Or was I all wrong about this? Even if I was right, maybe our tunnels were just in the contingency planning stages, only on paper. But contingency or not, the North Koreans would certainly want to know. And when someone with Shipton’s training deserted his post and was wanted for murder, how difficult would it be to recruit him as an informant?
Maybe that’s why the South Koreans hadn’t told us anything. They wanted to capture Shipton themselves, interrogate him using their persuasive methods, then work backward to his controller and maybe to other North Korean agents. If they let the U.S. in on it, we’d demand he be turned over to us right away. And because we paid most of their defense bills, they’d be under tremendous pressure to comply. But if they kept the whole thing secret, we’d think that Shipton was nothing more than another guy gone native. We wouldn’t worry about him. Even if we never heard from him again.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe there was a simpler explanation for all this. But in my gut I didn’t think so.
When Cecil Whitcomb had stumbled into Bo Shipton that night, both of them stealing at the 8th Army J-2 building, he’d stumbled into a secret war that would mean life or death for millions of people. And, by doing so, he’d signed his own death warrant.
At Camp Henry I went straight to the PX. The manager and the secretary, Miss Chong, showed me the data card. It was the right number. Maxed out on the ration.
“But we got a call from the MP’s,” Miss Chong said. “After I talked to you on the phone. Apparently this person went over to the commissary using the same ration control plate and the same identification card.”
“What happened?”
“The ID card checker noticed that the photo looked as if it had been tampered with. He called the MP’s.”
“And?”
“They arrested him.”
“Arrested him? They’ve got him in custody? And no one was hurt?”
“Hurt? Of course not.” Miss Chong looked indignant.
I would’ve bet that taking Shipton down would’ve caused a slaughter.
“Where is he now?”
“At the MP Station.” She pointed. “One block down. On your left.”
I ran out the door.
The MP Desk Sergeant was surprised to see a guy toting a canvas bag and all out of breath burst into his office. I showed him my badge. “Where’s the guy you arrested at the commissary?”
“With the phony ration control stuff?”
“Right.”
“Back here.”
He led me down the hallway to a holding cell and I peered through the one-way glass.
A chubby buck sergeant in wrinkled fatigues slumped on a wooden bench, his elbows on his knees. His brown hair was cut short and a narrow mustache drooped from his round nose.
“This is the guy?” I asked.
“That’s him,” the Desk Sergeant said proudly. “Caught him red-handed.”
A wave of nausea rumbled through my gut. For a minute I thought I was going to throw up but I fought back the feeling. The head of the buck sergeant lolled listlessly from his shoulders.
He wasn’t Bo Shipton. He wasn’t even close.
36
The guy reminded me of an overweight chipmunk. He kept rubbing his hands and wouldn’t make eye contact with anybody; really ashamed of what he had done.
“I thought it would be easy money,” he whined. “I’d seen the guy around compound once or twice, couple of months ago. He asked me where I worked and we shot the breeze, but this morning he sits down with me at the snack bar and shows me this ration control card and asks me if it looks like the real thing. It did. So he tells me I can have it. Cheap. I tell him it won’t do me any good without a phony ID card. So he pulls one out and shows me how the plastic is already slit and I can slip my photo right in there. So I ask him how much and he says a hundred bucks, but I can tell he’s in a real hurry so I get him down to forty and I figure I have a pretty good buy.”
“You did,” I said. “But you should’ve had the ID card relaminated.”
“Yeah. Now you tell me.”
“Did this guy give you his name?”
“No. Just a passing acquaintance, you know? Said, ‘hey,’ya know?”
“You saw him in the snack bar a few times? Anywhere else?”
“On the shuttle bus going to Camp Walker. In the PX.” He shrugged.
“What’d he tell you? Was he retired? Active duty? Civilian? What?”
“He didn’t say. I just figured he was on leave.”
I pulled out the photograph. “Is this him?”
The buck sergeant took it with the tips of his fingers. “That’s him,” he said sadly.
I snatched the photo back. “Did he say where he was going?”
“No.”
“Did he hang out with anybody around here?”
“Not that I know of.”
I slipped the photo in my wallet and stood up to leave. The guy looked at me, his big brown eyes starting to water. “Say, how much trouble am I in?”
I said, “Enough to fuck up your whole career.”
His mustache drooped all the way to his knees.
“I was afraid you were going to say that.”
For some reason Shipton had tried to draw me to Taegu. Was it to pull me away from Pusan, or to keep me away from Seoul? Or was it for some other reason altogether?
Or was it so he could lure me into a secluded spot and slice me up like he’d done Whitcomb and Miss Ku and the Nurse? And the two lovers before them.
One thing was for sure: there was no sense chasing ration control numbers all over the country anymore. Shipton had probably sold them all off, scattering them to the wind like a flock of pheasants exploding from a bush.
He knew I was following. Maybe he’d had a scare on Texas Street. After all, we’d been right on his heels, hadn’t missed him by much on the Kitty Hawk. But he’d be more cautious now. He’d be a lot harder to catch.
The First Sergeant was probably right. I needed the resources we could pull together in Seoul. Now that Shipton was onto us, I could no longer do this alone.
Bo Shipton was trying to manipulate me. The best way to avoid that was to go back to what he was after. Secrets. Classified information. All the black-marketing stuff was just to make money to support his operations.
Had the Kitty Hawk been his last big score? Would he disappear for good now, his mission accomplished?
I didn’t think so. If it was, I didn’t think he would’ve murdered Miss Ku. Instead, he would’ve run to Pusan, stolen what he wanted, and vanished. If Miss Ku had given us information, he would’ve been gone before it did us any good.
Of course, I was assuming he was still rational. Which maybe he wasn’t. After all, he’d had no good reason to kill the Nurse. He killed her just to warn me off. Or was there maybe another reason she had to die? One I hadn’t thought of yet?
It took two hours for me to interrogate the buck sergeant the Camp Henry MP’s had arrested and write up my report. The sun was just going down and I was half starved when I stopped in the NCO Club and had half a chicken and a mess of greasy french fries. Afterward, I wandered toward the front gate.
It was nice here. The rain and snow had stopped. The wind had died down. The sky was clearer than in Seoul. The moon and stars blinked at me between banks of drifting clouds.
At the pedestrian exit an MP stopped me and checked my ID card. After he glanced at it, I showed him Shipton’s photo.
“Do you recognize this guy?”
He shook his head and stepped past me to check the trunk of a PX taxi that was leaving compound.
Black market. Eighth Army was so preoccupied with it that we let all the big stuff slide.
Outside the compound, four cabs sat in front of the cement block walls. I told the driver of the first one to take me to Mikun piheing chang. The American army airfield.
Thirty minutes later I had bummed a ride in a helicopter heading north. We floated through billowing gray clouds and gathering dusk. After forty-five minutes, I lifted the visor on my helmet. Lights sparkled in the distance.