Nam began to lead a progressively more dissolute life, convincing even his family that he’d fallen on hard times and was spiraling downhill fast into drink and despair. Kill had several operatives keeping an eye on him, and they said that Nam was playing his part so well that he might become the first Korean Oscar-winner.
Commander Ku eventually nibbled. Not directly, but via one of his men.
Nam was beaten to a pulp.
It was Officer Oh, or Miss Pei, who found him facedown in the mud in a back alley. The man who’d done the beating had been waiting for her. As “Miss Pei” knelt in her high heels to help Nam up, the huge thug stepped out of the shadows. She reached for the knife that she kept in her purse.
Instead of attacking her, the man simply pointed at Nam and said, “Saturday at midnight. Tell him to be at the Sejong Inn in Munsan. If he’s not there, we’ll come looking for him. It won’t be good.”
With that, the man tromped away into the darkest part of the alley, splashing mud on Miss Pei’s nylons.
– 36-
I’d been brushing up on tactical missiles.
When I asked Strange about it, he just about had a heart attack.
“Do you realize how highly classified that information is?” he asked. His empty cigarette holder bobbed on his moist lips. “It’s Top Secret Crypto-freaking-zipto. As high as you can get, then a little higher. You can’t be messing with that.”
“Why not?”
We were sitting at our usual table in the crowded 8th Army Snack Bar. He leaned in closer. “The word is, we’ve equipped some of those missiles with nuclear warheads, just to show those North Korean Commies who’s boss.”
“All of them, or just some of them?”
He sat up straight. “How would I know? When a document like that comes through my distribution cage, it’s hand-carried by an officer of at least captain’s rank or higher.”
“You don’t get a chance to peek?”
“Nope. And no desire to peek,” he added. “I like living here and not in a cozy cell in Fort Leavenworth.”
“You got something against Kansas?” Ernie asked.
“A lot of things,” Strange replied.
“Like what?” Ernie asked.
“Like it’s cold and then it’s hot, and the land’s too flat, and there are too many agricultural misdemeanors.”
“‘Agricultural misdemeanors?’”
“Farm boys chasing livestock.”
I sipped on cold coffee and set the mug back down. “Would Captain Blood have had access to information about the missiles?”
“At the Five Oh First?” Strange thought about it. “No way. They’re counter-intel. They wouldn’t have a need-to-know.”
“What if they claimed someone was haunting the installations that housed the missiles?”
“Still no need-to-know,” Strange replied. “Whether or not the missiles were nuclear-tipped wouldn’t be their concern.”
“So if Blood wanted to get that information, how would he go about it?”
“He’d have to talk to someone in the missile command. Someone with rank. Or . . .”
“Or what?”
“One of the silly-vilian technicians at Raytheon might be able to clue him in.”
This confirmed my earlier suspicions. “How much do they know?”
“They’re the ones who hook up the wires and check the fuse boxes and whatever in the hell else. Without them, nothing ignites, nothing flies, and nothing goes kaboom.”
I paid for Strange’s hot chocolate. We must’ve really shaken him, because we managed to leave before he asked if we’d had any strange lately.
The Raytheon technicians were mostly middle-aged men. Ernie and I were too young, and our hair too short, to be believable as veteran electronics workers. We brainstormed candidates for the role and finally found the perfect one right under our noses: Staff Sergeant Riley.
When we first proposed it to him, he said he was way too busy and besides, he had a date on Saturday night.
“A date with a bottle of Old Overwart?” Ernie asked.
“And a dolly to pour,” Riley replied.
“Tell her to take a rain check.”
“I don’t have any way to call her. She doesn’t own a phone.”
“So who does? When she arrives at Gate Five and you don’t show, she’ll get the message.”
“If I stand her up, I might never see her again.”
“A great loss for romance.”
Riley thought it over and finally said, “Fine. What do you want me to do?”
By the time we turned Riley over to Nam, he was drunk. They made quite a pair: Sergeant Riley in civvies, a coat and tie, stumbling half-looped through a narrow Munsan alleyway, and former real estate magnate Mr. Nam still hurting from the beating he’d taken at KNP headquarters, wobbling just as badly, but a lot less fluidly.
Mr. Kill had decided that we couldn’t afford to risk exposing the operation by posting officers nearby.
“North Korean operatives are well-trained and very disciplined,” Kill told us. “Commander Ku will probably have the Sejong Inn staked out for at least two days before the meeting. Anything suspicious and they’ll abort.”
“How will they react to Nam bringing an unknown American to the meeting?”
“If nothing else spooks them, they’ll be curious. They know Nam is on the take and desperate for money. They might figure he’s trying to speed up negotiations so he can get his hands on quick cash.”
“Maybe.”
“It’s risky. But we have to force Commander Ku to commit quickly. If we give him too much time to think, he might back away.”
The Sejong Inn was well chosen. First of all, Munsan was about forty kilometers northwest of Seoul, just a couple of miles from the North Korean border. The inn itself sat in the center of a labyrinth of tiny hooches in a dirt-poor section of the town, with a dozen narrow pedestrian alleyways running off in every direction like the legs of a monstrous spider. About an hour before midnight, as Riley and Mr. Nam staggered their way through the unlit lanes, we sat with Mr. Kill in the Munsan Police Station, studying a map and outlining possible escape routes.
“In order not to frighten him away, we had to keep our forces very far back,” Kill said. “Should he flee, Ku will be able to escape fairly easily.”
“Unless we get lucky,” Ernie said. “One of your roving police cars might spot him.”
“They might. The problem is, we don’t know what he looks like.”
Ernie nodded. “How long do you figure this meeting will take?”
“No more than a half-hour. I told Nam that if it takes longer than that, he can expect us to come in.”
“Why only a half-hour?” Ernie asked.
“Commander Ku will come straight to the point. He’ll want to find out what information they’re offering, and once he knows that, he’ll offer a sum. They’ll either agree to the deal or they won’t.”
“If they don’t?”
Mr. Kill shook his head. “He’ll kill them.”
I leaned forward on the wooden bench, putting my elbows on my knees. “You’ve known the North Koreans to operate that way before?”
Kill nodded grimly. “But Nam knows too. He’ll agree to whatever Commander Ku offers. He might try to wheedle a little more out of him for show, but he’ll agree.”
I suddenly felt guilty about pressuring Staff Sergeant Riley into taking this assignment. But we’d prepped him with some buzzwords that missile technicians might use: radiation casing, booster gas canister, high explosive lens, tritium and deuterium. If they asked him to explain the more technical aspects, he’d play cagey and pretend not to want to reveal too much classified data until the money was forthcoming. Drunk and greedy wasn’t too much of a stretch for Riley. And he’d promise to provide not only the wiring diagrams the techs used, but also their schedule of maintenance visits, which compounds they were going to visit first and how long they’d be there. All this had been faked, of course, but we were hoping that the North Koreans would believe that they could use the information to pinpoint the location of any missiles equipped with something other than conventional warheads.