Joy Brigade by Martin Limon Page A

didn’t reach that inner sanctum, I’d never make contact with the person the Manchurian Battalion had embedded in the upper echelons of the North Korean Communist elite, the person who had the information Hero Kang needed. This is why Hero Kang needed a foreigner. If I didn’t win this Taekwondo tournament, our best chance of escape would fall apart.
    In North Korea, as I was learning, nothing was ever easy.
    My first fight was with a Cuban security guard. He was quite good, but he made a few fundamental mistakes, such as overextending his roundhouse kick, thereby leaving himself off balance if it failed to connect. Which it did, repeatedly, as I moved in and then hopped back just in time and countered with a short front kick that caught him one, two, three times in the midsection. The judges were fair. Although the Cuban’s fighting style had been flamboyant, with long legs and long arms flashing everywhere, he never landed anything more than glancing blows, whereas I made direct contact with his solar plexus three times. In a real fight, the Cuban would’ve been dead. The judges ruled me the winner.
    When I returned to the sidelines, Hero Kang beamed. “Only two more,” he told me. “Then you can face Maputo.”
    I noticed the tall black man eyeing me. Maputo, like the judges, had been impressed with my performance.
    Hero Kang elbowed me. Entering on either side of the gymnasium, at the base of the bleachers, were armed security men. After about a half dozen of them stationed themselves near the exits, a woman entered. Tall, dressed in black leather boots and coat with a matching red-star cap. A military officer, a senior captain. The same beautiful woman I’d seen last night. Her long black hair framed an oval face that was white and unblemished. Her lips were soft, petulant, and her luminous black eyes stared straight at mine.
    “Don’t look at her,” Hero Kang said, turning his back toward the security people. I turned and pretended to bestretching my hamstrings. “Her name is Rhee Mi-sook,” he told me. “A notorious fixer. Probably sent by the railroad security people.”
    “To arrest me?”
    “Secretly. So they can interrogate you first and find out who you really are.”
    “Great,” I said, still bending over so no one could see we were talking. “How do we shake her?”
    “Only one way,” Hero Kang told me. “Win the tournament.”
    Maputo mowed down everyone he faced. As did I, although not nearly as impressively. I counted on movement and scoring points, knowing by now that the judges were experts at realizing which moves were truly effective and which were just for show. Maputo, on the other hand, humiliated his opponents. He pelted them with side kicks and roundhouse kicks and, once they were backing away in fear, launched a showy reverse swivel kick that, despite being telegraphed by a mile, landed more often than not. A couple of his opponents had been bloody by the time the three rounds were over. Each time, Maputo easily won the decision. Even the members of the First Corps Taekwondo team were watching him, if with smirks on their faces.
    Hero Kang whispered in my ear about strategy, using pidgin English when someone was close enough to hear, Korean when they weren’t. His plan boiled down to one thing: move in close, inside his big roundhouse kick, and stay there. Maybe easier said than done.
    Finally, after everyone else had been eliminated, it was down to just me and him. That’s when an officer at the side of the hall shouted at the top of his lungs,
“Charyo!”
Attention! Everyone rose to their feet. An old man tottered in. He looked like he might be ninety. But he wore the uniform of a general of the People’s Army and his chest was weighed down by what must’ve been twenty pounds of medals.
    “General Yi,” Hero Kang whispered, “the First Corps commander. Here for your match.”
    Two aides hovered near the old man’s elbows, but he shrugged them off, straightened his