The Line

by Martin Limon

  A pair of headlights approached. Near the entrance to Chunhyang Lin, it slowed, then pulled into the gravel-strewn lot. As it passed Ernie said, “Sedan.”

  And a big one. It stopped toward the back of the lot, just out of the glow of the yellow neon sign. A door popped open and a Korean man in a suit walked toward us.

  “Showtime,” Ernie said.

  We both climbed out of the jeep.

  He stopped a few feet in front of us, staring at me. “We told you to come alone,” he said.

  “She didn’t say that.” And it was true, Marilyn hadn’t, though I certainly hadn’t been about to ask.

  The man shrugged. There was a scar along his face that disappeared into his rugged facial hair. “We want to talk to you,” he said. “Not him.”

  “What about Brunmeyer?”

  “We stopped him up the road.”

  This wasn’t good. They controlled the battlefield.

  “What’s your business with him?” I asked.

  The man shrugged again. “We’ve told him. Now, we want to talk to you.”

  Ernie looked at me. “Don’t do it,” he said. “Don’t go over there.”

  “Where’s Evelyn Cresthill?” I asked the gangster.

  “We still have her.”

  “When will you let her go?”

  “That’s up to my boss.” Then he said indifferently, “You talking to him, or no?”

  “Don’t do it,” Ernie said again, voice low.

  “If I don’t come back,” I told Ernie, “keep looking hard at Brunmeyer. Something’s off up at the JSA. I’m not sure what, but something. If the Provost Marshal doesn’t back you, go see Kill.”

  “Sueño,” Ernie said warningly.

  “It’s Evelyn Cresthill’s only chance,” I told him.

  I stepped forward, hands at my side. The Korean thug frisked me, stood back abruptly, and pointed at my .45. I pulled it out of its holster and tossed it to Ernie, who caught it on the fly.

  I stepped toward the sedan.

  -25-

  A nondescript man in an expensive-looking suit sat in the backseat. He waved at the open spot beside him and I sat down, keeping one leg outside of the car. In the dim light, his features appeared blurred. The white shirt under his suit was buttoned all the way up to his neck.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Brunmeyer won’t be harmed,” he said. “In fact, we will be releasing him soon. My colleague is explaining our demands to him—she is quite persuasive.”

  His English was so clearly pronounced that I thought he might be from the States, or at least had lived there for some years.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “We want you to ensure that Private Teddy Fusterman is convicted of the murder of Corporal Noh Jong-bei.”

  “Why?”

  “Not your business.”

  I paused, waiting, but he didn’t elaborate.

  “And how do you expect me to do that?” I said.

  “That’s your problem. I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

  And I could. There were a number of things I could do as a CID agent that would seal Teddy Fusterman’s fate. I could recant my testimony about the entrenching tool with Teddy’s initials, say it was a fake. I could end up in the slammer for a while for that, but I doubted it would come to that, given that the Army wanted a conviction, and it would definitely seal Teddy’s fate.

  “Why should I do this?”

  “For Jenny Cresthill. If you want her to grow up with a mother, you’ll do what we ask.”

  “You hurt an American dependent wife, and the Korean National Police will come down on you like an avalanche.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Unless it looks like she was killed by a jealous lover. Or in a car accident.” He turned toward me and grinned. “These things happen.”

  Mr. Kill would see right through such a ruse. But if the right people in the government hierarchy were paid to go along with it, Kill might not be able to bring a serious prosecution—or even be allowed to investigate. Money talked in Korea, as it did everywhere else, and if this group of mobsters had enough to hire a man of this status to be nothing more than a messenger boy, they probably had plenty with which to bribe politicians. But why was this so important to them? Why go to such lengths to burn Private Teddy Fusterman? The only possible answer I saw was that they were trying to protect the North Koreans.

  “Who do you work for?” I asked. “It’s not just gampei, is it? You work for someone bigger than that, maybe Kim Il-sung himself.”

  He snorted a laugh. “You can go now,” he said, dismissing me with a wave of his hand.

  The gangster outside of the car grabbed my arm and pulled. I resisted and broke his grip, then backed out of the sedan and calmly shrugged my coat back into place. Or at least, as calmly as I could before walking back toward Ernie.

  The gampei piled back into their sedan, turned around, and sped off.

  “What’d they want?” Ernie asked.

  “Just making a few threats,” I said. “Against Evelyn Cresthill.”

  “Why?”

  And then I lied. I told him they wanted us to make sure Brunmeyer didn’t step out of line or give any indication that they’d made demands on him, but that they hadn’t told me what those demands were. I mentioned nothing about Fusterman’s case.

  “And if Brunmeyer does whatever it is they want, they’ll let her go?”

  “That’s what they’re telling me.”

  Ernie shook his head. “They’re holding all the aces.”

  “For now.”

  Just prior to twenty-three-hundred hours—or eleven p.m.—we were bouncing up and down over a muddy lane in the dark because there were no streetlamps up here and we’d already been ordered by the guards at the South Korean army checkpoints to turn off our headlights and use our blackout lights; a dim yellow glow canted toward the ground. We passed a whitewashed wooden sign shaped like a thick arrow that pointed toward the top of a ridge. It read observation point ouelette.

  At a gravel-covered area in front of a small fortress of bricks and sandbags, we parked the jeep and climbed out. From the darkness, a rotund figure appeared.

  “Goddamn it, you’re late.”

  “Nice to see you too, Colonel,” Ernie said.

  “Knock off the bullshit. Follow me.”

  Planks in the dirt led up the side of the ridge. At the top, Colonel Peele disappeared through an opening in a large wall of sandbags. We followed. Beyond was a level area about the size of a basketball court, encircled by sandbags and brick. On the left stood a narrow wooden guard shack that towered about twenty feet high, and to the right, more sandbags and bricks were piled into igloo-shaped bunkers. Interspersed along the outer walls were narrow slits for riflemen and a few slightly wider ones with M2 .50 caliber machine guns balanced atop wooden platforms.

  “They could hold off a siege from Genghis Khan up here,” Ernie said.

  “Yeah, for about two minutes.”

  The firepower on the North Korean side of the border was so immense that the GIs stationed up on the DMZ knew no one expected them to last more than a few minutes in an all-out assault. They were here for one reason and one reason only: to make sure that the US was formally involved in any repeat of the Korean War. American forces were not only stationed right on the line, they were placed at the most likely invasion routes: the Western and Eastern Corridors, both of which led straight to Seoul. Were tensions to erupt into full-blown hostilities, a long list of American casualties would mean that the sitting US President would find plenty of political backing for us to enter into war on the side of our ally, the Republic of Korea.

  The GIs called it—and themselves—the “tripwire.”

  My eyes had adjusted to the darkness by now, and by the light of a three-quarter moon, I could make out that Obse
rvation Point Ouellette sat near the edge of a gully. Across that gully, about as far as the average center fielder could throw a baseball, sat another fortification.

  “That one belongs to the Commies,” Colonel Peele whispered.

  A few tiny red lights blinked within the North Korean position, and what was perhaps a night vision device stared at me, resembling the eyes of an owl.

  As I stared back, a Korean man in combat gear appeared at Colonel Peele’s side. The two men whispered to each other, then they nodded and shook hands. Colonel Peele turned to us and said, “Time to move out.” He took a step toward the north.

  “Hold it,” Ernie said. “You want us to go over there?”

  “Not there,” Peele replied. “Right on the line. Someone will be meeting us.”

  “Who?”

  Without replying, Colonel Peele approached the sandbagged wall, lay prone atop it, and flipped himself over. Ernie took a deep breath, looked at me, and said, “What the hell.” After he slid over the short wall, I followed, met with solid ground, and remained crouched and wary as we moved north. I hoped the pathway Peele was following had been cleared of land mines. In less than ten yards, the terrain dropped off into the gully. We descended rapidly, sloshing in mud at the bottom and shoving branches out of the way to reach the far side of the depression. And then we were climbing until we hit level ground again. A few yards into that stood a ten-foot-tall chain-link fence topped with concertina wire.

  Colonel Peele crouched and motioned for us to come closer. He pointed to the lower links of the wall, which had been snipped cleanly by wire cutters. There was enough space for a man to pull back the edges of the fence and crawl through.

  “I’m not going through there,” Ernie said. Any thought of addressing Peele as “sir” or using other military decorum had left both of us. Ernie and I were frightened and had entered survival mode, none of which seemed to bother Colonel Peele.

  “No,” he whispered. “I don’t want you to go through. But I’m showing it to you, just in case.”

  “Just in case what?”

  Before he could answer, footsteps approached.

  About ten yards on the other side of the fence, two figures walked toward us. One stopped, his AK-47 pointed at the ground. The other figure continued in our direction. Soon I could make out a North Korean combat uniform, and then the man’s features came into view. A weathered, gaunt face with distrustful eyes staring at Colonel Peele.

  “Han,” Peele said.

  Standing about five yards apart, the chain-link fence between them, Commissar Han and Colonel Peele stared each other down like two fighters just before a bout. Unfortunately, there was no referee here, no Marquess of Queensberry rules. Ernie and I had our .45s, but they wouldn’t be much help in comparison with the man standing behind Commissar Han with an automatic rifle.

  Colonel Peele stepped forward and laced his thick fingers around chain links. “We can get out of this, Han. You call off your alert, we call off ours.”

  “You’ve been overflying our capital,” Han said.

  His English was good, clearly enunciated with a vaguely British accent.

  “Yes,” Peele replied, “and we hope the sonic booms have woken up your Great Leader.”

  “Our Great Leader is unperturbed by your running-dog provocations. He is a strong man who will lead us to victory and the eventual reunification of the Korean Peninsula.”

  “Knock off the bullshit, Han. This is me,” Peele said, thrusting his thumb into the center of his chest. “I hear this propaganda from you at every MAC meeting, but this isn’t the time. We’re here to try to find a way to save your goddamn Great Leader. To make sure we don’t send our entire air force and navy fleet and army up there to make him apologize for murdering one of our men.”

  “How dare you accuse the peace-loving people of North Korea of committing such an act? Corporal Noh was killed by an American soldier! This Fusterman, or whatever his name is. You can’t blame this on us when it was one of your own, rotten to the core with the greed and never-ending lies of capitalism. You killed him. Not us.”

  “No. Fusterman’s innocent,” Peele said. “Junior Lieutenant Kwon was the officer in charge that night. He’s the one who’s guilty. He either murdered Corporal Noh with his own hands or he ordered one of his men to do it. Turn him over to us, and the mobilization will be called off.”

  Colonel Peele waved his right arm in the air, indicating the entire length of the Demilitarized Zone.

  “Prosecute Fusterman,” Han replied. “Hang him by the neck, witnessed by the Neutral Nations Supervisory Committee, and show us the film. Then we will call off our alert. Otherwise, I warn you, the wrath of the North Korean people will descend on your occupying forces and sweep you from the homeland of the pure race of Korean people. We will watch you flounder and drown.”

  Colonel Peele placed his fists on his hips. “You just don’t get it, do you, Han? You don’t understand what’s going to happen to you if we move in. Not just your Great Leader, but every single one of you Commies will be dragged out of your bunkers and punished by your own people, the ones you’ve starved and tortured.”

  I glanced at Ernie nervously, worried about escalation. He had a different reaction, making a face as if to ask, Did we come all the way up here just to listen to these two entrenched ideologues trade insults?

  But then Commissar Han opened negotiations.

  “What would you give us for Junior Lieutenant Kwon?”

  Without hesitation, Colonel Peele said, “We’ll return two of your spies. The ones you’ve been bitching about for the last three years.”

  “Your South Korean lackeys are holding six of our comrades. We want all of them.”

  “Three,” Peele said.

  They bickered for a while and finally settled on four spies being released in exchange for Junior Lieutenant Kwon. Apparently, two of the North Korean espionage agents had only been captured recently and were still too high-value for the South Koreans to turn over.

  Once they settled on that, the two men argued about the nature of the turnover. Han insisted that Junior Lieutenant Kwon only be questioned at the Joint Security Area, with a representative from the DPRK standing by, and when the interrogation was finished, he’d remain in his homeland, where the penalty would be decided.

  Peele shook his head. “No dice. We take him into custody, try him in a South Korean court and execute him down here.”

  Both were now omitting the possibility of Kwon being innocent. I kept my trap shut.

  “Impossible,” Commissar Han countered. “There is only one legitimate Korean government, and that is ours. We will not turn one of our citizens over to your . . . wallaby court?”

  “Kangaroo court,” Peele corrected.

  “Right. We won’t turn a Korean citizen over to your kangaroo court.”

  Colonel Peele breathed so rapidly I wondered if he might be hyperventilating. “No,” he said in a low, menacing voice. “You took advantage of us during the Pueblo incident. You tortured our men, murdered one of them and permanently injured others, but you won’t get away with it this time. One of your men killed Corporal Noh, and we’re not going to stand for it. If you want to avoid war, you will turn Junior Lieutenant Kwon over to us. Do you understand?”

  Han stared at Peele as if he were a strange specimen of beast. Finally, he said slowly, “Bul kanung.” And then repeated it in English. “Impossible.”

  Without warning, Peele dove forward nose-first into the mud. At first, I thought he might’ve collapsed, but then I realized that he was wriggling like an eel, his large skull already pushing through the sliced wires in the chain-link fence. Commissar Han stepped back quickly, and the man behind him with the rifle leveled it at Colonel Peele. Ernie and I both knelt, pulled our .45s and took firing positions. In seconds, we’d switched off the safeties, clanged back the cha
rging handles and had them pointed straight at the rifleman.

  Colonel Peele crawled as far into North Korea as his fat shoulders would allow, but some of the sharp metal was cutting into his shirt and even his flesh, slowing his forward momentum.

  Commissar Han shouted a command. With a deafening blast, the rifleman opened fire. Ernie and I fired, too. I thought for sure that Colonel Peele was dead and we were next, but then I realized that the blast from the AK-47 had landed a few yards in front of him—a warning shot. Our bullets had been aimed high, wafting harmlessly into the night sky.

  Even more enraged now, Colonel Peele dragged himself onward, his body now halfway into North Korea. Han and the rifleman backed off, giving me and Ernie the chance to reholster our .45s and leap at Colonel Peele. I grabbed his right foot, Ernie his left, and we pulled, yanking him back toward our side of the line. He kicked viciously, and as I struggled to maintain my grip on his combat boot, Peele howled: “They tortured and killed our men! They took our ship on the high seas illegally and made us apologize for it! They’re pirates and murderers, and someone needs to bring them to justice!”

  By the time we’d wrestled him back fully into South Korea, Peele was sobbing. “They killed my son,” he said. “If it weren’t for them, he’d still be alive.” He buried his eyes in his palms. “I’ll kill them all!”

  Three soldiers from Observation Point Ouellette appeared out of the darkness. With their help, Ernie and I managed to half-carry, half-drag the distraught Colonel Peele farther onto the free side of Freedom’s Frontier.

  -26-

  The next morning, we sat in the CID office as if nothing had happened the night before.

  Evelyn Cresthill was still being held as collateral for an action that went against every organelle in my body: lie. And more than just that. Perjure myself. Under oath.