Nightmare Range (20 page)

I found Ernie with one of the Lucky Seven waitresses who lived in the same complex of hooches as Sunny. He came wide awake when he saw me.

“What is it?”

“Singletery. He identified the guy called Smoke.”

Ernie shoved back the silk comforter. “That’s good, isn’t it?”

“Very good. But according to his phone message, the guy called Smoke has identified him too.”

“He knows Singletery’s our snitch.”

“You got it.”

Ernie sprang to his feet and started searching for his pants. The waitress sleeping on the mat next to him pulled the comforter over her head and groaned. In about a minute, Ernie was dressed and we were outside and striding through the narrow lanes of Itaewon.

“You bring your forty-five?” Ernie asked.

“Got it,” I said, patting the shoulder holster beneath my nylon jacket.

“Do we have time to get mine?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Okay.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out his brass knuckles. “At least I got these.”

Camp Pelham looked deserted. The MP at the gate emerged from the guard shack and said, “They’re on move-out alert.”

“Where’d they go?” Ernie asked.

The MP frowned. I pulled out my CID badge. “We’re on a case,” I said, “involving one of the guys in Charlie Battery.”

“Across Freedom Bridge,” the MP said. “That’s all I know.”

We thanked him and Ernie turned the jeep around. The village of Sonyu-ri looked deserted too, as did the compound at RC-4. No GIs to spend money, no business, no activity.

At the approach to Freedom Bridge we were waved to halt by another MP. This one wore a heavy parka with a fur-lined hood. The wind blew cold off the Imjin River. I showed him my identification.

“We’re looking for the Second of the Seventeenth Field Artillery,” I told him, “particularly Charlie Battery.”

“They’re all together,” he told us. “Turn right after Camp Greaves and follow the road back to the river. You’ll find them about four klicks upstream at Dragon Tail Canyon. That’s where they’re conducting the bridge-crossing exercise.” We started to roll away and he shouted, “Better hurry or they’ll be south of the river before you get there.”

We veered onto the wooden roadway, gigantic iron struts looming above us. Every few yards an armed American MP, wearing gloves and winter gear, stood guard watching the vehicles rolling slowly past him and searching below for any attempt at sabotage. The churning Imjin flowed rapidly, an occasional chunk of mountain ice crashing into the huge cement stanchions below.

On the far side, a long line of military vehicles, both Korean and US, waited to cross the river. We sped past them on the two-lane highway and soon Camp Greaves was on our right. Then the road divided. If we went left we’d continue north to Camp Kitty Hawk and the truce village of Panmunjom, which sat smack dab in the middle of the Demilitarized Zone. Instead we turned right, as the MP had advised. After about ten minutes the road swerved south and once again we could see the rapidly flowing waters of the Imjin.

The river was narrower here at Dragon Tail Canyon and therefore moving faster. The banks on this side were low and sandy, like a beach, but on the far side loomed three- or four-story high red bluffs. Already, the river crossing exercise had begun. Huge pontoons held flat wooden barges, large enough to hold two deuce-and-a-half ton trucks along with two 105mm howitzers. The guns and their crews were aboard the low-lying craft and
being propelled forward by huge outboard engines. As powerful as the engines were and as much smoke as they were giving off, they still could not propel the barge straight across the river. The current was so strong that the barges were being swept about a half-mile downriver, where they abutted a wooden quay. They hit there with a heavy bump, then were tied up by another crew so the guns and the trucks could drive off onto dry land.

“Combat engineers,” Ernie said.

The same unit I’d seen running PT outside of their compound on RC-4. Upstream a thick bank of fog was rolling in like a huge cloud of mist.

“Our visibility won’t last long,” I said. “Do you see Charlie Battery?”

“Over there. They’re about to load up.”

“Come on.”

Ernie drove the jeep down a narrow dirt road that led to the beach. He pulled up in a cloud of dust. I spotted Sergeant Singletery’s huge hunched shoulders and his bow legs. “Over there.”

We climbed out of the jeep and trotted toward Singletery. He was supervising the loading of the last of Charlie Battery’s howitzers onto the last barge.

“Chief of Smoke,” I said.

He turned, startled. “About time,” he said, grinning.

“We came as soon as I got your message.”

He stood with his hands on his hips, facing us. “I was thinking about what you said. About three guys, about one of them called ‘Smoke,’ about them maybe wanting to brag about what they did and maybe wanting to do it again. I asked around. It ain’t just Chiefs of Firing Batteries.”

“What isn’t?”

“They ain’t the only ones called ‘Smoke.’ ”

“Who else?”

Singletery turned and nodded toward the barge. A crewman had thrown off the last heavy line. “Them,” Singletery said. “Come on.”

We didn’t have time to discuss it further. It was the last barge and it was leaving. Signletery trotted onto the quay and we followed. When the barge was about a yard from the end and floating free, the three of us leapt aboard.

The fog upstream was even closer, engulfing us like a giant nightmare.

“So who else is called ‘Smoke’?” I asked.

Singletery turned and, as if to answer my question, stared down at the far end of the barge. Three men stood there, three combat engineers. Next to them was a huge contraption that looked like an electrical generator with some sort of tubing attached, like a short-barreled mortar. As we stared at the men, one of them aimed the tubing at us.

“Is he gonna fire that thing?” Ernie asked.

“It don’t fire,” Singletery said.

“Then what the hell is it?”

Before he could answer, the full force of the bank of fog slid silently over the barge. Within seconds it swallowed up the wooden planking and the canvas-covered trucks and the glistening metal barrels of the 105mm howitzers. We were enveloped in darkness.

“We better get ’em,” Singletery said, “before they start that thing up.”

“What is it?” I asked but already he was moving away from us, just a dark shadow in the mist. I grabbed Ernie’s elbow and pulled him forward and together we followed Sergeant Singletery and then, before we could reach the end of the barge, we heard an engine coughing, choking, and then starting to life—and then roaring.

“Shit,” Singletery said. He stopped abruptly and we bumped into him.

“Gas!” he shouted.

All around us we could hear artillerymen popping open canvas holders and scrambling to pull out rubber protective masks, yanking them over their heads, adjusting the straps, blowing out
forcefully to clear the air inside, and then lowering the protective rubber hood over their shoulders.

And then we saw it, dark and black and menacing. Smoke. Tons of it, roiling out of that metal tubing we’d seen a few seconds ago. CS—better known to the civilian world as tear gas.

“Come on.”

Ernie and I ran to the upstream side of the barge, toward the thickening fog, groping blindly. At least most of the tear gas was being swept south by the prevailing winds, which whistled loudly out of North Korea, following the southerly flow of the current.

“If that shit gets in our eyes,” Ernie said, “we’ll be helpless.”

“Blind, maybe,” I said, “but not helpless.” I pulled out my .45.

We’d both experienced CS gas before. It’s part of every soldier’s basic training; to step into a gas filled tent, take off your protective mask, recite your service number backward, and be shoved outside coughing and spitting by your Drill Sergeant.

We stood in the fog behind the lead truck on the barge. Ernie whispered in my ear, “They’re on the far side of the truck, next to that thing spitting out the gas. As soon as we hit land, they’ll skedaddle.”

“So we wait here,” I said. “When we land and this freaking gas clears, Singletery tells us who they are and we make the arrest.”

Ernie was about to say something when we heard a scream, then cursing, men grunting and the sound of bodies flailing against metal.

“Singletery,” I said.

We rushed around the front bumper of the truck. As soon as we stepped past the truck, the gas hit us. I kept my eyes closed, popping them open briefly and trying not to breathe. Amidst the fog and the pumping CS gas, I could see only shadows. Ernie surged forward, swinging at phantoms with his brass knuckles. I tried to aim my .45. A hunch-shouldered figure that I took to be Singletery was struggling with two of the combat engineers, the men I suspected had raped Sunny. Ernie had found the third and
was holding him in a headlock and punching his face with the brass knuckles. Singletery staggered backward. It looked to me as if someone had ripped off his protective mask. I saw the hood go flying off the edge of the barge.

My eyes burned with pain. Tears flooded out of them, so fast I couldn’t see. I knew the worst thing you could do when under assault by CS gas is to wipe your eyes because that just makes them burn worse. But if I couldn’t see, I couldn’t fire. Using my sleeve I bent and wiped moisture from by eyes. Then, with an act of will, I opened them as wide as I could and through the fog and the gas I took aim with the .45 and fired at the two men assaulting Sergeant Singletery.

I didn’t mean to hit them, I only wanted to scare them, but it was too late. They’d finally managed to shove the huge man off his center of gravity. As I fired, he reeled, waving his arms in the air, and tilted backward. He fell away, tumbling off the end of the barge. The sickening sound of a splash hit my ears.

I fired again, this time aiming to kill. I hit something and the two men went down.

“Don’t move,” I shouted. “I’ll blow your heads off!”

The man wrestling with Ernie lay flat on the deck. Ernie backed away, staggering toward the two-and-a-half ton truck. When he was next to me, he knelt on the wooden deck. Down the barge I heard men shouting, their voices muffled by their protective masks. “Man overboard!”

There was no rescue craft that I knew of, and no Coast Guard to notify. What I did know was that the waters of the Imjin were freezing and the current not only flowed quickly but was also known for its treacherous undertows.

Ernie crawled toward the machine spewing out the gas and pawed at the controls. Somehow, he managed to get it turned off. A couple of minutes later we bumped against the quay on the opposite bank and the air started to clear, the gas and the fog flowing swiftly downriver. Although my eyes were watering way too much for me to read it, I managed to recite from memory a
prisoner’s rights from the Uniform Code of Military Justice to the three men lying motionless on the deck.

A search was launched for Singletery. They spent two days looking for him. His body was never recovered. At 8th Army JAG, murder was added to the long list of charges against the three combat engineers.

Two months later Ernie drove his jeep and I rode shotgun, literally. I held an M-16 rifle across my chest while in the back seat sat a representative from 8th Army Finance. He carried a leather briefcase with a combination lock on it.

Mei-lan Burkewalder had long since lost her ration control privileges and her command sponsorship. This meant that she no longer received the cost-of-living housing allowance, which was apparent as Ernie drove us down bumpy lanes, splashing through mud, honking his horn at the crowds of taffy vendors and trash dealers and old ladies holding huge bundles of laundry atop their heads. Finally, we found the address: painted on a grease stained board: 21
bon-ji
, 37
ho
, in the Mapo district of Seoul. Ernie parked the jeep against a moss covered brick wall and we climbed out and tromped through the mud toward the splintered wooden gate. I pounded and we waited.

Mei-lan Burkewalder opened the gate herself. Her face was wan and gray, with no hint of makeup. The bracelets that used to dangle from her forearms were also gone. She didn’t bother to invite us into her hooch. She just let us into the courtyard and sat on the narrow wooden porch that ran in front of the sliding oil-papered doors. The guy from 8th Army Finance sat next to her. He unlocked the briefcase, pulled out a sheaf of paperwork, read it to her and asked if she understood. She nodded.

“Would you say that out loud please,” he said, “in front of these witnesses.”

He nodded toward Ernie and me.

“I understand,” she said.

Then he handed her a pen and she signed the paperwork. He
kept the top white copy and the yellow copy, which was for her husband’s pay and earnings folder, and handed her the bottom pink copy.

Captain Irwin Burkewalder had been killed in action while on combat operations in a support role with the 2nd Ranger Group near Pleiku. Word had come down about a week ago. Mrs. Mei-lan Burkewalder had been notified and now, as spousal beneficiary, she was receiving her ten thousand dollar payout from Serviceman’s Group Life Insurance. The finance guy pulled the money out of the briefcase and counted the twenty dollar notes out in front of her. They made an impressive pile. Then he handed her some paper bands and let her bundle them up. She fumbled the job. He helped her finish.