Slicky Boys

by Martin Limon

  “This is Sueño.”

  “Where in the fuck are you?”

  “You know where we are,” I said. “In Pusan. Doing our job.”

  “Is that what you call it? Now listen to me carefully, Corporal Sueño . . .” The First Sergeant always used our ranks when he was busy trying to cover his own ass. “I want you and Sergeant Bascom to hop on the first train heading north and get back to Seoul ASAP! You understand that?”

  “Understood. But why?”

  “Because I say so! That’s why. The head shed is just about to shit a brick. Two army investigators aboard a goddamn naval vessel!”

  “What are you talking about, Top?”

  “Don’t give me that innocent shit! I know it was you two shitheads. Nobody else would be stupid enough to pull such a stunt.”

  “But we’re onto something here.”

  “Who cares? Get your tails back here!” He paused. “What are you onto?”

  At least the First Sergeant was enough of a cop to suppress his bureaucratic instincts for a moment and show some interest.

  “We know Shipton is here. He could turn up any minute.”

  “The MP’s down there have his photo and they’ve put out an alert for him. You’re not needed there, Corporal. If he turns up, they’ll find him.”

  Not likely, I thought. Not unless he jumped up and down and shouted his name and the date he went AWOL at them. They mostly had their thumbs up their asses.

  “We’re more effective down here,” I insisted.

  “You’re more effective where and when I tell you to be goddamn effective.”

  Another phone rang. The Korean secretary picked up, listened for a moment, and glanced at me. She pointed at the receiver and mouthed the word “Taegu.”

  “Just a minute, Top. I have another call coming in.”

  “No ‘just a minute’ about it! You and Bascom get your asses back here and you get them back here now! You read me, Corporal?”

  “Yeah, I got it, First Sergeant.”

  Something slammed and the line went dead. I sighed, set the phone down in its cradle, and grabbed the other one from the secretary’s hand.

  “Agent Sueño,” I said.

  “This is Miss Chong from the Camp Henry PX. We found one of those numbers you gave me.”

  “When was it used?”

  “This morning. He must’ve been buying something at just about the time you called.”

  “Have you told anyone else about this?”

  “No. Just our manager.”

  “Please don’t mention it to anyone, Miss Chong. How late do you stay open?”

  “Until six this evening.”

  “We’ll be there as soon as we can.”

  To my surprise, Ernie didn’t seem excited by the news. Instead, he leaned against the brick building, a few droplets of perspiration dotting his upper lip. He acted as if he hadn’t even heard me.

  “The Nurse’s funeral,” he said. “They’re holding it tomorrow, at a Buddhist temple. I’d like to be there.”

  “You’d be about as welcome as a rat in a kimchi pot,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he answered. “Still, I’d like to go.”

  For the first time that morning I looked at him carefully. He seemed more pale than usual.

  “You never went back to the One-twenty-one Evac for those tests, did you?”

  “Who needs ‘em?”

  “You do,” I answered. “You don’t look well.”

  Ernie rubbed his stomach. “Probably just that cut bait we ate last night.”

  Suddenly, his cheeks bulged and he swiveled and lurched away from me, clutching his stomach. He barfed his guts up, retching painfully. Finally, he wiped his mouth and turned back to me.

  “So much for those scrambled eggs and hash browns.”

  I examined the color of the goo. “You’re barfing blood, Ernie.”

  He nodded. Then he lurched sideways. When I grabbed him, he seemed as weak as a rag doll. I helped him over to the Hialeah Aide Station.

  The Physician’s Assistant there looked at me as if I were nuts. “They wanted to run tests on him at the One-twenty-orie Evac but instead he came down here?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  “And I don’t want to hear it,” he snapped at me.

  Within twenty minutes they had strapped Ernie to a stretcher and wheeled him out to a medical evacuation helicopter for the flight back to Seoul.

  If I went to Taegu on my own, the First Sergeant would almost certainly court-martial me. But with only a routine MP dragnet, Shipton would find some way to slip out of the country before we caught him. He’d proved awfully resourceful so far. If he escaped, we’d never see him again and I’d have to live with what he’d done to Whitcomb and Miss Ku and the Nurse—and my part in their deaths— for the rest of my life.

  I checked out of billeting, still undecided. 1 used their phone and called Strange. After running down some bullshit story about the girls on Texas Street for him, his voice shuddered and he told me two words: “Mining equipment.” I didn’t know what the hell that was supposed to mean and he hung up before I had a chance to ask.

  Outside of Hialeah Compound I caught a cab and rode it to the bus station. I pushed through the bustling crowd and waited in line to buy a ticket.

  If I showed some results, if I caught Shipton, the First Sergeant wouldn’t be able to burn me for not returning to Seoul. Maybe.

  When I reached the window the ticket girl asked me, “Odi?” Where to? I slapped down a five-thousand-won note and bought one ticket for the express bus to Taegu. The trip from Pusan to Taegu is through beautiful countryside covered with groves of pomegranate trees and gracefully terraced rice paddies clinging to the sides of sloping hills. The trees were naked and the hills were draped with a thin layer of ice.

  At about the halfway point, my bus passed the city of Kyong-ju, the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Silla. Silla was one of the powers on the peninsula, along with Peikchae and Koguryo, when Korea was divided during the Three Kingdoms period more than thirteen centuries ago.

  I gazed at the blue-tiled pagodas and the upturned roof of the museum, wishing 1 could stop and spend a few hours immersed in the artwork and craftsmanship of the ancients.

  Instead, I stayed on the bus. When it stopped in downtown Taegu, I caught another cab that sped me across the flat terrain of the city to the U.S. Army’s Camp Henry, home of the 19th Support Group.

  On the way, I thought of Shipton and Slicky King So and what Strange had told me. No sudden insight flashed into my brain but slowly a pattern started to emerge. As 1 looked at its hazy outlines, I couldn’t believe it at first.

  Maybe I’d been listening to army propaganda films too long or reading only the honeyed versions of world events in the Stars & Stripes to be able to believe what I was guessing. But I thought of the secrecy of the military brass— even routine crime statistics were classified—and their absolute belief in their own infallibility. Gradually, I began to think that what I was thinking might be true.

  If I was right, Shipton did have a goal. And maybe, if you set aside his killings, I would’ve been rooting for him to attain it.

  Maybe.

  Probably not.

  Tunnels. Nuclear weapons. Mining equipment.

  The North Koreans had dug tunnels beneath the Demilitarized Zone. No question about that. And tunnels could only be used for offensive military operations. So what were we going to do about it? Passively sit by and try to find the tunnels one at a time? Harder than it seemed. Sensing equipment was only so good. It couldn’t penetrate hundreds of feet of granite, and there were thousands of square miles of mountainous terrain to cover and no theoretical limit to how deep the North Koreans could dig. And we are Americans, after all. Everybody knows that the best defense is a good offense.

  This is not to say that we were going to start a war, conduct a preemptive strike, or anything like that. Our political leaders wouldn’t stand for it. But 8t
h Army did have to take protective measures, didn’t they? They were responsible for the lives of fifty thousand soldiers and sailors and airmen and their dependents. Not to mention the defense of South Korea. What could they do?

  Tunnels. Mining equipment. Nuclear weapons.

  The North Korean mechanized armor units were overwhelming. A much greater force than the South’s. Some magazines said double or triple that of our side. Our current strategy, if the North Koreans decided to come south, was saturation bombing by B-52’s from Okinawa. But it would take time for those planes to arrive on the scene. And bombing, by its very nature, is a hit-or-miss affair. And bombing certainly couldn’t affect anything that was underground.

  So maybe we were digging our own tunnels.

  And what would we put in them? Maybe a little surprise for the North Koreans’ armor battalions. Maybe nuclear weapons.

  Had the Kitty Hawk been transporting A-bombs? Maybe. But it was navy policy never to confirm or deny such a thing. I couldn’t possibly know for sure.

  Or was I all wrong about this? Even if I was right, maybe our tunnels were just in the contingency planning stages, only on paper. But contingency or not, the North Koreans would certainly want to know. And when someone with Shipton’s training deserted his post and was wanted for murder, how difficult would it be to recruit him as an informant?

  Maybe that’s why the South Koreans hadn’t told us anything. They wanted to capture Shipton themselves, interrogate him using their persuasive methods, then work backward to his controller and maybe to other North Korean agents. If they let the U.S. in on it, we’d demand he be turned over to us right away. And because we paid most of their defense bills, they’d be under tremendous pressure to comply. But if they kept the whole thing secret, we’d think that Shipton was nothing more than another guy gone native. We wouldn’t worry about him. Even if we never heard from him again.

  Maybe I was wrong. Maybe there was a simpler explanation for all this. But in my gut I didn’t think so.

  When Cecil Whitcomb had stumbled into Bo Shipton that night, both of them stealing at the 8th Army J-2 building, he’d stumbled into a secret war that would mean life or death for millions of people. And, by doing so, he’d signed his own death warrant.

  At Camp Henry I went straight to the PX. The manager and the secretary, Miss Chong, showed me the data card. It was the right number. Maxed out on the ration.

  “But we got a call from the MP’s,” Miss Chong said. “After I talked to you on the phone. Apparently this person went over to the commissary using the same ration control plate and the same identification card.”

  “What happened?”

  “The ID card checker noticed that the photo looked as if it had been tampered with. He called the MP’s.”

  “And?”

  “They arrested him.”

  “Arrested him? They’ve got him in custody? And no one was hurt?”

  “Hurt? Of course not.” Miss Chong looked indignant.

  I would’ve bet that taking Shipton down would’ve caused a slaughter.

  “Where is he now?”

  “At the MP Station.” She pointed. “One block down. On your left.”

  I ran out the door.

  The MP Desk Sergeant was surprised to see a guy toting a canvas bag and all out of breath burst into his office. I showed him my badge. “Where’s the guy you arrested at the commissary?”

  “With the phony ration control stuff?”

  “Right.”

  “Back here.”

  He led me down the hallway to a holding cell and I peered through the one-way glass.

  A chubby buck sergeant in wrinkled fatigues slumped on a wooden bench, his elbows on his knees. His brown hair was cut short and a narrow mustache drooped from his round nose.

  “This is the guy?” I asked.

  “That’s him,” the Desk Sergeant said proudly. “Caught him red-handed.”

  A wave of nausea rumbled through my gut. For a minute I thought I was going to throw up but I fought back the feeling. The head of the buck sergeant lolled listlessly from his shoulders.

  He wasn’t Bo Shipton. He wasn’t even close.

  36

  THE GUY REMINDED ME OF AN OVERWEIGHT CHIPMUNK. He kept rubbing his hands and wouldn’t make eye contact with anybody; really ashamed of what he had done.

  “I thought it would be easy money,” he whined. “I’d seen the guy around compound once or twice, couple of months ago. He asked me where I worked and we shot the breeze, but this morning he sits down with me at the snack bar and shows me this ration control card and asks me if it looks like the real thing. It did. So he tells me I can have it. Cheap. I tell him it won’t do me any good without a phony ID card. So he pulls one out and shows me how the plastic is already slit and I can slip my photo right in there. So I ask him how much and he says a hundred bucks, but I can tell he’s in a real hurry so I get him down to forty and I figure I have a pretty good buy.”

  “You did,” I said. “But you should’ve had the ID card relaminated.”

  “Yeah. Now you tell me.”

  “Did this guy give you his name?”

  “No. Just a passing acquaintance, you know? Said, ‘hey,’ya know?”

  “You saw him in the snack bar a few times? Anywhere else?”

  “On the shuttle bus going to Camp Walker. In the PX.” He shrugged.

  “What’d he tell you? Was he retired? Active duty? Civilian? What?”

  “He didn’t say. I just figured he was on leave.”

  I pulled out the photograph. “Is this him?”

  The buck sergeant took it with the tips of his fingers. “That’s him,” he said sadly.

  I snatched the photo back. “Did he say where he was going?”

  “No.”

  “Did he hang out with anybody around here?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  I slipped the photo in my wallet and stood up to leave. The guy looked at me, his big brown eyes starting to water. “Say, how much trouble am I in?”

  I said, “Enough to fuck up your whole career.”

  His mustache drooped all the way to his knees.

  “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

  For some reason Shipton had tried to draw me to Taegu. Was it to pull me away from Pusan, or to keep me away from Seoul? Or was it for some other reason altogether?

  Or was it so he could lure me into a secluded spot and slice me up like he’d done Whitcomb and Miss Ku and the Nurse? And the two lovers before them.

  One thing was for sure: there was no sense chasing ration control numbers all over the country anymore. Shipton had probably sold them all off, scattering them to the wind like a flock of pheasants exploding from a bush.

  He knew I was following. Maybe he’d had a scare on Texas Street. After all, we’d been right on his heels, hadn’t missed him by much on the Kitty Hawk. But he’d be more cautious now. He’d be a lot harder to catch.

  The First Sergeant was probably right. I needed the resources we could pull together in Seoul. Now that Shipton was onto us, I could no longer do this alone.

  Bo Shipton was trying to manipulate me. The best way to avoid that was to go back to what he was after. Secrets. Classified information. All the black-marketing stuff was just to make money to support his operations.

  Had the Kitty Hawk been his last big score? Would he disappear for good now, his mission accomplished?

  I didn’t think so. If it was, I didn’t think he would’ve murdered Miss Ku. Instead, he would’ve run to Pusan, stolen what he wanted, and vanished. If Miss Ku had given us information, he would’ve been gone before it did us any good.

  Of course, I was assuming he was still rational. Which maybe he wasn’t. After all, he’d had no good reason to kill the Nurse. He killed her just to warn me off. Or was there maybe another reason she had to die? One I hadn’t thought of yet?

  It took two hours for me to interrogate the buck sergeant the Camp Henry MP’s had arr
ested and write up my report. The sun was just going down and I was half starved when I stopped in the NCO Club and had half a chicken and a mess of greasy french fries. Afterward, I wandered toward the front gate.

  It was nice here. The rain and snow had stopped. The wind had died down. The sky was clearer than in Seoul. The moon and stars blinked at me between banks of drifting clouds.

  At the pedestrian exit an MP stopped me and checked my ID card. After he glanced at it, I showed him Shipton’s photo.

  “Do you recognize this guy?”

  He shook his head and stepped past me to check the trunk of a PX taxi that was leaving compound.

  Black market. Eighth Army was so preoccupied with it that we let all the big stuff slide.

  Outside the compound, four cabs sat in front of the cement block walls. I told the driver of the first one to take me to Mikun piheing chang. The American army airfield.

  Thirty minutes later I had bummed a ride in a helicopter heading north. We floated through billowing gray clouds and gathering dusk. After forty-five minutes, I lifted the visor on my helmet. Lights sparkled in the distance.

  The Emerald City of Seoul.

  We landed on the helipad on the south post of Yongsan Compound. I thanked the pilots, hiked the long mile back to the main compound, and wound through the brick buildings of the headquarters complex. The lights of the CID building were off, but the front door was open. So much for security. The Admin Office was locked, however, so I pulled out my key and opened it.

  I switched on the light, tossed my bag into a chair, and started puttering around with the coffee maker. I wasn’t really sure why I was here. Maybe just to check the blotter reports, see if anything unusual had happened, anything that might lead me to Shipton.

  The coffee started to perk and I sat down in one of the vinyl-cushioned lounge chairs.

  I’d lost my best chance on Texas Street. Shipton would be hard to find now.. Maybe impossible.

  The only thing I could do was to anticipate his next move. But how the hell would I do that?

  I was mulling this over when all the faces I’d been dealing with in this case started to swim before my eyes: Cecil Whitcomb, Eun-hi, Miss Ku, the Nurse, Herbalist So, Shipton. When I got to the Chinese woman, I imagined her offering me a steaming bowl of tea. I sipped on it and suddenly felt totally relaxed. She studied me with her almond eyes. Then I was gone.