by Brian Haig
The Secretary’s security detail had a split second to decide. They could turn the Secretary around and shove him back inside the Blue House. Or they could push him forward, toward the bulletproof black sedan waiting at the curb. The car door was being held open by a South Korean soldier. The car was closer.
It did look like the best choice at the time. They literally lifted him off his feet, and began carrying him forward, when suddenly the natty-looking soldier holding the car door flew forward and the door slammed shut. The soldier lay flat on the ground, like he’d been nailed on the back of the skull with a blackjack, or, considering this was Asia, a nunchaku.
At moments like this, a fraction of a second means everything. And I’ll give the Secretary’s security guys credit. They instantly threw him on the ground and two of them piled themselves on top of him, while the other two drew their pistols and turned about and faced the crowd. They instinctively recognized the situation was out of control, and we had warned them there was a grave risk, so they weren’t taking any chances.
Buzz Mercer and I were running toward the Secretary of State when we heard the first loud bang, even over the noise of the crowd, and one of the Secretary’s security men flew backward with a big spray of blood spewing from his head. Then Bang! The other standing security guard grabbed his gut, sank to his knees, and fell over.
Then Bang! Bang! Bang! – three more shots were fired. But by this time, Carol and I were there. So were seven or eight South Korean uniformed policemen with their pistols drawn.
You sometimes wonder about the difference two seconds would make. Or what would’ve happened if Clapper hadn’t called and woken me up. Or if I hadn’t been so bored that I’d been channel-surfing through Korean newscasts. Things would’ve turned out quite differently, because I was probably the only guy in the crowd who would’ve recognized him and the threat he posed.
He was holding up his police shield and pointing his pistol, and you could’ve sworn he had every right to be there, that he was just doing his job. He even had the proper security pass pinned to his lapel.
Choi Lee Min, experienced policeman that he was, blended right in with the other cops.
I ended up right next to him. I looked at him, and he turned his head and saw me, and there was one of those shocked milliseconds that seem to last forever.
Then he spun his body to shoot me, and despite all those years of hand-to-hand training I’d had in the outfit, I knew in that instant I didn’t stand a chance. I saw the pistol aimed at my stomach and I instinctively knew that no matter how fast I moved, it wouldn’t be fast enough.
But before he could pull the trigger a hand crashed down on his forearm and knocked the weapon loose. It landed on the cement at his feet and we both turned to see who’d smacked him. Allie stood right next to him, glaring at his face.
Choi’s eyes turned to the ground; just as he started to bend over to retrieve his pistol, Allie threw her stiffened fingers straight into his throat. An explosion of pain must have raced through his synapses. She’d hit him hard. She’d meant to. She’d driven his Adam’s apple right into his larynx, like a nail jabbed into a balloon. His head drove forward and a sickening gurgling, choking sound came from his mouth. He buckled to his knees and his hands flew to his throat, trying to get some air into his lungs.
I threw myself down on the ground and scrambled around for his pistol. In one way, that proved to be the right thing to do. But in another way, it wasn’t.
Because here’s what happened: I looked up just in time to see a Korean rioter pushing his way through the crowd. In his hand I saw a black metal ball that an experienced soldier like me would recognize immediately as a hand grenade.
He was so close that even with my awful marksmanship I couldn’t miss. I didn’t even think. I just picked up the pistol and shot him. Right in the forehead. And since I was firing up from the ground, the bullet lifted him off his feet and sent him flying backward.
Then there were two loud booms. The first was not nearly as noisy as the second. In fact, it was hardly more than a quick pop. I mean, it sounded loud to me, but that first one was only a pistol shot. The second boom was the one that got everybody’s attention. It was so loud it was deafening. That was the hand grenade going off in the middle of the crowd.
Here’s what they figured out later. Choi had gotten his security pass from Harry Elmore. He’d used that pass to get past the barriers and blend in with the other Korean cops. None of the other cops remembered him being there throughout the evening, so he probably hadn’t risked showing his face until right before the assassination was supposed to go down. He was there to run interference and see that everything went down right.
It was probably Choi who used his pistol butt to clobber the Korean soldier at the Secretary of State’s car door, and then slam the door closed in front of him.
The protester was armed with a grenade because that was the weapon of choice for their plan. Say Choi hadn’t been able to get the car door slammed in the Secretary’s face, then he would’ve been shoved into the backseat by his guards. But the car wasn’t going anywhere, because protesters were cluttered in front of it, and even an American Secretary of State, oddly enough, isn’t allowed to run over a dozen or so foreigners inside their own country. Therefore his car would’ve been stranded by the curb and the protester would’ve flung the armed hand grenade underneath it. Now, here’s a fact: Bulletproof cars aren’t invulnerable to large explosions on their undersides. That’s where the gas tank is located. Also, the undersides of those behemoths don’t have all that thick armor plating. There would likely have been a huge explosion.
But Choi did get the car door closed. So he prepared the way for the second contingency. The Secretary’s security detail, if they ever saw Choi, assumed he was on their side. He was holding up his police shield as he shot the security guards and cleared the way for the kid with the grenade to jump on top of the Secretary and blow them both to pieces. Ballistic tests proved that the bullets that killed three of the Secretary’s security detail came from Choi’s pistol.
As it was, the suicide bomber killed another four people and wounded nine more. It was lucky for the Secretary that I’d fired my shot up from the ground, because that sent the bomber flying backward into the crowd and made the grenade roll backward out of his hand, so some other hapless souls ended up absorbing the explosion and shrapnel meant for him.
As for the suicide bomber, he was a senior at Kwangju University about 120 miles south of Seoul. He was as South Korean as they come. He was born and raised in the city of Kwangju, the capital city of a South Korean province that was known as a virulent hotbed of antigovernment and anti-American sentiments. Twenty-two years before, his father, as well as many other citizens of Kwangju, had been killed by South Korean troops who were brutally suppressing a huge revolt in the city. Korean lore had it that the troops who went into the city to suppress the revolt were there at the behest and encouragement of the American military command. It wasn’t true, because they had actually been sent in by an angry, ambitious military dictator, who afterward distorted the facts to deflect the blame away from himself. But the myth persisted. The kid had been very active in campus antigovernment groups. He was known around the school as a hothead and a fanatical anti-American.
He was the perfect cutout. Which was exactly why Choi picked him. Had he killed the Secretary of State, and had Choi simply vanished back into the crowd and made his escape, it would’ve looked like a South Korean extremist had assassinated a key American government official right on the steps of South Korea’s presidential palace.
The kid had probably never met Choi. He probably never even knew he was working for the North Koreans. Most likely he was recruited by someone in the campus movement, was told what to do, was provided with the hand grenade, and his hatred drove him on from there. On the outside chance he survived to be interrogated, the world still would’ve been convinced the Secretary of State was murdered by an angry South Ko
rean. And it would’ve been true.
And Lord knows what would have happened to the already egregiously wounded alliance after that.
As for Choi, he never made his getaway. He choked to death right where Allie chopped him. You think about life and its many coincidences. Allie’s being at the Blue House, and her having the presence of mind to rush to the point of confrontation, knock the gun away, and kill Choi, was simply amazing. It was what you might call an act of God, to let Allie be his hand of retribution. They found Choi there when they were cleaning up the bodies, his eyes bulging out of their sockets, blood still dribbling out of his throat onto the cement. I had no regrets about that.
What I had regrets about was the South Korean cop who saw me pick up a pistol and shoot someone. That was that first popping sound I told you about. That was the bullet that entered my back next to my lower spine and pinned me to the concrete like a grounded fish.
That was the one that turned out the lights inside my head.
CHAPTER 46
See if you can guess the first face I saw when I came to?
It was deja vu all over again, as they say. Doc Bridges and I were right back where we were the last time I saw him. I was flat on my back in a hospital bed, inside the same room even, and he was standing beside the bed taking my pulse and making some notes on a clipboard. I’ll bet it was even the same clipboard.
I said something like, “Oh Christ,” and he chuckled.
Then he said, “Hey, you’re a hero again.”
He held a newspaper in front of my face. It was the Herald Tribune. The boldface title line was “The Unlucky Hero.”
Some cynical reporter had gotten a real gas out of the fact that the guy who saved the life of the Secretary of State, and maybe the whole alliance, was shot by a Korean cop for his troubles.
Where was the outrage?, I asked myself.
Doc Bridges took the newspaper away, then held a finger in front of my eyes and we did the “follow this with your pupils” routine again.
In a very clinical tone, he said, “The bullet passed within millimeters of your spine. You’re lucky.”
“How lucky?”
He was reading something off a chart. “It missed your spine, didn’t it?”
“I guess.”
“I could see you’ve been shot before, so you know the drill. You’ll be in a wheelchair for a while, then you’ll use a cane. But after some physical therapy, you’ll be almost normal.”
I suppose I should’ve been relieved, but if you’ve ever spent any time in physical therapy, you know that’s not something you eagerly anticipate. And Army hospitals are to physical therapy what Nazi death camps were to racial harmony in Europe.
I groaned. “Almost normal? What’s that mean?”
He chuckled to himself. “You weren’t exactly normal in the first place. I’m not a miracle worker. Don’t expect me to turn out improved products.”
This is another of those old jokes doctors find funny. No wonder the hospital staff kept this guy hidden at the rear of the hospital, as far from humanity as they could get him.
He put the clipboard on its hook and said, “There’s another lady who’s been waiting outside for you. In fact, she’s the one who made me come in here and wake you up. I tried telling her you need your rest, and she said she knew what you needed better than I do.”
“What’s she look like?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“She’s been giving me hell since you got here. She told me if I lost you, she’d break my neck. She meant it, too. Very frightening.”
He spun around and walked out. A moment later the door slammed back open and in stomped the living typhoon herself: the one and only Imelda Pepperfield.
She looked at me, then huffed and puffed a couple of times.
I said, “You know you’re not supposed to be here?”
“ ’Course I know that.”
I tried to frown, but I smiled.
“It hurt?” she asked.
“Not a bit,” I candidly admitted. “I think I’ve got enough drugs pumping through my veins, you could reach over and rip off one of my arms and I wouldn’t feel a thing.”
She nodded a few times, then she said, “You done damned good, Major.”
Now, if you know anything about Imelda Pepperfield, you know praise coming from her lips is like water pouring from a rock. In other words, it don’t happen often. And when it does, don’t act shy or aw-shucksy. Relish the moment.
I was beaming like a little idiot, and she actually reached over and patted me on the head. I was like a cat getting its back stroked by a proud master.
She scooched her butt onto the side of my bed. “You been recused,” she said, confirming what I already knew.
“There were some conflicts,” I replied, obviously unable to explain what had really happened, even to Imelda. She, unlike me, was still a member of Katherine’s staff, so I couldn’t risk compromising her.
“Trial starts tomorrow,” she told me.
“You mean today’s Monday already?”
“Uh-huh. You were so drugged up, you slept through Saturday and Sunday.”
I stared at the far wall, and whatever satisfaction I felt about being a hero and all that suddenly evaporated.
She said, “I went and visited with Cap’n Whitehall.”
“Really?”
“Seems somebody got him addicted to hamburgers and beer, so he was havin’ withdrawal.”
Katherine had told her about that, I figured. I could just imagine Imelda with Whitehall’s goonish keeper. She probably didn’t even have to bribe him with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue. She probably told him that as long as he let her through with her contraband, she’d promise not to rip his ears off.
Anyway, I said, “So what’d you think?”
She sucked in her lips and seemed to chew on them a moment. “That boy’s got his mind set. He gets convicted, he’s gonna find a way to kill hisself. He had that look in his eye. That’s what I think.”
“Yeah,” I replied, since I’d already reached the same conclusion. One thing I’d learned about Whitehall was he was one of those 444 people who, if they told you they were going to do something, they’d do it. I doubted he’d even wait for an appeals process.
I said, “So what do you think his chances are?”
“I wouldn’t wanna be in his shoes. That Eddie Golden, he’s ruthless.”
“You know Fast Eddie?” I asked, surprised.
“Hadda work for him once or twice.”
“You did? You’ve never mentioned it.”
The Army has a small pool of senior legal specialists, and they rotate around depending on trial needs. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that Imelda ended up on Eddie’s team once or twice. No wonder she’d withdrawn into the corner when we questioned Jackson and Moran about whether they were beaten.
Her face got this distasteful look, which on Imelda, frankly, looked like somebody had poured acid down her throat.
“Wasn’t anything I was proud of. He don’t have scruples. Truth don’t mean nothin’ to him, just winnin’.”
“Well, he’s up against Katherine, and they don’t get any better than her. Trust me. She’s going to give Eddie a run for his money.”
Imelda didn’t respond to that.
So I said, “Did you get my substitute yet?”
“Cap’n Kip Goins. Got here yesterday mornin’. The judge arranged it.”
“Kip’s a good man. He’s also done two murder trials, so he’ll know what he’s doing.”
She didn’t respond to that, either.
I thought I knew what might be going on. Imelda and I had been together a long time. After years of trying cases together, we’d developed a special bond. But there’s more. Imelda was like a talisman to me. She was that rabbit’s foot a paratrooper kisses just before he goes out the door.
I might be kidding myself here, but maybe Imelda was
thinking of me the same way.
“Look, you’ll get ’em through this. Don’t let Golden pull any fast ones on Katherine. Keep her on her toes.”
Imelda nodded, but I didn’t get the impression she felt good about this.
Then Bridges stuck his head in and said I needed to get my beauty rest. Imelda jumped off the bed and made her way slowly and reluctantly toward the door. As soon as she was gone, I pushed the buzzer beside my bed, and a nurse who looked like she could bench five hundred pounds came rushing in.
I said, “I need a phone.”
She started to argue, but I gave her a look that would sizzle steaks and reminded her I was a major in the United States Army. I told her I better see the back of her muscle-bound ass going out the door for a phone.
The second she got it hooked up, I dialed Buzz Mercer’s number. For once he actually sounded happy to hear it was me. He’d better sound happy – damned happy. I’d saved his bacon.
I said, “I need you to come over here right away.”
Well, what could he say to that? Gee, Drummond, old buddy, I know you nearly gave your life and saved the alliance and all, and you saved my career, but I’ve got some paperwork I’m behind on.
If he said anything but yes, I’d find some way to get out of that bed and go kill him.
Twenty minutes later there was a light knock, then his little butch-cutted head peeked inside.
I said, “Come in, please.”
He wasn’t alone. Carol was with him. They found two chairs over in the corner and pulled them up against my bed. Then Buzz reached over and shook my hand. Gently, of course, because there were several IVs sticking in my arm.