Mortal Allies

CHAPTER 2

Corporal Vasquez flapped his arms and chewed on his lips as he inspected the big pockmarks on the car’s roof, and I felt sorry for him as I yanked my gear out of the trunk. He was no doubt scared witless about how he was going to explain those ugly dimples to the motor pool sergeant who’d loaned him the car. If you know anything about Army sergeants, you’ll understand.

I walked through the entry into the Dragon Hill Lodge, a military-owned and -run hotel located smack in the middle of Yongsan Garrison, the military base located in the heart of downtown Seoul. This is where the big cheese headquarters is located.

Captain Wilson, being a good sport, followed me across the cavernous, marble-floored lobby and waited while I checked in. The girl at the desk found my reservation, traded my Visa for a magnetic key, then peered intently into her computer screen and informed me I had a message.

A message already? Wasn’t I the popular guy?

“Kam sam ni da,” I charmingly said, tossing out one of the few Korean phrases from my sparse inventory.

She handed an envelope to me and I tore it open with a finger. The message said I had an appointment to be in the office of the Commander in Chief of the United Nations Command and the Combined Forces Command, at exactly 1500 hours. This was the big cheese himself, a four-star named Martin Spears whom I’d never met, but who was known for being frighteningly smart and painfully demanding.

Fifteen hundred hours is three o’clock to those who don’t talk military, and the word “exactly” was harshly underlined three times, like if I came one minute late, well… there’d be this firing squad thing.

My watch said ten minutes till one. No problem. That left two hours to take a long, relaxing shower, scrub the whiskers off my chin, and get changed out of my plaid Bermuda shorts and sweaty T-shirt and into a fresh uniform. That’s when I remembered my watch was on Bermuda time. I glanced at the clock on the wall: ten minutes till three.

I turned to Wilson. “This note says you’re supposed to have me in the Commander in Chief’s office in ten minutes, or else. I don’t mean to worry you, Chuck, but I sure hope you can get me there in… oops, look! Only nine minutes.”

Poor Wilson’s eyes went wide and his face quivered with fear. He grabbed my duffel, threw it over the counter, clutched my arm, and began tugging me back across the lobby.

We got all the way out the doors before he realized we’d released Vasquez and the sedan. Wilson’s head spun around like a madman’s until he saw a guy climbing into a black taxi about ten yards down. He sprinted over, grabbed the shoulder of the poor soul, and flung him backward.

“Military necessity!” he yelled.

I climbed into the back right behind him and listened patiently as he screamed at the driver to spare no gas. We were down to eight minutes. The hack punched the pedal and we sped out of the parking lot.

The Yongsan Military Garrison is divided into two halves. The side we were on contains mostly housing and support facilities – the hospital, the veterinarian, the grocery store, and such. The two halves are divided by a major intracity artery, and the headquarters for all the military forces in the Korean alliance is located guess where? On the other side, of course.

We got to the gate and could look across the road to the entrance of the other half of Yongsan; only this was where things suddenly looked hopeless. The road was choked with Korean protesters holding up signs, some of which were in English and said pretty despicable things, and some of which were in Hangul, which is the Korean script, and who cared what they said, because what you don’t know don’t hurt you.

Captain Wilson gave me a nice grin as he yelled at the driver, “Gun it! Drive through them!”

“What?” the driver screamed.

Wilson lurched forward and screamed in his ear. “Go! Honk your horn! Drive! Get us across this damn road!”

The driver punched his horn, hit the gas, and we sprang forward through a crowd of Koreans frantically diving every which way.

Somehow, almost miraculously, we made it across without killing anybody. At least, I don’t think we killed anybody, because there were none of those awful crunching sounds you hear when you run something over. I heard three or four bodies slam loudly against the side of the taxi, but hopefully all they got were bruises for their trouble.

I said, “I really wish you hadn’t done that.”

“Huh?”

“That,” I replied, pointing through the rear window. “That was a really bad idea.”

“But you did it. Back at Osan.”

“Where it was entirely different,” I informed him. “We were on military property. This highway belongs to the city of Seoul. Also, those were peaceful protesters, not blood-crazed rioters flinging rocks and Molotov cocktails.”

His eyes got watery. “You mean, I screwed up?”

“You screwed up bad,” I assured him, just as we pulled up to the front entry of the big headquarters building.

As I climbed out, I bent over, looked into his downcast eyes, and said, “Look, you get in trouble, give me a call. I’ll serve as your attorney. Okay? Don’t worry, I hardly ever lose.”

He suddenly grabbed my arm and shook my hand, and was still mumbling pleading things at my back as I walked through the grand entrance of the headquarters. Infantry officers might not have a real high regard for lawyers, but they kiss your ass pretty good when they think they need you.

The full colonel who was obviously the general’s gatekeeper looked up from his desk when I barged in and gave me an instantly disapproving glare. He looked down at my sandals, paused at my plaid shorts, then dwelled speculatively on the letters on the front of my T-shirt, which read “Go Navy, Beat Army.” Poor choice on my part, I suppose. He must’ve been a West Pointer, because that’s when his eyes really caught fire.

“Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

“Major Sean Drummond,” I said. “I just got to the hotel and there was a note at the desk that said if I wasn’t here at 1500 hours, I’d get castrated.”

I grinned stupidly. My wisecrack was supposed to soften the mood, show I was one of the guys, elicit a sympathetic smirk.

Oops. He leaped up and said, “You’ve made it all the way to major and never learned to salute when you report to a senior officer?”

He definitely was a West Pointer, because you can’t ever salute or say “sir” enough to the bully boys from the Hudson.

I whipped off a humdinger of a salute. “Major Sean Drummond, reporting as ordered, sir.”

This seemed to mollify him somewhat. Not a lot; only somewhat. He returned my salute, and hot damn, if it wasn’t more of a humdinger than mine. You could almost hear the air crackle, his hand sliced through it so fast.

“You’re the lawyer, right?” he asked.

“I am a lawyer, sir,” I dutifully confirmed.

“Your co-counsel is already in General Spears’s office.”

“My co-counsel?”

“That’s right,” he said, glancing down at his watch. “Unlike you, she arrived right on time.”

“She?”

“What are you waiting for?” he barked, pointing a long, stern finger at a hand-carved wooden door.

I got the message. I walked over, knocked gently, and entered the office of General Martin Spears, Commander in Chief of every military thing south of the 38th Parallel.

The first thing I saw was the back of the woman who was standing in front of the general’s desk. There was a shock of gleaming dark hair that hung like a shimmering flag all the way to her rump. She was short and slender with wide shoulders. She wore the traditional garb of a female lawyer: a dark blue pinstriped pantsuit cut to look neither sexy nor nonsexy. It didn’t seem compatible with her long hair. She looked like a tiny ballerina who’d gotten her wardrobe mixed up.

Something was disturbingly familiar about her.

Spears tore his piercing eyes off her and targeted them at me. He was a thin, late-middle-aged man with sparse, graying hair, a face like a bloodthirsty Mohawk, and eyes that looked menacing enough to shoot tank rounds at you.

I swiftly marched forward, his eyebrows making me painfully aware how shabbily and inappropriately I was dressed. I hoped that if I did this just right, he might, maybe, hopefully, please God, ignore my attire. I stopped in front of his desk and, inspired by the example of the colonel in the general’s outer sanctum, rocketed my right hand to my right brow so hard I nearly punched a dent in my forehead.

“Major Sean Drummond, reporting as ordered, sir.”

He nodded and then glumly murmured to the woman, “Your co-counsel has arrived.”

She slowly turned her head and I nearly fell out of my chair. Actually, I wasn’t sitting in a chair. But you get the point.

Katherine Carlson had been in my class at Georgetown law school eight years before. Actually, not just in my class, she was first in my class. She was the smartest damn thing anybody ever saw: summa cum laude as an undergrad at Harvard, full scholarship to law school, editor of law review, and – please believe me when I say this – a royal pain in the ass.

If you’ve heard the phrase “made sparks fly,” that understated what happened anytime Katherine and I got within spitting distance of each other. We made trees explode into flames. The law professors hated us. The other students hated us. Hell, even the janitors hated us. They didn’t hate me personally. Or her personally. They hated us.

The whole point of law school is to study, dissect, and discuss issues of the law. Well, that’s what Katherine Carlson and I did. The problems came when we got to that “discuss” part because she and I never, not once, saw eye-to-eye on anything. If you want to know what it was like, think about what kind of philosophical discussion the Easter Bunny and Attila the Hun might have if they sat down to compare lifestyles. Katherine would be the bunny, of course. I wasn’t really Attila, though that’s what she spitefully called me whenever she wanted to get a rise out of me. And when I wanted to taunt her, I called her Moonbeam, because she was so damned liberal she’d fallen off the left edge of the earth.

By the second year of law school, it got so bad the dean actually decreed that Carlson and I weren’t allowed to take any more classes together. Then we weren’t allowed to eat in the school cafeteria together. Then we weren’t allowed to be in the same hallway, then the library, or even the same building together. I heard through the grapevine that halfway through our third year, the faculty committee was making arrangements for one of us to be forcefully transferred to another law school – one far away, like maybe Europe or Asia, where nobody could hear us screaming at each other.

We weren’t just different; we were wildly, inconsolably, antagonistically different. Carlson wasn’t even her real last name. Can you imagine that? It was some half-assed moniker she chose for herself, since her parents weren’t actually married. At least, not married in any traditional sense, like having stood in front of a preacher or a local magistrate. That’s because Katherine’s family thought names, and organized religions, and governments, and laws, were all useless anachronisms. Her parents were sixties flower children who never recovered, who still, to the day we were in law school, lived in one of those preposterous rustic communes in the mountains of Colorado. The name of the commune, I’d once learned, was Carlson. See why I taunted her with the nickname Moonbeam?

I, on the other hand, was sired by a United States Army colonel who slapped his name on my birth certificate the day I was born and made me keep it. He was a career soldier, a shoo-in to make general until he was forced to medically retire after he got shot with a crossbow in the Vietnam War. Where he got shot is something of a delicate subject, but if you really want to know, it was square, dead center, right in the ass. And as for his politics, suffice it to say my father would’ve been a John Bircher except the Birchers are a bit too wimpy and undisciplined for his liking. Plus, my father was never a bigot. That not-a-bigot thing, that was the only thread of liberalism in his entire being.

Spears was now looking at me inquisitively, I guess because my bottom lip was quivering and my eyes were bulging out of my sockets. “Major, I assume you and Miss Carlson are acquainted.”

I somehow choked out, “Uh… we, uh, we know each other.”

She calmly said, “Yes, Martin. I actually went to law school with Attila here.”

My ears winced, not because she’d called me Attila, but because she hadn’t called him General, or General Spears, or sir. She’d called him Martin. When you make your living in the Army, like I do, you can’t imagine generals have first names, except as distinguishing appendages to use on their signature blocks, just in case there is more than one of them and you can’t tell precisely which General Spears you’re dealing with.

Of course, a woman like Katherine Carlson would find military ranks absurd, a loathsome badge of an Orwellian, tyrannical society. That’s the kind of person she was. Please believe me about that.

Spears leaned back in his chair and I could see him staring at the two of us, struggling to sort through what might be happening here.

“Miss Carlson, this is the officer you requested, isn’t it?”

“He definitely is,” she assured him.

“Good. I was hoping we didn’t make a mistake and get the wrong damned Drummond.”

“No, he’s the right damned Drummond,” she mocked.

Then Spears bent forward and his eyes, which were menacing even when they were relaxed, stopped relaxing. “Major, is there a reason you’re dressed that way?”

“Uh, yes sir. Actually, I was in Bermuda, on leave, when I got called by the Pentagon and was ordered to get myself immediately to Andrews Air Force Base to catch a C-141.”

“And you couldn’t change into a uniform between Bermuda and here?”

“Uh, actually, sir, no. See, I didn’t bring any uniforms with me. To Bermuda, that is. Not to worry, though. My legal assistant pre-loaded a duffel bag in the cargo bay of the C-141. So I’ve got uniforms. Now I do, anyway. I, uh, I just didn’t have time to change.”

I was blabbering like a fool, because my composure had taken a leave of absence a few seconds ago. He sat back and absorbed my words, no doubt thinking I was some remarkably rare variety of idiot.

“Do you know why you’re here?” he asked in a very simple-minded tone, the way parents talk to small tots.

“No sir. Except what I just heard you and Miss Carlson discussing. I guess she’s requested me as co-counsel,” I said, trying without much success to mask my disbelief.

“Your guess is correct.”

“Might I be so bold as to ask the general: co-counsel for what?”

Spears began playing with the knuckles of his right hand. I heard one or two crack loudly, almost as though he’d just sundered the bone. “Have you been following the Lee No Tae case?”

Something in the pit of my stomach rumbled in a very ugly way. “I’ve heard about it,” I admitted. “Something about a Katusa soldier who was raped and murdered?”

“Right case,” the general said, “but wrong order. First he was raped, then murdered.” His mouth twitched with disgust. “Then he was raped again.”

Katherine said, “I’ve been retained by OGMM, the Organization for Gay Military Members, to represent one of the accused. Since military courts require civilian attorneys to have a JAG co-counsel, I requested you.”

I nearly choked with surprise. See, an accused in the military has the right, if he or she so desires, to be defended by a civilian attorney in lieu of a uniformed barrister, provided they’re willing to pick up the tab themselves. However, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, or UCMJ, which is the code of laws Congress passed especially for the Armed Forces, has some striking differences from your ordinary, run-of-the-mill civilian law. And since civilian attorneys aren’t expected to know the peculiarities of the UCMJ, or the ins and outs of court-martial procedures, they must have a qualified JAG officer by their side to advise them. That way, if the accused loses, he or she can’t appeal on the basis that their civilian lawyer didn’t know the difference between a 105mm round and a buck sergeant.

Spears’s hawklike face suddenly got real intimidating. He was glaring nastily at us both. “All right, listen up. The reason I asked you here is because I want to pass on a few warnings.” He then very pointedly looked at me. “I can’t begin to describe how sensitive or explosive this case is. Lee No Tae was the son of Lee Jung Kim. Minister Lee is not only my close personal friend, he is a man of legendary stature in this country. This story has been on the front page of every newspaper on this peninsula for the past three weeks. We have ninety-five American military bases here, and at this moment every single one of them is ringed with protesters and rioters. It’s been this way ever since we arrested and charged the three soldiers involved with this crime.”

I glanced at Katherine; she appeared to be absently paying attention, sort of half listening, half not.

The general couldn’t miss her studied indifference, but he went on anyway. “We’ve been on this peninsula since 1945, and frankly, the list of crimes our troops have committed against Korean citizens could fill libraries. They’re tired of it. They have a right to be. Murders, rapes, robberies, child molesting – you name it, we’ve done it. And more likely than not, we’ve done it at least a few hundred times. It’s bad enough when a Korean commits a crime against another Korean. It’s doubly bad when an American does it. We’re foreigners for one thing, and it contains a hint of racism for another. But this crime, murder, then raping a corpse… Christ, it would turn anybody’s stomach. It’s inflamed the Korean people like nothing I’ve ever seen. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Katherine shifted her weight from her left foot to her right. She began studying her fingernails, as though to say, Couldn’t he just get this over with, because she did have this very urgent appointment for a manicure.

“No, Martin,” she said, “I don’t understand. Exactly what are you saying?”

If I hadn’t just been appointed co-counsel for one of the accused, I would’ve weighed in right then to warn Spears to be painstakingly careful with the next words to come out of his lips. He could not appear to be predisposed or prejudiced on the guilt or innocence of the accused. This was the Army, and if Katherine could prove he’d in any way used his four stars to prejudice or influence the fate of her client, she’d get this case thrown out of court in a New York second. The larger thing, though, was that Katherine Carlson was a thirty-three-year-old woman with an angelic babyface and a pair of wide, seemingly gullible emerald green eyes that made her appear hardly old enough to be out of law school.

What that serene camouflage masked was the most ruthless and vindictive legal mind I’d ever encountered.

He blinked once or twice, and chewed on something in the back of his throat. Sounding strained, he said, “What I’m warning you, Miss Carlson, is to be damned careful. Things are very flammable here. I won’t have anyone running around recklessly playing with matches.”

She looked up at the ceiling for a few seconds, like she was gazing at the stars, except the only stars in the room were the four on this gentleman’s shoulder, which she was making a point of openly ignoring.

I wasn’t, though. I wasn’t at all.

She said, “Are you telling me I can’t represent my client to the fullest extent of my legal resources?”

“I’m not saying any such thing,” he protested, although truth be known, I didn’t detect the slightest hint of conviction in his tone.

“Then what exactly are you saying, Martin?”

“I’m saying I don’t want any attempts to try this case in the media. It’s a crime that involves homosexuality, and we all know what that means. But you better recognize it’s also got damned serious diplomatic consequences. Say the wrong things and you’ll spark riots. People can get badly hurt. Don’t make a circus out of this.”

Katherine bent over and put her hands on the front of the general’s desk. She leaned forward till her face was inches from his.

In frigidly cold language, she said, “Now, I’m going to make myself perfectly clear. My client is accused of murder, necrophilia, rape, and a long list of lesser charges. He faces the death penalty. I will do everything in my legal power to protect him. I’ll be watching you and every other tinpot dictator in uniform like a hawk. Do one thing, just one thing, to impair my ability to defend my client, and I’ll get this case thrown out faster than you can spit. Then you’ll have to explain to the Korean people how my client walked free because you screwed up.”

She straightened back up to her full five feet two inches of height and glared down at him. “Martin, do you understand everything I just said?”

Poor General Spears just got his first whiff of what I had to put up with during three years at Georgetown Law. Only this was just a half dose of what Katherine Carlson had to offer. Maybe a quarter dose. She really was a royal pain in the ass – you have to believe me on this point.

His face got real red, and his fists got tight, because he certainly wasn’t accustomed to being talked to this way. And besides, he was justifiably worried about the safety of the thirty thousand Americans under his command and about maintaining the military alliance, which could possibly get ripped asunder by this case. I sympathized with him terribly.

My lips were just parting to assure him we’d be good and damned careful, and responsible, too, when Katherine suddenly whirled and faced me.

“Keep your mouth shut,” she hissed. “Not a word. You’re my co-counsel, but I’m in charge of this defense. You’ll follow my lead or I’ll file a complaint and have you disbarred for malpractice.”

I felt blood rush to my face and I gulped once or twice. I looked down at General Spears. He was staring back up at me. It was not a pretty look. What his eyes were saying was that I better get control over Katherine Carlson, and I better do it fast, or he’d hang my gonads on his Christmas tree.