I was exhausted. But the memory of Whitcomb’s blood-drained body was keeping me going. That, and the fear of what could happen if we didn’t come up with a culprit, and come up with one soon.
The coffee went down warm and harsh in my throat. I swallowed and set the mug down.
“Maybe we should interview the rest of those guys in the British Honor Guard like the First Sergeant said.”
“Hell with him,” Ernie said. “We start doing everything Top tells us to and he’ll lose respect for us.”
“But the Korean National Police want those reports too. And it takes time to translate them.”
“They already have the important ones.”
We had given a synopsis of what we had found, which wasn’t much, to Riley, who had sent it on to the KNP Liaison Officer.
A couple of Korean women, probably dependent wives, sat at a table near us. Both were attractive. One had long hair and eyes so wide she looked as if she’d paid for an operation to remove the fold of skin above her eyelid. It was supposed to make her look more American. Actually, it just made her look as if she’d taken a terminal hit of methamphetamine.
Ernie stirred his coffee, sipped on it, and gazed at them through the steam. As his glasses fogged up, both women giggled.
I thought of what we had so far. There seemed to be four possibilities.
Ernie listened and occasionally nodded as I ticked them off.
One was that Whitcomb had broken into 8th Army J-2 because he was after classified information. If that was the case, he could’ve been killed by almost anybody-either an agent from Communist North Korea or a counterintelligence agent from our side, or the Korean CIA, or by a middleman in a dispute over payment.
Spying was a growth industry in Korea.
Since the Korean War ended over twenty years ago, the country had been divided by a brutal gash across the center of the peninsula known as the DMZ-the Demilitarized Zone.
On one side sat the South Koreans, officially known as the Republic of Korea, and on the other sat the Communist North Koreans, officially designated as the People’s Republic of Korea. Both republics claimed title to the entire country.
The People’s Army of the Communist regime to the north was over 700,000 men strong, backed up with heavy armor and artillery provided by the Chinese and the Soviet Union.
Their largest artillery pieces were emplaced only thirty miles north of Seoul, the capital of South Korea. The North Korean guns were capable of firing shells into the city itself. North Korean aircraft could drop bombs on the downtown business district within two minutes of the first warning of their approach.
Meanwhile, the South Koreans hadn’t been sitting on their hands, waiting for the big bad North Koreans to come south and gobble them up. Their army was over 450,000 strong. Every able-bodied man was drafted into service at the age of twenty, and their soldiers were amongst the toughest and best trained in the world.
Between these two snarling dragons sat the 30,000 GI’s of the United States 2nd Infantry Division. They were the trip-wire. If the North Koreans ever invaded, their heavily armored legions would slaughter the outgunned and out-manned Americans of the 2nd Division. It was planned that way. Casualties would provide the U.S. President with the ideal pretext to fly in more troops to help defend South Korea from the Communist hordes.
When I’d first arrived in-country, a colonel delivered an orientation speech which summed up the situation we were facing. If war ever broke out again in Korea, he told us, United States soldiers would be involved in the most brutal conflict they’ve seen since the founding of our nation.
In a tribute to how things change, the poets of ancient China had once referred to Korea as the Land of the Morning Calm.
Did the Communist North Koreans send spies into South Korea? By the truckload. One commando raid had actually reached the grounds of the Presidential Mansion in Seoul.
The spies came in by land, across the DMZ through barbed wire and mine fields; by sea, along the rocky coastline of the Korean peninsula; or by air, with phony passports via Japan.
Still, Cecil Whitcomb being a spy for the Communist North Koreans didn’t seem likely. If he was really playing with fire and going after classified documents, why would he have stolen a typewriter and stashed it in his locker? Petty thievery wouldn’t pay much and would only bring unwanted heat. Meanwhile, the North Koreans would be paying him big bucks.
It didn’t make sense.
There had to be something else happening here.
The second possibility was that Miss Ku was exactly what she seemed to be. A woman in love who’d been wronged and decided to hire somebody to exact her revenge.
That made’ some sense when you considered the murder site. Whoever had taken out Whitcomb was a pro. The meeting spot was right in the heart of Seoul, a seemingly safe place for a rendezvous, and yet, because of the layout of the buildings, it was actually quite isolated from prying eyes. Someone had carefully selected it.
Also, Whitcomb had not been very effective in fighting back. He had been stabbed cleanly under the sternum and into the heart. A swift, deft move delivered by an expert.
And he had received many light cuts on the arm. Whoever had assaulted him had been so sure of their abilities that they’d toyed with him before killing him. That didn’t seem very professional, but I suppose some professionals enjoy their work.
Afterward, the money in his wallet had been removed, but that could’ve been done just to make it appear that the murder was a common robbery.
Option number two didn’t appeal to me much. Miss Ku had seemed like a determined young woman. If she wanted to take revenge on Whitcomb she would’ve done it herself. Korean women are bold. When they feel they’ve been wronged, they will attack a man in public, challenge him toe to toe, dare him to hit them, and physically fight if it comes to that. Of course, it’s a great loss of face for the man. And if he beats the hell out of her, he loses even more face. That’s how Miss Ku would’ve gone after Whitcomb.
Maybe.
The third possibility was that it was a random killing perpetrated by a thief who spotted a foreigner in downtown Seoul, attacked him, and stole his money.
Two things argued against that.
First, why would anybody have gone to the trouble of sending Miss Ku to hire us to entice Whitcomb to go to the Namdaemun area? Street thieves prowl likely areas looking for random victims. They don’t make elaborate plans to entice their victims to certain spots.
Second, if it were a common thief, the Korean National Police probably would’ve cracked the case already. And so far they had no more than we did. In a high profile case like this you can bet they’ve already rounded up the known muggers and questioned them thoroughly. The KNP interrogation methods are extremely effective. They don’t have to worry about civil liberties. As long as the guy lives through the interview, the KNP’s are safe from criticism.
It was the last possibility that seemed most likely to me.
When Whitcomb became a freelance thief on Yong-san Compound he’d elbowed into someone else’s territory. He didn’t know it, but it was a territory that had been extremely well-organized for decades.
Ernie nodded as I spoke.
“The slicky boys,” he said.
“Exactly.” I leaned forward. “Think about the bruises that Terrance Randall told us Whitcomb had on his legs.”
“They tried to discipline him?”
“Right. And when he kept it up, the slicky boys hired Miss Ku, used her to dupe you and me into giving Whitcomb that note, then killed him when he showed up in Namdaemun.”
Ernie sipped on his coffee, set it down. He shook his head. “I don’t like it.”