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“I thought they were after a young girl,” Lee continued. “Took three bloody fingers to convince them I was as stupid as I am.”

Lee turned to face the medic as the temperature outside plummeted and a chill crept into their prison.

“I hope that boy is worth it, or a lot of good men died for nothing.”

The medic was silent, nodding in response, letting Lee talk.

“He recognized me,” Lee said. “I don’t know how or why, but he did. Freaked me out!”

“Did you see anyone else on the run out there?” the medic asked. “Did anyone else make it to shore?”

“No. No one,” Lee replied. “Wait, there was someone, but they caught him. A pack of dogs ravaged him on the beach. I washed up on the rocks, just north of him. I saw him die.”

The medic nodded. He turned and crawled to the cell door and struck at the bars with a clump of wood, calling out in Korean, saying, “Open up. I’m finished here.”

Lee was confused. He didn’t understand what was going on. He scrambled over by the medic, reaching through the bars with his one good hand.

“What are you doing?” he asked quietly.

Suddenly, the realization that he had been betrayed swept over him, chilling him more than the cold of night. The Navy SEALs had all been wearing black wetsuits, not army fatigues. The medic’s eyes had the classic epicanthal fold characteristic of people throughout Asia, but his accent was from the American midwest, Lee was sure of it. And he was wearing boots! Lee had been stripped of his boots. All the clues were there, but he’d missed them.

A guard stepped down and opened the adjacent cell door. His keys rattled as he fought with the old, rusted lock.

“I don’t understand,” Lee called out, still reeling mentally from all that had transpired. He trusted this man. “Why?”

The medic turned, speaking in English as he said, “We had to know if you were telling the truth.”

The door opened and the medic crawled through, getting to his feet and dusting himself off.

“But …”

“Oh,” the medic replied, stepping in front of Lee’s cell. He crouched in front of Lee, smiling and pointing across the courtyard as he added. “You thought that was the interrogation over there? No, that was the prelude. This was the interrogation, and you did admirably. You told me what little you knew.”

Lee sunk to his elbows.

The medic left, laughing with the guard as they walked off, their boots crunching on the gravel as they crossed the driveway.

Lee was devastated.

He looked at the weeping stumps on his right hand and sobbed, feeling worse than when he was thrown in the cell. As much as the physical pain had crippled him, he’d somehow endured that, perhaps only by holding onto the moment, waiting for the passage of time to provide relief, but the cruelty of those last few words from the medic cut deeper than the loss of his fingers. That laugh, the ignominy of knowing he’d freely given up what little information he had, and the humiliation of his trust being betrayed broke his heart. Lee felt a pain like no other eating away within his chest. His hand throbbed, his muscles ached, but it was the mental anguish that crushed his soul.

He lay there in a fetal position for the next hour, rocking gently, trying to stay warm on what little straw covered the concrete floor. Outside, the routine crunch of boots passed every fifteen minutes. A sentry was walking a set path, walking along the gravel road at regular intervals.

Shortly after the sentry passed, another set of boots crunched on the gravel, only these were more hurried. They stopped outside his cell. The abrupt silence seized his attention and he turned to see nothing more than a set of legs beyond the bars.

Moonlight lit the courtyard, highlighting the soldier’s legs in silhouette. Something dropped on the ground and was kicked through the bars, landing not more than a few feet from him.

Lee didn’t move.

He lay there looking at the small box no larger than a pack of cigarettes. When he looked up, the legs were gone. He hadn’t noticed the sound of boots on the gravel, so whoever it was had approached from across the courtyard but then exited along the side of the building on the grass, before disappearing god knows where.

Slowly, cautiously, Lee picked up the cardboard packet, examining it in the soft light flooding in from outside. He didn’t recognize the label on the front, and the writing on the back was too small to make out in the faint light, but one Korean word caught his eye: painkiller.

Frantically, he ripped open the cardboard with his teeth. There were two strips of ten tablets sealed in plastic. It could have been poison. It could have been yet another cruel hoax by the North Koreans, but Lee couldn’t help himself. He tore open one of the strips and tossed four or five white tablets in his mouth, crunching them beneath his teeth.

The tablets tasted disgusting. They were bitter and dry, breaking up into a powder in his mouth, making them hard to swallow without water.

As nearly as he could tell, they must have been the North Korean equivalent of ibuprofen.