Ernie took a step toward the door.
“I got to piss like a racehorse myself,” I said. “Be right back, Chief.”
He grunted and picked up the phone again.
When we reached the hallway, voices drifted after us.
“Those guys can’t be navy,” somebody said. “Did you see those jackets?”
“Naval Investigation didn’t say nothing about agents arriving this soon.”
We strode quickly toward the ladder and slid down it without touching any rungs.
“When those squids realize we’re army,” Ernie said, “we’ll be in a world of shit.”
“And we have too much to do to sit in a brig until it gets sorted out.”
“Shipton could be on his way to the PX right now.”
Somehow I doubted that, not here in Pusan. It would be too risky so soon after hitting the Kitty Hawk. But we didn’t have time to argue the fine points.
We kept dropping down ladders and sprinting down hallways, not caring anymore who saw us or what they thought. When we finally reached the hatch in the side of the hull, a launch was shoving off.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Hold that boat!”
“Aren’t you supposed to say ‘belay’or something like that?” Ernie said.
That Ernie, always a stickler for the right word. The chief at the gangplank made a hand signal that held the boat.
“All right, you two,” he said, frowning. “You’re lucky I held it. Let’s see your liberty chits.”
I pulled out my CID identification.
“We don’t need liberty chits,” I said. “We’re Criminal Investigation agents and we’re on a case, Chief. A man’s life could be at stake.”
The chief stared at all the stamps and squiggles and officialese in my leather wallet. Ernie opened his badge, too, and slammed it shut impatiently. The chief was surprised, but too much of a lifer to want to fight all that documentation.
“Army?” he said. “What are you doing on the Kitty Hawk?”
“You don’t have a need-to-know!” Ernie snapped.
We scurried down the ladder and climbed aboard the launch. It pulled away and the startled face of the chief receded and grew blurry in the mist. About thirty yards out, a siren sounded aboard the ship.
“Step on it, Smitty,” one of the sailors said to the helmsman. “Get us ashore before they cancel liberty or some such shit.”
Smitty nodded and the engine roared.
35
First we caught a cab back to Hialeah Compound. I wanted to get as far away from the U.S. Navy as possible.
After showing our ID at the pedestrian gate, we went over to the MP Station. No unusual blotter reports. Everything had been quiet on Hialeah Compound last night.
“That’s because Shipton was busy elsewhere,” Ernie said.
Busy is right. Possibly offing his sixth victim, Seaman Harrelson, of the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk, and stealing who- knows-what kind of top secret information.
I wasn’t sure what to do next. The PX office wasn’t open yet, so we finally did the sensible thing and grabbed a couple of trays at the post snack bar. We went through the line and ordered ourselves some breakfast.
As I sipped on hot coffee and listened to the tinkling of glassware and the rustling of newspapers, I tried to put things in perspective.
Shipton’s primary goal was the theft of classified documents. Who knew how much he’d gotten away with in the last three months? Maybe the suspicions of Strange and his ilk were blown way out of proportion. Or maybe they were just the tip of the iceberg. Hard to tell. But what I did know for certain was that Shipton now had access to information on “tunnels” from the army and “weaponry,” probably nuclear, from the navy. Valuable stuff.
Why was he doing this? Because he was AWOL and broke and somebody was paying him to turn over the documents. Who? Not much doubt. The North Koreans.
So why did he black-market, too? Because there was good money in it. And maybe the North Koreans paid only upon delivery. And since Shipton was probably in no position to run an auction, the North Koreans probably paid him only what they wanted to pay him. And that might not be all that much. After all, they wanted to keep him hungry. Keep him feeding them stolen information.
Maybe they helped him get the phony ration control plates. Maybe that was his payment.
But that was speculation. We had a highly trained navy commando on the loose in Korea. He was a killer, he was after top secret documents, and he would stop at nothing to get what he wanted.
Shipton knew the military community intimately and he could blend right in. Buy uniforms, obtain phony ID’s, waltz in and out of classified areas with just bluff and bravado.
What would he do next?
Probably continue to make all the easy money he could off of those ration control plates until they became hot. Did he have any idea yet we were onto him? If not, in a couple of hours, when the front doors of the PX opened to shoppers, he might stroll right on through as if he owned the place. And we could be right there to finally bust him.
Maybe. But nothing else in this case had been easy. Something told me picking him up wouldn’t be easy either.
He hadn’t been subtle with the navy. Hit somebody over the head and steal what you need. But maybe he had no choice. The Kitty Hawk was only in port for a few days. Hard to establish an inside contact in that time. Besides, Shipton was probably counting on interservice rivalry to keep our exchange of information down and make it less likely that we would link his naval activities with the security compromises in 8th Army. And he was probably right.
I didn’t think he would just randomly keep stealing classified documents and black-marketing until one day we got lucky and he got caught. Something told me there was a master plan to all this. Bo Shipton was too intelligent, too well trained, to drift along in crime without some sort of overall goal. Maybe it was just to make enough money so he could slip out of the country and retire on the Riviera. Or did the classified information he was gathering, looked at as a whole, represent some sort of clandestine mosaic?
Whatever his motive, I knew in my heart that he had a mission. I just had to figure out what it was.
On the way to the snack bar, we had stopped at billeting and shaved and now, with bellies full of scrambled eggs and hash browns, we both felt a lot more human.
“This Shipton is one bold dude,” Ernie said, his mouth full of toast.
“Killing Miss Ku. Killing the Nurse. Not very bold. They were both helpless.”
“Yeah,” Ernie said. “And he tortured Miss Ku. At least Whitcomb was more like a fair fight, wasn’t he?”
“Even that wasn’t fair when you consider all the combat Shipton has been through.”
“It won’t do him any good when we catch him,” Ernie said. He glugged down the last of his coffee. “Don’t sweat it, George.”
I checked the clock on the wall. Almost eight hundred hours. Riley would probably be in. So would Strange. We left our dirty plates on the table and walked back to the snack bar manager’s office.
He was a Korean man in a neat white shirt and tie, hunched over a stack of invoices. I showed him my badge and he pointed to a phone at a table loaded with purchasing regulations. I lifted the phone and got through to the base operator and told her what I wanted. Ernie stood in the doorway and watched the short-order cooks in the kitchen.
Strange answered on the first ring.
“Distribution.”
I asked him a few questions that he couldn’t answer, but he said he’d try to get the information and I should call back in a couple of hours. He made me promise to tell him all about the girls on Texas Street once he had what
