The Wandering Ghost

by Martin Limon

  But we were forcing Colonel Alcott at gunpoint to open his own safe, to protect ourselves, mainly, but also to protect Corporal Jill Matthewson.

  If Ernie and I couldn’t prove that we had a good reason for everything we’d done, we’d be court-martialed. And Jill’s fate hardly beared thinking of. So the suspense was killing me. If there was no evidence of black-marketing in that safe, then there’d have been no motive for murder and attemped murder and Ernie and I could say goodbye to freedom.

  When the safe popped open, Ernie grabbed Colonel Alcott roughly by the arm and waltzed him over to the bed against the far wall and told him to sit down and not to move. I reached into the safe.

  Letters from home. From his wife back at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Photos of his kids in high-school graduation garb. Pornography. Magazines of the raunchiest kind. Personnel files of fellow field-grade officers. Apparently, Alcott fancied himself a later-day J. Edgar Hoover: Collect dirt on everyone; use it to protect yourself. And then I found it. A ledger. Dates, dollar signs, a description of the type of property: television sets, tape recorders, stereo amps, wristwatches, cameras. All prime black market material. And then an amount in won, usually two or three times the original value. And a section for expenditures: hall rental, catered food, musicians, dancers, occasionally even hired transportation. They’d held mafia meetings not only at the WVOW Hall but also at kisaeng houses here in the Eastern Corridor.

  There was also money in the safe. Stacks of greenback twenties. Fifties and hundreds were monitored by 8th Army Finance, so twenties were safer. And stacks of ten thousand won notes. With the exchange rate at about five hundred won per dollar, each note was worth about the same as a U.S. twenty. I counted the bills, even wrote down some of the serial numbers in my notebook. I left everything in the safe as I’d found it, except the ledger, which I kept. For leverage. With the ledger, we could embarrass 2nd Division—and therefore 8th Army—if we had to. Maybe send it to a newspaper reporter, or maybe a congressman. Maybe the same congressman who’d made the original inquiry about Jill Matthewson.

  I tucked the black market ledger under my arm.

  “Thank you, Colonel,” I told Alcott. “We’d appreciate it if you’d remain here a few minutes. My partner and I are going to escort Corporal Matthewson back to Seoul. We don’t expect to be harassed. And we don’t expect our progress to be impeded in any way. Otherwise this information will be made public rather than being handled through internal channels. Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” Alcott said. “I understand that Fred Bufford was right. You’re up here to smear the Division. To make us look bad.”

  “You did a pretty good job of that,” Ernie replied, “all by yourself.”

  Alcott’s red face seemed to flush even redder.

  “You don’t understand the pressures I’ve been under,” he told us. “You do your jobs and take your piddly promotions, but you don’t know what it is to go for serious rank in this man’s army.”

  Colonel Alcott started to rise from the bed but Ernie shoved him back down.

  “You don’t understand,” Alcott continued, “what it is to have a full-bird colonel or a general officer tell you ‘I don’t care how you do it, just do it.’ And to know that everything you’ve worked for, everything you’ve hoped to provide for your family, rides on whether or not you’re able to give him what he wants. You can sit back and sneer and pass judgment on me because you’re not in competition for the big promotions. You don’t know what it is to have some pervert base your efficiency report on whether or not he has four girls or five girls at some kisaeng house. About him telling you what some air force colonel bragged about at the Officers’ Club in Seoul, and how he works hard and he should rate at least as much as some zoomie. You don’t know what it’s like to do your job day in and day out without a flaw and still be expected to cater to the whims of every officer appointed above you. You can act superior but you’re not serious players. In fact, you two are nothing.”

  “Maybe,” Ernie replied. “But we’ll be something as long as we have this ledger.” He held his .45 pointed at Alcott’s forehead. “Anyonghikeiseiyo.” Stay in peace.

  We stalked out the broken front door.

  The pontoon vehicle was still being untangled from the concertina wire and chain link barriers that had been created when it knocked down the main gate leading to Camp Casey. Ernie and I retied our white bandannas with Chon Un-suk’s name printed in red and were accepted again by the rioters. The hot dog stand had been completely demolished and the mob had turned its attention to a PX bakery that was similarly being systematically torn apart. The KNPs, meanwhile, retreated across the MSR. Two or three hundred protestors had set up a makeshift barrier of overturned military vehicles and lumber from the old MP shack in front of what had been the Camp Casey main gate. I spotted the KCIA man who called himself Agent Sohn, standing across the street behind the KNP ranks, conferring with KNP brass. They were on the radio, almost certainly requesting reinforcements.

  The MPs in front of the Provost Marshal’s Office, like the 7th Cavalry at the Little Big Horn, were bracing themselves for an assault. Probably they’d notified the Division headquarters—on the move-out alert somewhere north of here—by field radio. Almost certainly some units had been ordered to return to Camp Casey to protect the base camp. These protestors were having a jolly old time, but both Ernie and I knew that as soon as reinforcements arrived, they’d be hammered.

  I climbed atop the cab of a quarter-ton truck, searching for Jill Matthewson, but I couldn’t spot her. A large crowd of protestors still held vigil outside the main gate and many of them had cameras. Both film and still shots were being taken of virtually everything that happened. But this incident would only make the evening news if the Korean government allowed it to make the evening news. You could bet they wouldn’t.

  The pontoon boat rolled right at me.

  I jumped off the truck. Ernie and I ran off to the side, to the shade beneath a clump of pine trees. Then we realized where the ponderous vehicle was headed.

  Ernie said it. “PMO!”

  The whale-like vehicle was rumbling toward the MPs preparing to make their last stand in front of the 2nd Infantry Division Provost Marshall’s Office. As it rolled, the pontoon picked up speed. Five, then ten, then fifteen miles per hour. That much weight moving at that much speed represented an enormous force. The amphibious pontoon vehicle rounded a little stand of pine trees and turned right, into the PMO parking lot. From behind their makeshift barricades, the MPs opened fire. Rounds spattered off the wooden sides of the oncoming vehicle; some pinged off the edge of the cabin where the driver crouched. The pontoon veered left and headed straight toward the giant MP.

  The big pink face of the MP statue with its wide blue eyes seemed momentarily shocked, even offended. I knew it was my imagination, but I could have sworn that the fatigue-clad statue puffed out its giant chest, as if to say How dare you? and then held its outraged stance until the prow of the huge pontoon slammed into its web-belted gut. Then it bent forward at the waist. The pontoon vehicle kept rolling inexorably forward and the giant U.S. Army MP cracked and tumbled backward under the onslaught, its big helmeted skull crashing onto the ground, almost reaching the MPs behind sandbags who ran screaming from the flying splinters. Still, the pontoon vehicle kept rolling. It smashed through the barricade, MPs scattered every which way, and finally it crashed into the front Quonset hut of the Provost Marshal’s Office. With dust and debris flying everywhere the big vehicle ground to a halt. Some MPs kept firing. Some of them cried out, trapped beneath the rubble.

  The little driver’s cab popped open and two people climbed out: One of them was a Korean officer. A colonel. The other was Corporal Jill Matthewson.

  They hopped onto the blacktop and ran back toward the front gate. Once there, the ROK colonel tried to rally the rioters. He climbed up on the same quarter-ton truck I’d stood on briefly and shouted at them to listen. The looters stop
ped and gathered round. Jill stood next to him atop the truck, breathing heavily, her right hand resting on the butt of her .45.

  This had to be Colonel Han Kuk-chei, the one she’d met at the Forest of Seven Clouds. The one who’d helped her escape from Bufford and Weatherwax.

  Colonel Han continued shouting orders. He wanted the barricades facing the KNPs reinforced and he wanted a new barricade set up between the protestors and the American MPs back at the now half-demolished Provost Marshal’s Office. His plan was to claim a section of Camp Casey as sovereign Korean territory, and to set up a court and to retry—in absentia—the two men who’d run down Chon Un-suk. The crowd, both inside and outside the compound, cheered at the proposal and dozens if not hundreds of the peaceful protestors still waiting patiently outside the walls of Camp Casey started to raise their banners and march through the smashed main gate onto the camp proper.

  Ernie and I stood amongst the pine trees, partially hidden from the main action by a clump of greenery.

  “They’re nuts,” Ernie said.

  “Absolutely. But how are we going to bust through all these people and try to talk some sense to Jill?”

  “You can forget it. Whatever’s between her and that Colonel Han, she’s hooked. She ain’t going nowhere.”

  “It’ll be a lot more dangerous here in a few minutes.”

  “You and I know it,” Ernie replied. “Colonel Han knows it, maybe Jill knows it, but I don’t think most of these protestors know it.”

  I was still perspiring, breathing hard, trying to remain calm, trying to think of what to do next. And then I felt it. Cold steel on the back of my neck.

  “Freeze, soldier,” a voice said. Low, husky, a voice I recognized.

  Ernie started to move but the same voice told him if he tried anything funny, his partner’s head would be blown off. Both of us raised our hands. Then the man slipped Colonel Alcott’s ledger out of my grip, tucked it under his own arm, and told me to turn around.

  I did.

  Sergeant First Class Otis glared at us, his .45 aimed right at the center of my chest.

  “I don’t want to kill you,” he said, “but I will if I have to.”

  Then from behind him, the slide of a .45 clanged, metal on metal.

  “No, you won’t, Otis,” someone said. “Not if you want to live through this mess.”

  Jill Matthewson crouched behind a broken forearm of the giant MP, her .45 pointed directly at the back of Otis’s head. Perspiration poured off his forehead.

  “You killed him,” Jill said, still crouched behind the forearm of the giant MP.

  “I didn’t,” Otis protested. Most of his attention was on her but the barrel of his .45 was still aimed at my chest. I wished he’d turn that thing away. Standing next to me, Ernie’s eyes were darting to and fro. He was about to do something. I prayed that he wouldn’t. Even a reflexive twitch on Sergeant Otis’s part would mean that a .45 slug moving at a jillion miles per hour would crack through my sternum and slam into my heart.

  “Weatherwax told me what happened,” Jill said. “You were the one who threw Marv Druwood off that building.”

  “Weatherwax wasn’t even there,” Otis replied. “He doesn’t know shit. Druwood was angry, that was true. He knew why you left. He knew most of it. Because you were pissed about the black-marketing and you were pissed about what the asshole officers did to your friend, that stripper. And so he was mad at the world. And drunk. And taking swings at everyone. Even me. I backed away from him, toward the edge of the roof, but only because I had nowhere else to go. It was either that or let him bust me in the chops. I should’ve been more careful, I admit that. I should’ve punched his lights out and then he would’ve had a headache the next morning, but he’d still be alive. But I felt sorry for him. I didn’t want to hurt him.”

  Jill snorted.

  “It’s true,” Otis continued. “He had a thing for you and he never liked the army much and he didn’t like the black-marketing any more than you did. So he was drunk and angry at the world and I kept backing away from him and his punches kept missing. He tossed a big roundhouse windmill punch at my head but by the time it reached where I’d been, I’d already moved. He lost his balance. But he regained it and he would’ve been all right. Then Warrant Officer One Mr. Fred Bufford showed up.”

  Sergeant First Class Otis, like a true seasoned NCO, was still using Bufford’s proper title.

  “Bufford was furious,” Otis continued. “He knew that Druwood was going to be a hardhead and snitch on the entire black-market operation. Bufford told him just that, then Druwood swung on him and they started to fight. Mr. Bufford did all right at first, with that long straight jab he has, but Druwood wouldn’t give up no matter how much punishment he was taking and somehow he got Mr. Bufford into a headlock. Weatherwax showed up and he jumped in and other MPs were helping.”

  “You being one of them,” Jill said.

  “No. I tried to stop them. I told them all they were making a big mistake. But there was no stopping Mr. Fred Bufford. He and the other MPs beat on Druwood unmercifully and then they started dragging him to the edge of the building. Druwood realized what was coming and he fought like a madman. Grabbing for handholds, screaming, cursing, his clothes being shredded, until finally four or five of them including Bufford and Weatherwax dragged him to the edge. Bufford managed to break Druwood’s grip on the cement and he shoved him off the ledge and tossed him over.” Otis paused, breathing heavily, the .45 still aimed at my chest. Then he continued. “A couple of the guys, including me, tried to grab for him but we were too slow. Druwood went over. Head first. And slammed into that Korean statue down below, that lion or monster or whatever it is. And we heard a crunch like you couldn’t believe. A crunch that would break your heart.”

  Jill Mathewson’s fist quivered. I thought for sure she was going to pull the trigger. Then she said, “So, according to you, you’re innocent.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you let them lie about it. You let them take Marv Druwood’s body over to the obstacle course and pretend he had fallen there.”

  “Bufford did that. They wanted to divert attention away from the grain warehouse. Away from the Turkey Farm.”

  “Because of the black-marketing.”

  “You know it.”

  “And what about the Thousand Crane Vase, Otis? You and your girlfriend, Brandy set it aside for yourselves.”

  Otis didn’t deny Jill’s accusation. “A man has to make some money in this world. The honchos here are stashing away fortunes. Where are they at oh-dark-thirty when I’m wrestling with a drunken GI or having my eyes scratched out by his pill-crazed business girl yobo? I’ll tell you where they are. Back in their hooches snoring and dreaming about the money that we make for them. That’s where. I’ve slept out in the rain and the snow and the mud for almost twenty years and I deserve something.”

  “How many other vases have you moved?” Ernie asked. “How many antiques?”

  Otis shrugged.

  “And my partner and I,” Ernie continued, “were about to bust everything wide open. Even after we returned to Seoul you knew we could cause trouble. Which is why you sent Brandy to bring us back to Division, bring us back to Tongduchon, and send us to mulkogi chonguk, to fish heaven, so you could take a bead on us and blow our brains out.”

  The barrel of Otis’s .45 veered toward Ernie.

  “I was just trying to scare you off.”

  “Bull,” Ernie said. “If I hadn’t bent down to retrieve that rubber ball, the top half of my skull would’ve been history.”

  “Drop it, Otis,” Jill growled.

  Indecision flashed in Otis’s eyes. A group of demonstrators, carrying torches and clubs headed toward the Provost Marshal’s Office. The MPs in front had fled. Nothing stood between the enraged Koreans and what was left of the 2nd Infantry Division Provost Marshal’s Office.

  Sergeant Otis must’ve realized that he couldn’t take down all three of us. There was no
way out for him. His crimes would be exposed.

  “Hold steady, Matthewson,” Otis said. “Hold your fire. I’m moving away. I’m moving slow and steady. Hold your fire and I’m no threat to you or your friends here.”

  He dropped Colonel Alcott’s ledger to the ground.

  “I’m a noncommissioned officer,” Otis continued, “and a good one. As an NCO, whether I been black-marketing or not, I have a job to do. I have my duty to attend to. You understand that? There’s a good girl. Slow and easy.”

  Otis backed away from us, keeping his .45 aimed at my chest. When he was about twenty feet away he turned and stood still for a second, as if expecting a round from Jill Matthewson’s .45 to smash into his back. When it didn’t, he lowered his .45 to his side and started sprinting toward the Provost Marshal’s Office. He arrived before the demonstrators did and ordered them to halt. When they kept coming he raised his .45 and fired over their heads. The demonstrators screamed and dropped to the ground. Some of them fled. But about a dozen of them got up and threw stones at Sergeant Otis. Most of them missed. But a couple hit their mark. Otis flinched and then the demonstrators hurled more stones at him. He tried to fire while covering his eyes with his free arm but the round went high, and then some of them reached him. I heard his .45 clang to the blacktop and skitter away, and now Jill was running toward the demonstrators, firing her pistol into the air, shouting at them to stop. As if smelling blood, dozens more of them emerged around the cor- ner of the clump of pine trees and charged toward the Provost Marshal’s Office. Ernie and I ran after Jill, caught up with her, and dragged her back to the safety of the tree line.

  As we did so, from where Sergeant Otis lay we heard the heavy thump of wood on bone. A final scream and then silence.

  Reinforcements arrived. I climbed up on a low branch of one of the trees. Two-and-a-half ton trucks, maybe a dozen, pulled up behind the railroad tracks to the rear of the frightened KNPs. A ROK Army officer leaped out of the cab of the first truck and saluted Agent Sohn. After a short conference, with Sohn gesturing toward Camp Casey, the ROK Army officer nodded. He shouted orders and men started jumping out of the backs of the trucks. They fell into unit formations. ROK Army infantry, the White Horse Division, the best of the best. Vietnam veterans. Each soldier armed with an M-16 rifle. While standing at attention, they were ordered to don their protective masks. They looked like a hive of lethal insects. Within seconds, they marched past the grateful KNPs and formed themselves into one massive V-shaped formation. They fixed bayonets with a clang of metal on metal. Then the officer shouted an order and, pounding one foot in front of the other, the V-shaped formation started shuffling toward the main gate of Camp Casey.