Captain Douglas Comes Home
"Team Leader Jin."
Kang-to's voice rolled down the ridge like a bell.
"Dharma Master."
Not long after, Harris, Sampson, and the others came running up.
"Whoa."
They froze at once. Before them lay the broken outline of a trench, buried under earth, and beside it the single bone Kang-to had taken out...
"British Army?"
"Douglas..."
"......?"
"It looks like Captain Douglas, the man Dr. Sampson had been searching for, is resting here."
Kang-to said it while gazing into empty air. In truth, it was not the air he was looking at, but Douglas's spirit.
"Is it really Douglas?"
Sampson asked.
"Yes."
"Oh, my God."
Sampson sank down on the spot.
"Take a look."
Kang-to placed the remains in Sampson's arms and tried to open a channel of spiritual resonance. At once, Sampson was able to see what Kang-to saw.
"Ooo..."
It was only a groan, and because of his overwhelming emotion, he could not find any other words.
"All units, gather with every piece of survey equipment. We’re postponing our return home."
Harris's order rang across the ridge.
The excavation team joined them immediately. Verification cameras went up first, followed by sensors and the rest of the equipment.
"......?"
The documentary crew shuddered all over again. The sensors they were wearing were moving unmistakably, responding to a low frequency of 18.9 hertz and a violent flare in the temporal lobe.
Drop.
Cold sweat slid off the crew's brows. It started at the roots of their hair. Once again, Kang-to's shamanic power had been proven beyond dispute.
"Begin the excavation."
After a moment of collective silence, Harris's command fell, and the dig began. This had once been a reconnaissance trench dug by the British Army, and because the slope was so steep, progress was painfully slow. If the embankment collapsed, they would be in real trouble.
It took a full day of hard labor to recover the remains. That, too, was only possible because this was the best excavation team in the world.
"These are indeed Captain Douglas's remains."
Ailey's DNA confirmation followed. The other four sets of remains were also identified as British soldiers who had fallen at Hook Ridge.
But there was something else.
From a corner of the trench, the bones of a roe deer were found as well.
"Looks like they caught it and ate it to stave off hunger."
One member of the excavation team muttered under his breath.
"No. The roe deer died from a gunshot wound."
Kang-to shook his head. The owner of those bones was the white spirit they had seen earlier. As if to confirm his words, the roe deer's spirit swayed softly in the air.
Douglas had rolled down from the ridge.
Even as he tumbled, he kept cutting down enemy soldiers. He only came to a stop when he struck a mountain of corpses. His injuries were too severe for him to make it back up the ridge.
By sheer effort, he crawled into the reconnaissance trench. Inside were the bodies of four of his men.
The retreating Chinese soldiers fired additional confirmatory shots into those corpses.
Two more bullets tore into Douglas's legs beneath the bodies. Then he lost consciousness.
When he opened his eyes again, he saw the roe deer. It had been crouched in the trench's corner, hiding from the gunfire.
It was not alone. In the middle of that war-torn trench, the roe deer had given birth to two fawns.
Like Douglas, who could not stand because of his gunshot wounds, the mother deer had been injured as well and could not rise. Still, milk continued to come, and she nursed her young. The greatness of motherhood made no exception for beasts.
The mother held out for fifteen days. When she died, Douglas pushed the fawns through a small opening and sent them out into the world.
The white spirit roe deer.
Now he understood what it had been.
Dear Tony, and Sandy...
Seven more nights passed after the roe deer died. Douglas survived for twenty-one days. It was the record of his life until the moment his breathing stopped.
Hold the Ridge.
The call to his son and wife was always something only his own ears could hear. His throat was no longer fit for shouting, so only broken breaths escaped him.
He endured on the canteens of his comrades and the flesh of the dead roe deer. That was as far as it went. Day by day, the wounds in his body worsened. By the light of a thin shaft of sunlight that slipped into the trench, he wrote a letter in his notebook.
It was the last line of the entry, written after his longing for his family. Even in his final moments, he remained a soldier who had not forgotten his duty.
"My God."
Sampson, checking the notebook, went slack-jawed. His whole body was swept by a shiver. He sprang to his feet at once and saluted Douglas's remains again. The documentary crew followed his lead.
The twenty-one-day survival record, written under the stars, matched Kang-to's Gongsu exactly.
"Wow."
When Sampson showed the others, every one of them clicked their tongues in wonder. They were stunned all over again by Douglas's noble soldierly spirit and by Kang-to's Gongsu. The notebook had been found by the excavation team, so there was no way Kang-to could have seen it.
Douglas had been harsh with his recruits, but when it came to protecting them, he would have thrown away even his own life. He was a true soldier, and that notebook was therefore treated as something every bit as precious as the bones themselves.
While the remains were being recovered, four more sets of bones were uncovered in the dangerous slope zone.
Two belonged to Chinese soldiers, and two were identified as Republic of Korea soldiers. Even that verification was simple, because Kang-to had read the names from the spirits' uniforms.
"Dharma Master."
By the time those remains had also been gathered, Sampson approached Kang-to.
"He is Captain Douglas's son. When I told him the news, he said he wanted to thank the Dharma Master..."
Sampson held out his phone.
"Hello."
"Thank you. Thank you so much."
"I've been having dreams for the past few days. My father's face was so clear that I had started to look forward to it."
"..."
"You're a shaman in Korea?"
"Yes."
"We bought plane tickets to Korea right away. We'll greet you properly once we're there."
"No, the thanks—"
The call cut out before Kang-to could finish refusing, the mountain signal too poor to hold the connection.
"Thank you."
This time it was Sampson.
"Doctor?"
"If it weren't for you, Dharma Master, none of this would have been possible. In my entire life, this was the greatest excavation and the greatest moment."
"Doctor..."
Kang-to did not see the tears shining in Sampson's eyes.
He was the one who felt grateful. Sampson was a world authority on excavation of remains, and with a reputation like that, agreeing to scientific verification of a shaman's Gongsu was no easy thing. And yet he had joined them without hesitation, giving the whole effort real weight. Then Douglas's remains had turned up as well, and Kang-to felt as if he had repaid that faith in kind.
"Dr. Ailey."
He shared that feeling with him too. Thanks to Ailey's lightning-fast DNA testing, the atmosphere at the site had stayed feverishly alive.
"It was an honor."
"That's my line. It was the most dramatic DNA test I've ever done."
"I'm sorry to ask, but could I trouble you for one more favor next time?"
Kang-to laid the groundwork for what would come next. The excavation had been noble enough, but an even more noble plan still waited ahead.
"If it's a request from you, Dharma Master, I'll go to the ends of the earth with you."
Ailey's pleased smile was as warm as spring sunlight.
Douglas's notebook memo caused an explosive sensation in Britain.
More than seventy years had passed since the war ended, and yet the British still turned the story over and over: his noble soldierly spirit, his love for his family, and the tenderness he had shown his men.
As things developed, even the British royal family took notice. Douglas's place in the royal family tree was part of the reason.
The highlight was the visit to Korea by Douglas and William's son and daughter. The middle-aged couple laid flowers at the spot where the remains had been recovered and bowed deeply to Kang-to in gratitude. With their own children along, there were seven of them in all.
"My mother said my father once wanted to build a football team. He worked hard at it, but he never quite got there."
The words of Douglas's son brought tears to everyone's eyes.
As a result, the BBC documentary drew enormous attention as well. The star of the documentary, Kang-to, scarcely needed any introduction at all.
[Lee Kang-to]
[Dharma Master Kang-to]
[Korean Shamanism]
[Shaman Priest]
[Shaman]
[Spirit]
Interest in shamanism across the English-speaking world flared hot. In the past, it might have been dismissed or treated as little more than curiosity, but this sensation was different. Behind it stood the immense credibility of the BBC documentary team Monorama, and the fact that the verification members included Sampson and Ailey, two of the greatest authorities of the age.
For that reason, neither Europe nor Korea could muster any effective rebuttal or scorn.
Above all, the results were extraordinary. This was not a case of dragging a lavish documentary crew out just to dig up a single bone fragment.
With the British royal family taking interest, Harris's team rushed out a special teaser.
Starting with the Gongsu on the island, it moved on to the discovery of the unresolved kidnapping victim's remains near the pension used as the British Army excavation camp, then to the discovery of Chinese remains and the identification and repatriation of those soldiers, and then to the recovery of Republic of Korea remains and British remains, ending with the dramatic discovery of Douglas and the four British soldiers on the very day the withdrawal decision had been made.
Each time, the verification equipment's certification data appeared as well: the low-frequency readings and the changes in the temporal lobe. The documentary crew had felt those effects themselves, so although they could not capture the spirits on camera, Kang-to's ability left no room for doubt.
The finale was Kang-to's closing interview.
"Science says there is no afterlife, and so it dismisses ghosts and spirits as nothing more than byproducts of the imagination. Science seeks universal truths and laws, but in natural science and life science, there are still countless unknowns. And what about the universe? No one has ever seen an alien, and yet no one denies that aliens might exist. The world of ghosts and spirits is different, though. Compared with aliens, many more people have seen them, and even now, at this very moment, someone is seeing one. To deny that, I think, is nothing more than prejudice."
He brought it to a close.
"If there were no ghosts or spirits, I can say with certainty that I would never have found Captain Douglas and those noble remains in such a short time."
Applause broke out from the police officers. They were at the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency.
"Thank you."
Deputy Commissioner Woo Chung-gyun personally delivered the letter of appreciation. It credited Kang-to with solving the unresolved case involving the twin remains found near the pension, and also expressed gratitude for his earlier help with the doctor-murder case.
Kang-to tried to decline the commendation, but Team Leader Jin made a heartfelt appeal.
"I want to help promote the Dharma Master's miraculous powers too. If we're going to do that, then you have to accept this."
"Team Leader."
"Whenever people hear 'shamanism,' they laugh, don't they? But shamanism is not all the same. A Dharma Master like you deserves to be treated differently and respected. In Britain you're treated like a star, so how does it make sense to ignore you here in our own country?"
Team Leader Jin was serious. Thanks to his role in solving the two cold cases, he had been slated for promotion to chief of the Criminal Mobile Unit, and that was in no small part due to Deputy Commissioner Woo's strong recommendation.
Perhaps it had been Team Leader Jin who helped pave the way for Kang-to's shamanic verification. That was why Kang-to could not bring himself to refuse the police agency's letter of appreciation.
There was another reason as well: the parents of the twins wanted to thank him personally, and Kang-to agreed to see them as part of the same visit.
"Oh, my."
Once he accepted the commendation, the twins' parents stepped right into Kang-to's arms. The twins had been the same age as Sol-bi when they died. Not one child, but two—how much mischief must they have gotten up to together? Thinking of that, Kang-to felt his nose sting.
"Thank you so much. They couldn't come back alive, but at least now we've found their bones..."
He comforted the parents as they nearly fell apart, and then met the next visitors.
"This is truly remarkable."
It was the former Minister Kim Ki-wook and his wife, who had lost their doctor son. When they heard about the commendation, they hurried over without hesitation.
"I'm sorry to have caused you any extra trouble..."
"Not at all. If it weren't for you, Dharma Master, our son would still be wandering in the dark."
"..."
"And the excavation of British remains, too? I watched the teaser for that documentary, and it was astounding. I spent time as an ambassador in that vast land of China, but this is a blessing for the Republic of Korea."
"Minister."
"Go ahead."
"I was planning to come see you again anyway, but since I'm here, may I ask a favor?"
"A favor?"
"It's about a matter involving China."
"Then I may be able to help. Just say the word."
"Well..."
Kang-to leaned close to Kim Ki-wook's ear and whispered softly.
"What?"
Kim Ki-wook barely heard him before he jerked as if he might collapse on the spot.
"Th-that kind of thing..."
"Could it be done?"
"Are you really going to try something like that?"
"Actually, I've been working through these steps precisely so I can do it."
"Oh..."
The former minister wiped the sweat streaming down his forehead. He seemed unable to believe what Kang-to had told him.
"Hoo."
After a moment to steady his breathing, Kim Ki-wook hardened his expression and gave his answer.
"That was my dream too when I served as ambassador to China... If it's you, Dharma Master, I think it can be done. I'll mobilize every connection I have and make it happen."