Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

The next evening, Tae had been taken back to the dimly lit interrogation tent. He would never forget the cloying smell of the flickering paraffin lamp, the enormous shadows of the interrogator and the guard, or the fragrance — of something so sweet, so familiar, that even in the semidarkness, heavy with terror, he knew it was his daughter.

The North Korean officer had asked Tae once more for the names of the KCIA agents. Tae said nothing and tried to smile at his daughter, but when she saw what they’d done to him, she began to cry. The NKA major gave an order and the guard jerked Tae’s head back against the chair, gagged him, and taped his eyelids back so that he was forced to watch his daughter.

Tae gave him the names and the NKA major raped her. After, as the NKA major stumbled breathless, satiated, back from her discarded form, Tae, in an agony the likes of which he had never known, heard his daughter whimpering like a dog in the far darkness of the tent, huddled in the corner, clutching her muddied clothes.

The NKA major gave her to the troops to do as they would.

It was the last Tae had seen of her. The NKA major was one of those reported killed during Freeman’s raid on Pyongyang, the name of the young American soldier who had shot him, Brentwood, one that Tae would never forget-But it was not satisfaction enough. With the madness that turns sorrow to rage, all Tae wanted to do now was to find Mi-ja and to kill every NKA he could find. Most of all he wanted to kill Jung-hyun, who had betrayed his daughter. And though he had already had more search-and-destroy missions in the last week than anyone else in I Corps, he had particularly wanted to go on this mission. Intelligence had received information that the company of NKA the air cavalry was now engaging was led by officers formed from the South Korean chapters of the Students for Reunification.

Ahead, through wafts of acrid white smoke beyond the slight rise of an irrigation ditch, Tae could see the wooden stock of a RPK 7.62 machine gun, surrounded by concertina wire, sweeping through a wide field of fire. Their bursts were too long — the barrel would overheat But it you rushed the wire alone and tried to go through it, it would wrap itself around you faster than any concertina. And too far for a grenade. The choppers had all gone. If the air cavalrymen didn’t move now, they would lose the advantage of the smoke screen.

Tae checked to make sure that the barrel of his SAW wasn’t clogged with paddy mud. He waved for two air cavalrymen to come up to his position. One man, steadying his helmet with his left hand, mouth parched with fear, drew level with him behind the ditch.

“Thought we were gonna get some F-14s up here,” the American said, eyes squinting skyward. “Off the carriers.”

“They’re busy,” said Tae. “Carriers have all been called up North.”

“Fuck!” said the cavalryman. “We’re up north!” Despite the heat of the battle, it struck Tae that the American private would never speak to an American officer like this. But he didn’t mind — all he cared about was the NKA.

“Russians are moving against the Aleutians,” Tae explained.

“Fuck the Aleutians. Send the Tomcats here.”

“They don’t see it that way,” said Tae. “I want you to cover me.”

“Where are you goin’?”

Tae indicated the machine gun still stuttering away.’ “They’ll have to change a drum soon.”

“Yeah—” said the cavalryman. “That’ll take ‘em about two seconds flat.”

“You ready? “asked Tae.

“Down!” yelled the cavalryman. The air filled with a shooshing noise, then an explosion that shook the earth, a hole blown in the wall of the irrigation ditch, a spume of dirty-colored water rising high in the air. Tae pulled the two smoke grenades from his pack and threw them upwind — the smoke cover the Cobras had laid almost gone.

“Ready?” asked Tae again. “We’ll have to do it without the Tomcats.”

The cavalryman nodded, his mouth too dry for him to speak.

Malle knew there was nothing she could do but submit to the corporal. Neither her daughter-in-law nor son had returned from the docks, and she, like everyone else in the Mustamäe apartment complex, had heard the tearing sound of machine-gun fire down near Viru Gate, and feared the worst.

Unable to closet her grandson, Edouard, in any of the other apartments for fear of Party informers in the building — there was always at least one on each floor — Malle had tried to explain it to Edouard, telling him that for now, until the nightmare was over, whenever the corporal “called by,” he would have to be ready to go straight up to the crawl space above the double bed in her son and daughter-in-law’s room.

Malle had tried to lead the corporal away into her room, but he said he liked lots of room “to move about,” raising his eyebrows in unison like a gypsy, meaning to convey an all-knowingness and sexual prowess he did not have; his impatience, his ripping and slobbering whenever he mounted her and took his pleasure, reminded her of hogs she had seen out on the collectives. Above all, she despised his cowardice — not simply the bullying rape in exchange for not launching a search for her grandson, but the cowardice evident in his gasps for “Raza! Raza!”—his wife’s name. For Malle, it wasn’t that she was a stand-in for Raza that angered her— thinking of someone else while making love to one’s partner was a common enough thing, she thought. What did disgust her whenever he called his wife’s name was that it clearly wasn’t a cry of separation from his wife so much as a primitive ploy for absolution — that somehow the utterance of her name while he was raping another woman would lessen his culpability.

Before the corporal had “called by” the second time, Malle had sat down, feeling unclean, contaminated, but determined and with a sense of obligation to explain it all as best she could to young Edouard — yet how could he understand that she had no option?

To her surprise, he said he understood very well. Then, his eyes burning with hatred, he told his grandmother that next time he’d kill the corporal.

“No—” she begged him. “Edouard, no — no. Don’t you see he’ll — Edouard, he is the only one who knows you haven’t been taken in for questioning. He doesn’t care about searching for you as long as I—”

She was talking to him now as one adult to another, the hatred in his eyes having evicted the innocence of childhood forever.

“Edouard—” She clasped his hands in hers, his coldness frightening her. “Edouard, if you do anything—” She closed her eyes at the horror of it, shaking her head, wishing it away, holding him close. She felt him draw away from her. “If you do anything like that, they will kill you,” she told him. “And your mother and papa.”

“They already have,” said the boy, speaking in a tone so seemingly detached from his body that he seemed to be talking to someone else. It was a voice she had never heard before.

“We don’t know that,” Malle said quickly.

“You heard them outside,” he said evenly, looking straight at her. “You heard them screaming, Nana.”

Nana! She seized upon the word of endearment as a desperate soul grasps for the slenderest hope. “Edouard,” she pleaded, squeezing his hands, which were still cold and unresponsive. “They will take your Nana and you — all of us.” She tried to smile, the smile of the brave, showing that if she could accept it, then surely—

“Be patient,” she told him. “Soon they will find who it is they’re after and leave us alone.”

He said nothing for a moment, and his silence was thick with accusation. Finally she could bear it no longer, her head bowed, shaking from side to side, her age at once ashamed and prostrate before his youthful impatience. “You must see we have no choice. They would go to your school, your friends, until they found you, then—”