After Warnocki disappeared, Colonel Laurel turned back to us.
“If you mess with my men again,” he told Ernie and then me, “I won’t stop him next time.”
“Stop him?” I said. “You were about to lose one muscle-bound staff sergeant.”
Laurel stared at me, his face once again unreadable, looking very much like a sinister puppet. Without saying anything further, he turned and marched across wet sand. The haenyo stood as he approached.
Together, the rubber-clad troupe of females followed Colonel Laurel to a boat with an outboard motor. All of them climbed aboard except for two sturdy women who shoved the boat out toward the breakers, turned it around, and then pulled themselves aboard. Laurel jerked on a hemp lanyard and the engine of the old boat coughed to life. He and the women bounced over the waves and then, after about fifty yards, faded into the mist.
Ernie dusted sand off his trousers.
“‘About to lose one muscle-bound staff sergeant,’” he mimicked. “Man, Sueno. That doesn’t sound like you.”
“Women have been raped,” I said, “in front of children. One of them brutally murdered, in front of children. To me, all this macho posturing is less than nothing.”
Ernie watched as I climbed the sand dunes and marched toward the two-lane highway that paralleled the beach. Then, as if remembering something, he hurried and caught up with me.
“What do you mean, we can’t force Colonel Laurel to show us his morning report?” I asked. “What kind of nonsense is that? He’s a military man, isn’t he? He takes orders like anyone else.”
I sat on the front edge of the ondol floor of the living room of the woman who owned the Nokko-ri Yoguan. Her family lived just behind the reception counter. She kept a bright red phone on a knitted yellow pad and charged me five hundred won for the call to Hialeah Compound in Pusan.
“They’re stovepiped,” Riley told me, his voice coming in scratchy over the line. “They don’t take orders from Eighth Army. Only from Special Operations Command in the Pentagon.”
“So we have the Provost Marshal contact Special Ops,” I told him. “Tell them to order Colonel Laurel to let us see his morning reports.”
“That’ll take time,” Riley replied. “The Special Forces always stalls. First the Pentagon weenies will contact Colonel Laurel, and then they’ll wait to hear back from him, and then they’ll have a conference, and finally, after typing everything up in triplicate, they’ll respond to Eighth Army.”
“We don’t have time,” I shouted. “The Blue Train rapist could strike again at any moment.”
Riley didn’t answer. He wasn’t wasting his breath. He was just giving me time to let it sink in: the military bureaucracy moves at its own pace, and no one, with the possible exception of a four-star general, can hurry it up.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll find another way.”
“Be careful with those guys,” Riley said. “I wouldn’t want my two favorite investigators to come up missing.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a volcano up there, isn’t there? They could drop you in.”
“Thanks for the encouragement.”
“Don’t mention it.”
I hung up on him.
It had only taken a half hour for Ernie and me to hitchhike our way back from the beach. People were curious about two American G.I. s in civvies standing alone on a lonely road. A three-wheeled truck loaded with garlic pulled over and gave us a ride all the way to the intersection that led to Nokko-ri. From there, we caught a ride with a Korean contract trucker carrying a load of heating fuel up to the Mount Halla Training Facility. He let us off right in front of the Nokko-ri Yoguan. In both cases I offered the drivers money, but in both cases they smiled and waved it off. Once you get away from the hustlers who congregate outside the gates of military compounds, Koreans are generous to a fault.
There was a chophouse just twenty yards in front of the main gate, and in English they advertised ohmu rice and yakimandu and ramian noodles. Ernie and I sat at one of the rickety wooden tables, and the old woman who ran the place approached, wearing a white apron and a white bandanna wrapped tightly around gray hair.
“When do the G.I. s start coming out of the compound, Mama-san?” Ernie asked.
“Maybe five o’clock,” she replied. “After cannon go boom and flag come down.” She thought about that and added, “Tonight skoshi G.I., tomorrow taaksan.”
Only a few G.I. s tonight. Tomorrow plenty. The merchants in Nokko-ri were well attuned to the comings and goings of Colonel Laurel’s training cycles.
We both ordered ramian and split a plate of the yakimandu fried dumplings. Ernie was about to add a liter of cold OB beer to his order when I stopped him.
“We have work to do,” I said.
“Work? Like what?”
“Like finding somebody who knows what’s going on inside the Mount Halla Training Facility.”
“They’re all Green Berets,” Ernie said. “They’re not going to tell us nothing.”
“I’m not talking about Green Berets,” I said. “Somebody else.”
“There ain’t nobody else.”
“Yes, there is.”
I pointed through the dirt-smudged window of the Nokko-ri Chophouse. Ernie followed my finger and gazed up the side of Mount Halla.
“Smoke coming out of the volcano,” he said. “So what?”
“Off to the right a bit,” I replied.
Then he spotted it. A communications beacon. And next to that, a squat building.
“That’s American?” he asked.
“Must be,” I replied. “How else is Colonel Laurel going to stay in touch with the honchos at Eighth Army?”
“I don’t think he gives a shit about the honchos at Eighth Army.”
The old woman brought two steaming bowls of ramian noodles, and then she slid the yakimandu between us. Ernie stared at the fare sourly.
“Where’s the kimchee?” he asked.
“You likey?”
“I likey.”
The woman smiled and in short order delivered one plate each of pickled cabbage and pickled cucumber and a bowl of water kimchee. As she set them on the table, the sharp tang of vegetables fermented in brine bit into my nostrils.
Ernie smiled and ordered a Seven Stars Cider. I stuck with the barley tea.
The cab driver wound around one sharp bend after another. The road was narrow, just wide enough for one vehicle. There were only a couple of bypass areas where a vehicle could move off to the side to make way for another.
“What happened to the jillions of dollars Eighth Army spends improving roads?” Ernie asked.
“I guess they spent it elsewhere. Must not expect many visitors up here.”
The cab driver’s name was Mr. Won. He had been introduced to us by the woman who owned the Nokko-ri Yoguan. I think he was her brother-in-law or something. Mr. Won leaned forward, both hands gripping the steering wheel, concentrating on his driving, ignoring us completely. Ernie sat in the front passenger seat. I sat in back. Below were rock-strewn valleys with little vegetation. Every now and then, I glanced back and saw the Mount Halla Training Facility and the village of Nokko-ri, growing ever smaller as we moved higher up the mountain. In the distance, the sea stirred placidly.
Finally, we rounded one more switchback turn, straightened out along the edge of the mountain, and there, on a plateau-like ledge, sat the squat green building I’d seen from the comfortable environs of the Nokko-ri Chophouse. Spiraling straight up was the metal edifice of the red-and-white communications tower.
Mr. Won stopped the car and immediately turned off the engine. His shoulders slumped forward and for a moment he bowed his head to fists still clenched on top of the steering wheel.
“Yogi kidariyo?” I said to him. You’ll wait here?
He nodded. As we’d agreed, he’d receive the bulk of his money once we were returned safely to the Nokko-ri Yoguan.
The small communications compound was surrounded by a high chain-link fence topped with concertina wire. It was all rusted out as if it hadn’t been replaced in years. A sign hung near the single gate in the fence: Chulip Kumji. And below that: Authorized Personnel Only.