salty water with flecks of what could have been wolf or deer meat. This stuff did nothing to abate my hunger.
“Well, Catherine,” Na-yung said, “as a reward for your accomplishment, I will allow you and your friend to choose your next assignment. Maybe you’d both prefer a job in the greenhouses or in a factory, out of the wind and snow?”
I thought for a moment; God had to be with me, because this was an opportunity that nobody could have predicted.
“I would stay with the logging unit, with Yoon-sung,” I said, “but I was wondering. Would it be possible for my
sister and I to stay in Korea, maybe in Wonsan when we travel there in the spring?”
Yoon-sung paused before translating. Na-yung noticed and snapped something at her, too quickly for me to understand, and Yoon-sung’s face turned red until she finally repeated my request. The table went silent.
“You would rather stay with them, in the south where the people are fat and lazy? Perhaps you are not as strong as I thought.”
I realized then that the request had been an insult, and did my best to explain. “No. If I had to choose between staying in the south and staying here, I would choose to remain in Chegdomyn, not in Korea. It’s just that more girls like us have escaped the Americans and relocated to Thailand, where they have their own community. We wish to join them. They are like family to us.”
Yoon-sung translated quickly, and some of the men and women started breathing again. Na-yung smiled.
“Well. Who can compete with family after all?” She thought for a moment and then nodded. “Fine. If you serve with honor on the train ride south, we’ll leave you in Wonsan.”
The rest of the dinner passed more or less uneventfully. Na-yung spoke briefly with Margaret, performed a small ceremony to welcome Kang Song-won’s son and his family into the trusted ranks, and then excused herself early, leaving me with the general, who did everything he could to make me uncomfortable. When it was over and Yoon-sung escorted us back to our hut, starving, she shook her head.
“General Kim wants you dead,” she said.
“I am used to men like him.”
Yoon-sung nodded. “Yes, but I can’t protect you, Catherine. You should not have spoken so bluntly. He and Na-yung are at war, and the general thinks she is too old to lead, thinks he should take the place as Party leader, sooner rather than later. You are now aligned with her and we have a saying: when two whales collide, the shrimp get crushed.”
I ducked into the hut after Margaret and turned back to look at Yoon-sung. “I don’t understand, what does that mean?”
“It means,” said Yoon-sung, blowing into her hands to warm them, “don’t get crushed.”
In three weeks my shoulder had more or less healed, and winter ended. Yoon-sung had to tell me because at first I couldn’t see the difference, but then one morning I saw my shadow on the ground and heard an intermittent crashing in the woods. I wondered what it was and drew my pistol. The others in our unit kept working as I crept toward the tree line expecting to see a pack of wolves or a bear, only to be covered in snow when a clump of it, heavy with melting water, collapsed onto my head. Somebody laughed when I returned. It took a few seconds to brush the snow off my shoulders and although it was still cold we all threw our hoods back, wanting to feel the sun on our faces for the first time in months.
We worked all day, happy for most of it, but then Yoon-sung stopped her sawing and looked up. Eventually everyone stopped working. You sensed a kind of ominous weight in the air because it had become so silent, an unsettling and heavy quiet with no indication that anything
had gone wrong or that there was cause for concern—except that something wasn’t right.
Margaret looked at Yoon-sung. “What?”
“There’s no noise,” she said. “There should be another logging unit working in this area, and there’s nothing.”
“Let’s go find them,” I suggested. “They may have run into another Russian.”
Yoon-sung nodded and rested her saw on a tree stump, calling out instructions for everyone to draw their pistols. She led us toward the second logging area. The snow crunched underfoot and we moved cautiously through the forest, suddenly aware of just how quiet it had become because there was no wind in the trees, nothing except for the occasional
crump
when snow and ice fell from branches overhead, and the noise reminded me of a distant artillery barrage. Ten minutes later we arrived at the second logging area; nobody was there. The loggers’ saws and tools lay in the snow, as did their clothing, a fact which made everyone especially nervous so that we gathered back in the trees, careful to watch in every direction as Yoon-sung spoke.
“This is strange,” she said.
“There were no footprints leading into the forest,” I said, “only ones leading to the city. I think they went back.”
“But why?”
Margaret and I looked at each other, but before I could answer we heard a distant noise, different from that of crashing snow, like the sound of far-off firecrackers.
“Back to Chegdomyn,” said Margaret, and we started running.
The noise increased as we stumbled through the forest, and I wondered what I was doing. We were headed
into combat. But this time there would be no armor, no radios to coordinate, and I had never fought with this unit before, didn’t know if they were
capable
of fighting, and even if they were, all we had were pistols. The discarded clothing suggested that the missing unit’s members were either all dead or had replaced their oversuits with armor, but why? Was this a coup and was the missing logging unit sympathetic to the general? The answer to that question sent my brain into a spiral of thought, making it hard to concentrate as the noise of combat increased.
We were about to break from the forest onto the main road into the camp when a group of Koreans, several of them trailing blood in the snow, emerged from the trees in front of us. As soon as they saw us, our pistols drawn, they stopped and threw up their hands. Yoon-sung recognized one. She said something, and the man smiled while the rest of them, realizing we weren’t going to shoot, continued on their flight, disappearing into the brush and snow.
“They’ve attacked the Dear Leader,” Yoon sung explained. “She’s holding out with a small guard force but can’t last long.”
“We should help her,” said Margaret.
“How?” Yoon-sung asked. “General Kim’s men broke into the armory and grabbed weapons and suits. What good are pistols?”
The fear rose into my throat and I couldn’t speak, watching as my hands started shaking. Margaret looked to me for support.
“Murderer, what should we do?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered.
Margaret’s jaw dropped and she chambered a round. “Well I know. I’m going to help her and you should too.
The general will take care of us as soon as he finishes with Na-yung.”
“I will go,” said Ch’on Sang-mi. “This is
Na-yung
.”
“Death to General Kim,” someone muttered.
And soon all of the loggers had gathered. I saw in them the same look that must have been on my face, one of terror and uncertainty, but they all stared at Margaret and Yoon-sung and waited for instructions, ready to go. I fell on my knees. For the first time the cracks in my resolve had turned into a full-blown collapse and I cried openly, not able to move when the unit moved out to leave me behind. I lay down in the snow. The cold eventually seeped through my coveralls and into my back, making it feel as though I lay on a slab of ice, cooling not just my skin but the sensation of terror along with it. The quiet returned. No snow fell, and for a moment the firing stopped, giving me time to think about everything—about Megan, who seemed to whisper in my ear as the crying abated, my tears not freezing now that temperatures had climbed.
Running was the only sane option
, Megan whispered,
but you were not born into sanity
. I got up slowly. My pistol lay deep in the snow where it had fallen, and I dug it out, making sure that it had a full clip before I followed the prints that the others had left. Eventually I caught up with them, and rejoined Margaret and Yoon-sung as they surveyed the camp from behind an abandoned tractor. Margaret welcomed me back.
“We have two things to accomplish, one before the other,” I said, speaking in Russian so Yoon-sung could follow. “First, get armor and weapons for everyone, or we will not survive.”
“And the second?” Margaret asked.
“Kill General Kim. As soon as we do that, the coup will crumble.”
Yoon-sung nodded. “He will probably be hiding somewhere. The man is a coward.”
“Is there any chance the Chinese could help?” I asked Yoon-sung.
She shook her head. “I don’t know, but probably not. Besides, the only radio with sufficient range is underground, with Na-yung. If the general’s forces haven’t disabled her antenna by now, she has already thought of that.”
My hands shook. Every nerve in my body screamed to run in the other direction as I forced them to function, to enable me to scan the camp from our spot and search for something that would show the way. Nothing obvious revealed itself.
“We have to move closer.” I slapped the tractor. “Yoon-sung, can anyone in your unit drive this?”
She nodded. “All of us.”
“Margaret and I will move in to get a closer look. If you see us come under fire, move in with the tractor to provide cover; it’s the only armor we have.” I looked at Margaret and we left.
We stuck to the ditch at the roadside, taking the chance of crawling our way into town but keeping low in the hopes we could avoid any thermal sensors. My coveralls were soaked with melted snow. The cloth clung to my shoulders, dragging me down so it felt as if I would keep sinking if I paused, and we moved even more slowly. The weight made it difficult to force freezing limbs forward and both arms ached so badly that when someone called out, I sighed with gratitude for the stop.
They yelled again and Margaret hissed at me. “We’ve been spotted, they’re saying to get up and that it’s safe, the aboveground part of the camp is secure.”
“Tell them we can’t, we’re wounded.”
Margaret answered, and within seconds we heard footsteps and rolled onto our backs, thinking the mud and filth would convince them we needed rescuing. Two men in armor peered down at us, their Maxwells cradled. I extended my left hand to them. One of them took it, pulling hard, and he lifted me to my feet as he said something in Korean after which I placed my pistol into the joint at his armpit and squeezed the trigger twice. Margaret had done the same. The two men fell to the ground and we stripped them quickly, dragging the bodies into the ditch and then slipping into their bloody undersuits, hoping we hadn’t done too much damage to armor systems. I connected essential items and buttoned up.