Nightmare Range (16 page)

“Where to?” he asked.

“Turn right up there, toward Songsan-dong.”

We were headed to Camp Stanley, headquarters of the Division Artillery.

I riffled through the printout Staff Sergeant Riley had collated for me yesterday: the names and ranks and DEROS (date of estimated return from overseas) of every Chief of Firing Battery in the Second Infantry Division. Two battalions of artillery were stationed at Camp Stanley, another battalion of 155mm howitzers nearby at Camp Essayons, and a final battalion closer to the DMZ up at Camp Pelham, about thirty miles northwest of here in the Western Corridor. There were three batteries per battalion so that made a dozen NCOs who held the official designation of Chief of Firing Battery or, in GI jargon, Chief of Smoke.

If taking these guys down involved violence, that would be fine with us. Ernie’d brought his brass knuckles. I’d brought my .45.

“Smoke?” the young GI asked. “You want to talk to the Chief of Smoke?”

“That’s right.”

“Hold on.”

He trotted away.

We were on Camp Stanley, in the motor pool of Bravo Battery, 1st of the 38th Field Artillery. Six 105mm howitzers were aligned in a neat row, leather-sheathed barrels pointing toward a crisp blue sky. Next to them, in geometrical counterpoint, sat six square equipment lockers; everything air mobile, everything ready to be airlifted by chopper into a combat zone at a moment’s notice.

Ernie unwrapped a stick of ginseng gum and popped it into his mouth. “This is man’s work,” he said. “Not all that sissy paper-pushing like back at Eighth Army.”

“Nothing sissy about Eighth Army,” I said. “You think it’s easy busting housewives who purchase too many packages of sanitary napkins?”

“No, I guess not,” Ernie replied. “I’ve got the scars to show for it.”

A man wearing the three-stripes-up and two-down insignia of a Sergeant First Class strode toward us. Using a red cloth, he cleaned grease off his hands.

“You looking for me?”

I showed him my badge. “You’re the Chief of Firing Battery,” I said.

“Chief of Smoke,” he corrected.

He didn’t bother to shake hands because he was still cleaning them, which was okay with us. His nametag said Farmington. We asked about leave policy and if a senior NCO had to sign out on pass.

“No,” he replied. “In the Division if you’re E-6 or above, your ID card is your pass. What’s this all about?”

“Where were you this past weekend? On Saturday night to be exact.”

He crinkled his eyes. “Why do you want to know?”

We told him about Sunny, and how she’d been brutally raped.

“The guys who did it,” he asked, “they were in this unit?”

“We don’t know yet,” Ernie said. “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

Sergeant Farmington told us that he had a steady
yobo
out in the village of Songsan-dong and that was where he’d been. “I don’t see the point of taking the bus all the way down to Seoul and then paying too much for pussy. I’d rather stay up here where things are cheap.”

“Can you prove that you were here?”

Farmington thought about it. “Yeah, I suppose I can. First, I bought a case of beer at the Class VI on Friday night, that should be in their records. And Saturday morning I checked in with the CQ about two of my soldiers who were assigned to weapons cleaning duty.”

“The Charge of Quarters put that in his log, you suppose?”

“I suppose.”

“What about Saturday night?” Ernie asked.

“My
yobo
can vouch that I was there. And by Sunday night all the beer was gone.”

Farmington grinned.

I took notes and knew that if we had to, every step of Sergeant Farmington’s alibi could be checked out, but I also knew that, for the moment, we wouldn’t bother. Farmington’s long record in the service and his easy-going attitude left little doubt that he was telling the truth. Time was everything. We’d move on to the other names on the list.

“Anyone else from your unit went to Seoul recently? Maybe a group of three guys?”

“Not that I know of. Nobody was bragging about anything. And they usually do when they come back from Seoul.”

When we told him more about Sunny, and what had happened to her, his face clouded with concern. He volunteered to go into the Bravo Battery Orderly Room and check the sign-out register. This was a big help because we didn’t need any hassles from some Battery Commander suspicious of 8th Army investigators from Seoul.

After about ten minutes, Farmington returned. “Nobody in the unit went to Seoul last weekend.”

“At least not that they admitted to,” Ernie replied.

“Right, at least not that they wrote in the pass register. But I’d be surprised if anybody did. We were out in the field last week, came in late Friday. There was still a lot of maintenance to do Saturday morning. So they wouldn’t have been able to get away until mid-afternoon Saturday at the earliest.”

“How long does the bus to Seoul take?”

Farmington shrugged. “Maybe an hour. Hour and a half when the traffic’s bad.”

“So still possible.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Definitely possible.”

Ernie and I conducted the same type of interviews at Alpha Battery and then Charlie Battery and then at the other three batteries on the far side of Camp Stanley and then three more 155mm howitzer batteries at Camp Essayons. Each one of the Chiefs of Firing Battery was suspicious at first but then cooperative when we described what had been done to Sunny.

It was mid-afternoon by the time we were finished.

“A lot of alibis,” Ernie said.

“One for each Chief of Smoke.”

“We have to check them out.”

“No time,” I replied. “The Provost Marshal will be busting a gut by now.” I checked my watch. Our whole trip up here had been a long shot. We thought maybe, with the knowledge that one of the rapists had been called “Smoke,” that we might be able to stumble on a Chief of Firing Battery without an alibi. Of course, things are not usually that easy. “If we leave now,” I said, “we’ll still have three or four more hours to bust people at the commissary.”

“Screw the commissary,” Ernie said. “Let’s go direct to the source.”

I knew what he meant. We could get a couple of easy busts by working with a man we knew in Itaewon. A man by the name of Haggler Lee.

We hopped in the jeep and headed toward the MSR.

“They owe me money,” Haggler Lee said.

Haggler Lee was substantially older than us, maybe forty, but in some ways he seemed younger. He had a baby face, kept his black hair neatly coiffed, and he wore the sky blue silk tunic and white cotton pantaloons of the traditional outfit of the ancient
yangban
class who ruled Korea during the Chosun Dynasty. He seemed soft, patient, averse to violence. A hell of a thing for the man who ruled the Itaewon black market operation with an iron fist.

When we entered his warehouse, he sat on a flat square cushion in the middle of a raised floor heated by charcoal gas flowing through subterranean
ondol
heating ducts. Swirling mother-of-pearl phoenixes and snarling dragons were inlaid into the black lacquered table in front of him. As we approached, he lay a horsehair writing brush on an inkstone and looked up at us.

“
Anyonghaseiyo
?” he asked. Are you at peace?

We lied and told him that we were, slipped off our shoes, and stepped up on the warm
ondol
floor. We grabbed a couple of cushions and sat. Out of the darkness, a young woman, wearing a full, flowing
chima-chogori
traditional gown, appeared and, using two hands, poured steaming hot water into porcelain cups. She hefted a small tray onto the table that was laden with sugar, soluble creamer, Lipton tea bags and a jar of Maxim instant crystals. Ernie and I both stuck with the coffee. We ladled it into the hot water and swirled it around. It tasted good after our long drive back from Division.

“It has been too long since I’ve seen my good friends,” Haggler Lee told us, sipping on a handle-less cup of hot green tea.

“You know why we’re here, Lee,” Ernie said. “Eighth Army’s going nuts on the black market statistics again.”

Haggler Lee nodded and set his cup down. “Mrs. Wrypointe,” he said.

“You know her?”

“Oh, yes.” He smiled his pleasant smile. “A fine lady.”

“You like her?” I asked.

“Yes, very much.”

“But if she gets her way, she’ll kick every Korean woman out of the commissary and the PX. That would be the end of your business.”

“
If
she gets her way. Right now, she’s merely driving up prices, which of course is good for my business.”

“But she hates Koreans,” Ernie said. “That’s why she wants them all out of her commissary and her PX.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” Haggler Lee said. “Another way to look at it is that she’s a woman of principle. She actually believes that black marketeering is bad. One has to admire such a steadfast attitude.”

“You admire that old witch?” Ernie asked.

“Oh, yes. An admirable lady.”

“Where did you meet her?” I asked.

“At Hannam House. She’s quite taken by traditional Korean music and dance.”

Hannam House was a cultural center sponsored by the Korean Ministry of Education. Foreign dignitaries, even American soldiers, were invited to periodic performances in order to better introduce them to the world to Korean culture. Of course, most GIs avoided the place like a bad case of the clap.

We told him that we needed to make a couple of black market busts and we needed to make them fast. The quid pro quo, of course, was that generally speaking, when 8th Army wasn’t putting too much pressure on us, we’d leave his operation alone. Mostly we did anyway. Black marketing, compared to rape and assault and theft and extortion and even the occasional murder, was not high on our personal priority list. Haggler Lee hated violent crime as much, if not more, than we did. And his contacts throughout Itaewon were extensive. He knew every mama-san, every business girl, every bar owner, every chop house proprietor and every Korean National cop in the entire red-light district.
As such, he was a great source of information and, more often than not, we cooperated with him.

Of course, 8th Army and especially the Provost Marshal knew nothing about this cozy relationship and if we had anything to say about it, they never would.

Haggler Lee told us about the two women who owed him money.

“They can pay,” he said, “but they keep doing business with me, keep saying they will pay next time. I know their plan. When they and their husbands pack up to return to the States, they will leave me with a fat bill. Many have tried this before. Many fail.”

“If we bust them,” I said, “they’ll lose their ration control privileges and no one will make any money. Not them. Not you.”

“Yes,” Haggler Lee replied. “But if more women believe they don’t have to pay me, then more won’t pay me. I must punish these two women to set an example.”

The women in question were black marketing and that was against 8th Army regulations. It was our duty to bust them for it. If it happened to coincide with Haggler Lee’s business model, so be it. He gave us their names and addresses.

On the way out, Haggler Lee escorted us to the door. The plan was that his pick-up man, Grandfather Han, would peddle his bicycle over to the homes of the two women who were our marks, pretending to make his weekly pickup. He’d find some excuse for arriving earlier than scheduled. Normally what he did was enter the home, box up the PX goods, and strap the cardboard load to the heavy-duty rack on his bicycle. This time, as he made the transaction, Ernie and I would follow him in and make the arrest.

The entire operation went off without a hitch and by early evening Ernie and I had two more black market busts.

“Where do you two get oft,” Riley said, “nosing around Camp Stanley after the Provost Marshal told you to lay off?”

We were back in the CID office. The cannon for
close-of-business had been fired and the flags of the United States, the Republic of Korea, and the United Nations Command ceremoniously lowered. We returned to the office thinking we’d be congratulated on our black market arrests. Instead we were being reamed out because of a phone call the DivArty Adjutant made to the 8th Army Provost Marshal. Apparently, someone in the 2nd Infantry Division chain of command found out that we’d been interviewing soldiers in their area of operations and had pitched a bitch.

“Colonel Brace had to
apologize
to the man,” Riley said, his face red. “Do you understand what that means?”

“Yeah,” Ernie replied. “It means he doesn’t have the balls to back us up.”

Miss Kim, the admin secretary, plucked some tissue out of a box, held it to her slender nose, and rose from her desk. She didn’t like it when voices were raised or when American vulgarisms were used. She once told me that when she started work here she hadn’t understood any of our four-letter words. As she learned them, looking them up one by one in a Korean-English dictionary, they often made her cry; especially when GIs accused one another of doing horrible things to their mothers. As she clicked in her high heels across the office and turned out into the hallway, all of our eyes were riveted to her gorgeous posterior.