What’s making me so nervous? He works in my group.
But he did not stop staring. Jiyeon gave in and put her head back down, pretending to read something on her desk. But her heart was still beating fast and she felt her face get warmer.
She decided to walk over to the kitchenette and get some water. Cold water can relax anyone she thought. She got up and started walking down the hallway, away from Mr. Kim’s dark office. She walked past rows of empty desks. Empty dark office after empty dark office flew past on her other side. She looked inside some of the offices and saw pictures of someone’s kids, all smiling. She thought it looked strange to see someone smiling in the dark.
Finally after what felt like a hundred steps, Jiyeon arrived at the kitchenette. It too was well lit. She grabbed a cup and filled it with cold water from the filter. As she tasted the cool water’s refreshing sensation, she thought about how Tom did not even have this luxury right now. She leaned against the refrigerator, her arms crossed while she held her cup. She was staring well past the wall in front of her. She wondered where Tom was. Was he crawling on the beach? Was he running through the forest? Was he stressed? Was he scared? She tried hard to picture what he would look like scared, but she could not do it. She did not know why she wanted to picture it anyway. She then thought about the other possibility. Was he — found? She forced down a sip of cold water.
Ugh, this is why I can’t sleep or work right now.
Her mind could not let it go. Even though something deep inside of her said that she would be hugging him tomorrow, wrapped in his big arms, she could not rid herself of these strange thoughts.
She slowly started walking back to her desk. The endless rows of empty desks stacked with paper looked like there had been a lot of work done in this office. She soon arrived at her desk and sat down. She looked at her computer screen and tried to focus. When she could not, she sat back in her chair and looked around the office again.
Suddenly she jumped up in her seat. Her heart sped up again and she could feel the blood pulsing through the left side of her neck. Mr. Kim’s office was empty. His jacket was gone. His bag was gone. He had left. Where did he go? She looked around. She could not see anybody walking around. But Mr. Kim is always here, she wondered.
Why did he stare at me and then leave so suddenly?
CHAPTER 28
Captain Kim stood near the edge of the beach looking into the pitch-black woods. He had one of his men shine a flashlight into the woods again. He looked carefully. He did not see any movement or anything resembling a human form. But then he looked down again and stared at what was puzzling him. Right at the edge of the beach as it met the forest he could see a wet spot. A spot two feet by two feet that had wet-looking sand. The rest of the sand on the beach was dry.
The other thing that puzzled him was that leading to this wet spot were several indents in the sand. He knew dry sand does not hold the shape of a foot very well, but a foot stepping in the sand can certainly leave an indentation. And Captain Kim saw a series of what looked like indentations going all the way back to the tide’s high point. He told one of his soldiers to shine his flashlight at these indentations. People did not walk on this beach. There are no beachgoers in this part of the country. This was supposed to be a pristine beach, he thought. The only marks should be from his men or any animals that might be in the area. Or a spy.
He turned to a group of soldiers that were not with him earlier but who were closer to this spot. “Did you walk here?”
“Not recently, tongmu Captain, we walked through here maybe fifteen minutes ago.”
Kim enjoyed hearing his proper title. Tongmu was the equivalent of “comrade”. Kim studied the marks leading to the beach again.
“Did you see any bubbles coming from below the surface?”
“No, tongmu. Not at all.”
Kim took his radio. He started talking into it but realized it was not working. He hit it a few times and tried clicking it on again. Nothing.
Typical. Nothing works in this country. I don’t even know why I expected it to.
Captain Kim had been allowed to study abroad in China for three months when he was a university student. Being the son of a regime insider who had the right political qualifications, he was one of few who had such a special opportunity. The purpose was to learn Mandarin Chinese to the point of fluency. Having citizens who could speak to the closest ally was highly important. He was required to live in special housing with North Korean officers who could watch him. They did not need to. Kim made sure he was a model citizen. He spoke to nobody and did not travel within Beijing. He focused on his studies. He stayed quiet. But he had thoughts. Those were filled with awe and questions. Two things impressed him most about China. First, food was plentiful. He had never felt that feeling where one eats past where one is full, where the stomach feels as though it were an inflated balloon, hanging separate from the body. In China, it was a painful feeling that he liked. Every time he was in the university cafeteria he made sure he got himself to this point.
The second thing that impressed him about China was that most objects worked. Elevators just worked. Electricity stayed on. TVs generally did not just shut off. The metro system did not break every day. Cars drove normally on the road. Heating generally worked. Water faucets just worked. How luxurious, he remembered thinking. In the Democratic People’s Republic things did not work like this. He had thought about it during those three months abroad quite often. Why was his country different?
Finally after tapping on his radio enough times the lights flickered on. He radioed another company further down the beach to ask if they had seen anything. They had not. He radioed the officer in charge of the woods team. He reported that his men had not seen anything.
He walked back to the spot near the woods that looked wet. He thought about the idea of an American running through here. He thought about the idea of an American in general. His stomach felt sick.
“You four, come with me.” He pointed out four soldiers. “The rest of you keep patrolling the beach.” He looked into the dark forest one more time and stepped into it.
If he’s in here he can’t be that far away. Do they know about that base?
CHAPTER 29
After moving as quietly as he could for almost 20 minutes, Tom got on his knee right by a small bush. The bush would help him stay hidden if anyone was around. He wanted to observe his surroundings and double check his location. He had a GPS unit on his wrist — almost like a watch. It was connected to a satellite somewhere above. GPS satellites orbited around earth like imagery satellites. But his communications equipment, his satellite radio, was connected to a communications satellite. Unlike imagery satellites or GPS satellites, which were constantly orbiting Earth, communications satellites were geosynchronous. This meant that they sat in one spot above Earth and rotated with the Earth. So if someone stood in one location on the ground, it would look like the same communications satellite was always above in the sky. The reason imagery satellites could not do this was because to be geosynchronous, a satellite had to sit pretty far away from Earth. So far that taking clear, zoomed pictures of the ground would be almost impossible. But to send communications back and forth, the distance posed no problem. Tom liked to think about the communications satellites while on missions. He liked the feeling of having a tool that was constantly watching down on him — as if he was surrounded by an omniscient presence. It made him forget for a moment about the dark land he was infiltrating.