by Brian Haig
And I said, “I’m telling you, I saw him up on the hillside with an M16 pouring rounds into the crowd.”
Now Bales bent forward and sarcastically asked, “And what? You broke out of the crowd and charged him. Without a weapon? You made him drop his M16 and run?”
“That’s exactly what happened,” I angrily snarled, realizing how ludicrous it sounded.
Bales snickered. “I would’ve thought a lawyer should be able to come up with a better alibi than that.”
For some reason that really pissed me off. “Up your ass.”
This time it was Bales who swung his fist across the table and punched me. But I only fell backward and landed on my bottom. Bales wasn’t nearly as strong as Choi. I added that to my mental notes.
When I finally looked up, Bales was standing over me. He kicked me twice in the stomach and I made big “ooof” sounds and folded up like a beach chair. His kick was harder than his punch. Much harder.
While I was struggling to get some air back in my lungs, Choi said, “There was only one shooter at the gate, Drummond. And he jumped into a car and was chased halfway around the city before he got away. And it wasn’t Officer Lee.”
I slowly got to my knees and Bales was still standing over me, so I begged him, “Please. Please don’t kick me again.”
He stood there a moment, and then took a step backward. I thought he was going to leave me alone, but he suddenly twisted around on his heel and let loose a roundhouse kick that caught me in the head.
I’m not sure how long I was out, but when I came to, Bales and Choi had hoisted me back up onto a chair, and I was wet all over. I guessed they’d thrown a bucket of water to try to revive me. I hurt about everywhere a man could hurt, except maybe my groin, which, all things considered, could be counted as a hidden blessing.
I couldn’t work up enough strength to get my eyelids open. I heard Choi laughing and telling Bales, “Damn it, Michael, be careful with your feet. I warned you of that with Jackson. You almost killed him.”
Bales halfheartedly chuckled. “The little fag sang, didn’t he?”
“And I had to write a report that he was beaten senseless by his cellmate. Don’t press your luck.”
All things considered, the best thing I could do at this point was play possum. I was feeling spectacularly sorry for myself, and I’d had more ass-kickings than any one man should rightly get, so I kept my eyes shut and played dead. And let me tell you, that’s damned hard to do when you hurt all over and you can feel blood trickling out of various cuts and wounds.
Choi finally got tired of waiting for me to revive, so he criticized Bales for his kick again and left to get some officers to drag me to a cell.
The two cops came in and each took a hold under my armpits. I hung limp, although my left shoulder, where the bullet had grazed me, burned like somebody had dropped acid on it.
They laid me on a sleeping mat, and, much as I would’ve loved to sleep, the pain was too great. I could peek through one of my eyelids, although the other one seemed to be fused shut. A guard was positioned right outside the bars, reading a skin magazine and apparently waiting for a sign I was conscious. Choi probably had told him to let him know as soon as I was awake so they could bring me back in the interrogation room and ass-kick a confession out of me.
I, of course, did some thinking about the Whitehall situation, although I will admit it was not at the top of my give-a-shit list at that moment.
I had badly misjudged Michael Bales; that was obvious. He wasn’t Dudley Do-Right at all. He was Dirty Harry with a little extra malice thrown in. And he and his buddy Choi had knocked the crap out of Private Jackson, and probably Moran also, to extract their statements.
Anyway, so what, because I was facing another of their physical interrogations. The thought nearly made me sick. I was sure Choi was in there telling him, “Hey, Michael, stick with your fists so we can get this jerk-off to break.” Two hours passed, and just as it was starting to become late afternoon, I heard footsteps and keys jingling, and I guessed they had run out of patience. I lay still and played dead and prayed desperately for myself. Korean voices chattered in the distance. I felt so hopeless I wanted to die. I’d been lying perfectly prone long enough for my body to stiffen and my bruises and wounds to begin to ache terribly.
I couldn’t withstand another beating. If Bales or Choi wanted me to confess to killing everybody in that crowd, I’d do it and take the chance I could sort it out later.
I felt myself being lifted by a couple of pairs of strong hands. I moaned pitifully until I heard a voice.
“Oh God, Sean, what the hell did they do to you?”
I opened one eyelid, because the other was swollen completely shut from Bales’s final kick. I tried to smile but my lips were pretty swollen so it probably looked awful.
I never thought I’d be happy to see Katherine Carlson. I was, though. If my legs weren’t so wobbly, I would’ve rushed across the cell and hugged and kissed her.
But that was an empty, fleeting thought, anyway, because my body finally decided to give my nerve endings a break. I fainted.
CHAPTER 26
You’ll never guess the first face I saw when I regained consciousness. Captain Wilson Bridges, M.D., was standing, head bent at the neck, studying what appeared to be my medical chart. The good news was he was operating in his capacity as a surgeon rather than pathologist. His medical coat had lots of dried blood all over it. The bad news was a fair amount of it was mine.
I said “Hello, Doc,” but that’s not how it came out. I sounded like a bullfrog with laryngitis.
His eyes shifted from the chart to my face, and he moved closer. Holding a finger in front of my eyes, he said, “Follow this.”
I did so as he moved it back and forth.
Then he squeezed my left wrist and looked down at his watch, and I didn’t say a word because I didn’t want to disturb his concentration. It was my body he was scrutinizing. This was no time for him to make mistakes.
He jotted something on that ubiquitous clipboard and placed it back on a hook. I saw two IVs going into my arms.
Captain Bridges smiled. “You’re going to live, Major.”
To which I grumpily replied, “I hurt so damned much, I don’t want to live.”
He chuckled.
“Yeah. Yuck, yuck,” I said.
He chuckled again, which was easy for him, because he hadn’t been shot, knifed by a piece of glass, and had the shit kicked out of him by too many people to count.
“How long have I been here?”
“Since yesterday afternoon. We sent an ambulance to get you after your lawyer called. By the way, you’re a big hero.”
“Yeah? Tell me about that,” I insisted. After all, how often do you go from being a kung-fu punching bag to a hero?
“One of the network news cameras filmed you running through the crowd and chasing off a shooter. It’s been on all the news. Even CNN’s carrying it.”
This, I suppose, explained how Katherine got me released from the Itaewon station.
I said, “How bad was it?”
“You mean the massacre?”
The fact that he chose that particular word to describe what happened was my first indication. I nodded.
He shook his head. “We lost two more this morning. That makes fourteen dead. Ten of the wounded are here; the rest are being treated in Korean hospitals around the city. Our little basement morgue couldn’t handle it. We had to rent a refrigeration van for all the bodies. If you hadn’t chased away one of the shooters there’d probably be two or three more vans parked outside.”
Remember that old saying about how “all politics is local”? Apparently the same applies to hospital departments. The guy was more concerned about morgue space than the pathetic fate of the folks who got in the way of a bullet. Down the hall was probably some little old lady complaining about how many forms she had to type. Three doors away was a supply clerk moaning about… Well, you get the point.
And
on that thought, I asked, “And how am I doing?”
“Not bad. You’re probably going to walk with a cane for a few weeks. You’ve got two broken ribs, but from the X rays it seems you’ve broken some ribs before, so you know the drill. I’ve taped them and you’ll have to refrain from exercise or strenuous activity for a while.”
This was no problem as far as I was concerned, because, oddly enough, I’d lost that urge I usually felt to get up and run a marathon.
He reached over and grabbed a hand mirror and placed it in front of my face. I took one look and immediately felt an elephantine wash of pity for the poor ugly bastard staring back at me. You could barely see a single square inch that wasn’t bruised or swollen or scabby. One tooth was missing and another was broken in half. My nose was skewed at an odd angle.
“You were beaten up pretty badly,” Bridges said, in what had to rank as the understatement of the year.
“Oh Jesus,” I murmured, barely able to recognize myself. He quickly yanked the mirror away.
“Hey, you won’t be getting any dates for a while, but it’ll all heal,” he assured. “And you’ll get some shiny enamel teeth that won’t get any cavities.”
Captain Bridges, I was learning, had the bedside manner of a rottweiler puppy.
He grinned and said, “Anyway, there’s a lady waiting outside to see you. She’s been here since you were brought in. In fact, I was instructed to keep you in isolation until she spoke with you. I can throw a towel over your face or put a blindfold on her and lead her in.”
Did I say a rottweiler puppy? I was wrong. A full-grown pit bull.
I was expecting Katherine, but in walked the heartless, bloodthirsty Miss Carol Kim. She stopped at my bedside and looked at my face, then picked up the doctor’s clipboard and studied something. Like I needed this. She was checking the name on the board to make sure the battered wreck on the bed was indeed me.
“Wow, you look awful,” she murmured, studying the clipboard.
I straightened a lock of my hair. “How’s that? Better?”
“Much,” she said with a cold smile, then lowered her tight little butt onto my bed.
She reached out and lowered the bedsheet to my waist. She clinically examined my body, and I looked down, too; there were more black-and-blue patches fairly regularly spaced. There was a bandage on my shoulder, and white tape running around my ribs.
“Wow, they really kicked the stuffing out of you.”
Like I didn’t know that already.
Then she said, “It was a really wonderful thing you did, by the way. We’re very proud of you.”
And I said the perfunctory, “Yeah, well.”
That out of the way, she pulled out a tape recorder, pushed a button, and laid it on the bed.
In an officious tone, she said, “Major Sean Drummond, the United States Army officer who was present at the massacre. The date/time is 10:15 A.M., May 23. The location is the Eighteenth Military Evacuation Hospital.”
She got a very businesslike frown on her face. “Major Drummond, could you please describe what you saw at the massacre site yesterday morning outside the main gate into Yongsan Compound?”
Now she and I, both trained lawyers, were speaking our own phlegmatic language, so I proceeded to detail everything that occurred as factually as I could recall it, from the moment the protesters arrived at the gate right through the multiple beatings I’d received at the hands of the South Korean police. And the kick from Michael Bales, don’t let me forget that point. In fact, I dwelled on Bales and Choi for quite a while, although she didn’t seem interested, even though I wanted it all on the record, real clear. In fact, what I really wanted was Michael Bales’s scalp hanging off the end of my bed for the rest of my life, where I could wake up every morning, gaze fondly at it, and say, “Take that, you prick.”
In case I haven’t mentioned it before, vengeance is one of my strong suits. Or weak suits. Whatever.
When I finally finished, after nearly thirty minutes, Carol Kim picked up her recorder, withdrew the tape, and inserted a fresh cartridge. She went through the introductory motions again, then set the recorder down and studied my eyes. Or should I say, she studied my one eye, because the other one was still swollen shut.
She said, “You stated you heard a single shot behind you before the automatic fire began. Where did that shot come from?”
“I don’t know. It was just a quick pop. But it was from somewhere in the rear of the protesters… or maybe behind the protesters. It didn’t sound too close.”
“Was it a pistol or a rifle?”
“I couldn’t tell. Why, what’s the point?”
“Please Major, answer my questions. I’ll explain later.”
“Okay, fine.”
“Are you sure the Korean police officer you chased was shooting into the crowd?”
“He had an M16 aimed in our direction, the weapon was bucking, and people were getting hit and falling over. Yeah, I’m sure.”
“But he stopped shooting when he saw you coming? Why?”
“At the moment he saw me, he had just emptied a magazine. I saw him reaching into his vest for a fresh mag, then I guess he made a quick assessment and decided he wouldn’t get it inserted before I got to him.”
“How long does it take to change magazines?”
“A highly trained soldier can accomplish it in maybe ten seconds. Someone less familiar with the weapon might take twenty, thirty seconds. You need to push a button to get the old mag out, then ram in the new mag, then pull back the charging handle to chamber a round.”
“The film we’ve viewed shows you were still twenty to thirty yards from him when he dropped the weapon and ran. Why do you think he ran?”
I thought that was a stupid question and responded accordingly. “How about because he was killing people and didn’t want to get caught.”
“Major, please, this is important. The camera shots we got from the news organization are blurry. The cameraman was under fire and swinging the camera around, so the focus wasn’t good. You had a good look at the shooter. Tell me what you think went through his head.”
“What I think was that he wasn’t going to take any risk of getting caught. I had a riot baton in my hand. I was running fast. He was thirty or so yards away and he was a very fast sprinter. He made a split-second choice and it was the wrong one. He should’ve jammed in that magazine and blown me away. Alternatively, maybe he just figured he’d murdered enough people already.”
She cocked her head. “Jump forward to the point where you had him cornered in the shop in the dead-end alley. He fired some shots, and you went down with a shard of glass in your leg. That’s what you said earlier, right?”
“Right.”
“You went in and his corpse was behind the counter?”
“Correct.”
“You rolled him over and the pistol was in his mouth?”
“Correct. At first I thought I’d hit him with a lucky shot, because he was lying on his stomach and there was a big hole in the back of his head. Then I rolled him over and saw his own pistol stuck inside his mouth.”
“So you believe he committed suicide?”
“Unless someone helped him stuff his pistol inside his mouth, I think that’s a fairly safe conclusion.”
“But you saw no one else inside the shop?”
“No. Nobody. And I checked for a rear entrance, because I wondered why he hadn’t simply fled. There wasn’t one.”
“Why would he have killed himself?”
“I don’t know. However, I’d like to go on record as saying I’m damn glad he did. It’s probably the only reason I’m alive.”
She was starting to reach down and shut off the recorder when I reached over and grabbed her hand.
“There’s another thing,” I said. “He was wearing gloves. A pair of white cloth gloves, like you see taxi drivers over here wear. They were soaked with blood.”
“Gloves?”
“Yeah, white ones.
I mean, it’s May, so it’s damned hot, and I thought that was odd. What I think is, he was wearing the gloves so there wouldn’t be any fingerprints on the M16. Maybe he and the other shooter planned all along to just drop their weapons and run.”
“You’re sure about the gloves?”
“Of course I’m sure. Check with the Korean police.”
“We’ve talked with the Korean police. They haven’t mentioned anything about it.”
“Well, he was,” I insisted. I mean, it wasn’t a big point, and it certainly wasn’t conclusive, except it implied a degree of premeditation on the shooter’s part.
She shut off the recorder.
“Okay,” I said. “What’s this about?”
A big gush of air came out of her lungs, like someone who’s under a great strain.
“While you’ve been in this hospital a very ugly dispute has erupted between our government and the Republic of Korea. The slaughter, it’s all that’s been on the news. The problem is nobody knows what happened, or why. There’s a war of finger-pointing going back and forth.”
I sat up. “Finger-pointing over what?”
“The protest, or demonstration, was approved by the city of Seoul and was under South Korean civil protection. That much is indisputable. The South Koreans, of course, don’t want to be blamed for the massacre of fourteen American citizens and the wounding of seventeen others. They’re claiming an American protester fired the first shot, then one or two ROK policemen returned fire in self-defense. You yourself admit you heard the first shot fired somewhere behind you. Other eyewitnesses corroborated the same thing.”
I thought about this. It met with the facts. It made sense out of a chaotic event. But it didn’t make complete sense.
“Then why did my shooter run? If he was simply returning fire, why’d he flee? And what about the other one, the second shooter?”
“Nobody’s sure. It’s believed the second shooter was an ROK police officer as well. He was wearing a police uniform and he dropped his weapon and ran. It was an M16 with all the serial numbers filed off. Nobody has any idea who he was.”
“He was an ROK police officer? And they don’t know who he was? How can that be?”