Ian Slater - WW III

The moment he entered, seeing Major Rhee sitting behind a folding camp table, writing pad and pencil before him as he sat staring at Tae, Tae noticed another smell, something instantly familiar — the fragrance of plumeria.

It was Mi-Ja, standing quietly in the far corner of the tent to his left. The light was poor but not so dark that he could not see the tears streaming down her face.

“ Appa”— “ Daddy,” she began.

“Be quiet!” ordered Rhee without looking at her, then addressing Tae, a beefy NKA guard behind. “You will tell us,” instructed Rhee, “all the names of all underground counterespionage leaders in Taegu, Yosu, and Pusan. Otherwise we will give your daughter to our soldiers — to do with as they please.”

Tae shook his head, unable to speak, his head now bowed in shame. The NKA major walked over to Mi-Ja and took her long, dark hair, wrapping it around his wrist, jerking her head back sharply and tearing her bodice open with his other hand, her breasts naked in the dim yellow light as they rose and fell sharply in her panic.

Tae knew that if he gave them the names they wanted, not only would the chief underground counterinsurgency agents be rounded up and shot, but also their families and everyone who knew them. Hundreds. Rhee’s left hand flashed up and grabbed Mi-Ja’s breast, his finger and thumb squeezing at the nipple. She cried out and Tae turned to help her only to be knocked down with the guard’s rifle butt onto the earthen floor, the taste of mud now mixing with the metallic taste of blood.

“The names!” yelled Rhee. “Now!”

Tae had intended giving them false names to buy time, the name “Kim,” for example, as common as “Smith” in English. The NKA major, the guard’s eyes popping out with surprised delight, moved his left hand down and began rubbing it hard between Mi-Ja’s legs.

“Leave her,” screamed Tae, frightening the guard, who stepped back from him before he retaliated, smashing Tae in the face with his rifle butt. Mi-Ja heard the bone crack and saw her father fall, unable to get up with his hands still bound behind his back, his foot slipping on the muddy floor even as he tried. Rhee let Mi-Ja go and she ran to Tae crying, pleading hysterically to tell them.

Tae, on his knees, was shaking his head in a way she had never seen before, like a stricken dog trying to rid himself of some internal noise which he couldn’t locate and for which all prior experience had not prepared him, stunned, and as full consciousness returned, wondering how they had found Mi-Ja. Perhaps through her boyfriend in the Reunification Party, which explained to Tae why they’d taken several days before deciding to interrogate him.

“Up!” ordered Rhee, and Tae, using one of the table’s legs for support, struggled unsteadily to his feet.

“Untie him,” ordered Rhee, and the guard used his bayonet to cut the knot. The major held out the pencil to Tae. “Print!” he ordered. “And you! “he shouted at Mi-Ja, who was now cowering back in the far comer of the tent like a whipped dog, trying to cover her shame. “Be quiet or you will be sorry!”

Tae heard his daughter’s terrified sobbing and wrote down the names.

Rhee was under no illusion that Tae had given all the names to him, but it was good enough. Once you had one or two names, you could start breaking down the various organizational “cells” in each city, and then, usually more quickly than you anticipated, everything would start to unravel, some of them surrendering even, lured on in part by terror of what would happen if they didn’t and in part by public promises of forgiveness and “reeducation.” Rhee looked down at the list — nine names for three cities. About right. He pulled out his revolver to shoot Tae. Mi-Ja screamed and ran to her father. She was checked by the guard and fell back as if bouncing from a solid wall, the bottom of her dress now covered in mud.

“Tie him to the chair!” ordered Rhee, letting his revolver slip back into the holster. Walking over to the table, he kicked two of the folding legs from under it so that the table was now inclined like a child’s slide. He ordered the guard to hurry up and tie Tae securely to the chair, and when he finished to tie the girl to the table. “If you resist,” he said, flicking a hair away from her face, “I will shoot him as we did your boyfriend. You are all lackeys of the Americans.”

Mi-Ja closed her eyes and began reciting a Christian prayer. This infuriated the major, who slapped her hard. Unbuttoning his fly, Rhee smiled hatefully at her and, behind him, the defeated ROK major lashed to the chair. “You are all whores of the Americans.” She began to fight, trying vainly to get away from the table, her muscles tightening, but was unable to loosen any of the bonds.

“I will kill him,” Rhee warned her, and she stopped — still and staring at the mold-spotted roof of the tent that seemed to be breathing as he mounted her, grunting his pleasure, her father screaming at him, the blood from Tae’s mouth running over his mud-spattered chin.

“Gag him! Tape him!” ordered Rhee. The guard stuffed an oily rag into Tae’s mouth and taped his eyelids back so that he was forced to watch. Mi-Ja kept looking up at the tent breathing over her.

After — staggering back like a drunkard from the table, almost falling against the side of the wind-bulged tent — Rhee, out of breath, told Tae hoarsely, “Now the men can have her.” Tae said nothing but looked over at his daughter with all the love he could muster, Mi-Ja’s wail of despair no louder than the squeak of a small animal in pain.

“I was mistaken,” Major Rhee said, smiling at the guard. “She wasn’t a whore.” The guard’s eyes were bright again with expectation. He asked the major what he should do with her. The major put on his cloth camouflage cap. “Whatever you wish,” he said. “Give her to the men.”

On their way down to the White House situation room, Mayne asked his press secretary, Trainor, whether Senator Leyland had accepted the president’s offer to join the White House war advisory committee.

“No answer as of an hour ago.”

“But you did make the offer public?”

“Yes, sir. This morning’s press conference. Some of the southern papers were a bit smart-ass about it, but The Times took the high road.” He showed Mayne the leader about NATO units falling back in southern Germany. “Quite frankly, Mr. President, I don’t see how he can say no. If he declines, he looks like he doesn’t want to help the country when it needs him. If he accepts, he’s on our side.”

“There aren’t more than two sides in this country, Bill,” said Mayne. “Not in this war. You see the people in the streets? Everywhere I go you can feel the momentum. They don’t want war — they know I didn’t want war. But this isn’t any hazy Gulf of Tonkin a million miles away. This is out-and-out aggression. This is the Communists stepping over the line, and the American people know it.” He paused for a moment. “How many listeners did you say Voice of America has? Seventeen million?”

“Thereabouts, Mr. President. With all due respect, Mr. President, I don’t think any fireside chats are going to sway the Russians.”

“I’m not an idiot,” said Mayne sharply. “Point is, our intelligence reports from different sources can seldom agree on anything, but they’re all saying the same thing on this one. There’s a lot of restlessness out there among the republics. We too often think of it as just one big bloc. I guess it was always a weaker federation of states than we thought, but when Gorbachev got in, started promising them perestroika, glasnost, and all the rest of it, he gave them hope. That’s a pretty potent force, Bill. This country was built on that in our Revolution.”