“How is it, boss?” Sam asked as Crocker rebandaged it.
He lied. “Better.”
He checked Sam’s forehead with the back of his hand and found it slightly hot.
“I think I’ve got a fever. Last night I dreamt I was attacked by a shark while surfing on Maui and lost my leg.”
“Your leg is fine.”
“The last thing I want is to be a burden. If I become too hard to carry, you can leave me behind.”
“That’s not going to happen. Keep drinking water. I’m gonna go check the traps.”
Nan woke up suddenly at one a.m. in the bedroom of her temporary apartment, looked at the clock, and sighed. Today was her husband’s forty-seventh birthday, and she hadn’t heard anything more from the FBI, except that they had passed on the information she had received to the appropriate authorities. They hadn’t specified who those authorities were and what actions they were taking to rescue her husband.
The FBI had asked her to keep the information she had received to herself, which she had. It amused her now when friends, family members, colleagues at work, and neighbors continued to relate their theories of what had happened to James-he had run off with another woman, he had taken his life because he was suffering from depression, he had been abducted by a cult.
The questions she asked herself were more pertinent and troubling: Had the government demanded James’s release from North Korea? If the North Koreans refused, what action was the United States going to take? And why were FBI agents guarding her and Karen? She wanted to trust her government and decided that she would, even though she was by nature skeptical.
Now she got out of bed in her cotton nightgown and walked on bare feet to her daughter’s bedroom. She sighed at the sight of Karen sleeping with a stuffed rabbit clutched to her chest and a framed picture of James on the pillow next to her.
If there’s a silver lining or a blessing in all this, she said to herself, it’s that in a strange way this ordeal has pulled the three of us closer together.
Crocker felt sick to his stomach as he looked over his shoulder at the tin-roofed hut on the bluff. Forty feet in front of him, Akil stood on the shore of the bay trying to push a wooden post low enough to free the metal chain around it that was attached to a small boat. The chain grated against the wood, but he couldn’t manage to push the post down far enough.
Stealing the boat had been Crocker’s idea, but now he wondered if it was smart.
“Try not to make so much noise,” he said to Akil as he watched him struggle.
“You know a better way of doing this?”
Absent a metal saw or other tool to cut through the chain, which they didn’t have, he didn’t.
When Crocker cast his gaze back toward the dim light in the window of the hut, the muscles in his stomach contracted. The lion’s share of the rabbit he had captured and cooked earlier had gone to Dawkins and Sam. Then he remembered how he had tried to preserve those last four water purification tablets by putting half, instead of a whole one, in the gallon bag he carried.
Bad decision!
He started to scold himself and then stopped. He needed to focus. It had taken them six hours to descend to sea level. All of them were tired and weak. Sam was running a fever.
Hearing the grate of the chain again, he turned and saw that Akil had manipulated the dock post to a forty-degree angle and was using the heel of his right boot to push the chain over the top. Crocker watched as Akil stopped, leaned over, and threw up into the water.
Fuck!
He crossed to help him, then turned to recheck the hut.
“Let’s try together.”
The combined power of Crocker’s arm and Akil’s leg pushed the chain free. Akil stepped down into the open boat, stopped, and leaned over the side like he was about to get sick again.
“I think it’s the water in the bladder. Don’t drink it.”
“Too late.”
Together they fetched Sam and Dawkins. With them loaded into the boat, they pushed off and used the lid and bottom of the PRS kit to paddle into the bay. When they were a hundred meters out, Crocker couldn’t hold in the contents of his stomach any longer. Half a minute later, his stomach muscles contracted and his pharyngeal reflex activated again.
This time nothing came up except a ribbon of bile. He rinsed his mouth with a handful of salt water and continued paddling.
“When are we gonna try the engine?” Akil asked, his face appearing greenish in the moonlight.
“Let’s get out farther. How are you feeling?”
“Like shit. Why?”
Another two hundred meters out, he squirmed past Dawkins and Sam, both lying on the bottom and already asleep, and pulled the cord to start the little four-horsepower Chinese Seanovo outboard. It coughed and ignited on the third try. Steering the boat south, he wondered how far the percussive pop of the engine would travel.
A feverish feeling was coming over him. Minutes later, when Dawkins opened his eyes and reached for the water bag, Crocker stopped him.
“Wait.”
He reached into the pouch on his belt, retrieved a whole purification tablet, tossed it into the bag, sloshed it around, and handed the bag to Dawkins.
“Give it another minute. Then it should be good.”
He blinked into the sun that was starting to dip west, opened his eyes again, and shielded them. His body ached and felt hot, his head hurt, and his mouth and throat were dry. He drank from the two-thirds-full bag of water and looked around the boat. Dawkins sat in the middle, running a wet rag over Sam’s forehead and neck. Akil slumped in the bow of the twelve-foot-long craft with his legs propped on the side.
How he could sleep or even rest in that position surprised Crocker. More importantly, the position of his body was pushing the little craft east. He corrected course south and tried to fix their position in the haze-filled bay. They appeared to be about a half mile east and three-quarters of a mile south of Ung-do. He made out the shape of the larger Ryo-do ahead, but couldn’t see the mainland. Judging from the picture of the bay he held in his head, they were almost parallel to Munchon. Another twenty or thirty miles, and they’d reach the south end of Hamgyong Bay.
He lay with his back against the stern, holding the steering arm on the Seanovo to keep their course steady and let the sun draw the sickness out of his body. He dreamt he was riding his Harley down Route 29 past the town of Covesville in the Shenandoah Valley. Now he was passing some Monacan Indians, the tribe that had once mined copper from the hills nearby and tried to keep away from white settlers, who spread epidemics of smallpox and influenza.
Feeling sick himself, he awoke to the sound of the engine sputtering. Dawkins looked anxious as the engine coughed one last time and stopped.
“You want me to look at it?” Dawkins asked.
“No point. We ran out of fuel.”
It took some vigorous shaking to wake Akil. When he opened his eyes, he seemed disoriented. Crocker changed positions with Dawkins and fed Akil sips of water. He was running a fever, too, so he splashed cool water from the bay over his face and chest.
“Where the fuck are we?” Akil asked.
“Same place we were last night-Hamgyong Bay, North Korea.”
Hunger gnawed at Dawkins’s stomach, Sam’s, too. Crocker told them to take sips of water and hold it in their mouths before they swallowed. He and Akil paddled, singing in unison, descending from ten thousand bottles of beer on the wall to zero as the chop tossed the little boat from side to side.
They continued despite the wind, falling temperature, and lack of food. After the sky turned dark, Akil began humming an Egyptian lullaby over and over, and Dawkins and Sam fell asleep.
When Dawkins awoke hours later, he saw the two men still paddling with the lid and bottom of the PRS kit. He couldn’t fathom how they had been able to continue this long. When he turned to ask Crocker how he felt, he saw his eyes were closed.