Schumacher felt like an animal in a ferociously illuminated zoo. He stole a quick look at his watch: six a.m., January 24. He wasn’t sure where they were but figured it was Pyongyang, the capital. Looming over the train station was a tower adorned with a huge portrait of Kim Il Sung, set in a gold frame against a red background.
Schumacher glanced at his shipmates, their breath visible in the chilly air as they stamped their feet to stay warm. They looked disheveled and smelled bad after their long night of captivity. The men were trying to seem composed, but their faces registered shock, doubt, fear.
Soldiers herded them on two buses that then headed down a broad boulevard. Mercury-vapor lights cast eerie pools of green on the streets. Workers were beginning to line up at bus stops, and blue fluorescent lights were already on in some shops. But mostly the place looked as sterile and lonely as a vacant parking lot.
The buses drove through the city and crossed a bridge over the wide Taedong River. Schumacher’s sense of disorientation was so strong that he thought he was losing touch with reality. He fought a powerful desire to sleep. He tried to think about what he’d be doing at this hour on a normal day. Aboard the Pueblo, he’d be on morning watch. Dawn at sea was his favorite time. Watching the sun climb slowly out of the water and into the sky, he felt, was like seeing God write poetry.
The lieutenant raised his eyes long enough to glimpse ugly buildings and littered door stoops flash by. Everything seemed so dead. Maybe this was what the far side of the River Styx looked like. A hard whack to the top of his head interrupted his musings; Schumacher obediently dropped his chin to his chest.
The buses turned off the boulevard onto a dirt road. They jounced along until they pulled into a large courtyard behind a four-story concrete building that stood black against the early-morning gray, icicles dripping from its eaves. It looked like a barracks. Schumacher saw 200 to 300 soldiers massed in the courtyard, jeering and chanting with an almost hypnotic rhythm. They made him think of a lynch mob working itself into a frenzy.
The soldiers on the bus got out and waded into their brethren in the courtyard, shoving them back to make way for the captives but in the process creating a gauntlet. The crewmen headed into it. A soldier stepped into Steve Harris’s path and punched him in the mouth, drawing blood. Bucher got down stiffly from the bus and caught a karate kick in the back. That did it. He whipped around and went after the small, moon-faced soldier who’d kicked him, fists flying. Four other North Koreans dove on top of Bucher and all of them collapsed in a flailing, swearing pile.
Soldiers manhandled the captain into the building, up three flights of stairs, and into a small room. They slammed him down on a crude bed, where he lay gasping for breath and scanning his new surroundings. The entire building smelled of hay and horse manure; the sailors later nicknamed it the Barn.
Bucher’s cell measured about 12 by 17 feet. It was furnished with a wooden chair, a small table, and a steam radiator that made little headway against the cold. The sole window was covered with brown paper on the inside and canvas on the outside. From the ceiling a bare lightbulb emitted wan yellow light. The heavy wooden door had multiple cracks, through which an eye sometimes peered.
Suddenly the door flew open. In strode a communist junior officer shrieking, “Imperialist aggressor! You’d better make sincere confession, or we shoot spying imperialist liar!” He stomped his feet and slapped his holstered pistol to drive home his point. By his side was a guard who looked no older than 15, nervously clutching a bayonet-tipped carbine. The boy eyed Bucher with a mixture of fear and revulsion. The officer railed on angrily for several minutes before earnestly asking the captain, “How you feel? Perhaps need to go to toilet, yes?”
Bucher was led down the corridor to a foul-smelling lavatory. He limped to a urinal and voided mostly blood. The filthy basin already was streaked with other men’s blood—probably his crew’s, Bucher thought. He wheeled on the junior officer. “Where are my men?” he bellowed. “I demand to speak to them right now!” The North Korean told him to shut up.
The officer and his jumpy adolescent sidekick escorted Bucher back down the hall. The skipper saw a dozen or more rooms, their doors closed. “Good luck, Captain!” called a distinctly American voice from behind one. Bucher couldn’t tell who it was, but his spirits soared; at least some of his guys were alive and confined on the same floor with him.
Not long after he returned to his cell, another guard appeared with a plate of boiled turnips and a soggy piece of buttered bread. Bucher refused to eat, partly because of his determination not to cooperate with his captors in any way, partly because of nausea from the pain of his beatings and untreated wounds. The captain hadn’t told the North Koreans of his injuries out of fear he’d be sent to a hospital and separated from his men. The food-bearing guard withdrew, looking insulted.
He soon came back to prod Bucher at bayonet point to another room for what turned out to be his first interrogation. In the room were more guards and a narrow-eyed North Korean major who was sitting at a table with some folders on it. Among them was the skipper’s personnel file, which he’d ordered destroyed during the attack. The captain knew his jacket contained only routine material—date of commissioning, various duty stations, service schools he’d attended. But if the communists had captured this, what else did they have?
The major began asking questions obviously based on what he’d read in Bucher’s file, and the captain saw no reason to stonewall. The North Korean seemed uninterested in his years aboard submarines, but paid sharp attention to his attendance at the Navy’s Combat Information Center School, in Glenview, Illinois.
“That proves you are a trained spy!” the major blurted triumphantly. “Counterintelligence school—part of infamous CIA!”
Bucher didn’t bother to explain the difference between the CIA and a CIC, or combat information center, an area on a Navy ship where gunnery targets were plotted. He merely repeated his cover story about engaging only in peaceful research and again demanded the release of his men. The guards responded with a hail of kicks, punches, and karate chops that left him curled in the fetal position on the floor.
The skipper was dumped back in his cell. His rectum and right leg burned from shrapnel wounds; his mind reeled with worry. Could he and his men hold up under beatings that probably would escalate to systematic torture? What if the North Koreans turned up the heat on quiet, unassuming Steve Harris and his CTs, their heads crammed with secrets? And what of Bucher himself? The captain had endured 16 hours of sporadic beatings that left him mottled with bruises. He hadn’t slept in 27 hours. How much more could he take? Already he felt himself disintegrating physically and mentally.
Bucher was ordered out of his room again at about midmorning. Lined up single file in the corridor were his five officers, heads bent submissively. The Americans were marched down the hall to a large room where some desks had been arranged in the shape of a horseshoe. At the center desk sat a fat communist general, wearing an elegant olive uniform and chain-smoking. Several more field-grade officers sat at desks on either side of him. Facing the communist officers was a row of six empty wooden chairs. Sheets covered the windows, and dim ceiling lights gave the room a menacing aspect. It looked like the stage for a Stalinist show trial in the 1930s, with Bucher and his officers in the role of the doomed defendants.