The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [84]
“They stole it?”
Dr. Song got a wild look on his face. “The thing’s the size of a Mercedes,” he said. “We sent a fishing boat to pick it up, but along came the Yankees.” Here, Dr. Song laughed. “Perhaps it was the same crew who fed you to the sharks.”
Dr. Song woke the Minister, and together, the three concocted a story to mitigate their failure. Dr. Song believed that they should depict their talks as a complete success until, as they were about to agree on the deal, a higher power interceded via a phone call. “It will be assumed this is the American President, and Pyongyang’s anger will be redirected from us to a meddlesome, vexing figure.”
Together, they practiced timelines, rehearsed key moments, and repeated significant American phrases. The phone was brown. It sat on a tall stool. It rang three times. The Senator only spoke four words into it, “Yes … certainly … of course.”
The trip back seemed to take twice as long. Jun Do fed the puppy a half-eaten breakfast burrito. Then it disappeared under all those seats and proved impossible to find. When darkness came, he could see the red and green lights of other, distant jetliners. Once everyone was asleep, and there was no life on the plane but the pilots smoking in the glow of their instruments, Comrade Buc sought him out.
“Here’s your DVD,” he said. “The best movie ever made.”
Jun Do turned the case in the faint light. “Thanks,” he said, but then he asked, “Is this a story of triumph or of failure?”
Comrade Buc shrugged. “They say it’s about love,” he said. “But I don’t watch black-and-white films.” Then he looked more closely at Jun Do. “Hey, look, your trip wasn’t a failure, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
He pointed into the dark cabin, where Dr. Song was asleep, puppy in his lap.
“Don’t you worry about Dr. Song,” Comrade Buc said. “That guy’s a survivor. During the war, he got an American tank crew to adopt him. He helped the GIs read the road signs and negotiate with civilians. They gave him tins of food, and he spent the whole war in the safety of a turret. That’s what he could do when he was only seven.”
“Are you telling me this to reassure me, or yourself?” Jun Do asked.
Comrade Buc seemed not to hear this. He shook his head and smiled. “How the hell am I going to get these fucking motorcycles off the plane?”
In darkness, they set down on the uninhabited island of Kraznatov to refuel. There were no landing lights, so the pilots dead-reckoned the approach and then lined up by the purple glow of the moonlit strip. Two thousand kilometers from the nearest land, the station had been built to service Soviet sub-hunting planes. In the shed that held the pump batteries was a coffee can. Here, Comrade Buc placed a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills, then helped the pilots with the heavy Jet A-1 hoses.
While Dr. Song slept on the plane, Jun Do and Comrade Buc smoked in the crackling wind. The island was nothing more than three fuel tanks and a strip surrounded by rocks glazed white with bird guano and littered with chips of multicolored plastic and beached drift nets. Comrade Buc’s scar glowed in the moonlight.
“Nobody’s ever safe,” Comrade Buc said, and gone was his jovial sidekick tone. Behind them, the old Ilyushin’s wings drooped and groaned as they took on their payload of fuel. “But if I thought someone on this plane was headed to the camps,” he added, turning to Jun Do to make sure he was being heard, “I’d smash his head on these rocks myself.”
The pilots pulled the blocks and spun the plane, nose into the wind. They cycled the engines, but before lifting over the dark, choppy water, they opened the bilge, slopping out all the plane’s sewage in a midnight streak down the runway.
They crossed China in