When he asked Akil how he remained so centered and optimistic, the rough man responded by pointing to his head and said, “It all comes from here. What we achieve inwardly changes outer reality.”
“Is that a Muslim belief?”
“No, I think it came from a guy named Plutarch.”
“Plutarch the Roman philosopher. Did you study him in college?”
“No. Never went.”
“Then where did you come across that concept?”
“I read it on the shitter door of a yoga studio. It’s stuck in my head ever since.”
Crocker might have appeared untroubled, but in fact he spent most of his time trying to figure out how they were going to make it to safety, given their dwindling supplies. Now that the juice had run out of the batteries in the GPS tracker, their chances of being rescued were almost zero.
What he didn’t know was that the morning after the batteries ran out, an enraged Davis walked into the Vice Admiral Greene’s office and punched him in the face, breaking his jaw.
A half-moon peeked through the branches of the Japanese red pines as they trudged, Crocker and Akil carrying Sam on the jerry-rigged stretcher and Dawkins walking on his own. Sam’s ankle had become infected and they’d run out of Motrin, so the Korean American had to suck it up, which he did without complaint. Since they had run out of disinfectant as well, Crocker lanced the infection every day and cleansed the wound with boiled water.
After six nights of walking, Crocker and company had reached the top of Hamgyong Peninsula. The closer they drew to the mainland, the more farms and clusters of huts they saw. So far they hadn’t run into barking dogs, which was odd. Akil joked that the North Koreans had eaten them all, and Crocker thought he was probably right.
They were roughly 110 miles north of the South Korean border. On a good night they managed to progress from eight to ten miles over footpaths through forests, swamps, and fields. It helped that the streams that ran down the peninsula to the bay provided a steady supply of food and water. Crocker expected both to become harder to secure now that they approached denser population centers along the southeast coast. According to the map, the terrain ahead was mountainous, and they would have to cross at least two major rivers before they could continue south to the cities of Munchon and Wonsan.
The terrain and climate reminded Crocker of woods of New Hampshire. He’d camped in them often-intimate days and nights with his mother, father, sister, and older brother dining on grilled chicken and baked beans, followed by his dad pointing out the constellations and telling jokes and stories.
Crocker recalled a story his father told about a widow who fell in love with a rich nobleman. The nobleman wouldn’t marry her because he didn’t want to raise another man’s offspring, so the widow drowned her children in a nearby river. When she told the nobleman what she had done, he was horrified and wanted nothing more to do with her. She went to the river hoping to retrieve her children. Unable to find them, she drowned herself and was condemned to wander the waterways of the world, searching for her children and weeping until the end of time.
Akil, leading the way, entered a clearing alongside a stream and stopped. They set down the stretcher and looked for a place to cross. Crocker checked his watch-0314 hours. The stream was about twenty feet wide, and there were no bridges in sight.
“What do you think?” Akil asked.
“Let’s try to cross here, and look for a place to sleep on the other side.”
“Okay, boss. You wait here while I test it.”
Akil handed him his web belt and holster with the SIG Sauer with two remaining mags, waded into the ice-cold water, and came out shivering and raising his thumb.
Seconds later they entered together-Akil and Crocker carrying the stretcher with Sam, and Dawkins beside them. Crocker held the stretcher over his head and was concentrating on his footing when he heard Dawkins cry “Look!”
On their right, past a bend downstream, a brown bear was in the water, presumably looking for fish. It stopped, turned, rose up on its rear legs, and roared. The noise startled Dawkins, who slipped and fell. In the moonlight, Crocker saw that the current was hurling Dawkins back toward the shore they had come from, about twenty feet ahead, and was moving so fast that when he tried to slow himself by grabbing a boulder, he smacked into it chin first and went under.
“Wait!” Crocker said to Akil. “I’m going after him.”
Akil seemed to intuit exactly what he wanted him to do, taking the stretcher and balancing it over his head.
Crocker dove into the current, which carried him past the boulder as if he were on a ride at a water park. He used it to push off, and tried to locate Dawkins by his pale shirt. Eight feet ahead he saw an arm and let the powerful current take him until he was able to reach up under Dawkins’s shoulder and neck, and pull his head out of the water.
Dawkins coughed up water, and the bear roared again. But the current was strong and they had no way to stop. When Crocker glanced to the right he saw the bear watching from thirty feet away. Dawkins spotted him, too, and started to panic and pull away.
“Relax!”
He held Dawkins tightly to his chest with his right arm and let the current carry them past the bear, to a bend in the stream where the water was shallow and they could easily walk ashore. The roaring bear was so close they could smell his rancid breath.
“Run,” Dawkins whispered.
Crocker reached out and stopped him. “Unwise.”
The bear rose with a fish clenched in his left paw like a trophy, spun, and ambled off into the woods.
Chapter Twenty-One
The only mistake in life is the lesson not learned.
– Albert Einstein
Crocker awoke with the sun directly above him in the sky.
“Boss?” Akil asked.
“Yeah. What’s up?” His right shoulder hurt and his leg muscles were sore and tight.
“I want to show you something.”
He relieved himself behind a tree and noticed that they were on a moss-covered outcropping of rock surrounded by tall pines. Sam and Dawkins slept beside each other under a blanket near the base of one of the trees.
He found the water bag and chugged purified water, then remembered that they had no food. It was something he would have to take care of soon, probably using the stainless-steel wire to fashion head-snare traps, which had been successful so far in catching squirrels and rabbits.
“What is it?”
As he followed Akil, he decided that they needed to set out earlier tonight-maybe a few hours after dark, start descending along the coast and turn south. The sky was clear, but gray clouds approaching from the north threatened rain.
Akil stopped on a rocky promontory that looked south over the bay. “Look. That’s Ung-do over there,” he said, pointing to the teardrop-shaped island to the southeast. It appeared peaceful in the pool of sunlight that shrank and faded.
“And that’s Munchon,” Akil said, moving his arm to a dark collection of structures in the southwest. A dark delta, a glowing river, and several tributaries bisected the space between where they stood now and the city in the distance.
“Yeah. Those rivers are gonna present a challenge.”
Back at camp, he tried to avoid thinking too far ahead, concentrating instead on the immediate tasks before him: setting the traps, gathering kindling, building the fire pit, and boiling water. He dipped a bandage in the water and applied it to a dark red spot on Sam’s ankle, then removed it and let it cool.
The sky had turned darker and the wind was whipping up the leaves around them. Crocker repeated the process three more times to draw the infection to the surface. Then he sterilized the blade of his knife by holding it over the fire, waited for it to cool, cut into the skin, and drained away the pus.