Screw this!
Dawkins clutched his arms across his chest and shivered. The room he was sitting in felt and looked like the inside of a refrigerator, with light blue walls and strong fluorescent light. At first he didn’t recognize the face across from him, a severe one with round cheekbones and sallow gray skin that matched the color of his jumbled front teeth.
When the man stepped back, Dawkins saw that he was wearing a green uniform with gold-and-red epaulets, and realized that this was the honored general he had met weeks before. Then, he’d appeared kindly. Now he kicked the chair in front of him so that it spun across the dark blue linoleum floor and hit the wall. He leaned into Dawkins’s face and shouted.
Dawkins tried to cover his ears, but the general’s angry aide and translator slapped his hands away.
“Most honored general say you liar and coward. He want to know why you delay?”
“I’m not delaying. Everything is going well. I have solved most problems, and a few minor ones remain. I will solve them.”
“What problem?”
“It’s complicated. Optical mechanics…the challenges of dealing with very limited space and weight. Tell the honored general that for every problem there is a solution…up here.” He pointed to his head.
The aide translated, and the general muttered something and threw his hands up in disgust.
“When? How many weeks? Most honored general want date.”
“It’s hard to say. So much depends on things outside my-”
The aide screamed, “He want specific date written down on paper!”
Dawkins didn’t want to show fear, but he couldn’t help himself. He started to tremble.
“When? When? WHEN???”
The shouting felt like lashes. Dawkins raised his head to see the general standing over him, bent at the waist, hands on his hips, handing him a pen. A jagged vein on his temple pulsed. The sparse hair on his head bristled. Everything about him spoke anger, cruelty, and pain.
“Most honored general insist you write date!”
Dawkins looked at the pen and the yellow sheet of paper in front of him.
“He want you to write the date and sign.”
“I…I can’t.”
“You can’t?” the interpreter asked. “Now the general want to know if you crazy?”
“No…no.”
“If you crazy, you no good. He get rid of you.”
For a second he imagined the general holding a flamethrower and flashed to the flesh burning off the woman in the amphitheater. The smell filled his nostrils, and he started to feel sick.
“You crazy. He think you either crazy or liar!”
Dawkins opened his mouth but was so upset he had trouble speaking. “No, no… not crazy. Tell him-Please tell him I’m doing my best.”
Chapter Eighteen
Endurance is one of the most difficult disciplines, but it is to the one who endures that the final victory comes.
– Buddha
The SEALs had entered Yonghung Bay in the Sea of Japan and had drawn within two miles of Ung-do. While Crocker remained alert to every hiss, groan, and creak of the SDV, Suarez and Akil were amusing themselves by trading “yo mama” jokes over team comms.
Akiclass="underline" “Yo mama so fat she’s got two watches, one for each time zone she’s in.”
Suarez: “Yo mama so ugly they filmed Gorillas in the Mist in her shower.”
“Yo mama so ugly that when One Direction saw her they went the other way.”
“She’s so mean her name in a text is autocorrected to ‘bitch.’ ”
Crocker tuned them out. He was attempting to visualize the mission in his head, but with so little information to work with, he was having a bitch of a time filling in the details. Obviously it was imperative that they quickly set the charges, recover the hostage, return to the SDV, and beat a rapid path back to the sub.
What he couldn’t imagine were the steps in between-the number of DPRK soldiers they’d encounter, how well they’d be armed and trained, how quickly the army and air force would respond, the complexity of the security system around the installation, how quickly and freely he and his men would be able to move from one side of the island to the other, how far into the mission they could venture before they were detected. Nor did he have any information on where the hostage was being held.
What he did know was that he and his men were going in zero footprint. That meant no dog tags or personal information that could identify them as American soldiers. It also meant that they could expect no backup, or QRF to rescue them should something go wrong. They were four operators completely on their own. Any life-threatening injury to any of the men could jeopardize the entire mission. Whatever happened, he wouldn’t leave anyone behind.
Akil had regressed from trading jokes with Suarez to taking the piss out of Sam.
Akiclass="underline" “What team are you on again?”
Sam: “Five.”
Akiclass="underline" “I hear you guys kicked ass in Iraq. Have you gotten into the shit since then?”
Sam: “All the time, dude.”
Akiclass="underline" “I mean outside of jerking each other off in the shower.”
Crocker growled, “Akil, stop fucking around and pay attention.”
“Ten-four, boss. My dick is shriveled up and my entire body is numb. What else do you want to know?”
“You and Suarez triple-check the opsec, detonators, det cord, CL-20?”
“We checked them twenty times. All’s good except for my dick. If it’s not working, I’ll be really ticked off.”
“You won’t need it where we’re going.”
“You never know, boss. Maybe I run into some ninja North Korean fox.”
“And maybe she kicks your ass.”
Naylor broke in. “Deadwood, Tiger One. Currently three-twenty-two meters west northwest of Keno. We’re going to start moving south and keeping an eye on sonar. Possible underwater ordnance in the area. Over.”
“Underwater ordnance” meant mines. “Copy, Tiger. Over and out.”
He couldn’t wait to get out of the sardine can and start moving. Even though the SDV made very little noise, the bubbles produced from the tanks left a trail on the surface. Nothing they could do about that except hope no one was watching.
Dawkins had spent hours bent at the knees in a pigeonlike position with his wrists pulled above his head and tied to the wall behind him. He was alone in the cold room except for a sinister-looking guard at the door. His knees, back, and arms were in agony. Still, every time he tried to close his eyes and rest, the guard crossed over to him and punched him hard in the stomach.
Hurting, exhausted, and trying not to give in to negative thoughts, he attempted to recall every detail of his life with Nan, starting with their meeting near the front desk of the University of California at Berkeley library, where he had been studying for a physics test and she was waiting to meet a friend. She was wearing a black skirt and a yellow blouse. Minus her glasses and with her dark hair pulled back, she reminded him of the title character Rodelinda in Handel’s opera.
He ignored the pain of his arms being pulled from their sockets and played the melody in his head. That weekend, Nan and her friend Deirdre had accompanied a group of his friends on a trip down Route 1 to Big Sur. They rode in a powder-blue Impala with Ohio plates and spent the afternoon at a cove and beach off an unmarked road. She wore a black-and-white polka-dot two-piece bathing suit. He wore cutoffs. Her eyes turned amber in the sunlight. They sat on a blanket on the sand talking for hours about school and life while the others climbed a path that took them to another cove.
He was a bookish, awkward, shy grad student who at night fell asleep to arias. Nan was gentle and intelligent. She seemed interested in him in ways no one else had been before. He opened up to her about his passion for music, physics, and mathematics, and how he thought they represented a key to understanding existence. Dawkins had become so completely absorbed in their conversation that he forgot to put on sunblock. That evening, running a fever and feeling uncomfortable, he sat on the sofa in the rented cabin in Pfeiffer State Park while the others went out for dinner and drinks. Nan stayed and looked after him.