Matthewson. Suddenly they grew quiet. After a long pause, the most talkative young man said, “If we help you, we need something in return.”
Did they actually have information that could help us find Jill? Or were they bluffing?
“What?” I asked.
“Jill,” he said, “participated in one of our demonstrations.”
I nodded. I knew that. I didn’t say that if Ernie and I did manage to find Jill Matthewson alive, she could face court-martial proceedings for having participated in that demonstration. We’d worry about that later.
“Tonight,” he said, “after people get off work and before the sun goes down, we are planning another demonstration. A bigger one this time. In front of the Camp Casey main gate.”
I nodded. Understanding. Wondering what he wanted from me.
“You and your friend,” he said, pointing at me and Ernie, “must accompany us this afternoon. You must join our demonstration.”
Ernie stopped making eyes at the cutest of the female students and said, “Are you nuts?”
The students whispered amongst themselves. Not sure of what exactly Ernie meant by “nuts.”
“No,” the leader said finally. “We are not ‘nuts.’ You must join the demonstration and you must speak. You say you agree that Korean courts should try all people accused of crimes on Korean soil. Even GIs. If you say that at the demonstration, we will lead you to Jill Matthewson.”
There must’ve been over five hundred people in front of the Camp Casey main gate. Most of them were students who’d been bussed in just this afternoon from Seoul. But a surprising number were locals. Working people. Cab drivers, young women still wearing bandannas and aprons from their work in kitchens, an occasional vegetable vendor with a cart, even one or two shop owners who, much to my surprise, had closed up their tailor shops or brassware emporiums and walked down the street to join in the protest.
“Chon Un-suk mansei!” one of the protestors shouted through a bullhorn. Chon Un-suk ten thousand years! Which didn’t make much sense since she was already dead.
Some of the students held four-foot-high photographs of the young middle-school student, framed in black.
What must’ve been the entire contingent of Camp Casey MPs stood in front of the main gate, wearing fatigue uniforms and riot helmets, holding their batons at port arms. More MPs stood behind them with short-barreled grenade launchers cradled in their arms, for launching tear gas into the crowd. Finally, as if he was Camp Casey’s last line of defense, the twenty-foot-tall MP stood with his pink-faced grin, staring idiotically at the entire proceedings.
So far, everything was peaceful.
A KNP contingent stood along the railroad tracks, opposite the main gate, behind the protestors. They also wore riot helmets and thick chest padding and wielded long batons that they held in their hands impatiently. All in all, there were almost as many MPs and KNPs as there were protestors, although the cops were much better armed.
Ernie and I crouched in the center of the student protestors.
“If the MPs spot us out here,” Ernie said, “we’re toast.”
“What choice do we have?” I answered. “We were sent up here to find Jill Matthewson. That’s what we’re doing.”
“We’ll lose our CID badges.”
“We’ll tell them we were working undercover.”
“Eighth Army will never buy it.”
“Screw Eighth Army.”
Ernie shook his head. “You’re changing, Sueno.”
Maybe he was right. I thought about it. One of the protestors screamed through a megaphone at the top of his lungs in rapid Korean.
Finally, I replied. “I’m changing,” I told Ernie, “because finding Corporal Jill Matthewson should’ve been an easy assignment. Instead, at every step of the way someone’s tried to stop us. They stopped Private Marvin Druwood and then they stopped the booking agent, Pak Tong-i. Permanently. And last night, they tried to kill us. Why?”
Ernie shrugged.
“We have to find out,” I said.
“We could go talk to Brandy.”
“We’re too hot to enter the Black Cat Club. Or even the bar district. The KNPs are probably watching.”
“They’re watching us here.”
“They’re watching the crowd. Not us. This is the last place they’d expect to find us.”
“This is the last place I’d expect to find us.”
“It’ll only take a few minutes. Then they promised to lead us to her.”
“They might be lying.”
“Chon Un-suk’s mother believes them.”
Ernie shrugged again.
The leader of the protest shouted into his megaphone, speaking in Korean. Occasionally, he paused and the crowd shouted back their assent. Finally, he switched to English, turned, and directed his words at the main gate of Camp Casey.
“Now,” he said. “One of your own will speak to you.”
He motioned for me to stand. Ernie stared at me, wide-eyed. I rose to my feet. Like Adam accepting the apple from Eve, I grabbed the megaphone.
10
I’ve often wondered what it’s like to jump out of an airplane.
To take that final step into the abyss, with the wind rushing by and birds gliding below, and then to fall and twist and float free, away from all restraint, gliding through clouds. Airborne troopers do just that at least once a month to keep their parachute status active and thereby collect an additional fifty-four dollars per month in jump pay.
When I stood in the middle of that crowd and the young Korean man handed me the megaphone and I held it up to my mouth and I started talking, I suddenly knew what it was like to leap out into eternity.
I’m not sure exactly what I said. Ernie recounted it to me later. Something about every country being able to control its own destiny and every courtroom being accountable to the people of that country. It wasn’t much and it was garbled, but the overriding point of my little speech-as far as the U.S. Army’s concerned-was that I’d participated in a prohibited demonstration. It didn’t matter how minor, or how dumb, my participation might’ve been. Such participation, in and of itself, was a court-martial offense. Of course, so was returning to the 2nd Division area of operations after we’d been ordered not to. So I was just adding one sin onto another.
But what riveted my attention while I held the microphone was not the line of helmeted KNPs lining the railroad tracks, nor the adoring attention of the demonstrators who gazed up at me, nor even the helmeted American MPs barricading the main gate of Camp Casey. What riveted my attention was Lieutenant Colonel Stanley X. Alcott and Warrant Officer One Fred Bufford, both of whom were standing in fatigues before the main gate behind their protective line of MPs; both men perched atop the hood of a U.S. Army jeep. Colonel Alcott, realizing who was speaking, stared at me with his mouth hanging open. Fred Bufford, meanwhile, smirked. A broad twisted smile. Satisfied. As if to say that everything he suspected about me had finally been proven true.
The huge MP statue looming behind the main gate seemed to have changed its expression from bland idiocy to disbelief. Disbelief, apparently, that I could do something so stupid. Stupid, maybe. But it was my only chance of obtaining a lead on the whereabouts of Corporal Jill Matthewson. As a cop assigned to a mission, I do what is required. Regardless of what Stanley Alcott or Fred Bufford thought.
When I finished talking, the crowd of demonstrators roared in approval and then a Korean speaker took over the megaphone and the students holding the photographs of Chon Un-suk started chanting and parading through
