The Eve of the Storm
Late on the night of the eleventh, Ma-ryang rose from bed and went to stand at the window.
The moon had passed full and was slowly shrinking, but it was still bright enough to lay a clear light over the black city of Seoul. He looked out at the Han River, where the moonlight glittered on the water, and for a little while he let the old days come back to him. The faces of the father, the wife, and the son he had left in the North were growing faint. He was drawing away from those memories faster than he liked, and it shamed him — shamed him that his first family should come to mind less and less.
Soon-young stirred awake and asked him.
"Honey, you're still up?"
Ma-ryang turned, slow.
She was lying in the bed, rubbing her eyes.
"Moon's too bright, isn't it?"
"No. I just woke."
He drew the curtain across the window. Since Soon-young had come into his life, loneliness had found no way in. There was a vast emptiness in him, wide as a continent, and she moved through it without rest, filling it as she went.
"We leave for Busan tomorrow. Anything you want?"
"Gum."
"Gum?"
A smile rose on him of its own accord. All she wanted was a single tin.
"They've got the American gum too, haven't they?"
"That stuff's too tough. I hear the Japanese gum is softer. If you've got a minute in Busan, buy me one."
"All right."
Ma-ryang came back to the bed, stroked Soon-young's hair, and fell asleep.
At dawn the next day Ma-ryang, up early, reported to the yard at Cheongnyangni. He had made a point of coming out ahead of the others, but Ko Wang-chul and Shim Hansu were already there, getting ready to roll.
"Department Head Jang, you're here?"
Wang-chul greeted him warmly.
"Department Head Ko. Out early."
"I'm Cheongsan's transport chief. I ought to be the first man in."
"That's how it should be. But what's that in your hand?"
"It's nothing."
Ma-ryang caught a glimpse of what Wang-chul had hidden behind his back. Black feathers.
"Crow, by the look of it."
"Ah. Yes. It was just lying dead out in the yard."
Wang-chul's face went uneasy.
"Don't hang too much on a crow. A bird that flies the sky still dies on the ground when its time comes."
"Yes, Department Head."
Hansu came up a little late and offered his greeting.
"Hyungnim, you're here?"
"Aye. Sleep well?"
"Yes. I turned in early last night, not long past dusk."
"Slept well, then. Good."
With the greetings done, Ma-ryang started on the trucks. He went to No. 1 and No. 2 and ran a hand over the triangular steel beam bolted across the nose of each cargo truck. White frost lay on the cold iron, and he brushed it off with a gloved hand. Cheongsan's maintenance crew had pulled the lower frame off a wrecked U.S. Army truck and mounted it there. The ramming bumper on the truck's face wore its menace openly.
Past No. 2, built to the same pattern as No. 1, he checked the haulers that made up the middle of the column. Their small faults had been patched as well, and the roofs reworked. Last he inspected the tail truck, the one Hansu would ride. It carried no impact bumper, but like No. 1 and No. 2 it had barbed wire strung along the outside of the cargo bed. No. 1, No. 2, and the tail truck were built for a fight.
Looking over the driver's seat, Ma-ryang saw a bow.
"Why'd you bring the bow?"
"I thought I might shoot a bird or two on the way back. I haven't drawn in a while, and it feels like the skill is rusting."
"Out of nowhere, that."
He had no way of knowing that Hansu meant to wake the old feel in his hands so he could teach Jin Hyeon-gyeong.
The column left the Cheongnyangni yard and reached Bupyeong at five in the morning. As always, Cho Choong-hoon was there to meet the Cheongsan men. He greeted Ma-ryang as he climbed down from the truck, looked over the more than twenty trucks behind him, and asked.
"What are you doing with this many trucks?"
"Hyungnim told me to bring a lot of them."
"Did he? What we've got to move is five trucks' worth."
"Understood."
Choong-hoon asked after Ki-jo.
"No word from President Lee in Busan?"
"Not yet. He said if he ran late, he'd send word even if it was dawn tomorrow."
"Right. That hyungnim of yours said he was seeing to something in Busan that would do us good. Word will come."
"Yes. So he will."
The Cheongsan crew took charge of the beer bound for Busan, and the haulers were loaded by six. Before leaving for Busan, Lee Ki-jo had ordered them to commit twice as many trucks as the cargo required, and so Ma-ryang, Hansu, and Wang-chul split the five truckloads of beer across ten haulers. Ma-ryang sent the rest of the haulers back to Cheongnyangni.
When fourteen Cheongsan trucks pulled out of the Bupyeong supply depot, Choong-hoon — who on any other day saw them off from the main gate — did something else. This time he got into a jeep himself and followed at the tail of the column.
Hansu, riding the tail truck, knew why. He remembered what Choong-hoon had told him before they left.
"Don't stop those trucks until you're completely clear of Incheon. Word is the Incheon gangsters have their eye on us."
But nothing happened all the way out of Incheon. He was just settling into the thought that it had been an empty rumor when a red flag went up on the truck ahead.
A red flag pumped up and down meant halt. A flag simply held aloft meant danger in front — do not stop. The driver of the tail truck saw it and locked both hands on the wheel.
In No. 1, Ma-ryang fixed his eyes on the two jeeps blocking the road ahead.
"Ha. Cute little bastards."
Wang-chul snorted.
"Smash both on the way through? Or just cave the one in and go?"
"Both. Leave one in one piece and they may well stick to our tail and make a nuisance of it."
"Yes, sir."
Wang-chul clamped down on the wheel and floored the accelerator.
The thugs had set a stove made from a fuel drum cut in half in the middle of the road and lit a fire in it, the better to be seen from far off. Two jeeps sat beside the fire. The trucks, they figured, would have the sense to stop, and they were taking their ease on the strength of that. But No. 1, with Wang-chul at the wheel, showed no sign of slowing. It came on faster, and the men in the road went pale.
"Wh— what the hell are those bastards?"
"Move!"
Headlights glaring, the truck bore down, and a dozen-odd men broke and fled in a blind panic for the roadside. The drivers still sitting in the jeeps abandoned them and ran flat-out for the fields beyond the shoulder.
KWA-KWANG!
The truck, its nose braced with a steel beam, launched the drum stove as if kicking a ball, and embers sprayed in every direction. The jeeps standing to either side took the blow square along their flanks, spun through a hundred and twenty degrees, and were flung aside. No. 1 and No. 2 blew past without shedding speed, and ten haulers followed in a line, raising a choking wall of dust.
From the tail truck, Hansu looked at the two jeeps No. 1 had smashed. Ah. So that's what it was.
Choong-hoon, coming up behind, saw the wreckage, accelerated, and drew alongside the tail truck's passenger side. Running even with it, he shouted.
"Hey! Department Head Shim!"
"Yes, sir!"
"I'll handle the cleanup! Don't worry about a thing — just keep going!"
"Understood, sir!"
Cho Choong-hoon eased off, turned the jeep around, and headed back to the scene. He meant to pass through the shambles and see whether anyone had been hurt.
The gangsters who had fled to either side of the road came back up onto it late and stood staring blankly at the two jeeps, their sides caved in.
"Hey! Anyone hurt?"
Choong-hoon had stopped to ask, and the flustered men, taking him for a driver who had come from the other direction, nodded.
"Must've been the jeeps running into each other. A man ought to take care on a dark road before dawn."
"No, that's not it. Some crazy bastards just rammed straight through."
"That so? Even so — nobody hurt. That's the main thing, isn't it? I'll call a shop I know and tell them there's been a wreck here."
Once he had confirmed that no one was injured, Choong-hoon left the scene as he was.
The column, which had run without a single stop, took a rest near Suwon. The men, still flushed from ramming the jeeps and punching through, didn't even notice they were tired.
Ma-ryang smoked with Wang-chul and looked over the marks of the impact on No. 1's steel bumper.
"Clean, isn't she?"
"Can't even tell we hit something and drove on."
"Hehehe. Those Incheon gangsters are sloppy. No venom in those kids. Not a drop."
Proud of the truck he had modified past all reason, Wang-chul pulled two big paper sacks from the cab.
"Department Head Jang, I laid in a stock of hotteok — sweet filled pancakes. Have some before we roll."
"I thought I smelled something sweet in the cab. So this was it."
Wang-chul gave Ma-ryang his first, then passed the pancakes around to the men. They thanked him and ate the sweet hotteok in the sun.
The trucks pulled out of Suwon, came down through Cheonan, rested in Daejeon, and rolled into Daegu as the sun sank behind the western hills.
"We'll stretch our backs and shut our eyes a while here before we push on."
The schedule Wang-chul had drawn up was to leave Daegu around midnight and enter Busan at four in the morning. They had about seven hours to spare.
"You sleeping out?"
"No. Tonight I ought to bunk with the two of you."
"Aye. Let's."
In the room at the inn, the three department heads were asleep the moment their heads touched the pillows.
At that same hour, Ki-jo was at the Cheongsan Shipping office in Busan, meeting the heads of the two unions that divided the docks between them.
The chiefs of the Free Labor Union and the Daehan Labor Union hated each other so thoroughly that they refused even to sit down in the same teahouse. Only because Oh Yang-soo had barely talked the Daehan chief around, and Ki-jo the chief of the Free Union, had this meeting been scraped together at all.
Park Hyo-san, head of the Free Labor Union and a victim of the recent violence on the docks, would not so much as look at the Daehan chief's face.
"I fail to see why I should have to meet a man from the Daehan Union here. And I don't accept the notion that the two unions need to join hands, either."
Han Mu-jeong, head of the Daehan Labor Union, had a complaint of his own.
"We're the side that's friendly with the liquor trade. Take your part, and we're the ones who land in trouble."
Ki-jo laid the situation out.
"If the beer Cheongsan Transport is hauling is interfered with inside Busan, the U.S. Army will fix Incheon as the permanent port of entry for beer."
Park Hyo-san, hearing that, sneered.
"Ha. That's no concern of ours. It's the Daehan Union that'll feel the lack, not the Free Union. Beer coming in through Incheon would suit me fine."
Ki-jo told him it would not be so.
"The harm will find its way back to the Free Union as well. The Americans won't send only the beer to Incheon. The other consumer goods will start going there too. Soap, army boots, clothing — things of that sort."
The moment he touched the Free Union's sources of income, Park Hyo-san flared.
"Now that's nonsense. Everything we handle comes in from Japan. You're telling me it won't land at Busan, the nearest port, and will swing all the way around to Incheon?"
"The sea lane is shorter to Busan, of course. But supplies that come ashore at Busan still have to be hauled on to the American bases by truck or by rail. That cost is no trifle."
From the U.S. Army's point of view, Busan and Incheon were not so different. A ship leaving Japan would take a day or two longer to reach Incheon, but the cheaper haul overland would leave ample room to bring the total cost of transport down. Ki-jo pressed one factor more.
"Under the drawdown plan, only two American divisions will be left in Korea. And both of those divisions sit closer to Incheon than to Busan."
Of the eight U.S. divisions stationed since the armistice, six were due to leave. American freight coming in through Busan stood to be cut to a quarter of itself, only two years after the cease-fire. As of 1955, both unions were watching the work dry up, and even the side business of siphoning off supplies was running into a crisis.
"You ought to take this beer moving through Incheon as the Americans' final warning."
When Ki-jo had laid out how the American withdrawal would reshape the flow of cargo by sea, the two union chiefs folded their arms, and their faces turned grave.
Han Mu-jeong of the Daehan Union asked him.
"If the Busan men block the beer coming in through Incheon, won't they set aside a separate allotment just for Busan?"
"The U.S. Army is not a corner shop. From where they sit, splitting the freight and shipping it two ways costs more."
"Hm."
Han Mu-jeong was not ignorant of that. He had asked only because cutting his ties with the gangsters sat heavy on him.
"Then what would you have us do?"
Ki-jo decided it was time to set out the plan he had brought with him.
Park Hyo-san and Han Mu-jeong knew the storm clouds bearing down on Busan well enough, and they gave their full attention to what he had to say.