Joy Brigade

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Yellow floodlights loomed out of thick fog. Atop the rickety wooden dock, soldiers paced.

“Red-star jokers,” Mergim told me, squinting into the mist-laden night. “They inspect ship. After that everything okay. Maybe.”

I leaned on a taut steel cable, gripping it tightly. The sea rumbled below: dark, listless, reeking of slimy death. We were five miles inside the Taedong River estuary in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK, better known as North Korea.

Mergim scratched his unshaven face, searching my eyes for signs of panic. Apparently, he found them. “Don’t worry,” he said, slapping me on the back. “I come here many times. Still alive.” As if to demonstrate, he pinched the loose skin on the back of his hand. “You be okay.” Then he turned back to the dock. “Maybe.”

My name is George Sueno. I’m an agent for the Eighth United States Army Criminal Investigation Division in Seoul, South Korea. But now I was standing on the deck of an Albanian merchant freighter, a ship called the Star of Tirana. I was clad in unwashed woolen work pants, staring into the vast predawn darkness of communist North Korea, wondering if this entire operation had already been exposed and, more importantly, if I’d be tortured to death by those pacing red devils.

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