Black Market

by Donald E. Zlotnik

  The major general tapped the starched leg of his trousers with his swagger stick and looked over at his aide, who nodded in agreement with the number Woods had stated. “The old woman is my mother…” He paused so the words would sink in. “And the boy who was beaten is my son.”

  The battalion commander felt like fainting. He could see his military career falling apart. Arnason looked directly at the lieutenant colonel and smiled.

  “The village of Khu Pho is composed entirely of the families from my division and from the soldiers serving at the District Headquarters.” The major general moved his swagger stick to his left hand and rested his right hand on his pistol holster. “I would like the name of the officer who countered my District Chief’s orders not to sweep the village of Khu Pho, and I want the names of every officer involved in that sweep.” The major general’s voice lowered. “Five people were executed and I will press charges for murder.”

  “Sir…” The battalion commander spoke up. “I am the commander of the highway security battalion this month.”

  “Then you are responsible?”

  “I thought your District Chief was trying to hide something, that’s why I countered his orders—”

  “He was trying to hide something!” The general’s voice rose to the verge of open anger. “He was trying to hide the fact that my family was living in the village! The communists would have liked to know where they were too! That’s why they planted the mine in the road just outside the village … To get the reaction they got from you Americans.”

  “Sir, I am sorry!” The battalion commander was trying to make up for a very serious mistake in judgment on his part. He had only two more weeks left of his six months of command and had almost made it without an incident. The highway security detail for his battalion had been what he thought at the time a very lucky break. It was nearly impossible to screw up your career with that kind of duty.

  “Not yet, Colonel. You will be sorry, but not yet.” The major general returned his attention back to Woods. “Sergeant, I want you to appear at my headquarters tomorrow to receive a very high Vietnamese award, but the reason why I personally came here today was to thank you for saving my son’s life.”

  “You’re welcome, General.” Woods stood at attention.

  The major general smiled again and saluted Woods before leaving the office.

  Arnason waited until the jeep pulled away from the building. The orderly room was so quiet that they could hear each other breathing. “Well, Colonel … I guess that sort of answers your questions.”

  Youngbloode couldn’t help smiling.

  “Don’t be a smartass, Sergeant!” The battalion commander stormed out of the building. He had to get to the brigade commander before the ARVN general did and give the colonel his version of the story. If he was lucky, he could blame one of his staff officers and the infantry company commander, who was an OCS graduate and expendable.

  “Woods!” Youngbloode was smiling. “Woods! What am I going to do with you!”

  Woods shrugged his shoulders. “Let me go back to sleep?”

  “You really earned your pay today, Sergeant … except I don’t know what I should do about you disobeying my orders.”

  Arnason frowned.

  Woods tried thinking what orders he had disobeyed. “Orders, sir?”

  “Yes. I told you that those ‘Bad News’ caps could only be worn when you were on patrol, in your bunker, or on guard duty.” Youngbloode grinned. “How do you expect me to keep discipline if my noncommissioned officers don’t obey the rules?”

  “You got me, sir.” Woods shook his head and smiled.

  Arnason snatched the black drive-on cap off Woods’s head and brushed his hand through his hair. “Damn kiddie NCOs!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The San Francisco Gull

  The CID sergeant dropped the telephone back down in its cradle and felt the sweat breaking out over his forehead in the air-conditioned office. Master Sergeant LeMoine’s body had just been found by a couple of South Koreans from the Capitol Division, who had gone up to his tower to get their paperwork signed. The depot commander wanted the Criminal Investigations Division to conduct an investigation as to the cause of the murder.

  The sergeant rubbed his fingers around the edge of his unauthorized handlebar mustache. He knew the real reason the Koreans had gone to see Country in the tower and wondered if they were the ones who had killed him. He discarded the idea, because even though they were upset over the rising prices of the black-market meat, they were still getting a very good volume discount that placed the price of their meat at about half the cost of purchasing it from Vietnamese sources.

  He needed to alert the ship’s captain and the veterinarian meat inspector before going over to the tower to start his investigation.

  The telephone rang a half-dozen times before the Army switchboard operator came on the line. “Plug me into the San Francisco Gull’s captain’s quarters.”

  A bored metallic voice answered, “Yes sir.”

  The line went dead for a couple of seconds and then was filled with a loud static before clearing when the captain keyed his telephone. “The San Francisco Gull, Captain Rankin speaking.”

  “Rank?” The CID sergeant cleared his throat. “Cutter here. We’ve got some problems. LeMoine has just been found dead up in his tower … shot twice.”

  There was a long pause before the captain answered. “Are you the one investigating it?”

  “Yes. I’m on my way over there now, but I thought that you should know about it right away.”

  “Thanks. Have you told Doc?”

  “He’s next.”

  “Thanks. Tell Doc McPeters that we’ll have a meeting at seven o’clock tonight.”

  “Roger.”

  “Thanks again.” The line went dead.

  The CID sergeant direct-dialed the veterinary clinic and waited, while the telephone rang a good dozen times. He knew that there was always someone in the clinic during the day. Veterinary clinics in Vietnam rarely dealt with live animals and were almost exclusively used to inspect food items and mess halls; with the one exception of inspecting live animals that were shipped out to Special Forces camps for the CIDG strikers.

  Doctor McPeters had a passion for genetics and volunteered a lot of his time to help the local Vietnamese farmers improve the quality of their livestock through selective breeding. He was busy removing semen from a prize boar for artificial insemination of a breeding sow in a village near Qui Nhon. He kept three champion boars in a pen behind the clinic for just that purpose. When he had first decided on helping the Vietnamese improve their breeding stock, he had simply given them the imported boars and bulls. Within a month, over half of the expensive prized studs had been butchered and sold to Vietnamese restaurants.

  “Hello!”

  “Doc?”

  “Yes, dammit! What do you want, Cutter!”

  “Were you busy.”

  “What does it sound like?” The vet set the large glass vial down on the table near the telephone. “I was extracting some semen.”

  “You were jacking off one of your pigs again?” Cutter couldn’t help taking a cheap shot at the doctor.

  “If you called to make smart-assed remarks…” He started hanging up the telephone and heard Cutter’s voice.

  “LeMoine has been murdered.”

  “What!”

  “Someone shot him twice … once between the eyes.”

  “Oh shit! What does this mean?” Fear crept into the doctor’s voice. He had agreed to help the black marketeers by declaring the frozen meat unfit for human consumption because they had offered him a great deal of money. The Army had sent him to a civilian medical school after he had reenlisted as an NCO. He came from a very poor family, and the only way he was ever going to get his own clinic when he got out of the service was on his own. He had already started the plans for an ultramodern clinic back in Kentucky, outside of Lexington, that would cost a little over two mil
lion dollars and he already had almost all of the money stashed away in an Australian bank.

  “It means that Country is dead.” The sergeant felt only contempt for the gutless doctor. He and Country had done all of the dirty work, while the doctor and the ship’s captain took the biggest share of the profits. “We’ll have to ease up on our operation for a couple of weeks until things cool off.”

  “What about the Gull? She’s got fifty tons of meat still in her freezers.”

  “Change the paperwork. We can’t risk operating now that so many people are watching the refrigeration yard.” The sergeant was getting very angry. He hated losing money himself, but the doctor was just too damn greedy. “Captain Rankin wants a meeting tonight at seven.”

  “I’ll be there.” The veterinarian didn’t sound very enthusiastic.

  “Good. Try not to fuck it up! Go back to jacking off your pigs!” Cutter dropped the telephone down and left his office. The heat outside hit him like an invisible nuclear explosion. He hated the heat and bitched to himself as he walked over to the perishable refrigeration yard that LeMoine used to run with an iron hand. A crowd was already starting to gather around the base of the tower. Cutter put on his professional investigator’s face and strode up to the steps. The first thing he noticed was the pink pool of blood and water in the almost white sand at the base of the tower. He started up the ladder and caught the eye of one of the warehouse clerks from the nonperishable section. Cutter winked and the young specialist fifth class smiled back at him. He had known the boy for two months, after having been introduced to him through LeMoine.

  The air-conditioned tower felt good after the short walk over the sand. He looked down at LeMoine’s body sprawled out on the floor and could see the drying trail of blood that went to the small hole drilled in the floor under the air conditioner. That explained the pink pool at the base of the tower. Cutter frowned; from the amount of blood, LeMoine must not have died right away and had lain there paralyzed for some time before death came. Cutter wondered what LeMoine had thought about as he waited for death. A very brief picture of LeMoine cutting Masters’s throat and then shoving him overboard to the waiting sharks flashed through the investigator’s thoughts. He struggled to get back to LeMoine’s body. A fairly large number of MPC notes were scattered around the office, and one of the desk drawers was still open. Cutter glanced around the room and slowly shook his head; someone wanted him to think that robbery had been the reason for killing LeMoine.

  The depot commander was standing near a bank of windows, trying to act important. “It looks to me like someone robbed him and dropped some of the money in their hurry to escape.”

  “It could be, Colonel.” Cutter used his professional investigator’s low thinking voice.

  “He played a lot of poker and was one of the big winners on this base.” The colonel tried adding some of his personal knowledge to help solve the case as quickly as possible. Murder never looked good on a person’s command record.

  Cutter nodded in mock agreement with the colonel and smiled before speaking. “Sir, do you think we could get someone to clear the spectators away from the tower area?”

  “Consider it done!” The colonel looked over at his MP lieutenant and conveyed the order with his eyes.

  The CID investigator took his time going through all of LeMoine’s notepads and desk drawers. He was looking for anything that would tie himself or the black-market operation to LeMoine, but to the colonel and the military police still present it looked as if he was being very thorough in his investigation.

  “Is it all right if we put him in a body bag and send him over to the morgue?” The MP lieutenant interrupted Cutter’s train of thought.

  “Make sure you empty everything out of his pockets first.” Cutter removed a large manila envelope from LeMoine’s desk. “You can put it all in here.” He wrote a brief note on the outside of the container and handed it to the lieutenant. “Would you send one of your MPs to the gate to get me the sign-in log for today?” Cutter looked over at the colonel and saw him nod his approval.

  Cutter finished sorting through LeMoine’s personal items and found nothing that linked the master sergeant to the black-market operation. He looked up in time to see the lieutenant pull LeMoine’s custom-made knife off his belt and put it in the envelope. The butt end of the handle stuck out. A shiver slipped down Cutter’s back. He had seen that knife cut before and it was very sharp. The image of the young soldier’s face appeared again in front of his eyes.

  “Here you go, Sergeant.” A military policeman, wearing his shiny helmet, handed the daily log to the investigator. Cutter ran his finger down the list until he reached the last entry, which had been the Koreans. The unit before them had been the Recon Company of the First Brigade of the First Cavalry. Cutter frowned and then stood up. He was almost positive, but not quite. He left the colonel and his MPs staring at his backside as he took the stairs three at a time down to the ground and almost, but not quite, ran over to his office.

  The row of filing cabinets lining the wall was still all locked up, and Cutter spent a couple of minutes fumbling with his keys before he matched the numbers on the lock with its key and unlocked the classified file marked SENSITIVE—DEATH INVESTIGATIONS. He flipped through the fat folders until he came to the tab marked MASTERS, DARYL, and stopped. The file wasn’t as large as the rest, and he turned and dropped the folder onto his desk, leaving the file drawer open. He flipped through pages of the report until he found the sheet that he was looking for and ran his finger over the blocks until he found the one filled in with Masters’s unit while he was in Vietnam: Recon Company, First Brigade, First Cav.

  The CID sergeant’s hands began to shake. He was sure that someone else had been with Masters the day that he had overheard their conversation. He had sensed it that day and had repeatedly asked the soldier if he had been alone. If only he had pushed the issue at the time! There was no doubt in the investigator’s mind that LeMoine had been killed in revenge for the murder of Masters.

  Sergeant Cutter didn’t realize just how close to the truth he was. He lit a cigarette and hot-boxed it before making a telephone call to the main gate where each one of the vehicles’ senior men had to sign in. He checked on the unit and the time that matched his roster and nearly fell out of his chair when the MP at the gate told him that a Sergeant Shaw had signed in for the recon company vehicle.

  Koski folded the letter and carefully slipped it back into the envelope. Warner could see that something in the letter had really bothered the big Pole, but he knew better than to just ask him what the problem was. The little recon man used his K-Bar knife to cut open the cellophane wrapper on the gift box of fancy cheeses and smoked salmon. Normally he would receive one of the large gift boxes around the first of the month from the store in the Oakland Mall, but this month he had received two of the packages. Warner shook his head. He had told his mother how much his teammates enjoyed eating the hard-to-get items, and she had doubled her order in the store.

  Warner lifted a tin out of the box and read the label. “Hey! Russian caviar! We’re going to eat good tonight!”

  Koski tinned and gave Warner a look of pure hatred. “You fucking rich bastard!” He reached for the ladder and pulled himself out on the roof.

  Warner turned and looked at Sanchez. “What’s his problem?”

  “I think he got a bad-news letter from home.” Sanchez reached down and adjusted his pride before going back to looking at the pictures in the new edition of Hustler.

  Warner paused and looked at the color picture of The Sacred Heart of Jesus above Sanchez’s bunk and the cover of the Hustler magazine he was holding up. The contrast was a perfect example between the forces of good and evil.

  “Well, I’m not going to leave it like that!” Warner started climbing up the ladder.

  “Be careful or he might throw you off the roof.” Sanchez’s warning had a vein of reality running through it.

  Koski sat on the sandbags, ho
lding the open letter in his hands. Warner could see that his cheeks were shiny. The big Pole had been crying.

  “Otto, you were being a horse’s ass down in the bunker.” Warner lifted himself out of the trap door into the moonlight. Arnason and Woods had been pulling guard duty together so that Woods could finish briefing Arnason on the day’s events. They stopped talking and looked over to see what was wrong between Koski and Warner.

  The Pole remained quiet for a couple of minutes and then, just as Warner was about to go back down inside of the bunker, he spoke. “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s fine!” Warner was pissed more over feeling helpless than at the comment Koski had made to him. “You know, I’d like to help if I could…”

  Koski turned on the sandbag and spat out the words. “Sure! You can if you’ve got fifteen thousand dollars lying around!” The Pole knew that Warner came from a rich family, but with his limited capacity to understand real wealth, he thought that fifteen grand was even out of Warner’s reach.

  “Sorry … I don’t.” Warner’s voice lowered. “Why do you need fifteen thousand dollars?”

  “My mother has cancer.” The words came out of the huge man like bullets. “My father wrote me to see if I had anything saved up.” Koski shook his head slowly. “Bless the old man, but he thinks that soldiers are rich. I send them everything that I make, but I tell them that it is something I had extra.”

  Woods looked over at Arnason, who felt as bad as he did. There wasn’t anything really comforting that they could say. Warner asked the same question all of them had been thinking. “How about your family’s insurance?”

  Koski stood up and stretched. “Only people like you can afford to pay for the insurance premiums. My parents came from Europe after the war, with my grandfather. None of them spoke English and they have struggled very hard just to make ends meet.” He started to squat down and jump off the bunker roof. “I’ll think of something … maybe I can get a loan.” He spoke without hope in his voice.