GI Confidential

by Martin Limon

  “Over here.”

  He led us around the bank. “There was a fourth. Big man,” he said, rounding his forearms at his sides to indicate someone huskier. “We think jeep here.” He pointed to the side street behind the bank. “He climb in, drive away.”

  “All this gunfire,” Ernie said, remembering the bullet holes we’d seen in the tellers’ stations and the desks and the walls inside the bank. “And nobody popped him?”

  Inspector Ahn paused, trying to figure out what Ernie meant.

  “Nobody shot him?” I repeated.

  “No. No shoot,” Inspector Ahn said. “Too afraid after grenade. But one very brave man try.”

  Near a clump of bushes more yellow tape was strewn, and two technicians in gray overalls stooped behind a clump of thick shrubbery. Inspector Ahn gave an order and they stood up and backed away, each man grabbing a handful of brush. They pulled the branches apart. Lying on the ground was a blue-uniformed Korean cop. His white gloves and the whistle hanging around his neck indicated that he was part of traffic control. And standard procedure dictated that Korean traffic cops weren’t armed. Inspector Ahn explained that this cop had heard the gunfire, run over to see if he could help, and confronted the last GI as he sprinted toward the jeep.

  He was a young man, baby-faced, barely in his twenties. Thin, maybe not much more than one-ten or one-twenty. Black-rimmed glasses lay twisted next to his lifeless face, his expression now peaceful and childlike. The worst part was that this innocent-seeming man who’d charged a criminal twice his size, unarmed, had his head tilted at a brutal angle, his neck twisted far past the point of breaking like a snapped wooden chopstick.

  “Christ,” Ernie said softly.

  He’d suddenly become religious.

  So had I.

  For some damn reason, low and somber, the brass bell sounded.

  -18-

  “Sarkosian is Armenian,” I told Ernie as we sped along in the jeep heading back to Camp Mercer.

  “From the Levant?” he asked.

  Maybe I was talking just to talk, to show off what I’d read. Or maybe the shock of the crime scene at the Kukchei Import-Export Bank required movement of the mouth, expelling hot air from lungs, noise to counter the sounds reverberating from the little jeep, nodding heads, more questions—all to keep my battered mind preoccupied. So as Ernie drove, I spoke. “They were,” I said. “At one time. Centuries ago, Armenia stretched from the Caspian Sea all the way to the Mediterranean.”

  “Is that a lot of ground?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “Especially in the Middle East.”

  “Good on them. How are they doing nowadays?”

  “They’ve been swallowed whole by the Soviet Union.”

  “Ugh,” Ernie said. “So how’d this guy Sarkosian wind up in the US Army?”

  “Because of the diaspora.”

  “I thought that term was only for Jews.”

  “Before the Holocaust, the Armenians were persecuted by the Ottoman Empire. So they’ve been fleeing their homeland for over a century. A lot of them ended up in the US.”

  Ernie shook his head. “Christ, Sueño. Why do you bother filling your head with all this useless information?”

  “Why do you memorize baseball stats?”

  “They’re important,” he said.

  “What’s important,” I said, “is that we find this holy terror and lock his ass up.”

  “Yeah,” Ernie said. “I concur wholeheartedly, Professor.”

  As it turned out, Sarkosian never returned to Camp Mercer. The jeep was found abandoned late that afternoon near the main bus station in downtown Seoul. The KNPs interviewed every ticket seller who’d worked that day, and a few remembered foreigners buying tickets, but because of the thick plastic windows that hid the tellers from the public, no one could identify the foreigners or recall whether any of the Caucasian men purchasing tickets had been wearing a military uniform. The KNPs also checked the Seoul Train Station about a mile away, but no leads there either. At least we knew he hadn’t left the country—other than military conveyance, there were only two legal ways to depart South Korea. Either through the Kimpo International Airport outside of Seoul or the ferry to Japan that left from the Port of Pusan. The customs officials at both locations had been fully alerted and would be waiting to arrest Sarkosian if he turned up.

  But for now, he had disappeared. Inspector Ahn determined that he’d been the bag man at the Suwon caper and had gotten away with at least 600,000 won, about twelve hundred dollars. So he had walking-around money, and maybe more if he’d stashed the previously ill-gotten loot somewhere other than Camp Mercer.

  His wall and foot lockers on base were inventoried by his CO and First Sergeant—along with me and Ernie—and nothing of value was found. His traveling bag—which GIs call an “AWOL bag”—was missing, along with a few changes of civilian clothes, as confirmed by his houseboy. Had Sarkosian had a backup plan? We couldn’t be sure. But he was gone, karra chogi, somewhere in-country with a bag full of money and a change of underwear and we had no freaking idea where in the world he was.

  While at Camp Mercer, we checked the wall lockers of Sarkosian’s three late confederates as well. Again, no cash or expensive items. In the arms room, we determined that only three rifles had been checked out—none by Poulson, the driver—and by comparing serial numbers, we discovered that all three rifles had been used at the shootout at the Kukchei Import-Export Bank in Suwon. They were still in Inspector Ahn’s possession. As far as we could tell, Sarkosian was no longer armed since the meticulous records required by army regulation showed that all previous weapons checked out had been fully accounted for and checked back in.

  The armorer who’d allowed all this unauthorized checking in and out of weapons was now in a world of hurt. He told us he’d been intimidated by Sarkosian and his boys, afraid to tell them no, and thought they were using the weapons and the ammo for target practice. He was small-fry, not worth our time. His fate would be decided by the charges his unit commander was already typing up.

  The other GIs in the unit who knew the four bank robbers were tight-lipped, but they seemed to agree that no one had any idea what they’d been up to. The four had always stuck together, tight as thieves, and seldom associated with others.

  An all-points bulletin was put out for Specialist 5 Karim Sarkosian, not only by the Korean National Police, but also by the Provost Marshal of the 8th United States Army. Every law enforcement agency in-country would soon have a copy of his photo and be on the lookout for him.

  “He’s trapped,” Ernie said.

  “He might have a good time hiding from us for a while, but eventually his money will run out. Then he’ll have to turn himself in.”

  “Unless he uses his money to buy a gun,” Ernie said, “and comes back shooting.”

  “So let’s find him,” I said.

  “Right,” Ernie replied. “But how?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  Early the next morning, we picked up Katie Byrd Worthington at the Bando Hotel. Wearing her usual jungle fatigue shirt, blue jeans, and sneakers, she hopped into the back seat of the jeep. As Ernie pulled out into traffic, she looked back and forth between us.

  “What’s with you two?” she asked. “Why so glum?”

  We told her about the bank robbery in Suwon and the resulting deaths, plus the GI who’d gotten away.

  “Yeah, I heard about that. We’re running a story on it, mostly based on the Associated Press reports, but you guys could add some color.” She raised an eyebrow at us and pulled out her notebook. When neither of us spoke, she said, “Okay. I get it. You want a trade.”

  We still didn’t answer so she leaned forward and said in her husky voice, “Sarkosian.”

  I swiveled my head. Ernie almost plowed the jeep into the kimchi cab in front of us.

  �
�How’d you know that?” I asked. The names of the GIs hadn’t been released by 8th Army, pending notification of next-of-kin for the three dead GIs, and because we didn’t want to tip off Sarkosian as to how much we knew or didn’t know.

  “I have my sources.” She smirked and leaned back in her seat. “Now that I have your attention, I can tell you he called me last night.”

  Ernie slammed on the brakes, tires screeching, and somehow managed to avoid the honking traffic behind us. He pulled over to the side of the road and swiveled in his seat.

  “Sarkosian?”

  “I don’t remember stuttering,” she said primly.

  “What? He called you at the Bando?”

  “Where else? The Ritz was all booked up.”

  “What’d he say?” Ernie asked.

  “Uh uh uh.” She waggled her forefinger at us. “First, a little color about that bank robbery so the Overseas Observer doesn’t seem as bland as the AP and UPI.”

  “And in return, you tell us everything Sarkosian said. Word for word.”

  She waved her narrow notebook in the air. “I have it right here.” She flipped it open and showed me the page.

  In the dim light I squinted. “What’s that?”

  “Shorthand,” she said. “You really oughta take the time to learn.”

  “That’s for broads,” Ernie said.

  “Yeah. Along with short skirts and crossed legs. And more brains than you poor testosterone-addled Neanderthals will ever have.”

  Ernie grunted. “You kicked some serious testosterone out of Sergeant Major Screech Owl.”

  “And I’ll kick more out of you if you don’t mind your p’s and q’s.”

  “Hold it!” I said, waving my arms like a referee. “Enough with the bickering. Listen, Sarkosian’s a seriously bad dude.” I pictured the young man whose neck he’d snapped. “I need to know what he said to you and how he got your number.”

  Katie adjusted herself on the canvas seat and crossed her legs to steady her notebook. “First, the bank in Suwon. Tell me.”

  So I did. Ernie started the jeep again, pulled out into traffic, and wound us through the downtown area. He finally hit the road leading east toward the Walker Hill resort area. By the time we’d reached the Han River and crossed at the eastern extreme of Seoul Dukbyol-Si, or Seoul Special City, Katie was through leaching information from me about the horrific scene at the Kukchei Import-Export Bank.

  “This will help,” she said. “Make that AP stringer look like the lazy slob he is.”

  “Now,” I reminded her, “the phone call.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Katie flipped back a couple of pages in her notebook. “I was asleep,” she began. “And at about twenty-two-hundred hours, the phone rang. ‘They fucked me up,’” she said, reading from her notes. “He kept repeating that. ‘They fucked me up.’ Like that justified his actions and might protect him somehow.”

  He must be seriously disturbed, I thought, to imagine that after yesterday, he’d ever be able to escape the wrath of the KNPs and 8th United States Army.

  “At first, I didn’t know who was talking,” Katie continued. “His voice was deep and gravelly, like he was really tired. There was some background noise, horns honking, so I figured he was in the middle of a big city. Probably Seoul.”

  “He could’ve been across the street from you,” Ernie said.

  Katie hugged herself. “Thanks for sharing. But I don’t think so. He has no interest in me for anything other than publicity.”

  “And are you going to give that to him?”

  “Are you kidding? A GI robs three banks, murders God knows how many people, watches his accomplices slain by Korean police, and now he’s on the lam with every cop in the country, both military and civilian, looking for him, and you think the Overseas Observer isn’t going to run that?”

  “No sex,” Ernie said.

  “We’ll find some,” Katie replied.

  Ernie sensed I was impatient at the interruption, so he swallowed his retort, which would’ve been good, I could tell.

  I turned in my seat. “Tell me what Sarkosian said. From the beginning.”

  Katie looked down at her notes.

  “The main thing he wanted me to relay is that he’s going to kill you.”

  “Me?” I asked.

  “Both of you. He saw that photo in last Sunday’s edition with you two standing in front of the Kukmin Bank in Itaewon. And he knows it was you who tracked him down to that money changer, Old Hwang, in Yongju-gol. For some reason, he figures that if he kills you two, he’s home free.”

  “What’d you tell him?” I asked.

  “Not my job to tell him anything,” she said. “I’m just a reporter.”

  “A reporter who’s sicced a killer on us.”

  “And how have I done that?”

  “By publishing that photograph without asking us.”

  “Oh, phooey,” she said. “You ever heard of something called the First Amendment?”

  “How about blackmail?” Ernie continued. “I can’t believe you’re still holding that photo of us flat on our backs in Yongju-gol over our heads.”

  She giggled. “Being saved by a girl, don’t forget.”

  “I haven’t,” Ernie said. “That’s the only reason we’re taking you back to Third Corps.”

  “How else is a girl supposed to get around? You guys have the vehicle with the emergency dispatch, the Eighth Army CID badges, permission from the First Corps Commander to talk to Major General Bok. And what do I have? Nothing but a damn press pass. The army doesn’t give a hoot about that, especially the Korean army. So I have to rely on a little help from my friends.”

  “You’re using ‘friends’ pretty liberally,” Ernie said.

  I tried to steer the conversation back to Sarkosian.

  “Did he give you any hint of where he is right now, or where he might be going?”

  “All he said was that he’d find you.”

  “That’s really it? That’s all he wanted to tell you? That he plans to kill us?”

  “Yeah. He sounded pretty decided. He said, ‘They fucked me up.’”

  “He thinks it’s our fault that the KNPs ambushed him in Suwon?” Ernie asked.

  “Apparently. I mean, he’s gotta blame somebody.” She glanced back at her notes. “He also said that all he was ever trying to do was get enough money together to go into business when he got back to the States. Buy a little store or something. He never intended to hurt anyone. The ricochet bullet that killed the teller at the Daehan Bank was an accident. Nothing more. In Suwon, according to him, the Korean cops fired first. All he and his pals did was try to defend themselves. He was almost in tears when he described how his friends were gunned down in cold blood by what he called the ‘fascist Korean police.’ He claims that if they hadn’t been attacked by the cops, everything would’ve been fine. Nobody would’ve gotten hurt. With the money he pulled down in Suwon, he would’ve had five thousand dollars, which was his original goal. Enough for a down payment on a plot of commercial real estate he’d already checked out.”

  “Five thousand would be around the total take for all three robberies. What about his fellow bank robbers? Weren’t they supposed to get a share?”

  Katie snapped her fingers. “Damn. I didn’t think to ask him.” Sheepishly, she said, “I was still pretty groggy.”

  “He still has the money, doesn’t he?”

  “Yeah, but because of your investigation, he can never walk free in the States again or go into business like he’d hoped. That’s why he blames you two.”

  “It’s all our fault,” Ernie said wearily.

  “You know criminals,” Katie replied. “They always blame everybody and anybody except themselves.”

  “Since Sarkosian’s life is ruined,” I said, “his only goal is to find an
d kill us so he won’t go down alone?”

  “That’s what the man says.”

  “Why’d he call you?” Ernie asked. “And tip us off to his intentions?”

  “He wants to be in the Overseas Observer. He wants his story told.”

  “Are you going to put it in? The part about his hopes and dreams, how he’s just an ambitious young fellow messed up by evil cops?”

  “We’re thinking about it.”

  “We?” I asked.

  “That’s the editorial we.”

  “You and your main office in Hong Kong.”

  “Right.”

  “So,” I said, “a guy with a sack full of money and no future who’s already murdered multiple bank tellers, a traffic cop, and maybe more civilians is searching for me and my partner, and his only objective is to kill us before he’s arrested or killed himself.”

  “That’s the long and the short of it,” Katie said. “Great copy.”

  “But you don’t have a photograph,” Ernie said.

  “No. We could do a posed one of you two, but that’s pretty boring.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What I really want is an action shot.”

  “Of me and Sueño being gunned down?”

  “Would you mind?”

  “Not in the least,” Ernie said. “Once I’m dead, I probably won’t mind much at all.”

  “There’s one thing, though,” Katie said.

  “What?”

  “If I put your photo in this Sunday’s edition of the Overseas Observer, it’ll put Sarkosian in a jealous rage.”

  “How so?”

  “He wants his photo in there.”

  “Did he mention that when you talked to him?”

  “Not exactly. But I can tell he’s concerned about how he’s portrayed in anything we might run. Which is why he called me in the first place.”

  “Do you think he’ll call you back?”

  She thought about it. “No. Not unless we run a story about you two. With a photograph. About how you’re bravely hunting down a murderous bank robber.”