Slicky Boys

by Martin Limon

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ernie going through the same motions. He took a step away from the chief, and then a gravelly voice erupted through the morning stillness.

  “Where the hell did you get that army jacket?”

  Emie stopped. I turned.

  The chief was talking about the dark blue nylon jacket Ernie wore. Mine just had a map of Korea with a dragon coiled around it. Ernie’s had a map of the Korean Peninsula, too, but instead of a dragon he had a dagger stabbing through the heart of Seoul, dripping blood. Beneath was the embroidered statement, “I’ve already done my time in hell,” and the dates of Ernie’s first tour in country.

  Sailors only spend a few days here, not twelve months.

  Ernie grinned at the chief. “Stole it off a drunken dogface.”

  A howl of laughter went up from the squids behind us. The chief laughed too.

  “All right!” the chief said, waving us on through.

  Ernie caught up with me as we walked down a long metal corridor.

  “Quick thinking, Ernie.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” he said. “It’s true. I did steal it off a drunken dogface.”

  I didn’t bother to ask for details.

  Actually, I had no idea where we were going. The Kitty Hawk seemed immense; loaded with armaments and aircraft and big enough to house three thousand sailors. We passed a barber shop and a room with a fat color TV in it, and in the distance I smelled the usual aromas of a military chow hall in the morning. Coffee, bacon, sizzling sausage.

  “I haven’t had a decent breakfast since we left Seoul,” Ernie said.

  “No time.”

  “So where are we going?”

  “We have to find the bridge.”

  “What bridge?”

  “That’s where the captain is and probably where they keep all the classified documents.”

  “Watch your head!”

  A thick metal pipe ran across the roof of the passageway as if someone had set it there as a booby trap. I ducked beneath it.

  We found a ladder and climbed. And kept climbing until I started ‘to smell salt air again. Suddenly there was dark sky above me and we stepped out on the metal deck.

  At the railing, the mist had started to lift. Out to sea a band of deep blue lit the horizon. A crescent moon sat slightly above, as if overseeing the impending sunrise. Toward land, the lights of Pusan twinkled on, one by one.

  I took a deep breath of the fresh air and held it.

  “Maybe I joined the wrong service,” I told Ernie.

  “You?” Ernie said. “A squid? Floating for months at a time? You couldn’t stand it.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  Light filtered through huge plate glass windows in the metal superstructure looming above us. Behind them, shadows scurried.

  We wandered below deck, peeking in offices, until I saw a tired-looking sailor slumped behind a desk.

  “Who handles classified documents?” I asked.

  “Who wants to know?”

  I slipped out my badge and flopped it open.

  “Investigative Services,” I said.

  I was stretching the truth a bit. Naval Investigative Services was the navy’s equivalent of the army’s Criminal Investigation Division. No sense advertising that soldiers were aboard the Kitty Hawk. You might as well tell them they’d been infected with the bubonic plague.

  He barely glanced at the badge.

  “This must be about Harrelson,” he said.

  “Yeah, that’s right.” I tried to hide my surprise. “What’s the status?”

  “Still in sick bay. Whoever did it cracked his skull wide open.”

  “Will he live?”

  He lifted his hand and rocked it from side to side. “They’re not sure yet.”

  “What did the guy get?”

  “How in the fuck should I know? They don’t tell me shit.”

  “But Harrelson worked with classified documents, didn’t he?”

  “Damn right. That’s why Chief Longo is so pissed.”

  “Longo’s in charge of classified documents?”

  “In charge of security for the whole ship.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  “Down to the next ladder, one deck above. The office is marked.”

  “Thanks.”

  We left the clerk, found the ladder, climbed upstairs, and wandered the hall until we found an office with the stenciled letters: Security.

  It was a roomy office, with six desks and a dozen filing cabinets. A heavyset man was on the phone. He wore the uniform of a chief. A group of sailors milled about, trying to look busy. Everyone seemed upset.

  “Yes, sir. Yes.”

  The chief slammed down the phone. I walked toward him.

  “Chief Longo?”

  He checked us out, letting his eyes linger on our wrinkled blue jeans.

  “Yeah?”

  I pulled out my badge and the identification behind its plastic holder and barely opened it, asking the question as I did. “How’s Harrelson?”

  “Stable. That’s about the best they can say.” He scowled.

  “I’m Investigator Sueño. This is my partner, Investigator Bascom.”

  Ernie nodded slightly.

  “So fast?” The scowl hadn’t left his face.

  “We happened to be in the area. I need a rundown of the type of documents that were compromised.”

  The chief rubbed his forehead and eyes with a big hairy paw. The man was obviously exhausted. Good.

  “You know you need clearance, even an investigator needs clearance, before I can discuss weaponry.”

  Weaponry! What the hell was Shipton after? I took a chance. “Only if it’s nuclear,” I said firmly.

  The chief snapped, “What the fuck do you think I’m talking about?”

  He looked around, as if suddenly realizing that he’d shouted.

  “Oh, sorry. It’s just that Harrelson was a good kid.” He shook his head glumly. “Right here on the Hawk.”

  “Did anybody get a look at the perpetrator?”

  “Nobody. I doubt even that Harrelson did. The blow came from behind. It was twenty-three hundred hours, maybe he wasn’t as alert as he should’ve been. The guy broke into the classified locker.”

  “But only went after the documents concerning weaponry?”

  “That’s what it looks like so far. Jesus, I don’t know. I think we’d better go talk to the captain.” The chief rubbed his eyes again. “So you guys just happened to be in the area.” He was looking at Ernie. “What detachment are you with?”

  “Seoul.”

  His big hand stopped rubbing. “Seoul? There isn’t a Naval Investigative Detachment in Seoul.”

  “Temporary duty,” I said. “From the Philippines.”

  “They sent a whole detachment on temporary duty from the Philippines?”

  “Listen,” Ernie said. “You got a head around here? We been wandering around the ship and all I’ve had so far this morning is coffee. My eyes are about to turn yellow.”

  “Sure. Down the hallway.”

  Ernie took a step toward the door.

  “I got to piss like a racehorse myself,” I said. “Be right back, Chief.”

  He grunted and picked up the phone again.

  When we reached the hallway, voices drifted after us.

  “Those guys can’t be navy,” somebody said. “Did you see those jackets?”

  “Naval Investigation didn’t say nothing about agents arriving this soon.”

  We strode quickly toward the ladder and slid down it without touching any rungs.

  “When those squids realize we’re army,” Ernie said, “we’ll be in a world of shit.”

  “And we have too much to do to sit in a brig until it gets sorted out.”

  “Shipton could be on his way to the PX right now.”

  Somehow I doubted that, not here in Pusan. It would be too risky so soon after hitting the Kitty Hawk. But we didn’t have time to
argue the fine points.

  We kept dropping down ladders and sprinting down hallways, not caring anymore who saw us or what they thought. When we finally reached the hatch in the side of the hull, a launch was shoving off.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “Hold that boat!”

  “Aren’t you supposed to say ‘belay’or something like that?” Ernie said.

  That Ernie, always a stickler for the right word. The chief at the gangplank made a hand signal that held the boat.

  “All right, you two,” he said, frowning. “You’re lucky I held it. Let’s see your liberty chits.”

  I pulled out my CID identification.

  “We don’t need liberty chits,” I said. “We’re Criminal Investigation agents and we’re on a case, Chief. A man’s life could be at stake.”

  The chief stared at all the stamps and squiggles and officialese in my leather wallet. Ernie opened his badge, too, and slammed it shut impatiently. The chief was surprised, but too much of a lifer to want to fight all that documentation.

  “Army?” he said. “What are you doing on the Kitty Hawk?”

  “You don’t have a need-to-know!” Ernie snapped.

  We scurried down the ladder and climbed aboard the launch. It pulled away and the startled face of the chief receded and grew blurry in the mist. About thirty yards out, a siren sounded aboard the ship.

  “Step on it, Smitty,” one of the sailors said to the helmsman. “Get us ashore before they cancel liberty or some such shit.”

  Smitty nodded and the engine roared.

  35

  FIRST WE CAUGHT A CAB BACK TO HIALEAH COMPOUND. I wanted to get as far away from the U.S. Navy as possible.

  After showing our ID at the pedestrian gate, we went over to the MP Station. No unusual blotter reports. Everything had been quiet on Hialeah Compound last night.

  “That’s because Shipton was busy elsewhere,” Ernie said.

  Busy is right. Possibly offing his sixth victim, Seaman Harrelson, of the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk, and stealing who-knows-what kind of top secret information.

  I wasn’t sure what to do next. The PX office wasn’t open yet, so we finally did the sensible thing and grabbed a couple of trays at the post snack bar. We went through the line and ordered ourselves some breakfast.

  As I sipped on hot coffee and listened to the tinkling of glassware and the rustling of newspapers, I tried to put things in perspective.

  Shipton’s primary goal was the theft of classified documents. Who knew how much he’d gotten away with in the last three months? Maybe the suspicions of Strange and his ilk were blown way out of proportion. Or maybe they were just the tip of the iceberg. Hard to tell. But what I did know for certain was that Shipton now had access to information on “tunnels” from the army and “weaponry,” probably nuclear, from the navy. Valuable stuff.

  Why was he doing this? Because he was AWOL and broke and somebody was paying him to turn over the documents. Who? Not much doubt. The North Koreans.

  So why did he black-market, too? Because there was good money in it. And maybe the North Koreans paid only upon delivery. And since Shipton was probably in no position to run an auction, the North Koreans probably paid him only what they wanted to pay him. And that might not be all that much. After all, they wanted to keep him hungry. Keep him feeding them stolen information.

  Maybe they helped him get the phony ration control plates. Maybe that was his payment.

  But that was speculation. We had a highly trained navy commando on the loose in Korea. He was a killer, he was after top secret documents, and he would stop at nothing to get what he wanted.

  Shipton knew the military community intimately and he could blend right in. Buy uniforms, obtain phony ID’s, waltz in and out of classified areas with just bluff and bravado.

  What would he do next?

  Probably continue to make all the easy money he could off of those ration control plates until they became hot. Did he have any idea yet we were onto him? If not, in a couple of hours, when the front doors of the PX opened to shoppers, he might stroll right on through as if he owned the place. And we could be right there to finally bust him.

  Maybe. But nothing else in this case had been easy. Something told me picking him up wouldn’t be easy either.

  He hadn’t been subtle with the navy. Hit somebody over the head and steal what you need. But maybe he had no choice. The Kitty Hawk was only in port for a few days. Hard to establish an inside contact in that time. Besides, Shipton was probably counting on interservice rivalry to keep our exchange of information down and make it less likely that we would link his naval activities with the security compromises in 8th Army. And he was probably right.

  I didn’t think he would just randomly keep stealing classified documents and black-marketing until one day we got lucky and he got caught. Something told me there was a master plan to all this. Bo Shipton was too intelligent, too well trained, to drift along in crime without some sort of overall goal. Maybe it was just to make enough money so he could slip out of the country and retire on the Riviera. Or did the classified information he was gathering, looked at as a whole, represent some sort of clandestine mosaic?

  Whatever his motive, I knew in my heart that he had a mission. I just had to figure out what it was.

  On the way to the snack bar, we had stopped at billeting and shaved and now, with bellies full of scrambled eggs and hash browns, we both felt a lot more human.

  “This Shipton is one bold dude,” Ernie said, his mouth full of toast.

  “Killing Miss Ku. Killing the Nurse. Not very bold. They were both helpless.”

  “Yeah,” Ernie said. “And he tortured Miss Ku. At least Whitcomb was more like a fair fight, wasn’t he?”

  “Even that wasn’t fair when you consider all the combat Shipton has been through.”

  “It won’t do him any good when we catch him,” Ernie said. He glugged down the last of his coffee. “Don’t sweat it, George.”

  I checked the clock on the wall. Almost eight hundred hours. Riley would probably be in. So would Strange. We left our dirty plates on the table and walked back to the snack bar manager’s office.

  He was a Korean man in a neat white shirt and tie, hunched over a stack of invoices. I showed him my badge and he pointed to a phone at a table loaded with purchasing regulations. I lifted the phone and got through to the base operator and told her what I wanted. Ernie stood in the doorway and watched the short-order cooks in the kitchen.

  Strange answered on the first ring.

  “Distribution.”

  I asked him a few questions that he couldn’t answer, but he said he’d try to get the information and I should call back in a couple of hours. He made me promise to tell him all about the girls on Texas Street once he had what I wanted.

  I hung up and thought of calling Riley. But what would I tell him? That Shipton was more dangerous than I’d figured? Besides, we weren’t supposed to be on the Kitty Hawk at all—supposed to go through channels for that sort of thing—and I didn’t want to mention our little naval adventure if I didn’t have to.

  We walked around the compound for the next couple of hours, keeping our eyes open, until the PX manager unlocked the front door of the store. Korean dependent wives streamed in, along with a few GI’s, but nobody who looked like Shipton. Ernie found a secluded spot across from the parking lot, and I went in the back door to use the nervous manager’s phone.

  He wasn’t happy to see me again but was relieved that this time I didn’t want to go through the cards. I borrowed his copy of the AAFES phone directory and started calling PX managers in the compounds leading north from Ptisan.

  At each place I got a raft of shit, but gradually I convinced each manager that he’d be in serious trouble if he didn’t cooperate. If someone else was murdered, I promised to put the blame directly On him. In the end, each consented. Most even gave me a Korean secretary, who took down the four stolen RCP numbers Shipton was using and promised to check all the rati
on cards before they left the store. If they found anything, they would call me here at the PX manager’s office.

  The calls took over an hour. When I finished, I told the manager that if I received any calls he should keep the person on the line and bring me to the phone right away. I’d be in the parking lot or in the store somewhere.

  He frowned but agreed.

  I grabbed a couple of paper cups, filled them with coffee from the manager’s large urn, and carried them out into the parking lot.

  Ernie was still slouched against the cement wall.

  “If we were on the black market detail,” he said when he saw me, “we could make a year’s worth of quota today.”

  I handed him the coffee and turned to look at the GI’s and Korean women pushing carts of merchandise out of the store toward the line of PX cabs. ‘They’re at it hot and heavy.”

  “This is a big city,” Ernie said. “Only one military base. A big demand.” He sipped on his coffee. “I think we’re wasting our time here.”

  “I do, too.”

  “After a big score like the Kitty Hawk,” Ernie said, “Shipton wouldn’t take any chances. He’d leave Pusan.”

  “You’re probably right. But where would he go?”

  “Depends on what he’s after.”

  “Yeah.”

  We finished our coffee. As goods were loaded into the backs of taxis and customers climbed aboard and sped off, more people filed into the end of the cab line. It was endless.

  “Maybe I ought to call Riley,” I said.

  “Maybe you should.”

  “You want to go in? It’s cold out here.”

  “No. I’ll wait. You’re better with the bureaucratic bullshit.”

  “Thanks for the compliment.”

  “You deserve it.”

  I went back inside, and after my talking to the Korean female operator and listening to a lot of clicking and buzzing, the phone rang and someone picked it up.

  “Criminal Investigation,” the voice said, but it wasn’t Riley. It was the First Sergeant.