Within seconds the men had filed off the bus and were standing in formation in the center of the parade field. Before the last G.I. stepped off the bus, Ernie and I crouched behind seats in the back. The driver, thinking the bus was empty, closed the door and slowly started to turn the vehicle around. Before he reached the main gate, I stood up and hurried forward.
“Let us off here, Ajjosi,” I said.
He was startled, but years of aberrant G.I. behavior had prepared him for anything. He stopped the bus and opened the door, and Ernie and I hopped off. We left our armbands on the bus, but I kept my clipboard. After the bus pulled away, we slipped into the shadow of a Quonset hut.
“Where to?” Ernie asked.
I glanced at my clipboard. “Munoz, Sergeant E-five, and Amos, Walker R., SFC. Those are the two guys we have to talk to.”
“So how do we find them?”
“Moolah the hell out of me.” And then I spotted street signs on a pole. White arrows pointed in four directions. One of them said S-3 Training. We followed it and soon found a Quonset hut marked Mount Halla Training Command. In the distance, angry voices shouted and, in unison, dozens of boots pounded on dirt. As best I could tell, the G.I. s were being divided up into smaller groups and marched to the various training stations, rappelling or commando tactics or whatever other edifying courses Colonel Laurel had cooked up for them.
We tried the front door. Locked.
“They’re all out there with the troops,” Ernie said.
“You check on that side,” I said. “I’ll meet you out back.”
Ernie nodded and trotted around the corner.
What we were looking for was an open window, a door, anything so we could gain access. Before I reached the rear, Ernie was already whistling. The back door of the Quonset hut was also locked, but one of the windows was filled with an air-conditioning unit. It wasn’t turned on, and there was enough space between the metal casing and the windowsill to reach inside the building.
“Let me have that clipboard,” Ernie said.
I handed it to him and Ernie used the metal clip to pry a rusty nail that held the overhead sliding window in place. Once the nail started to budge, he pulled on it with his fingers and, after much twisting and rotating, it popped free. I performed a similar operation on the other side of the window and we slid it upward, giving us about two feet of open space above the air conditioner.
I knelt down and Ernie stepped up on my back. As he slid his upper torso above the air conditioner, I braced him and pushed on the bottom of his boots.
“Whoa!” he said. “Not so fast.”
After groping in the dark room, he finally found a handhold atop a filing cabinet and pulled himself inside. About thirty seconds later, he’d opened the back door. It was dark inside, so I turned on the lights.
“Someone will see,” he said.
“They’re busy,” I replied. “Besides, if I find what I’m looking for, this shouldn’t take long.”
In fact, it didn’t take long at all. Military men love wall charts, the bigger and gaudier the better. This one was marked Schedule of Assignments. The name of every Special Forces trainer was listed on the left, including Staff Sergeant Warnocki and even Lieutenant Colonel Laurel. Warnocki, apparently, was the rappelling expert, and Colonel Laurel taught every class concerning diving. Sergeant Munoz, the man Specialist Vance had told us about, was indeed blocked out on leave for the past four weeks, having returned to duty yesterday, Friday. It would be easy enough to find out for sure if he’d actually traveled to Puerto Rico, but for the moment I would assume he had. Sergeant First Class Walker R. Amos, the man who carried the ration-control cards to Seoul, wasn’t blocked out at all on the chart. His specialty was apparently Survival, Escape and Evasion.
“That can come in handy on a train,” Ernie said.
On the opposite wall, we found a map of the compound. The mock prisoner-of-war camp was clearly marked.
Ernie and I did our best to mingle with the trainees. They stood in a loose formation inside the main gate of the “Volcano POW Camp.” It was nothing more than a few wooden shacks surrounded by concertina wire. We didn’t see anyone there other than trainees.
“Where are the Green Berets?” I asked one of the G.I. trainees.
“Inside the biggest shack,” he said. “They’re taking us in there two at a time.”
“For what?”
“Hell if I know. But none of the guys who’ve gone in so far have come out.”
Ernie and I stepped away to talk about it. Neither one of us was armed.
“You have your handcuffs?” I asked.
“I’d feel naked without ’em,” Ernie replied, patting the small of his back.
“So we have to take him down quick and clean, before any of his buddies have time to react.”
“Okay. So, how do we do that?”
“Pretend we’re a couple of trainees, to put him off guard.”
We stepped toward the front of the formation. Nobody complained. None of the G.I. s were anxious to go in first anyway. In about five minutes, two men stepped out of the shack. They were probably Special Forces trainers, but you couldn’t tell by their uniforms. They were wearing the dark green-and-red epaulette combat gear of the Warsaw Pact. One of the men was white, the other black. They pointed at Ernie and me and said, “Move it.”
Ernie and I trotted forward.
“On the ground!” one of them shouted.
We both dropped to the low crawl position and then they started kicking us-not hard, but firmly enough to get us moving. Eating dust, we crawled into the shack. So far, we couldn’t be sure how many trainers there were or which one was SFC Amos. On their mock Communist uniforms, they didn’t wear name tags. Ernie and I continued to play along. The shack was dark, illuminated by only one yellow light.
“All right,” one of our captors said. “If you’re dumb enough to be captured and locked up by the enemy, then you’re going to be treated like the complete idiots you are. And often, the only means of escape is through tunneling. Like rats.”
One of the captors kicked me. “You know how to dig holes?”
I shook my head.
He kicked me again. “Speak up!”
“No!” I shouted.
“I didn’t think so. So we’ve already dug a hole for you. Check under that bunk over there. You have ten seconds to find it.”
Ernie and I crawled forward and beneath a rickety wooden bunk there was flooring made of the same splintery planks. Ernie clawed at them and within seconds managed to pull one of the planks up. I pulled another and soon we had revealed a dark pit that dropped into the ground.
Behind us, automatic fire. Blanks, I knew, but the sound reverberated like thunder and the air filled with acrid smoke.
“Beat it!” one of the captors shouted. “Get out! Through the tunnel!”
Ernie slid down first. I followed.
It was completely dark down here and so narrow that my shoulders dragged against dirt. The air was tight. Occasionally Ernie’s boots kicked mud back into my face.
What were we doing down here? We should’ve arrested those guys up in the shack, but if they resisted we probably wouldn’t have been able to take them both down. Besides, we weren’t even sure yet which one was Sergeant Amos. If it was the black guy, I was toast. I was betting it was the white guy. He was about the right height and he was certainly strong enough to overpower the women and make his escape over the high fences at Anyang. But so far, because of his cap, I hadn’t even seen the color of his hair.
Also, his nose wasn’t big enough to justify the huge proboscises that had been drawn in the witness sketches. Besides, there were probably other trainers at the end of this tunnel.
The tunnel seemed endless. I remembered that the shack was sitting alone, far from any obvious place to come back up to the surface. We kept crawling.
How sure was I that this guy, Sergeant First Class Walker R. Amos, was actually the Blue Train rapist? Fairly sure. We’d meticulously eliminated every other American G.I. who could have been on the two trains involved. If this Amos guy had carte blanche to take the ration-control cards to Seoul, he’d be able to travel on the Blue Train pretty much at will. I had to assume that he could be dangerous. Very dangerous.