The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [20]
Not that he envied those who rowed in the daylight. The light, the sky, the water, they were all things you looked through during the day. At night, they were things you looked into. You looked into the stars, you looked into dark rollers and the surprising platinum flash of their caps. No one ever stared at the tip of a cigarette in the daylight hours, and with the sun in the sky, who would ever post a “watch”? At night on the Junma, there was acuity, quietude, pause. There was a look in the crew members’ eyes that was both faraway and inward. Presumably there was another English linguist out there on a similar fishing boat, pointlessly listening to broadcasts from sunrise to sunset. It was certainly another lowly transcriber like himself. He’d heard that the language school where they taught you to speak English was in Pyongyang and was filled with yangbans, kids of the elite who were in the military as a prerequisite to the Party and then a life as a diplomat. Jun Do could just imagine their patriotic names and fancy Chinese clothes as they spent their days in the capital practicing dialogs about ordering coffee and buying overseas medicines.
Above, another shark flopped onto the deck, and Jun Do decided to call it a night. As he was turning off his instruments, he heard the ghost broadcast: once a week or so, an English transmission came through that was powerful and brief, just a couple of minutes before it was gone. Tonight the speakers had American and Russian accents, and as usual, the broadcast was from the middle of a conversation. The two spoke about a trajectory and a docking maneuver and fuel. Last week, there’d been a Japanese speaker with them. Jun Do manned the crank that slowly turned the directional antenna, but no matter where he aimed it, the signal strength was the same, which was impossible. How could a signal come from everywhere?
Just like that, the broadcast seemed to end, but Jun Do grabbed his UHF receiver and a handheld parabolic, and headed above decks. The ship was an old Soviet steel-hulled vessel, made for cold water, and its sharp, tall bow made it plunge deep into waves and leap the troughs.
He held the rail and pointed the dish into the morning haze, sweeping the horizon. He picked up some chatter from container-vessel pilots and toward Japan he got all the craft advisories crosscut with a VHF Christian broadcast. There was blood on the deck, and Jun Do’s military boots left drunk-looking tracks all the way to the stern, where the only transmissions were the squawks and barks of U.S. naval encryption. He did a quick sweep of the sky, dialing in a Taiwan Air pilot who lamented the approach of DPRK airspace. But there was nothing, the signal was gone.
“Anything I should know about?” the Captain asked.
“Steady as she goes,” Jun Do told the Captain.
The Captain nodded toward the directional antenna atop the helm, which was made to look like a loudspeaker. “That one’s a little more subtle,” he said. There was an agreement that Jun Do wouldn’t do anything foolish, like bringing spying equipment on deck. The Captain was older. He’d been a heavy man, but he’d done some time aboard a Russian penal vessel and that had leaned him so that now his skin hung loose. You could tell he’d once been an intense captain, giving clear-eyed commands, even if they were to fish in waters contested by Russia. And you could tell he’d been an intense prisoner, laboring carefully and without complaint under intense scrutiny. And now, it seemed, he was both.
The Captain lit