The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [30]
“Never,” the Captain said. “No guns on my ship.”
Jervis turned to Pak. “Are you a translator or what?” he asked.
“I’m an intelligence officer,” he answered.
“Would you just fucking translate for once?”
“Didn’t you hear me, they’re spies!”
“Spies?” Jervis asked. “Their ship is half-burned. They don’t even have a shitter on this thing. Just ask them if they’ve got a fire extinguisher.”
Jun Do’s eyes lit up.
“Look,” Pak said, “that one completely understood you. They probably all speak English.”
Jervis mimed a fire extinguisher, sound effects and all.
The Machinist clasped his hands as if in prayer.
Even though he had a radio, Jervis yelled up to the ship, “We need a fire extinguisher.”
There was some discussion up there. Then came the response: “Is there a fire?”
“Jesus,” Jervis yelled. “Just send one down.”
Pak said, “They’ll just sell it on the black market. They’re bandits, a whole nation of them.”
When Jun Do saw a red fire extinguisher descend from that battleship on a rope, he suddenly understood that the Americans were going to let them go. He’d barely spoken English before, it had never been part of his training, but he sounded out, “Life raft.”
Jervis looked at him. “You don’t have a life raft?”
Jun Do shook his head no.
“And send down an inflatable,” Jervis yelled up to the ship.
Pak was at the edge of losing it. He took his helmet off and ran his fingers along the surface of his flattop. “Isn’t it obvious why they’re not allowed to have a raft?”
“I got to hand it to you,” Jervis said to Pak. “I think you’re right about that one understanding English.”
In the pilothouse, some sailors were screwing around with the radio. You could hear them in there transmitting messages. One picked up the handset and said, “This is a person-to-person message to Kim Jong Il from Tom John-son. We have intercepted your primping boat, but can’t locate your hairspray, jumpsuit, or elevator shoes, over.”
The Captain had been expecting a lifeboat, so when down the rope came a yellow bundle no bigger than a twenty-kilogram rice sack, he was confused. Jervis showed him the red deployment handle and mimed with large arms how it would expand.
All the Americans had little cameras, and when one started taking pictures, the rest of them did, too, of the piles of Nikes, of the brown sink where the crew shaved, of the turtle shell drying in the sun, of the notch the Machinist cut in the rail so he could crap into the sea. One sailor got ahold of the Captain’s calendar of the actress Sun Moon, depicting movie stills from her latest films. They were laughing about how North Korean pinup girls wore full-length dresses, but the Captain was having none of it: he went over and snatched it back. Then one of the sailors came out of the pilothouse with the ship’s framed portrait of Kim Jong Il. He’d managed to pry it off the wall, and he was holding it up.
“Get a load of this,” he said. “It’s the man himself.”
The crew of the Junma stood graven.
Pak was instantly in motion. “No, no, no,” he said. “This is very serious. You must put that back.”
The sailor wasn’t giving up the portrait. “You said they were spies, right? Finders fucking keepers, right, Lieutenant?”
Lieutenant Jervis tried to defuse things. “Let the boys have a couple tokens,” he said.
“But this is nothing to joke about,” Pak said. “People go to prison over this. In North Korea, this could mean death.”
Another sailor came out of the pilothouse, and he’d gotten loose the portrait of Kim Il Sung. “I got his brother,” he announced.
Pak held out his hands. “Wait,” he said. “You don’t understand. You could be sending these men to their graves. They need to be detained and questioned, not condemned.”
“Look what I got,” another sailor said. He came out of the pilothouse wearing the Captain’s hat, and in two short steps, the Second Mate had drawn his sharking knife and put it to the sailor’s throat.
A half-dozen rifles were unslung, and they made a nearly instantaneous click. Above, on the deck of the frigate, all the