The Ilyushin was littered with fast-food wrappers and empty Tecate beer cans. Two black motorcycles blocked the aisle in first class, and most of the seats were taken up by the nine thousand DVDs Comrade Buc’s team had purchased in Los Angeles. Comrade Buc himself looked as though he hadn’t slept. He was camped out in the back of the plane where his boys were watching movies on fold-up computers.
Dr. Song meditated alone on the plane for some time, and he didn’t stir until they were far from Texas. He came to Jun Do. “You have a wife?” Dr. Song asked.
“A wife?”
“The Senator’s wife, she said the dog was for your wife. Is this true, have you a wife?”
“No,” Jun Do said. “I lied to explain the tattoo on my chest.”
Dr. Song nodded. “And the Senator, he figured out our ruse with the Minister, and he felt he could only put his faith in you. This is why you rode with him?”
“Yes,” Jun Do said. “Though the Senator said it was Wanda who figured it out.”
“Of course,” he said. “And concerning the Senator, what was the nature of your conversation?”
“He said that he disapproved of our tactics, that the boarding of fishing boats would continue, and that we would never see our precious toy again. That’s the message he wanted me to deliver.”
“To whom?”
“To the Dear Leader.”
“To the Dear Leader, you?” Dr. Song asked. “Why should he think you had his ear?”
“How should I know?” Jun Do asked. “He must have thought I was someone I’m not.”
“Yes, yes, that’s a useful tactic,” Dr. Song said. “We cultivated that.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Jun Do said. “I don’t even know what toy he was talking about.”
“Fair enough,” Dr. Song said. He took Jun Do’s shoulder and squeezed it in a good-natured way. “I suppose it doesn’t matter now. You know what radiation is?”
Jun Do nodded.
“The Japanese invented an instrument called a background radiation detector. They pointed it at the sky, to study something about space. When the Dear Leader heard of this device, he asked his scientists if such a thing could be attached to an airplane. He wanted to fly over our mountains and use it to find uranium deep underground. His scientists were unanimous. So the Dear Leader sent a team to the Kitami Observatory in Hokkaido.”
“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 darkness, and with dawn, they flew above the train tracks leading south from Shenyang, following them all the way to Pyongyang. The airport was north of the city, so Jun Do could get no good look at the fabled capital, with its May Day Stadium, Mansudae Mausoleum, and flaming-red Tower of Juche. Ties were straightened, the trash picked up, and, finally, Comrade Buc brought Jun Do the puppy, which his men had crawled the length of the cabin to capture.
But Jun Do wouldn’t take the dog. “It’s a gift for Sun Moon,” he said. “Will you get it to her for me?”
Jun Do could see the questions moving through Comrade Buc’s eyes, but he voiced none of them. Instead, Comrade Buc offered a simple nod.
The landing gear was lowered, and on approach, the goats on the runway somehow knew the moment to wander away. But touching down, Dr. Song saw the vehicles that were waiting to meet the plane, and he turned, panic on his face.
“Forget everything,” he called to the Minister and Jun Do. “The plan must completely change.”
“What is it?” Jun Do asked. He looked at the Minister, whose eyes showed fear.
“There’s no time,” Dr. Song said. “The Americans never intended to return what they stole from us. You got that? That’s the new story.”
They huddled in the galley, bracing themselves as the pilots leaned hard on the brakes.
“The new story is this,” Dr. Song said. “The Americans had an elaborate plan to humiliate us. They made us do groundskeeping and cut the Senator’s weeds, yes?”
“That’s right,” Jun Do said. “We had to eat outside, with our bare hands, surrounded by dogs.”
The Minister said, “There was no band or red carpet to greet us. And they drove us around in obsolete cars.”
“We were shown nice shoes at a store, but then they were put away,” Jun Do said. “At dinner, they made us wear peasant shirts.”
The Minister said, “I had to share my bed with a dog!”
“Good, good,” Dr. Song said. He had a desperate smile on his face, but his eyes sparkled with the challenge. “This will speak to the Dear Leader. This might save our skins.”