Rogue Warrior: Dictator's Ransom Part 24

10.

[ I ].

GOING QUIETLY WOULD have been the smart thing to do, both tactically and strategically; resisting wasn't going to help me accomplish my mission. But there's something stubborn in me. Call it fashion sense: I've never been very big on jewelry, especially stainless-steel bracelets.

I shook my head. When the first man approached with the shackles, I expressed my opinion somewhat more forcefully, throwing him into the crowd. I hoisted the next as well, tossing him onto the roof of the Hyundai. Starting to tire, I didn't bother throwing the next man; I just pushed him off the side of the pier.

Just before the man hit the water, one of the soldiers presented me with his AK47. Fortunately, he only hit me in the head. I spun around, intending to grab the rifle out of his hand, but instead found it pointing at my chest. Before I could decide which way to lunge for it, I felt a sharp p.r.i.c.k at my neck. The next thing I felt was my knees. .h.i.tting the concrete. My face followed as my body jerked wildly and I had an electrifying experience-one of the men in the civilian suits had fired a taser at me, and the jolt was so overwhelming that it took a few seconds for my brain cells to figure out what the h.e.l.l was going on.

They didn't like it very much. But they couldn't do much to stop it.

Trace was undergoing a similar experience, minus the slam to the head. She dove at one of the soldiers, grabbing his gun. The taser hit before she could get her finger on the trigger, but what stopped her from firing was the fact that one of the little flower girls was in the way. Her hesitation allowed the Koreans to hit her with another jolt; at that point she blanked out, and was probably lucky not to have had a heart attack.

The next hour or so pa.s.sed in a blur. My legs were shackled and I was stabbed with a hypo of something that made me feel as if sacks of cement were tied to every bone in my body. We were placed-dumped might be a better word-in the back of one of the troop trucks. We drove west for somewhere between twenty and forty minutes until we reached a compound used as a military prison and concentration camp, the sort of place where uppity North Koreans were sent to learn their manners. Trace was lifted out of the truck on a stretcher. The guards tried to make me walk. I couldn't quite talk my legs into it, and ended up crawling from the back of the truck to the entrance of a large stone building that served as the camp's processing center and headquarters.

The Kimch'aek Hilton was presided over by the only fat person I saw the entire time I was in North Korea. He waddled out from behind his desk as I crawled in. Putting his hands on his hips, he grinned and leaned over me, muttering something in Korean to the effect that I was a lowly worm.

Even without a full translation, I took that personally.

"Listen, motherf.u.c.ker," I said. "I have to see General Sun and the Great Leader. And your a.s.s is going to be kicked from here to Pyongyang if something happens to me. Or my a.s.sistant."

The translator hadn't accompanied us, and I have no idea whether fatso understood English. His expression didn't change one iota. He said something about clothes, and I was immediately dragged to a room at the side. A set of large pajamas and sandals were thrown in behind the guards as they left. I got changed in slow motion. My body didn't hurt, really, but I felt as if my brain was sending messages to my muscles via tin cans and string. The pants were an inch or too short, but they were dry. The shirt was a size or two too big. The guards came back and zapped me again, putting a spark in my a.s.s that sent me back against the wall like a drunken sailor at fleet landing, almost too late for the last liberty launch. I blacked out, and when I came to I was in a prison cell.

I'm sure the place will be featured in Home & Prison next month. Measuring roughly six by eight feet, its back and side walls were made from large stone blocks. The floor was rough concrete, with a good portion of pebbles exposed. There were no windows, and while the place looked older than dirt, there was no sign that anyone else had ever been there-no sc.r.a.pes on the walls, no hash marks in the cement between the stones. The bed was a thin blanket on the floor. Overhead, a single light-bulb cast a pale light from behind a metal cage. There was a bucket in the corner; that was the bathroom.

Rusted iron bars lined the front of the cell. The walls extended far enough beyond the bars to cut off the view of the corridor. Stones lined the opposite wall, but I sensed there were more cells on my side of the corridor. I couldn't hear anything, except for the occasional shuffle of a guard who appeared intermittently, sneered in my direction, then returned down the hall.

Whatever drug they had hit me with in the truck was still slowing me down. I alternated between trying to get my senses back by doing sit-ups and push-ups, and just lying on the floor in a daze. Twice I was brought a cup-sized tin full of rice, but the rice looked almost black. Even if I'd been hungry there was no way I would have touched it.

I knew things were getting better when I was finally able to count off a hundred sit-ups without losing track. I got up and paced off the cell, then sat against the back wall, trying to adjust my hearing to the sounds of the place. Feet sc.r.a.ped somewhere in the distance. As I listened, I decided that they belonged to a guard walking a patrol in a corridor to my left, probably watching the access point to the section where I was.

When Trace and I had first gone aboard the Korean patrol boat, I figured that sooner or later, someone would tell Sun about me and he'd send someone out to bring us back to him. But now I wasn't so sure. Maybe he had already been told about me, and this was his response. I was reasonably confident that Doc, or someone from the navy, had overheard my transmission and would be keeping an eye on the ship Polorski had boarded. But I knew also that I'd no longer be the priority-Polorski and whatever nuke he managed to weasel out of the North Koreans in exchange for Yong Shin Jong was.

Can you spell "expendable"?

Maybe an hour after my head had cleared, a pair of guards approached the cell. I rose from the floor and watched as they unlocked the door. There were two locks, and each guard had only one key, a good precaution that made it harder to get out by simply overpowering them.

Door open, the men stood back in the hallway. I left the cell, not exactly sure what to expect. The guards weren't telling in Korean, English, or Swahili. They stood behind me as I walked out, then followed as I went down the hall, pa.s.sing four empty cells before coming to an archway. Another guard stood to the right, blocking off an alcove that was a dead end anyway. I turned to the left and found myself facing an open gate to a courtyard.

Recreation time.

The yard came out of the back of the building. It was narrow but deep, measuring roughly ten feet by nearly a hundred. The sun was about halfway up the sky; I'd lost an entire day.

The weather had turned chilly and I jogged along the fence line to stay warm. The guards stayed by the building, taking out cigarettes to smoke. The drugs and electric zaps had let my muscles relax so much that they no longer felt tired; if the circ.u.mstances had been different, I might have asked about getting a supply of the dope they'd used.

An inmate worked on the other side of the fence in the far corner, poking at rocks with a long wooden rake. He was an older fellow, and seemed to ignore me as I jogged. But as I pa.s.sed, he hissed my name just loud enough for me to hear.

I continued past, pretending to grow more and more tired as I turned the corner past the guards and continued my circuit back in his direction. Gradually I slowed, as if losing my breath, until I was walking with my head hung down and my hands on my hips.

"White rock," whispered the inmate when I came close to him.

I took a few more steps, then spotted the rock he was talking about. I dropped down as if to tie my shoe.

"They don't care," said the inmate, pretending to rake near my part of the fence. His English was heavily accented, and I had trouble making out the words. "Follow the directions."

The directions consisted of numbers-0000-and letters-NE fenc-penciled onto the flat bottom of the rock. Terse, but decipherable: I was to meet someone at midnight, at the northeast corner of the yard or fence.

Or maybe the corner of the compound. Or maybe someplace named "fenc" that I didn't know about.

I started to slip the rock into my pocket.

"Leave it," hissed the inmate. "Go."

I put the stone back and started trotting again. The guards were still pa.s.sing their lone cigarette back and forth, gazing off into the distance. Obviously they'd been paid off-unless this was a setup. I pumped my legs harder as I considered the situation. Had Trace sent the message? The letters didn't seem to be in her handwriting, but they'd been so faint and small that it was hard to tell. If it wasn't Trace, who was it? Some inmate who had the run of the place? How did he or she know English?

North Korea has a variety of prisons, concentration camps, and villages of exile where people in need of political reform-read, anyone the regime or some other government bully doesn't like-are sent for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation can include the entire family and take a lifetime or two. As you'd expect, informal governments among the prisoners are fairly common, and in some cases are more powerful than the formal structure-until, of course, the guards get the guns out. I guessed that whoever had left the message wanted to meet with me and tell me how things worked. Which was fine with me.

As I completed my fifth circuit of the yard, the guards finished smoking. One whistled loudly, and together they walked toward the entrance to the building, expecting me to follow. I jogged to the building. Just inside I was stopped and searched for contraband by a third man-rocks, presumably.

"I'd like to talk to the woman that came in with me," I told the officer as he patted me down. "I want to see her. Trace Dahlgren."

The man gave me a quizzical look.

"Trace?" I said.

He made a face. I tried gesturing, making the shape of a woman with my hands, but they didn't understand that either. Finally, I just yelled, "Trace!"

This did get a response-the men who'd escorted me to the courtyard grabbed me and threw me against the wall. I pushed one of them away, but before I could get the other one off of me, the man who'd searched me began hitting me with a baton. I started to wrestle it away from him when I felt something p.r.i.c.k my side. Before I could do anything else, my body convulsed. I didn't feel any real pain, though, until after I'd hit the floor. Then however many volts they'd tasered me with flashed through my body like a tidal wave, once again rearranging my nervous system.

The rest happened as if it were part of a movie: more guards arrived, men grabbed my arms and legs, and I was unceremoniously pulled back to my prison cell, my b.u.t.t dragging along the floor though I could barely feel it. The guards left me in the cell and went away, their words the buzzing bees make when you've kicked over their nest. All I could think was that a few more hits like that and I'd be able to give the Energizer Bunny a good run for his money.

[ II ].

WHILE I WAS being turned into a human battery, Trace was enduring an entirely different ordeal. She'd been taken to another building adjacent to the one I was in. The first night she spent in a cell similar to mine, also in isolation. The guards stared at her the entire time. She, too, had a pail for a bathroom, and the only way she could get some privacy when nature called was by propping the mattress up against the bars. The guards poked it down. She moved the pail so she could hold it up while she went.

At about the time I was taken out for exercise, a woman arrived with a medical bag to check Trace out. The woman spoke French with a heavy accent that made it sound almost Spanish, which Trace speaks fairly well. She deciphered enough to understand that the woman was a nurse, and was there to make sure she was in good shape and hadn't been abused. Trace decided to cooperate, hoping she might be able to strike up some sort of conversation with the woman to get more information from her.

She also didn't have much choice; the nurse was accompanied by two guards with long, hard-plastic nightsticks. The nurse won some points with Trace when she scolded her escorts and the guards, telling them to go down the hall and shield their eyes while the exam took place. She was entirely businesslike during the exam. Trace couldn't tell whether she understood her Spanish. In any event, the nurse gave no answer to Trace's questions. She checked her over thoroughly, then did what was essentially a cursory rape exam.

"No one has attacked me," Trace told the nurse, in English and Spanish, but the woman didn't acknowledge her. It was likely, thought Trace, that she'd heard that from actual victims, worried that their protests would inevitably lead to more trouble.

The woman packed her gear back into the small case she'd brought and left. Trace sat back on her mattress, staring at the bars. Unlike my cell, hers had a pair of openings at the back looking out on a yard. There was no gla.s.s; they were covered with a chicken wire screen and nailed shut. Prying the wire away wouldn't have been too difficult, but the windows were only eight inches square and there was no way she could squeeze through.

About an hour after the nurse left, another woman showed up; this one was an older inmate who brought a fresh change of clothes and sandals. Trace had been wearing green prison pajamas like mine; now she was given a purple pants suit with a long tunic. Trace tried to shoo off the guards but they didn't retreat; finally she pulled the blouse over her top and then changed her pants, staying behind the woman for cover.

When Trace had finished, the woman led her from the cell. Trace a.s.sumed she was going to be put to work. She welcomed the chance-it would give her a better idea of the facility and make it easier to plan an escape. She followed the older woman out to the corridor and then down a short stone staircase, memorizing every footstep.

The building seemed empty; there were no other prisoners and no guards between her cell block and the door to the outside. Painted rocks outlined a path through the dirt to a small one-story building. Trace and the woman were trailed by two guards as they walked around the front and side of the building, then down a hill to a two-story stone building that had a garden and a porch. A sentry stood in front of the steps up to the porch, an AK47 slung over his shoulder and a walkie-talkie at his belt. He kept his eyes straight ahead as Trace and the old woman went to the stairs. The woman hesitated for just a second before reaching to the string tied to a bell at the side of the door. Then she gave it a sharp tug, clanging the bell twice.

A man in a soldier's uniform opened the door. The woman took off her shoes and walked inside without saying a word. Trace did the same, still trying to take note of everything she could. She was so focused on checking out the security-there was no one else in the building, there were no video cameras, no motion detectors, no sensors on the windows-that she didn't guess what was going on until she was shown into a small bedroom on the second floor. A silk print dress had been laid out on the narrow bed.

"Why are you taking me here?" she asked the old woman.

The woman gestured at the dress, then started out of the room. Trace started to follow, but the old woman put up her hand and pointed again at the dress.

The dress was about her size, falling nearly to the ground. It would have covered her entire body, including her arms, but she didn't like the direction this was going in so she didn't bother changing. Instead, she sat on the bed and listened, waiting for the old woman to leave the house so she could reconnoiter. Hearing the downstairs door close, she went to the door to the room, intending to slip downstairs. But as she reached it the sentry who'd been outside came in. A cross look on his face, he jerked his thumb over his shoulder, then turned abruptly and went back downstairs, expecting Trace to follow.

The house's rooms were not very big, but there were a lot of them. A hall several times wider than the upstairs rooms divided the first floor in two. It was unfurnished except for some elaborately decorated vases and two small wooden benches. The doors to the rooms lining the hallway were closed.

The soldier showed Trace to a room near the back of the hall. The room was about twice the size of a suburban living room in the States. It was stuffed with elaborate black lacquer furniture and a variety of chairs. A man sat in one at the far corner of the room. The room was filled with tobacco smoke, and as she followed the soldier toward the chair Trace realized the man was smoking a pipe.

The man in the chair raised his hand, then in English told Trace to come and stand before him. He was the same fat guy who'd checked us in the day before.

"You are an American," he said. "But you are not white."

"What difference does that make to you?"

A dumb little smile appeared on fatty's face.

"I have made a study of the West," he told her. He used the pipe as if it were a pointer. "This pipe is from England."

"That's nice."

"Western women are different from Koreans."

Trace shifted her weight subtly. She decided she could take the soldier first, grabbing his weapon before going for fatty.

"You will cook my dinner. I wish an American dinner," said fatty. "A hamburger."

"What do I look like, McDonald's?"

Fatty didn't seem to understand.

"Are you serious?" said Trace. "You want me to make dinner?"

"Very serious, miss. You will make dinner."

More puzzled than anything else, Trace followed the soldier back out into the hall. I don't want to give you the impression that she's not a good cook, but Trace wouldn't be my first choice behind the stove. We've never seen much of her domestic side at Rogue Manor. Being one of the few women in a mostly male organization, she's careful about not falling into the female role stereo type. Ask her to wash the dishes and she'll usually tell you which part of your anatomy is in need of drastic alteration. And as for cooking at company outings, once or twice she's threatened to treat us to some Apache specialty her great-grandmother taught her, but as they generally involve some variation of marinated armadillo, we've always found an excuse to pa.s.s.

The kitchen sat at the end of the hall. The appliances, all German, were upscale and new, the sort that would equip a well-off European home. Opening the double-wide Liebherr refrigerator, she found a bowl of chopped meat. There were vegetables, and some small bottles of condiments, but the fridge looked as if the navy football team had gotten there ahead of her.

Trace set the meat out on the counter and looked over the kitchen. There were no knives anywhere, and no gla.s.ses or bottles-in other words, no easy weapons were at hand. She found a medium-sized frying pan, and began cooking the burger.

"We need french fries," she told the guard, who'd been watching her from the doorway. "Potatoes. You can't have a hamburger without fries. It doesn't make sense."

The soldier didn't say anything, nor make any sign that he understood.

"French fries," she said, approaching him. "Potatoes. We chop them up. Chop, chop."

He retreated. Trace ducked below to the cabinets, continuing her search for a weapon. The best she could do before the soldier returned was a large fork.

"You didn't get potatoes?" she said to him, dropping the fork by her side.

He had a plate in his hand and slipped it onto the counter, gesturing at it.

"French fries?" she asked, but the man still didn't understand. "I'm just cooking a burger? No roll, no vegetable, no nothing? What is it, a mono-meal?"

The man shook his head, and kept his distance. Trace finally flipped the burger onto the plate. As she did, the soldier backed out of the room.

"This is f.u.c.king weird," she said, taking the plate and following him just up the hall to a dining room. Fatty was already waiting, sitting at the end of the table. Two more guards had appeared, clutching AK47s nervously as she approached.

"You're just eating the hamburger by itself?" asked Trace.

"Hamburger is a very good American meal."

"It's not a hamburger if it's not in a roll," said Trace. "And you need french fries."

She glanced at the guards. Four against one-if she'd had a gun, she wouldn't have minded the odds, but all she was armed with was a fork. She put the burger down and took a step back.

"It really needs a bun," said Trace. "And ketchup."

Fatty smirked. He had a full set of Western utensils on the table.

"You can bake bread tomorrow," he told her.

"You think I'm going to be your cook?"

Fatty laughed and explained to her that he was king here-he used that word-and had complete control over her. And everyone else, for that matter. There was no possibility that either she or I would ever be freed. The best we could do was go along to get along.