Who those enemies were, I wasn’t quite sure yet. At times it seemed like everyone was.
The phone rang. Staff Sergeant Riley picked it up. He identified himself and listened for a while, saying, “Will do” two or three times. He hung up.
“Sueno!” he yelled, although I was just a few feet from him. “Bascom! You two are to get your sorry butts out to the ROK Army headquarters right now. Report to Major Rhee. While you’ve been sitting on your sorry asses, someone in this man’s army has been doing some work.”
“What’ve they got?” I asked.
“What’ve they got? They’re just about to bust this case wide open. Get over there now. They want the Eighth Army to witness this historic moment in joint ROK/US law enforcement.”
“They got him?” Ernie said.
“How the hell should I know? But a big task force is moving out. Be there or be square. Move out sharply! Hubba hubba!”
Ernie and I shrugged on our coats. On the way out, Ernie flipped Riley the bird.
Even though she was wearing ROK Army fatigues, Major Rhee Mi-sook looked smashing. The baggy uniform had been tailored to accentuate the roundness of her hips and the smallness of her waist. Raven black hair had been piled atop her head and pinned beneath a camouflage cap.
“You’re late,” she said.
A row of six ROK MP jeeps followed by an armored personnel carrier were lined up in front of the brick ROK Army headquarters. Like the 8th Army headquarters down the street, the entire complex had been built by the Japanese Imperial Army before World War II, but you didn’t mention that around here, or you were liable to get your butt kicked.
“Why’d you wait for us?” I asked Major Rhee.
She studied me quietly for a moment, and then Ernie, letting us take in the full magnificence of her unblemished oval face and the full pouting redness of her lips. Her black eyes were full of hatred, or love, I wasn’t sure which. With her, there might not have been much difference.
“We need Americans,” she said finally. “We always need Americans. Just follow,” she told us. “Don’t do anything. Stay out of the way and watch.”
Without waiting for a reply, she performed a smart about-face. On the way back to the lead jeep, she raised her right arm and circled her pointed forefinger in the air. All the jeeps and the armored personnel carrier fired up their engines. Ernie and I scurried to our jeep and followed the convoy out the main gate into the busy midday Seoul traffic. When we reached the Samgak-ji Circle, the convoy bulled through all the kimchi cabs and the three-wheeled pickup trucks piled high with garlic or shimmering green cabbage and backed up traffic for a quarter mile.
As we drove, I tried to calm the revulsion in my gut at seeing Major Rhee. In North Korea, working as a double agent, her mission had been to hunt me down. She done so and then she’d tortured me, seeming to greatly enjoy her work. If I hadn’t been rescued by the Manchurian Brigade, she would’ve forced me to make a phony confession and might’ve even had me executed as a capitalist spy. I couldn’t forget these things, especially the way her eyes had glazed over as I’d screamed in agony.
She was wearing the uniform of a South Korean officer now, performing important work for the South Korean brass. I was supposed to forget what she’d done up north, that was all part of the spy game they told me, but I still saw her as the serpent in the garden, gorgeous but deadly.
Ernie, as usual, brought my thoughts back to sordid reality.
“So did you get any of that?”
“What? You mean when I was in North Korea?”
He shrugged. “Whenever.”
“No time.”
“But you have time now.”
I shuddered. “She’s not interested in me, not in that way.”
Ernie barked a laugh. “Are you kidding? She looks at you like a python looks at a rat.”
I’m not sure why but that made me even more uncomfortable than I was already. I decided not to think about Major Rhee Mi-sook gobbling me up, which was hard for a minute, until the convoy swerved away from the main road and took a left up a steep incline. This road was much narrower. The few cabs and wooden pushcarts traveling downhill were forced to pull over and press themselves up against open shops and brick walls to get out of the way. Clumps of pedestrians stopped what they were doing and stared at the massively armed convoy trundling past. Old women wearing short blouses with long ribbons and flowing skirts balanced huge bundles of laundry atop their heads and gawked. They’d seen military convoys before, plenty of them, but they’d never seen a woman-and such an eye-catching woman-in the lead jeep.
We walked along the edge of the slope for about a half mile until we reached a straight stretch of road with a cement retaining wall on the left and a ledge overlooking the western edge of the city. Major Rhee ordered a halt. Armed men hopped out of the armored personnel carrier, all of them holding M-16 rifles. Commands were barked. At either end of the retaining wall were broad stone steps. One squad of soldiers climbed the stairs on the left, the other the stairs on the right. Major Rhee motioned for us to follow. As the soldiers trotted ahead of us, Major Rhee hurried to keep up. We stayed right with her.
At the top of the ridge, there were no more paved roads, just an endless shanty town that had been there probably since the end of the Korean War. The soldiers filed through narrow pedestrian lanes, passing crowded hooches, most of them made of plaster and rotted boards. Toddlers without pants were gently shoved out of the way, chickens squawked, and women squatted in front of huge plastic pans, looking up startled from their chopping of turnips or shelling of peas.
Finally, we came to a halt at a small intersection, at the center of which sat a weathered oak with colored pieces of paper and folded notes attached to it for good luck. Major Rhee spoke to the sergeants in charge of the two squads, pointed down one particularly narrow alley and then walked back to us.
As she approached, she pulled a.45 automatic pistol out of her black leather shoulder holster. She ratcheted back the charging handle, letting it slide forward with a clang. “I’m going in first,” she said. “Would you care to come along?”
“We’re not armed,” I said.
She smiled a lethal smile. “Don’t you trust me to protect you?”
The answer was no, but I didn’t say it. Instead, I held out my open palm and said, “Lead on.”
She turned and stepped into the narrow alley.
The soldiers fanned out into parallel lanes as Ernie and I followed Major Rhee down the center pathway. Overhanging thatched roofs closed in above us, and soon we were stumbling through mud, groping forward in the dark, swatting at spider webs. When we reached another narrow intersection, Major Rhee crouched.
She waited until I crouched next to her, and then she pointed at a wooden gate that looked like it was about to fall off its hinges. Chunks of plaster had crumbled away to expose brick beneath the wall, which was topped with shards of broken glass to ward off thieves. Major Rhee Mi-sook rose and walked toward the gate. At either end of the passageway, ROK Army soldiers waited, weapons poised. I expected there were more troops in back of the hooch, although we were not in position to see them.
Holding her pistol pointed toward the sky, Major Rhee grabbed the string that worked as a pulley to unlock the gate. Metal rattled, but the door didn’t open. She motioned with her free hand and two soldiers approached holding a heavy wooden log with iron handles, their rifles strapped behind their backs. She stepped back and, on the whispered count of “hana, tul, seit,” the soldiers swung the battering ram forward.