The Korean Intercept Read Free

Mai were young. He had risen from the straw pallet they had shared and, as usual, donned his short jacket, the baggy trousers and straw hat. He had crept away from the hamlet of mud-walled farmers' huts and made his way across the cooperative's stony fields where potatoes and cabbage, turnips, lettuce and beets barely matured during the short growing season. The ground was frosted over and crunched beneath the rubber soles of his sandals.
    He had topped the hill and made his way by starlight to the graveyard, to the small hillside clearing surrounded by pines and a few twisted fruit trees where nightly he would kneel at his wife's grave. Though he knew that Mai's spirit was mercifully free of the physical suffering that had made her last year of life so unbearable for them both, his heart ached. That her mortal remains were so close to him in this ground somewhat eased the loss he felt within. These private moments with her memory renewed him and gave him the strength to face one more night and another tomorrow without her.
    His life with Mai had never been without suffering and struggle. But the struggle had always seemed easier, worthwhile, because his woman, a good woman, was there to share the struggle with him. They were married when they were fourteen. They had met as children in the days of World War II when Japanese soldiers had used Hongsan as a staging area for attacks into China. The Japanese, who had massacred most of the adults when they withdrew, killed their parents. Youngsters like Chong and Mai survived only because their parents, fearing the worst, hid them in the mountains. Such tragedy had bonded them together for life, a life that became little better under the occupying heel of the Russians after the war and no easier when the country was handed over to its own Communist dictators three years later. Mai had already given birth to the first of their three children when Ann Chong was conscripted and sent south to fight the Americans in the winter of 1951, so long ago, the one time he had ever been more than fifty kilometers from his village and his family.
    He now had full-grown children, and they had gone on with their lives since their mother's death. Ahn Chong did his best, but bitterness would not leave him, bitterness as ever-present within him as the empty place in his heart left by Mai's passing.
    If Mai had become ill in the south, below the 38th parallel, she would have survived. His ailing wife would have received treatment. But the central government withheld food and clothing from the northern frontier provinces, as well as education and medicine, with an iron hand. That his son-in-law was chairman of the collective's Worker's Council, that the new military air base had been constructed less than three kilometers away, meant nothing. Another nameless, faceless old peasant woman had died and no one cared, it seemed, except for her widowed husband. Ahn saw her face whenever he closed his eyes: wrinkled and aged, leathery as his own, but even ravaged by illness, the most beautiful face he had ever known. He heard her voice in the whisper of the wind through the pines.
    And so he came to kneel at her grave this night as he always did, to commune with her spirit and meditate on the words of the Buddha.
Do not weep. It is the very nature of all things most near and dear unto us that we must divide ourselves from them, leave them, sever ourselves from them. Every life is filled with partings
…
    The heavens tore abruptly open above him, ripped asunder. It happened with such abruptness, such totality, such ferocity, power and nearness that Ann reflexively, instinctively threw himself across the mound of earth that was Mai's grave.
    Something—something big—stormed by at what must have been treetop level, its backwash blasting over Ahn harsher, far colder, than the night wind. A shape momentarily blotted out the sky. There was not the thunder of a jet, only an extended
whoooosh
! that