FOREST
NORTH KOREA
With the orange light of the smoldering chopper behind him, Dewey broke into a desperate run. He glanced at his watch for direction, then moved in a northward line into the dark expanse of tall trees.
The KPA would be coming soon. He needed to create as much distance as he could, as quickly as possible.
Just as important, Dewey had to get to Talmadge. He had to reach Pyongyang before the poison kicked in again and killed him.
The light from the fire became more and more diffuse as he moved, gradually disappearing behind the tall pines that seemed as if they would stretch on forever. Dewey was soon crossing a pine needle–covered forest floor in almost total darkness, his eyes acclimating to the dark gray light that the trees let in from the sky above. He ran as fast as the conditions would allow, stepping high to avoid the thick roots that carpeted the desolate forest. For the first fifteen minutes, Dewey sprinted hard, using his hands to guide him by trees. He fell twice after kicking into roots. His lungs burned. But he didn’t stop and he didn’t slow down. He couldn’t.
Then he heard the telltale electric din of a helicopter somewhere in the distance to the north. Soon, the whirr of a second chopper was discernible. He recognized the low-pitched, bear-like growl of Mi-26s, no doubt a full-on recon team rushing to see what the North Koreans shot down. He saw white light in the sky far out in front of him. Like searchlights, the under-mounted halogen spotlights on the choppers abruptly cascaded down, framing the tree canopy and splashing white in bright patches that cut through the trees and washed over the forest floor. Dewey tucked against the dark side of a tree and remained still as both helicopters passed just above the treetops. Light suddenly hit the tree he was hiding behind, then moved on. He resumed his run.
He remembered words from Ranger School:
Step high. Let your hands guide you.
There were so many simulated night missions, ad hoc crisis exercises, and just plain long runs that it all finally blurred into a dark, exhausting continuum. That was the point. Without equipment to guide them, on clear nights and during horrendous storms, they were taught to operate at night.
You must learn. War is waged during the day. It’s won at night.
Everyone hated the night runs. Dewey did, too, at first. He suffered a high ankle sprain less than a week into Ranger School, on a dead-of-night, low-chute drop, simulated exfiltration exercise followed by a ten-mile run through North Carolina farmland back to the base. He still winced when he thought about the way his ankle had turned as he hit the ground that night, nearly snapping. But there was little sympathy for those who got injured during training; it was purely sink or swim. If you couldn’t handle the training, you sure as hell wouldn’t be able to handle the real thing, at least that was the thinking.
Then, as now, Dewey found a way to compartmentalize the pain. He drew a picture of a box in his head, then took the excruciating feeling of his ankle and put it inside, then shut it off. The pain was there, but locked away.
Pain had always been Dewey Andreas’s greatest weapon—how to inflict it, how to endure it.
The first five miles were grueling. Dewey felt as if he was going to die. But he pushed through it, and then each footstep began blending into the last footstep, and suddenly the pain all went away and he was transported and he could’ve run for days. The feeling beyond the pain.
As his eyes grew more accustomed to the tree-shrouded forest, he quickly learned to anticipate the size and pattern of the trees along with the big roots, bumping up from the ground. The pines were tall and thin, spaced every dozen yards or so, as if the trees were planted in a pattern. Dewey ran for an hour without stopping, leaving the burning helicopter and the KPA recon teams far behind.
After an hour, Dewey could only think about water. He wanted it, needed it, but he kept running, telling himself he would stop after the next five minutes, and soon the next five minutes became an hour, and then he ran on for one more.
He came to a small break in the forest where the trees abruptly ended. Across an overgrown field of tall grass, shrubs, and rusted-out farm equipment, he made out a cluster of dilapidated buildings. He looked for power lines, seeing none, and then moved through the field at a half run, breathing hard. As he came close to the buildings, he skulked within a hundred feet of them. They appeared abandoned, but the odor of manure was strong. There had to be people there. A dirt road led from the cluster of shacks, winding away to the north back into the forest between two dark walls of trees on both sides. Dewey picked up the road and fell into a hard run, pushing his pace, constantly checking the compass on his watch to make sure he was still heading toward Pyongyang. He ran hard for half an hour, and when the road bent west he cut east, back into the forest. Dewey fell into the same steady routine as before, running in the darkness, guided by a spectral slate gray that barely allowed him to avoid the trees, step after step and mile after mile of a marathon he thought might never end.
It had been several hours when he came to a small stream and he collapsed, falling to the ground and crawling to the water’s edge. He put his entire face in the slow-moving water, nearly choking as he tried to catch his breath and drink at the same time. The fever had started to return, and it mixed with the pain from the run, and he lay on the ground next to the stream for several minutes, struggling for breath, wracked by pain and exhaustion. He felt a temperature coming on.
Then he heard the voice.
This is not how it ends. Not here. Not now. Get up.
Dewey climbed to his feet. He pulled the rucksack off and fumbled around until he found the SAT phone. He hit two digits. It took almost a minute until he heard a series of clicks, then a short ring.
“CENCOM, go.”
“This is Dewey Andreas. I need Jenna or Hector.”
“Hold, please.”
A few seconds later, Jenna came on:
“Dewey?” she said.
“Lock me in,” said Dewey. “I need to know where I am.”
“Hold on.” He heard Jenna typing. “All right, I have you. You’re thirty-one miles from the crash site. How did you get there?”
“How far away is Pyongyang?” he said, ignoring her question.
“Approximately twenty miles. You went slightly off course. You need to move northeast from where you’re located.”
“Where am I meeting Talmadge?”
There was a slight pause.
“We don’t have a way to contact him,” said Jenna.
“He doesn’t know I’m coming?”
“No. Which is why you need to get to his flat. I’ll get the location of the apartment and upload it.”
“Got it.”