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 amp; 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 8th 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.”
