Now Davis willed so hard for the beacon to appear that his head hurt. Those were his teammates on the ground. All of them alive and uninjured, he hoped. Even though he had a wife and two young children waiting at home in Virginia Beach, part of him remained with his teammates, in enemy territory, looking for a way out.
The first satellite images of the destroyed Ung-do facility, received a day and a half ago, had filled him with an enormous sense of pride. That was quickly giving way to frustration and anger. Davis considered himself thoughtful and reasonable-the kind of person who saw all sides of a dispute. But now he couldn’t understand why officers on the Carl Vinson weren’t willing to take the risks and launch the rescue.
Last night he’d tried to convince the Blackhawk pilot to disobey orders. When that failed, he had unleashed his frustration on the ship’s operations officer, calling him “a disgrace to his uniform” and “a fucking coward.”
He apologized later, at breakfast. That wasn’t like him, he explained. He was usually the mellowest guy on the team, referred to by his teammates as “surfer dude” because of his laid-back demeanor and blond hair.
Now the same operations officer looked back at him and shrugged. Davis glanced up at the clock. Another ten minutes had passed, and the beacon still hadn’t appeared. His stomach roiled and he started to sweat as he realized that it was growing too late to launch a rescue tonight.
One of the technicians squeezed Davis’s shoulder as he headed for the exit.
“Maybe tomorrow night,” he said. “Don’t give up hope.”
The twenty-two men and two women who made up North Korea’s military and political leadership had been stunned by the attack, which completely disabled Office 39’s operation, resulted in the death of its leader, the Dragon, and set back their nuclear program five to ten years. As they waited in the plush red velvet seats in the beige marble conference room under military headquarters in downtown Pyongyang, they knew they should expect reprisals.
They had been sitting for two hours now, waiting for their thirty-two-year-old Supreme Leader to appear and rail at them. All of them secretly wanted that. They hoped for a catharsis, a cleansing, followed by a call to action. That they could accept. It would help them map the future. What they were hearing instead was that the Supreme Leader had literally become sick with humiliation. So sick, in fact, that he couldn’t fathom a response to the attack.
He had reputedly told an aide, “There’s no point trying to cover the whole sky with the palm of your hand,” a variation of a Korean proverb. What the Supreme Leader had meant by it was the subject of much speculation. Maybe he was saying they had been deluding themselves into believing that they were a strong country, and this attack had revealed that they were weak. Maybe that’s why he was allowing himself to feel humiliated.
The men and women in the room-with one or two exceptions-shared a deep sense of insecurity. They weren’t ignorant people. All of them had traveled to China, Russia, and Japan. They’d seen smuggled videos and DVDs from the United States and Europe. They knew their country was essentially backward. If they had any chance of remaining in power and continuing to enjoy the special perks they had been given, they knew they needed to be ruthless, vigilant, and clever.
Still, five days after it had occurred, little was known about the attack. No bodies had been discovered, no equipment had been found, and no surveillance video had survived the devastating explosion. None of their radar installations had reported violations of North Korean airspace, and no foreign ships or submarines had been detected by sonar. The only evidence that had been found were small, unmarked pieces of some kind of underwater vehicle that had washed up near Munchon. Some speculated that the attack was a South Korean response to the sinking of its Pohang corvette two years earlier. Others suspected that there had been some inside collusion, perhaps supported by the United States and South Korea.
The red light flashed near the door above the Supreme Leader’s chair, and the room grew still and silent. But in place of Kim Jong-un, it was Dak-ho Gun-san, the wizened interior minister, who descended the steps and took his place behind the podium. The skin under his right eye was swollen and blackened, and a bandage covered the side of his face. According to rumor, the night Dak-ho reported the attack and death of General Chou to the Supreme Leader, a pajama-clad Kim Jong-un had grabbed a brass figurine of his grandfather from his desk and thrown it at Dak-ho, hitting him in the face.
Now Dak-ho’s voice quivered with outrage as he read a list of the names of those present who the Supreme Leader had declared enemies of the state. As these men and woman heard their names, they slumped in their seats and wept. Soldiers in tan uniforms quickly handcuffed them and led them away. They left in unimaginable anguish, knowing that their careers were over and that their wives, husbands, and children had probably been arrested, too. All of them, including former minister Dak-ho Gun-san, would spend the rest of their lives in one of the country’s political prisons, scavenging for food like animals.
A light rain started to fall as Dawkins watched Crocker and Akil standing outside the primitive shelter they had constructed from the two Kevlar blankets, tossing leaves over the top so they wouldn’t be visible from the air. Six days had passed since his liberation. During that time, he was sure he was either going to die or be recaptured and put to death.
In the moments when he wasn’t numb with exhaustion and fear, he sometimes resented what these brave men had done. Maybe, he thought, it would have been better had they left him alone in his cell to be blown up with the rest of the underground complex. That way, he wouldn’t face almost certain torture, and his wife and daughter would be left alone.
Yet the more time he spent with Akil, Sam, and Crocker, the more he started to believe in them and to adopt their the-only-easy-day-was-yesterday approach. Crocker fascinated him. He was a man who never showed fear or disappointment. Even now that the batteries in the emergency beacon had died, he seemed to take it in stride and remain optimistic that they would be rescued or find their way to safety. From the way the men casually joked with one another and went about the business of hunting for food, collecting wood, finding water, and walking through enemy territory at night carrying Sam and never complaining, you would have thought they were on a camping trip in an American national park.
“I love danger,” Akil had confided to him. “It turns me on.”
When he first said it, Dawkins thought he was just trying to boost his spirits. Now Dawkins believed him. Today the Egyptian American had entertained them with stories of moving to the States when he was six, joining the marines, and the many women he had pursued and bedded-Dutch twins in Mexico who kept him up all night and left in the morning with all his clothes, the Jewish stripper from Boston he had run into in Dubai, the female diving champion who would make love only underwater. He talked about them all with so much enthusiasm and affection that they became real. He remembered their scents, eccentricities, the way they walked and the sounds they made in bed.
The more Akil talked about women, the closer Dawkins felt to Nan. He realized that his modesty and shame about his body had caused him to miss a lot. Life was richer than he had realized. People were filled with pathos, humor, courage, and some kind of magic.