by Martin Limon
“Demotion.” Then his eyes widened and he stared at us as if begging. “I can’t take the cut in pay. My wife and my kids back in the States are barely getting by as it is.”
I patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about demotion,” I said, not sure if I believed it. We realized we weren’t going to gather much more information here so we left him and ran to the open door. Above the entranceway an engraved wooden sign was bolted: EIGHTH UNITED STATES ARMY OFFICERS’ WIVES’ CLUB, YONGSAN BRANCH.
Ernie and I entered.
Mrs. Wrypointe sat on a metal chair, covering her eyes with her left hand, the right being held by another American woman, who was comforting her. A half-dozen women swiveled to stare at Ernie and me as we entered. I pulled out my CID badge.
“Agent Sueño,” I said, “and Agent Bascom.”
They all started talking at once. Out of the hubbub the name that kept getting repeated was “Burkewalder.”
The convoy left the compound about twenty-two hundred hours that evening, or 10 P.M. civilian time. Colonel Brace, the 8th Army Provost Marshal, was at the lead, riding in his green army sedan with his Korean civilian driver. Two jeeps full of MPs came next, followed by me and Ernie. We emerged from Namsan Tunnel and gazed down at the bright lights of downtown Seoul. Colonel Brace’s driver took the familiar turnoff toward Myong-dong.
“So she popped her a good one,” Ernie said.
“So they claim,” I replied. “Mei-lan Burkewalder interrupts the meeting of the OWC and reads off Mrs. Wrypointe for being behind the crackdown on black marketing and now her husband’s been notified and he’s in the middle of combat operations as part of the remaining US military advisory group in South Vietnam.”
“So Mrs. Wrypointe calls her a black marketing whore and Mei-lan karate chops her in the nose.”
“What Mrs. Wrypointe called her is in dispute,” I said, “but everybody agrees about the punch. Not a karate chop, a straight right. Knocked off Mrs. Wrypointe’s glasses and bloodied her nose.”
“So now we’re going to bust Tiger Kang for black marketing.”
“Mrs. Wrypointe insisted.”
What worried me were the people riding up front in Colonel Brace’s sedan. Lieutenant Pong, the Korean National Police Liaison Officer to 8th Army, I could understand. He was a law-enforcement professional and his presence was required to coordinate the arrests of any Korean civilians. The other person was along for the ride strictly because of who she was married to and because of her proven ability to intimidate: Mrs. Millicent Wrypointe.
“Colonel Brace might as well turn over the authority of his office to the OWC,” Ernie said.
“Might as well,” I agreed.
Colonel Brace’s driver took a wrong turn and Ernie and I waited at the intersection for them to figure it out. Ten minutes later they were back, the two jeeps full of MPs trailing behind, and they pulled up next to us. Colonel Brace rolled down his window.
“Where is this damn place?” he shouted.
“Follow us,” Ernie said and without further discussion we took off. Once again, we parked at the foot of the hill leading up to Tiger Kang’s. It took some time for the MPs and Colonel Brace’s driver to find safe places to park. When the entire party was assembled, Ernie said, “We have to approach on foot.”
Colonel Brace, wearing a starched set of fatigues, nodded. “So they won’t have time to destroy the contraband.”
Mrs. Wrypointe wore pressed slacks and sneakers and a warm pullover sweater. Her nose was bandaged with white gauze. “Come on then,” she said. “The more time we give all these Koreans to gawk at us, the more time they have to warn this Tiger Kang.”
Apparently, she thought all Koreans worked together.
With Ernie at the lead, we trudged up the hill. As we passed each streetlamp, I fell back further and further. Something told me not to get too involved in this; it wasn’t going to turn out right, and if things went wrong, Mrs. Wrypointe would love nothing more than to blame me and Ernie.
But Ernie couldn’t resist the excitement. I believe he’d fallen in love with Tiger Kang’s kisaeng house, and maybe with Tiger Kang herself. And he certainly had a crush on Mei-lan Burkewalder. The hand-carved front door was lit by a floodlight and Ernie pressed the buzzer and in seconds the door popped open. Reflexively, two beautiful young women in tradition chima-chogori Korean gowns held their hands clasped in front of them and bowed so deeply they exposed the jade pins knotting their ebony hair. Ernie bowed back but as he did so Lieutenant Pong pushed past the women, followed immediately by Colonel Brace and Mrs. Wrypointe. The MPs milled around outside, thumbs hooked over their web belts. I told two of them to watch out back and two more to wait here at the front entrance. The other four followed me into Tiger Kang’s.
Ernie was already upstairs. That’s where the parties were going on, the noise and the laughter, and that’s where Lieutenant Pong, Colonel Brace and Mrs. Wrypointe headed first. When I reached the top of the stairs, I saw a startled group of Korean businessmen, seated next to beautiful young Korean hostesses inside one of the raised-floor party rooms, faces flushed by imported scotch. Lieutenant Pong looked inside, then proceeded down the row. All the rooms were empty until he reached the party room at the end of the hall. Lieutenant Pong slid open the oiled-paper door and stood there as if he’d been turned to stone. Colonel Brace and then Mrs. Wrypointe were following on his heels so closely that they practically bumped into him.
Ernie studied the expressions on their faces and then turned and grinned at me.
Mrs. Wrypointe screamed.
“What the hell did they expect to find?” Ernie asked. We were back in his jeep, winding our way through the brightly lit district of Myong-dong. “Eighth Army honchos out for a night on the town, where the hell else are they going to go? Tiger Kang’s.”
“She didn’t expect to find her husband,” I said, “with his tongue down the throat of Mei-lan Burkewalder.”
“Mei-lan probably made sure that he picked her for the evening.”
“Out of revenge?”
“What else?”
“Maybe they’d been an item for a while,” I said. “Maybe that’s why she wasn’t worried about us busting her for black market.”
“Maybe.” Ernie zipped up onto the expressway and half a mile later we entered Namsan tunnel. “Anyway, they got their black market arrest. And a historic moment it was. Tiger Kang arrested and taken down to the local KNP station.”
“They’ll treat her like a queen.”
“You can count on that.”
When we emerged from the tunnel, Ernie turned left on the MSR. After zigging and zagging through a quarter mile of heavy traffic, he turned down a dark lane and parked the jeep in one of the back alleys of Itaewon. We should’ve gone back to the MP station to file our report but somehow I needed to cleanse myself of 8th Army for a while. What better place than Itaewon, the greatest red-light district in Northeast Asia?
We found two empty barstools at the Lucky Seven Club. Sunny still hadn’t returned to work. We asked about her and the barmaid said she was improving. She didn’t sound too convincing. We ordered two cold OBs and two shots of black market bourbon. Within seconds we’d jolted them down and ordered two more.
“What the hell happened to you?” Riley growled.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You look like dog shit.”
It was zero eight hundred. At some point last night I’d staggered back to the compound, made it up the hill to the barracks and collapsed in my bunk. The houseboy, Mr. Yim, shook me awake in time for me to shower and shave before dragging myself to the CID office, but I’d made it. I touched my face. “I look all right.”
“Except for your eyeballs spurting blood.”
“They’re not bleeding.”
“No. They just look that way.”
I made my way to the counter and poured myself a cup of coffee.
“Where’s your partner in crime?”
> “I don’t know.”
“You better find out.”
“Why?”
He tossed a pink phone message on the front of his desk. “This came in for you last night, to the MP desk officer.”
After sipping my coffee, I staggered back to his desk, grabbed the message and sat down heavily in a gray Army-issue vinyl chair. I stared at the message but couldn’t focus.
“Some guy named Singletery,” Riley said. “The desk sergeant said the connection was bad but Singletery seems to think that you need to get up there real quick. He has a lead for you.”
I studied the note. It was garbled, written in pencil in a childish script. I willed the pounding in my head to subside and tried to concentrate. It was a long message, filling up the entire pink square, finally trailing off at the end, but I got the gist of it. I set the note down on Riley’s desk
“He’s in danger,” I said.
“Who?”
“Singletery.”
For once, Riley didn’t make a smart remark. “Where’s Ernie?” he asked.
“Not in the barracks.”
“Out in the ville?”
I nodded.
“I’ll call the MP duty patrol to take you out there.”
I nodded again.
I found Ernie with one of the Lucky Seven waitresses who lived in the same complex of hooches as Sunny. He came wide awake when he saw me.
“What is it?”
“Singletery. He identified the guy called Smoke.”
Ernie shoved back the silk comforter. “That’s good, isn’t it?”
“Very good. But according to his phone message, the guy called Smoke has identified him too.”
“He knows Singletery’s our snitch.”
“You got it.”
Ernie sprang to his feet and started searching for his pants. The waitress sleeping on the mat next to him pulled the comforter over her head and groaned. In about a minute, Ernie was dressed and we were outside and striding through the narrow lanes of Itaewon.
“You bring your forty-five?” Ernie asked.
“Got it,” I said, patting the shoulder holster beneath my nylon jacket.
“Do we have time to get mine?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out his brass knuckles. “At least I got these.”
Camp Pelham looked deserted. The MP at the gate emerged from the guard shack and said, “They’re on move-out alert.”
“Where’d they go?” Ernie asked.
The MP frowned. I pulled out my CID badge. “We’re on a case,” I said, “involving one of the guys in Charlie Battery.”
“Across Freedom Bridge,” the MP said. “That’s all I know.”
We thanked him and Ernie turned the jeep around. The village of Sonyu-ri looked deserted too, as did the compound at RC-4. No GIs to spend money, no business, no activity.
At the approach to Freedom Bridge we were waved to halt by another MP. This one wore a heavy parka with a fur-lined hood. The wind blew cold off the Imjin River. I showed him my identification.
“We’re looking for the Second of the Seventeenth Field Artillery,” I told him, “particularly Charlie Battery.”
“They’re all together,” he told us. “Turn right after Camp Greaves and follow the road back to the river. You’ll find them about four klicks upstream at Dragon Tail Canyon. That’s where they’re conducting the bridge-crossing exercise.” We started to roll away and he shouted, “Better hurry or they’ll be south of the river before you get there.”
We veered onto the wooden roadway, gigantic iron struts looming above us. Every few yards an armed American MP, wearing gloves and winter gear, stood guard watching the vehicles rolling slowly past him and searching below for any attempt at sabotage. The churning Imjin flowed rapidly, an occasional chunk of mountain ice crashing into the huge cement stanchions below.
On the far side, a long line of military vehicles, both Korean and US, waited to cross the river. We sped past them on the two-lane highway and soon Camp Greaves was on our right. Then the road divided. If we went left we’d continue north to Camp Kitty Hawk and the truce village of Panmunjom, which sat smack dab in the middle of the Demilitarized Zone. Instead we turned right, as the MP had advised. After about ten minutes the road swerved south and once again we could see the rapidly flowing waters of the Imjin.
The river was narrower here at Dragon Tail Canyon and therefore moving faster. The banks on this side were low and sandy, like a beach, but on the far side loomed three- or four-story high red bluffs. Already, the river crossing exercise had begun. Huge pontoons held flat wooden barges, large enough to hold two deuce-and-a-half ton trucks along with two 105mm howitzers. The guns and their crews were aboard the low-lying craft and being propelled forward by huge outboard engines. As powerful as the engines were and as much smoke as they were giving off, they still could not propel the barge straight across the river. The current was so strong that the barges were being swept about a half-mile downriver, where they abutted a wooden quay. They hit there with a heavy bump, then were tied up by another crew so the guns and the trucks could drive off onto dry land.
“Combat engineers,” Ernie said.
The same unit I’d seen running PT outside of their compound on RC-4. Upstream a thick bank of fog was rolling in like a huge cloud of mist.
“Our visibility won’t last long,” I said. “Do you see Charlie Battery?”
“Over there. They’re about to load up.”
“Come on.”
Ernie drove the jeep down a narrow dirt road that led to the beach. He pulled up in a cloud of dust. I spotted Sergeant Singletery’s huge hunched shoulders and his bow legs. “Over there.”
We climbed out of the jeep and trotted toward Singletery. He was supervising the loading of the last of Charlie Battery’s howitzers onto the last barge.
“Chief of Smoke,” I said.
He turned, startled. “About time,” he said, grinning.
“We came as soon as I got your message.”
He stood with his hands on his hips, facing us. “I was thinking about what you said. About three guys, about one of them called ‘Smoke,’ about them maybe wanting to brag about what they did and maybe wanting to do it again. I asked around. It ain’t just Chiefs of Firing Batteries.”
“What isn’t?”
“They ain’t the only ones called ‘Smoke.’ ”
“Who else?”
Singletery turned and nodded toward the barge. A crewman had thrown off the last heavy line. “Them,” Singletery said. “Come on.”
We didn’t have time to discuss it further. It was the last barge and it was leaving. Signletery trotted onto the quay and we followed. When the barge was about a yard from the end and floating free, the three of us leapt aboard.
The fog upstream was even closer, engulfing us like a giant nightmare.
“So who else is called ‘Smoke’?” I asked.
Singletery turned and, as if to answer my question, stared down at the far end of the barge. Three men stood there, three combat engineers. Next to them was a huge contraption that looked like an electrical generator with some sort of tubing attached, like a short-barreled mortar. As we stared at the men, one of them aimed the tubing at us.
“Is he gonna fire that thing?” Ernie asked.
“It don’t fire,” Singletery said.
“Then what the hell is it?”
Before he could answer, the full force of the bank of fog slid silently over the barge. Within seconds it swallowed up the wooden planking and the canvas-covered trucks and the glistening metal barrels of the 105mm howitzers. We were enveloped in darkness.
“We better get ’em,” Singletery said, “before they start that thing up.”
“What is it?” I asked but already he was moving away from us, just a dark shadow in the mist. I grabbed Ernie’s elbow and pulled him forward and together we followed Sergeant Singletery and then, before we
could reach the end of the barge, we heard an engine coughing, choking, and then starting to life—and then roaring.
“Shit,” Singletery said. He stopped abruptly and we bumped into him.
“Gas!” he shouted.
All around us we could hear artillerymen popping open canvas holders and scrambling to pull out rubber protective masks, yanking them over their heads, adjusting the straps, blowing out forcefully to clear the air inside, and then lowering the protective rubber hood over their shoulders.
And then we saw it, dark and black and menacing. Smoke. Tons of it, roiling out of that metal tubing we’d seen a few seconds ago. CS—better known to the civilian world as tear gas.
“Come on.”
Ernie and I ran to the upstream side of the barge, toward the thickening fog, groping blindly. At least most of the tear gas was being swept south by the prevailing winds, which whistled loudly out of North Korea, following the southerly flow of the current.
“If that shit gets in our eyes,” Ernie said, “we’ll be helpless.”
“Blind, maybe,” I said, “but not helpless.” I pulled out my .45.
We’d both experienced CS gas before. It’s part of every soldier’s basic training; to step into a gas filled tent, take off your protective mask, recite your service number backward, and be shoved outside coughing and spitting by your Drill Sergeant.
We stood in the fog behind the lead truck on the barge. Ernie whispered in my ear, “They’re on the far side of the truck, next to that thing spitting out the gas. As soon as we hit land, they’ll skedaddle.”
“So we wait here,” I said. “When we land and this freaking gas clears, Singletery tells us who they are and we make the arrest.”
Ernie was about to say something when we heard a scream, then cursing, men grunting and the sound of bodies flailing against metal.
“Singletery,” I said.
We rushed around the front bumper of the truck. As soon as we stepped past the truck, the gas hit us. I kept my eyes closed, popping them open briefly and trying not to breathe. Amidst the fog and the pumping CS gas, I could see only shadows. Ernie surged forward, swinging at phantoms with his brass knuckles. I tried to aim my .45. A hunch-shouldered figure that I took to be Singletery was struggling with two of the combat engineers, the men I suspected had raped Sunny. Ernie had found the third and was holding him in a headlock and punching his face with the brass knuckles. Singletery staggered backward. It looked to me as if someone had ripped off his protective mask. I saw the hood go flying off the edge of the barge.