"You're a DEA agent, for chrissake! That's all I'm saying," Zondra shouted at Carina.
"In the grand scheme of things, it's not that big of a deal," Carina argued back, huffy and looking away. "It's not cocaine or heroin. It's not addictive and it isn't killing anyone."
Carina used to justify a lot of things to herself, out loud, to get us on her side. I think a lot of the time, she knew how crazy she sounded. She just didn't care back then. It was a long road from there to where we were when I saw her again after I was assigned to Burbank and Chuck.
This argument started after our newest orders came down. We were told to break a dissident out of a detention facility in North Korea. This was at the beginning of the summer of 2003. This was the first time in my life I felt like my life was in real danger. Or I should say this was the real beginning of my life being in constant danger. It didn't end for nine more years. That's a long time to live that way–full peak adrenaline and then nothing. It was a delicate balance, to manage the rush…use the energy, dispel the fear, and shut everything else off. When the rush was over, the shutdown became complete, for there was no time for reflection. Reflection made us second guess–and that could get us killed. Out of danger and restlessly numb, we needed the distractions I spoke about. And there was no in between. All or nothing, each moment we lived.
That post-mission crash was something we had to learn to live with…to live around. It was something they never taught us at the Farm. It would have been good to know, in retrospect, but the CIA was never about keeping their agents whole as people. It was always about results. They drove us, burnt us out, then started over. Like professional athletes—ancient in their mid-thirties. Only for us, too old meant dead, not a job doing Monday Night Football commentary.
We all dealt with it in our own way, as I've explained. The more dangerous the missions, the harder the crash. Then the more extreme measures needed to feel…something…anything…after turning ourselves into machines to do the job. We could have turned to each other, but we never did. At least not for a very long time, and a lot of mistrust disrupted those connections. The CIA and/or DEA wanted us that way, though. Disconnected and autonomous, teamed only for efficiency.
Some of the cons my father and I ran were dangerous. My father minimized it, probably as a way to justify putting his only child in mortal danger for the sake of money. A few times with him I remembered being frightened, like the time I did actually break my wrist pretending to fall off my bicycle in front of an armored car. Because in my youth I didn't fear dying or getting hurt, those types of situations were thrilling. Doing this job gave me the same rush—for succeeding, for doing impossibly dangerous things with ease, for excelling at an extremely difficult profession.
I was good at something for the first time in my life. Something that was considered respectable, at least on the surface. It's important here for me to say that even as an agent, even a newly trained one, I really didn't fear dying or getting hurt either. The reasons why were different…I just didn't understand, not at 23. It didn't take me long to understand, though, that the government was always about the end justifying the means. Always. In the hazy zone between wrong and right, I slowly learned that. No matter what they said, I always had to accept there were things they didn't tell us—things they kept secret for a reason. We never knew the whole truth, or what was real and what was just pretend.
They would send the orders, send us off, and tell us we had no back up. That was the first of many times I've heard that—the mission to North Korea.
North Korea is the most isolationist country on Earth, and has been since the early 1950s. It is a communist, totalitarian wasteland, its people oppressed and cut off from the rest of the world. They had no diplomatic ties to any nation other than China. U.S. passports were invalid in North Korea.
The only way the U.S. got intelligence out of North Korea was with the assistance of dissidents—citizens working in secret inside their own country, at great risk of personal peril. They got information out, assisted defectors fleeing to China or South Korea, and both protected and managed contraband, which in North Korea could be as simple as a can of Coca Cola.
Their network was also the only way Americans like us got inside.
Lee Hak-Kun was our mission. He was a leader in a ring of dissidents, one of the most prolific sources of intelligence gathered about North Korea in the 1990s. He wasn't just smuggling in medical supplies or Madonna CDs. He worked high-level in the government. He had intel concerning North Korea's development of nuclear weapons. A big deal.
He was captured by the DPRK for his involvement in a high level defection earlier in the year. He possessed great knowledge of U.S. intelligence, much more than what was known by the DPRK at the time of his arrest. On the surface, it was a noble mission. Free this freedom hungry political prisoner who had saved hundreds of defectors from a bleak existence. The truth? The CIA wanted him sprung…before they tortured him, lest he give them any new intel they were unaware of, that they could potentially use against us.
So enter the CAT squad, or at least Zondra and me. The DEA had no jurisdiction or vested interest in our op, so Carina and Amy were back up for this mission, which meant they accompanied us to South Korea and provided the minimal support we were allowed.
The argument I referenced? That was Carina, fretting about needing to leave behind her marijuana to make it safely through customs, both in and out of the country. Most countries were stricter than the U.S., with harsher penalties. In Europe and South America, she took risks…minimal risks, always arguing that she could always figure out a way to slide things by. Her DEA badge was a type of shield. Countries like China, Iran, and Pakistan shot first and asked questions later. We never gambled in those types of circumstances. Carina was resourceful enough to find what she needed within the boundaries of whatever country we were in.
We went first to South Korea and rendezvoused with intelligence officers stationed at Kunsan Air Force Base in Gunsan. In the summer of 2003, China had a new leader—Hu Jintao. During his term, China would gradually become a larger problem on the world stage. However, only three months in, the Yellow Sea was nowhere near the gray zone (a quasi military term in between war and peace) that it is today, or even in 2012. With the assistance of the South Koreans and U.S. intelligence, we got our access to North Korea via the Yellow Sea.
China considered North Korean defectors as illegal economic immigrants, and returned them if captured. The route out through China was complicated by the usual need for a third country, because China, in terms of personal liberty, was only slightly better than North Korea. Using submarines, we were able to move in without detection. Carina and Amy stayed at the Air Force Base. We were running silent, the op too dangerous to maintain an open com link. But they had equipment that could track us remotely. We were on our own, with the threat of disavowal if we were caught, but they monitored just the same.
Wearing that same old attire—black catsuits, only this time with sturdier shoes for traveling through the mountainous terrain, Zondra and I were passengers in a small, sonar-proof submarine. We were cramped into quarters just big enough for one person. Everything in the berth could be touched with your hand while you stood in the middle. It was a four hour trip once we left South Korea, a circuitous route to avoid contact with Chinese vessels.
Four hours is a long time, stuffed in a room the size of a closet with another person. Especially a person who ran as generally hot as Zondra always did. The instigation of her ire, this time? The hands-off declaration by the CIA. If we were captured during the mission, we were on our own. Doomed to the dungeons or gulags until we were old women, if we weren't executed for crimes against the DPRK first.
"They don't have a choice," I argued. "No diplomatic presence dictates it."
"You don't have to quote regs to me, Walker," she countered acerbically. "It's just shitty is all. Bullshit politics."
She wasn't wrong. I don't know why she was so jaded already…or better yet, why I wasn't, considering my path in life up to that point. "Why are you doing this job, then, if you hate it so much?" I asked her. I honestly wanted to know, not certain that she would answer me.
"Someone has to do it, right?" she answered me, her dark brown eyes on fire. "What about you, Princess? Why the CIA?" she asked, her voice thick with sarcasm, especially on the snarky nickname she had for me back then.
"Limited options," I answered her cryptically. I don't know why, I still to this day don't know why, but those words seemed to throw water on that fire inside her. It was as if she understood, even empathized, with the fact that I was merely making the best of a very bad situation.
I could never resist the urge to prove my points, though, and I continued. "This man we are supposed to save…he gave up his entire life for something he believed in. He thinks for all that he did to help all those people, for all the information he passed at the risk to his own life, that it didn't matter. That he's going to die alone in that hellhole. And maybe the CIA only cares about what he'll say while they're prying bamboo under his fingernails or lightning his hair on fire…but I'm still here. I'm still choosing to help him, because I can. Because it's the right thing to do."
God, listening to myself repeat that, I sound very magnanimous, even pretentious. But, I honestly believed what I was telling her. The way I could make sense of it, the way my heart made peace with it, was to add my own motivation to the orders. Rather than the end justifying the means, the end was the purpose for the means. Somehow that little speech of mine, done mostly to convince myself at the time, got underneath her anger. She stayed that street fighter, but she became my friend in that moment, the first real friend I had as an adult. It went sour not too long afterward, which I will explain later, but here, it was a start. And the mission solidified it.
The submarine surfaced close to a mile from shore, and we disembarked with full scuba gear. In the cover of darkness, we swam through the ocean until we reached the shores of Liaoning Province in China. It was only slightly easier than trying to enter North Korea via the ocean. Once we were on the rocky beach, we changed, swapping our ocean gear for hiking gear and stowing it all back in our backpacks. We walked almost five miles, following the route we were given.
We met our contact at the border of North Korea, exactly on time. I was expecting an older gentleman, but we were met with a young girl, probably a teenager. I spoke fluent Korean, so we reconnoitered easily. She may have been young, but she was an expert at navigating the trails and avoiding the patrols. She had obviously been doing this her entire life. It was grueling and exhausting, but we made it to our contact point. We had been racing against the sunrise all night, not able to openly travel in the daylight hours. We arrived with only moments to spare, in a ramshackle home that served as a way station for defectors. We were 15 miles inside North Korea, another 15 or so from Pyongyang, the city where Lee was being held.
During the day, we stayed beneath the floorboards of a bedroom, in a dirt hole in the ground. Twice, we were slid small bowls of rice, that we ate with our hands in the dark. I was beyond mission-focused in that state, razor sharp and alert. It only occurred to me later about the people who were hiding us…most likely barely able to feed themselves, but sharing what little they had with us because we were trying to help them.
When night fell, which was earlier than one would expect, due to the lack of electricity, especially in areas separate from major cities, we moved again. All we had were directions to another stop on the defector trail of sorts, this time on the outskirts of Pyongyang. We made it the remaining 15 miles right before the sun rose again. In this house, we were stuffed inside storage crates, separated.
It was like being sealed inside a coffin, only there was a cutout in the back for air. Exhausted, my feet, ankles, and calves burning from exertion, I fell asleep, probably for about five hours. It was a restless sleep, but enough to rejuvenate me for the most dangerous part of the mission, which was due when the sun went down that night.
It began here–the one-eye-open half-sleep of spies, and lasted for a very long time. I slept with guns under my pillow, knives still lashed to my thighs and ankles. I had to remain battle-ready at all times, zero to sixty in a split second. I never shared my bed with anyone just for sleeping, until Chuck and I were together. He made me feel safe enough to sleep–deep, restorative sleep, once we lived together. I say it like it was a stretch, but it wasn't. We were only technically dating for a couple weeks before Chuck asked me to move into his apartment. Again, more on that later, but I'm mentioning it here as a contrast. I spent nine years of my life half awake…or maybe half asleep…in so many ways, just one of them being sleep deprivation related. I got used to living like that, and then once I was sleeping next to Chuck, I made up for it. At first it was masturbation, then alcohol that I needed to fall asleep. Nothing worked better than his arms around me and his shoulder as my pillow. He would tease me, call me a sleepy head, and tickle me to get me to get up sometimes, never understanding that groggy morning feeling was attributed only to him, and how he made me feel.
When night fell, they let us out of the crates. We geared up and headed into the city. What took the most time was slinking in and out of the shadows to avoid detection. The prison was heavily guarded, even in the middle of the night. The only way our mission succeeded was with help from someone on the inside–a fellow dissident who worked as a guard. He was instructed to give us the signal at the proper time, two taps on a metal door, exactly ten seconds apart. He unlocked the door, moving to block the security camera at precisely the correct time.
Once inside, we followed the path we had memorized on the schematics we had of the prison. It was dark and murky. It stank of human excrement, vomit, and something I would later associate with death, only at this point in time I had no frame of reference. It was like something out of a horror movie.
We had four minutes. We approached Lee's cell. I could see him in his grungy jumpsuit, far in the corner of his cell in the dark, curled up on the floor. In Korean, I whispered to him that we were with the U.S. government and we were here to break him out. Zondra picked the rusty lock on his cell, and I went in to retrieve him. He was frail and had difficulty walking, probably from malnutrition and possibly from physical abuse at the hands of the guards. Zondra and I were communicating without speaking, something we learned to do on this mission and continued to do afterward. We didn't have time to move at the pace Lee could move. So I slung him over my shoulder and carried him out.
He was heavy, but not unmanageable for me. We locked the cell behind us, something we were told in our pre-mission briefing that was a necessity in order to draw less attention to Lee's absence. The same guard gave us the second signal, another two taps on the metal door, now five seconds apart. He was passing the security camera for the last time, and our window to get Lee back through the door was closing. As silently as we possibly could, we ran.
We weren't silent enough.
"Meomchuda!" Stop, in Korean, shouted as we cleared the exit door.
My arms were full, so Zondra covered me after she drew her weapon. We could hear shooting behind us, shots being fired inside the prison. I never knew for sure, but I always believed the guard who helped us escape was probably shot and killed while we were escaping. She only had one gun, but she covered me on both sides. Like I mentioned before, I don't know who the first person Zondra killed was, or when the CIA gave her her Red Test. I only know at least there, in North Korea, she didn't kill anyone. She didn't even wound anyone. She just fired her gun at enough people to throw off their aim, until we were hidden in the shadows again.
The entire time I was running, I was waiting to be shot and killed. I had no control over the situation, and I was relying on Zondra to keep me safe. It was a miracle that she managed to do it. Every step I took made my legs burn and ache, each pound of the soles of my feet against the ground tearing more skin and bursting blisters. I ignored the pain, pushed it to the center of myself and just kept going, my focus razor sharp and deliberate, one foot in front of the other, for almost a full mile.
Then Zondra and I switched, as she took Lee and I drew my weapon. By that point, the alarms at the detention facility were in full shrill. We could see the searchlights high in the air, reflecting off the cloud cover and swinging wildly back and forth. Search parties were spreading out from the prison. Those guards weren't just doing their jobs–they were in fear of their lives, execution the punishment for failure in a harsh regime. Those thoughts buffeted around in my head. How many innocent people died, not by my hand, but because of my actions? I tried to rationalize, of course. How innocent were they? It's an unwinnable argument to have with yourself. Just as with myself, following orders was necessary for survival. Were they any more innocent than I was?
Those last few miles before we disappeared back into the darkness was the first time I had ever fired my weapon, in defense of position, the same way Zondra had. I had fired it hundreds of times at the Farm and then training when I was with the Secret Service. It felt different though, thinking that there was a chance that I would shoot someone. Not this time, not here, however.
This time, we made it to the next way station. The occupants hid us under the floor, while they tended to Lee in the darkness. Their network took over, and moved us through the rest of the country, back to the Chinese border, traveling at night and hiding during the day. Thirty miles of walking and running was easier for Lee, after he had eaten and slept, and had his wounds tended. The last house we stayed in before crossing the border, we were asked to partake in a celebratory drink with a concoction called snake wine, or snake blood wine.
It's an old, medicinal tradition in southeast Asia: Korea, China, and Vietnam. Even speaking about it now reminds me of how vile it is. We watched them prepare it for us. They had a live snake, a venomous one, although which type, I'm not sure. The snake was slit along its belly, and its blood drained into waiting vessels of rice wine. It was considered rude to refuse, so we drank it. I held my breath and chugged the whole thing in one gulp. Hands down one of the worst things I've ever ingested–burning and bitter, leaving my lips and part of my tongue numb. I only read about it once we were home, but apparently that was the venom. People have been known to have permanent health problems from ingesting snake venom. That never bothered me, though. That moment–drinking like that–prolonged that heart-pounding rush, and avoided the crash that was coming.
We made it to the shore of the Yellow Sea three days later. We rendezvoused with the submarine one mile out in the ocean, while Lee was taken from the shore by South Korean intelligence. He was later smuggled into the U.S. as a defector. The mission was a success, Lee was free, and the U.S. government's secrets were safe.
We celebrated once all four of us were back in South Korea. A typical wild, nightclub-hopping night. Carina had the company of a few officers from the Air Force Base. They were dancing, along with Amy, and even Zondra. I was drinking. A lot. Somehow looking for another shot of alcohol that would numb more of me than just my lips or tongue.
The last thing from that night I remember was sitting at the bar and drinking. I woke up in our hotel room, with no memory of how I'd gotten there or what I'd done. I was completely naked, in Carina's bed, with Carina and an Air Force Lieutenant whose first name I never knew. My mouth felt woolen and my head felt like I'd been bashed on my skull with a hammer. Both my bedmates were naked as well, and still passed out. Carina's sex toys were scattered on the mattress and tucked under the pillows. An entire box of condom wrappers were strewn on the floor.
Therein lies the questions. Did I have sex with him, whoever he was? No way to know. I felt tender between my legs, how I would feel after a long night of Sam fucking me. But I know, at least after this incident, Carina explained that two girls and one guy meant one of us got the dildo, and the other the cock. Again, just a technicality. I was either fucked by Mr. Air Force…or fucked by Carina with a dildo.
This time, I know I rolled out of bed and onto the floor, grabbing my clothes and rushing into the bathroom. I was sick, violently sick, nearly collapsing onto the toilet as the entire contents of my stomach blasted out, burning my throat and nasal passages. I must have dry heaved for a long time, and eventually blacked out again. I woke up on the bathroom floor, looking at the light on the ceiling, watching it pinwheel while I felt I was floating off the ground.
I frightened myself, feeling like I was sliding down an endless pit with no handholds. Why? I asked myself. Why did I let things go this far? Why couldn't I remember what had happened? Everything inside my head hurt, as I searched through the darkness for answers, none of which I ever got. Except this vague, hazy memory of being touched, aching for it…even though I wasn't even sure who had touched me. Amazingly enough, what bothered me the most on that day wasn't my loss of control. It was the fact that I couldn't remember the feeling…or how my body had responded to whatever had happened the night before. At the very least, if I had somehow consented to sex with a stranger, what was the point if I couldn't remember if it felt good or not?
I made a promise to myself that I would never let this situation happen again. It was dangerous considering the life we lived. This point came up again, of course. For that was a promise that I broke. Twice. The first time was about a month before our mission against the Gentle Hand started, in the fall of 2003. The second time, and the one that changed everything for us, was before Pakistan, in the winter of 2004.