were there. So were seven or eight South Korean uniformed policemen with their pistols drawn.
You sometimes wonder about the difference two seconds would make. Or what would’ve happened if Clapper hadn’t called and woken me up. Or if I hadn’t been so bored that I’d been channel-surfing through Korean newscasts. Things would’ve turned out quite differently, because I was probably the only guy in the crowd who would’ve recognized him and the threat he posed.
He was holding up his police shield and pointing his pistol, and you could’ve sworn he had every right to be there, that he was just doing his job. He even had the proper security pass pinned to his lapel.
Choi Lee Min, experienced policeman that he was, blended right in with the other cops.
I ended up right next to him. I looked at him, and he turned his head and saw me, and there was one of those shocked milliseconds that seem to last forever.
Then he spun his body to shoot me, and despite all those years of hand-to-hand training I’d had in the outfit, I knew in that instant I didn’t stand a chance. I saw the pistol aimed at my stomach and I instinctively knew that no matter how fast I moved, it wouldn’t be fast enough.
But before he could pull the trigger a hand crashed down on his forearm and knocked the weapon loose. It landed on the cement at his feet and we both turned to see who’d smacked him. Allie stood right next to him, glaring at his face.
Choi’s eyes turned to the ground; just as he started to bend over to retrieve his pistol, Allie threw her stiffened fingers straight into his throat. An explosion of pain must have raced through his synapses. She’d hit him hard. She’d meant to. She’d driven his Adam’s apple right into his larynx, like a nail jabbed into a balloon. His head drove forward and a sickening gurgling, choking sound came from his mouth. He buckled to his knees and his hands flew to his throat, trying to get some air into his lungs.
I threw myself down on the ground and scrambled around for his pistol. In one way, that proved to be the right thing to do. But in another way, it wasn’t.
Because here’s what happened: I looked up just in time to see a Korean rioter pushing his way through the crowd. In his hand I saw a black metal ball that an experienced soldier like me would recognize immediately as a hand grenade.
He was so close that even with my awful marksmanship I couldn’t miss. I didn’t even think. I just picked up the pistol and shot him. Right in the forehead. And since I was firing up from the ground, the bullet lifted him off his feet and sent him flying backward.
Then there were two loud booms. The first was not nearly as noisy as the second. In fact, it was hardly more than a quick pop. I mean, it sounded loud to me, but that first one was only a pistol shot. The second boom was the one that got everybody’s attention. It was so loud it was deafening. That was the hand grenade going off in the middle of the crowd.
Here’s what they figured out later. Choi had gotten his security pass from Harry Elmore. He’d used that pass to get past the barriers and blend in with the other Korean cops. None of the other cops remembered him being there throughout the evening, so he probably hadn’t risked showing his face until right before the assassination was supposed to go down. He was there to run interference and see that everything went down right.
It was probably Choi who used his pistol butt to clobber the Korean soldier at the Secretary of State’s car door, and then slam the door closed in front of him.
The protester was armed with a grenade because that was the weapon of choice for their plan. Say Choi hadn’t been able to get the car door slammed in the Secretary’s face, then he would’ve been shoved into the backseat by his guards. But the car wasn’t going anywhere, because protesters were cluttered in front of it, and even an American Secretary of State, oddly enough, isn’t allowed to run over a dozen or so foreigners inside their own country. Therefore his car would’ve been stranded by the curb and the protester would’ve flung the armed hand grenade underneath it. Now, here’s a fact: Bulletproof cars aren’t invulnerable to large explosions on their undersides. That’s where the gas tank is located. Also, the undersides of those behemoths don’t have all that thick armor plating. There would likely have been a huge explosion.
But Choi did get the car door closed. So he prepared the way for the second contingency. The Secretary’s security detail, if they ever saw Choi, assumed he was on their side. He was holding up his police shield as he shot the security guards and cleared the way for the kid with the grenade to jump on top of the Secretary and blow them both to pieces. Ballistic tests proved that the bullets that killed three of the Secretary’s security detail came from Choi’s pistol.
As it was, the suicide bomber killed another four people and wounded nine more. It was lucky for the Secretary that I’d fired my shot up from the ground, because that sent the bomber flying backward into the crowd and made the grenade roll backward out of his hand, so some other hapless souls ended up absorbing the explosion and shrapnel meant for him.
As for the suicide bomber, he was a senior at Kwangju University about 120 miles south of Seoul. He was as South Korean as they come. He was born and raised in the city of Kwangju, the capital city of a South Korean province that was known as a virulent hotbed of antigovernment and anti-American sentiments. Twenty-two years before, his father, as well as many other citizens of Kwangju, had been killed by South Korean troops who were brutally suppressing a huge revolt in the city. Korean lore had it that the troops who went into the city to suppress the revolt were there at the behest and encouragement of the American military command. It wasn’t true, because they had actually been sent in by an angry, ambitious military dictator, who afterward distorted the facts to deflect the blame away from himself. But the myth persisted. The kid had been very active in campus antigovernment groups. He was known around the school as a hothead and a fanatical anti-American.
He was the perfect cutout. Which was exactly why Choi picked him. Had he killed the Secretary of State, and had Choi simply vanished back into the crowd and made his escape, it would’ve looked like a South Korean extremist had assassinated a key American government official right on the steps of South Korea’s presidential palace.
The kid had probably never met Choi. He probably never even knew he was working for the North Koreans. Most likely he was recruited by someone in the campus movement, was told what to do, was provided with the hand grenade, and his hatred drove him on from there. On the outside chance he survived to be interrogated, the world still would’ve been convinced the Secretary of State was murdered by an angry South Korean. And it would’ve been true.
And Lord knows what would have happened to the already egregiously wounded alliance after that.
As for Choi, he never made his getaway. He choked to death right where Allie chopped him. You think about life and its many coincidences. Allie’s being at the Blue House, and her having the presence of mind to rush to the point of confrontation, knock the gun away, and kill Choi, was simply amazing. It was what you might call an act of God, to let Allie be his hand of retribution. They found Choi there when they were cleaning up the bodies, his eyes bulging out of their sockets, blood still dribbling out of his throat onto the cement. I had no regrets about that.
What I had regrets about was the South Korean cop who saw me pick up a pistol and shoot someone. That was that first popping sound I told you about. That was the bullet that entered my back next to my lower spine and pinned me to the concrete like a grounded fish.
That was the one that turned out the lights inside my head.
CHAPTER 46
See if you can guess the first face I saw when I came to?
It was deja vu all over again, as they say. Doc Bridges and I were right back where we were the last time I saw him. I was flat on my back in a hospital bed, inside the same room even, and he was standing beside the bed taking my pulse and making some notes on a clipboard. I’ll bet it was even the same clipboard.
I said something like, “Oh Christ,” and he chuckled.
Then he said, “Hey, you’re a hero again.”
He held a newspaper in front of my face. It was the
Some cynical reporter had gotten a real gas out of the fact that the guy who saved the life of the Secretary of State, and maybe the whole alliance, was shot by a Korean cop for his troubles.
