“Then who did?
“Bufford. And maybe Weatherwax. They interrogated him after you left. That’s how they obtained the information that led them to the Forest of Seven Clouds.”
Jill sat in silence, thinking about that.
“Did you use a rope on him?” Ernie asked.
“A rope?”
“To strangle Pak Tong-i. To scare him into talking.”
Jill shook her head.
“Then it wasn’t you who killed him. It had to be Bufford and Weatherwax.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said finally.
“I’m right,” Ernie replied.
Stanchions blocked the road ahead. Ernie slowed.
“Easy now,” I told him. “These civilian license plates should ward them off. Of course, they’ll see we’re Miguks, and Ernie and I have short hair and look like GIs, so they might try to talk to us anyway. But what we do is we ignore them and keep rolling slowly through the checkpoint. They have no authority to stop us.”
“Seems like up here at Division,” Ernie said, “people don’t worry much about the legal extent of their authority.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But these MPs have no reason to stop us.”
“Unless they figure that you’re those Eighth Army CID agents they’ve been looking for,” Jill said.
“Or that you’re an AWOL MP,” Ernie shot back.
“Not AWOL any longer.”
We’d taken the handcuffs off of Jill and she’d voluntarily submitted to our instructions to return with us to Seoul. So she was once again under military jurisdiction and-technically-no longer absent without leave. And since she’d returned to military jurisdiction prior to thirty days after leaving her unit, she couldn’t be charged with desertion.
We passed the reinforced concrete bunker with the M-60 machine gun. Beyond that stood an armed ROK soldier. He peered into the car, saw our civilian license plates, and waved us on. The last obstacle was the American MP. He was tall and skinny and held his M-16 rifle at port arms, his back toward us.
“He isn’t even paying attention,” Ernie said.
We were about to cruise past him when suddenly he turned, lowered his rifle, and stepped in front of us. Ernie slammed on the brakes. From beneath the MP’s helmet, a long skinny nose pointed out.
Jill screamed.
Ernie shouted a curse but it was too late for him to step on the gas. The MP had leveled his weapon and was pointing it right at Ernie’s face. Warrant Officer Fred Bufford. In the flesh. I popped open the passenger door and rolled onto the blacktop. Ernie sat frozen behind the wheel. Jill ducked but it was too late, Bufford had spotted her. He started shouting for us to get out of the car, hands up. Shielded by the side of the vehicle, I pulled my. 45.
Boots clomped behind me. I turned. The ROK Army soldier’s rifle was pointed directly at my face. I lowered my. 45, dropped it to the ground, and raised my hands in surrender.
At the point of a gun, Bufford marched Jill Matthewson into the bushes.
Ernie and I stood at the side of the road, our hands up, guarded by the ROK Army MP. Another ROK Army MP had taken over at the checkpoint, glancing into vehicles, waving them through. What had happened to the American MP who normally worked here? Probably, Bufford had sent him back to his unit, with a bullshit story about the move-out alert. Ernie and I were both worried about the same thing. What was he going to do to Jill?
I started speaking Korean to the ROK soldier. His name tag, hand embroidered, revealed that he was Private Yun. I told him that I was an agent for 8th Army Criminal Investigation Division and that my credentials were in my inside coat pocket. At first he ignored me. I kept at him. I told him that Warrant Officer Bufford was a fugitive from justice and Yun was now taking orders from the wrong man. I warned him about how much trouble he would be in if he didn’t listen to me. Finally, Private Yun, still holding his rifle on us, reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out my CID badge. I warned him that he now had thirty seconds to lower his rifle and return our weapons.
The young man’s face flushed with indecision. He shouted at the other ROK Army MP. They conferred in rapid Korean. Finally, they decided that one of them would cover for the other while they used the radio to call the sergeant of the guard. That wasn’t quick enough for us. By the time they ran the information up the chain of command and a decision came back down, Corporal Jill Matthewson might be dead.
From the north, from the 2nd Division area, a car screeched up to the checkpoint. A long sedan. Black. A driver in a dark suit popped out of the front door and another dark-suited man emerged from the passenger’s side. The driver opened the back door and a man climbed out. Agent Sohn, the KCIA man. When he held up his badge, the ROK Army MP nearest him shouted a martial greeting. Private Yun, still standing in front of us, glanced back. That’s all Ernie needed. He charged low, diving for Yun’s ankles. I stepped to my left and then threw myself at the ROK MP. A shot rang out. Apparently, it didn’t hit me because I was able to thrust my shoulder full force into Private Yun. He went down. Ernie scrambled for the rifle, seized it, and pointed it at the KCIA men. They backed off. While Ernie held them at bay, I retrieved our. 45s.
Ernie shot out the tires of the KCIA sedan. We ran into the woods, following a trail of broken branches and trodden grass left by Bufford as he’d forced Jill at gunpoint into the forest. Through the tree line and beyond, ten- foot-high cement megaliths stretched in a double row. Dragon’s teeth. As far as the eye could see.
Ernie and I stopped when we saw them. They lay between two dragon’s teeth, near a creek in a grass- covered meadow, perhaps twenty yards away. It was clear what was happening.
He was naked. Bony knees, pale flesh, elbows rubbed raw and red. He held Jill’s. 45 in his hand, finger on the trigger, the barrel propped beneath her jaw. Her pants were pulled low but her legs were still locked, and she lay back with her butt pressed against mud. Her eyes were clenched tightly and she was crying. Not tears of helplessness but tears of rage.
Ernie pointed the rifle and fired. A round caromed madly off one of the dragon’s teeth. Bufford looked at us but he didn’t climb off of Jill. He shouted that he’d pull the trigger if we didn’t back off.
“You’re finished, Bufford,” Ernie shouted. “Even if you kill her, there’s no way out.”
“I’ll kill her now!” Bufford said.
As he shouted at Ernie, the barrel of his. 45 shifted, just slight- ly. But it was enough. Enough for Jill Matthewson to know that this was her chance.
She brought a fist up in a looping left cross and at the same time propelled her knee up right between Bufford’s legs. He screamed. The gun went off. Ernie and I sprinted forward. Through the smoke and confusion I couldn’t tell what had happened to Jill. We stumbled and clawed our way through the mud and as the smoke cleared I realized that she was still alive. I’ve never seen anyone in such a rage. By the time Ernie and I approached she was on top of Fred Bufford. His pistol lay uselessly in the mud and Jill Matthewson was pulverizing him and had started to gouge out his eyeballs. It took Ernie and me two minutes to pull her off of him. We handcuffed her because it was the only way we could stop her from killing Bufford with her bare hands. Our mistake was that we handcuffed her with her hands in front rather than behind her back.
Bufford lay unconscious next to the creek. Blood trickled from his eyes, nose, and mouth.
I policed up the. 45 and found Jill Matthewson’s wallet lying next to her torn blue jeans. A couple of photographs had fallen out. I picked them up and held them up to the light. A rape scene. I saw three men: Lieutenant Colonel Alcott; a man I recognized as H.K. Pacquet, the Chief of Staff of the 2nd Division; and Warrant Officer Fred Bufford. All naked. All working on some poor young woman who’d been bound and gagged. The lighting was dim. I studied the woman. I expected her to be the stripper, Jill’s friend, Kim Yong-ai. But then I realized that she wasn’t Kim. She wasn’t even Korean. She was American. And then I realized who she was. The impetus for Jill Matthewson’s rage became clear to me.
Ernie was too busy to look at the photos, what with handcuffing Bufford and helping Jill climb out of the mudhole she was lying in. When the KCIA men appeared at the edge of the clearing, Ernie warned them back with the M16 rifle. They stood and observed, as Jill pulled up her pants and adjusted what was left of her torn shirt and blouse.
Before Ernie could notice, I stuffed the photographs into my pocket. I didn’t want Ernie, or anyone other than Jill, to see them. I handed her the wallet. Automatically, she searched for the photos. When she didn’t find them, she looked up at me. I pulled them out of my pocket and handed them to her. She refused to take them.
