When the madam drifted away, Brad told Machiko about the girl he was seeking. It had been Spring then; prophetically, it was Spring now, the startlingly fresh green bursting forth; the hint of cherry blossoms in clear air. And a younger Brad Saxon like the season’s early colt, bouncing awkwardly, without direction.
A bitter young man, certainly. With the stark coldness of black mountains too recently on him; with the icy hate of dirty little men and bright blood spilled on the alien snows of Korea.
Brad’s face hadn’t been so scarred then, but it was stamped with agonies and a deep-smouldering rage, an impotent, bottled-up anger that threatened to boil out and destroy all near it. Chronologically, he was young, but even the very young age swiftly in combat. At least, the survivors do.
And prisoners turn old even faster. Those that are left after death marches through the stained snow; those who remain after beatings and starvation and torture. When these things happen, men are ancient before their time, brittle and inwardly corroded by their hates.
Nine years after, and who remembered the shattered village of Kunu-ri? You found the name only in yellowed files of newspapers—and engraved on the souls of men who had bled there. Kunu-ri—and the remnants of the Indianhead Division staggering out of the valley, leaving all its artillery, most of its trucks and tanks behind it. Leaving 4,464 dead and missing.
Only all of them weren’t dead—yet. A thousand or so were left to be herded into stinking boxcars, to be prodded by bayonets and hammered with gun butts; to be left with ice films glazing blind eyes. Brad Saxon wouldn’t die like that. And he wouldn’t die in the horror of prison camps to the North.
They thought he was dead when the grimy men in padded uniforms marched his group off to one side of the railroad tracks and opened fire with their burp guns. And he would have been, except for the blood smeared on his face—sticky, hot blood seeping from the fresh corpse beside him.
He didn’t remember how long he lay in the trampled snow, stiff, listening to the short bursts of gunfire taking care of the wounded, to the singsong words and sadistic laughter of the slant-eyed animals who had the guns. An eternity crept by before they left, and another eon before Brad dared to lift himself from the heap of dead men. And it wasn’t over yet. There was a hundred miles of commie-infested mountains between him and the shocked and reeling outfit. Too far for a Caucasian in an Oriental country.
That’s what the books said, anyway. But Brad Saxon had men to kill, so he had to get back. Through frozen gullies, shadow-like over the rocks, a flat snake passing the sheeted ponds of rice paddies, he worked his way South. At Pakc’hon, he strangled a farmer greedy for the reward the Reds were offering for GIs. In Sinanju, he burned another in his ratnest shack. The flames drew guards off the road.
Hollow-eyed, staggering at times, Brad ran and slunk and stole his way toward the UN lines. And he made the hundred miles—only to find there was another hundred to go. Grinding dry rice between aching teeth, choking down odorous kimchi dug from buried crocks, Brad went on. He avoided sentries when he could. When he couldn’t, he killed them—with his hands, with a broken bayonet, with a loop made from his belt, and later, with accurate bursts from a Russian submachine gun.
The names of towns he’d never forget—Pyongyang, Sariwon, Kaesong, all of them seen only as blurs from a mountaintop, seen only as deadly shadows lurking in a breathheld night. Days fading into hungry weeks, into months. Then the capitol city of Seoul, gripped by victorious Chinese, a ghost city wailing lonely in frozen darkness. Across the numbing waters of the Han, crawling spent and beaten over the shell-pocked highway that led into Yongdongpo.
They were there—the spat! of an M-l, the belated challenge of a wary outpost guard. Brad Saxon was home, but he had more battles ahead. They tried to fly him out to Japan, but he crawled out of the tent hospital and hid until the plane was gone. He wolfed food, and shocked nurses and doctors by his determined calisthenics. It was vital that he get his body back into condition. There were beasts to kill, and Brad needed to kill them.
Technically, he was AWOL when he led a squad of yelling riflemen against a guerilla band—and led the merciless slaughter of them all. On the books, Brad was still a patient in the evacuation hospital when he was a platoon sergeant around whom a legend was building—a legend of revenge and death.
The Chinese stopped his war near Inje, with a bullet through the big tendons back of his left knee. This time, the medics got him aboard a plane, and he fumed helplessly in Tokyo Army Hospital, planning his escape back to Korea as soon as his wound healed. It didn’t work out that way.
They gave him a pass into the city, and Brad limped along the strange streets, eager for the taste and feel of a woman. Just any woman wouldn’t do; she had to be something special, someone softly feminine and giving and beautiful.
He wandered through the Kyobashi area, drinking in sounds and sights so different from Korea—different, and yet somehow familiarly the same. He looked for the girl, and didn’t find her in the glittering Shin-bashi bars. On a side street, in the New Opal Hotel, he found her. He found Sueko.
A soft hand closed on his arm, and Brad Saxon jumped.
“You don’t like me?”
A sameness in the tilt of oblique cheekbones, a sameness around a rosebud mouth. Brad came back to now, to the girl who wasn’t Sueko, but Machiko. He drained the bottle of sake, cooled now by the time he’d just spent in the past.
“Sure I like you,” he said. “I’m sorry. I guess I was dreaming.”
Machiko leaned toward him. The low swoop of her evening gown widened, exposing the dusky cleft between her breasts. She smelled clean, exciting.
“The other girl?”
Brad lifted two fingers at the hovering madam. “Yes. I came back to find her—and I will. Maybe not tonight; maybe next week, next month, but I’ll find her.”
Machiko kept her face lowered until the woman behind the bar served their drinks and moved away. Then she looked up. “I—hope so.”
She smiled at him through a rosy glow, over a parade of sake bottles that marched into his big hand. The night rush was on at the New Opal, a pair of soldiers drifting in to look over the merchandise, three more regulars greeted by delighted cries from the girls; the madam joined now by a jacketed bartender. The record player thundered; feet shuffled on the worn floor.
Machiko was sweet; she was sympathetic, and she looked very much like another girl he had once known. Right here in this place. Across the miniature courtyard and down a squeaky hall to a certain room. Suddenly, Brad had to see that room again. He lurched erect with Machiko pattering anxiously beside him. Mumbling apologies, he shouldered across the dance floor. Men frowned at him, but when his size and bulk registered with them, they moved out of his way.
There was no light behind the sliding panels of the remembered door. Brad swayed before it, staring at its blankness.
“This room?” Machiko asked, and when he nodded, she kneeled to remove his shoes.
The imitation Stateside bed was in its usual corner; the box dresser bare of the statue of Ho-Teh, fat, grinning god of health. It was cold.
“Oh hell,” Brad said, realizing that he was drunk, that the waiting and hoping were making him maudlin. “Oh hell,” he said again.
The door slid shut behind him. A dim bulb showed him the bones of the room, the unrumpled bed, the withered cherry branch with its tinseled good luck charms hanging dusty from an exposed rafter. It was all wrong. It shouldn’t be dim. It ought to be lighted with the glowing beauty of a tiny, modeled girl who tucked her little hands into the sleeves of her yukata and looked like a lovely butterfly.
With a delicate motion, Machiko moved in front of him, lifted her hands in an utterly feminine gesture and fluffed out her hair. Dark, searching eyes; dew on the petals of a morning flower; sandalwood and spice, and the urgent thrusting of desire making his belly taut and his loins rigid.
Alien