Ping-Pong Heart

– 34-

In the dark, the compound appeared deserted. No lights shone, which confirmed to me that they were underground. We low-crawled up to the chain-link fence that bordered the compound, which was rusted and deformed in places. We made our way along it until Ernie found a loose section that he propped up about six inches with a forked tree branch. On my back, as they’d taught us in Basic Training, I wriggled beneath the fence until I was inside. Then I knelt and pulled the fence higher for Ernie to slide through.

We crouched and studied the compound. Ernie pointed, and we silently approached the big Quonset hut.

We knew there’d be an underground storage area for the anti-aircraft ammunition, as well as an underground command bunker. It made sense that Captain Blood would use the bunker for our “deal.” It was safe, quiet, and secure, and no one from the outside could see those lights.

The sky was spangled brightly with stars. It’s like that near the Korean Demilitarized Zone. There are few internal combustion engines operating in the area, no factories, so the air is pure. Wildlife thrives up here. Certain species of crane and mountain hare are extinct in South Korea as far as scientists can ascertain, except along the DMZ. There are even rumors that a few Siberian tigers roam the mountains in these parts, but that’s probably just GI myth.

We found the ammo storage facility. A huge, flat ziggurat-like structure. We gazed down the stone steps. At the bottom of a filthy pit, the iron doors were closed, but I could hear rats squeaking in the shadows around it. This was no place for humans, especially not highbrow ones like Blood. We continued our search.

About twenty yards away, we discovered the entrance to the underground command and control center. It could have been my imagination, but I thought I saw a sliver of light seep from beneath the thick, metal-reinforced door. A shuffling noise from within confirmed my suspicions.

“How do we get in?” Ernie whispered.

I thought about it. “We could wait until somebody comes out,” I said.

“That’ll be too late.”

He was right. We had to find a way in, preferably one that would take them by surprise. How to break in unnoticed to a heavily fortified military command center, I had no idea.

Then it dawned on me that routine operations would be conducted above ground. Only if the base were under attack would everyone in the headquarters make a mad dash for the underground bunker.

I pointed and said, “Let’s search over there.”

There was a square, tin-roofed building not twenty yards from the cement steps that led down to the command center. Ernie crawled to the door, reached up to twist the knob, and pushed it open. Nothing. Dark inside. We crouched through but didn’t turn on the lights. Instead, we opened the tin shutters and let moonlight filter in. There was a coffee maker on a table against the wall. I felt it.

“Warm,” I told Ernie.

We searched the entire building. Empty except for evidence, like crumpled C-ration wrappers in the trash bin, that someone had been here recently.

“They were here,” Ernie said, “and moved to the command center.”

“Afraid we’re going to dump a mortar round on them?”

“I guess so.”

“But they must have a lookout,” I said. “Someone to warn them when we’re approaching with Nam.”

Still crouched down, Ernie peered out the window. “On that side of the compound,” he said.

There was the camp’s guard tower, a wooden structure about fifty feet tall with a wall of sandbags around the top. It faced north and had an unobstructed view of both the Imjin River and Liberty Bridge.

“There,” Ernie said, pointing.

“Do you see anything?”

“No,” Ernie replied. “But he’s probably there. Sitting low so his head’s not peeking above the wall.”

“If we wait long enough, he’ll stand up,” I said. “Or someone will come out of the command center to relieve him.”

“That could take hours,” Ernie said.

“I’m sure he has a field radio up there or some other way to communicate.”

Just as I’d uttered the words, a tiny red light glimmered through wooden planks.

“He’s there,” Ernie said. “We can’t wait. We have to take him down now and use him to gain access to the command center.”

“Good idea,” I said, “but how?”

“I’ll climb up.”

“He’ll shoot you before you get halfway up the ladder.”

“No he won’t.”

“Why not?”

“He’ll think what all GIs think when they’re pulling guard duty.”

“Which is?”

“That I’m there to relieve him.”

“Earlier than scheduled?”

“Sure. We all grew up watching Walt Disney.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

He looked at me like I was dense. “We keep wishing upon stars, praying for miracles.”

Ernie was halfway up the wooden ladder of the guard tower when a raspy voice whispered down at him. Ernie said something short and guttural in response. I was hidden in the nearest building, within earshot, so if I couldn’t understand what he was saying, the guy at the top probably couldn’t, either. I heard him ask, “What?”

Ernie let out another unintelligible grunt and kept climbing. I expected a shot to ring out, wounding Ernie and sending him on a fatal fall several stories to the ground like in the movies. But much to my surprise, nothing happened. Ernie was right. The guy didn’t believe that an enemy would be so bold as to just climb up to the tower, and though he couldn’t understand anything Ernie was saying, the mind has a tendency to fill in the blanks with what it wants to see and hear. This guy had decided that he was being relieved early, that he’d be able to climb down from that freezing, lonely, uncomfortable tower, return to the warmth of the underground command center, and have a cup of hot coffee with some C-rations out of a can.

Our target at the top of the tower was standing now. His silhouette was clearly outlined by the night sky. I propped the M-16 rifle on the window sill and centered his head in the front sights. If he saw through the act of the good fairy who’d come to relieve him and tried to fire on Ernie, I was fully prepared to blast his cranium into tiny shards of bone. Fortunately for him, and for Ernie, the guy was oblivious. Ernie reached the floor of the tower and, a few seconds later, his silhouette appeared opposite the guard’s. In their close quarters, Ernie used his .45 to good advantage, threatening the guard with it, and a few seconds later waved the captured rifle over his head to signal that he’d taken control of the tower. I ran to the base and waited as the two of them-guard first-climbed down the ladder. When he stood before me, I leveled the M-16 at him. As he turned, I pulled off his helmet and tossed it into the dirt.

Scarcely looking better than he had in the hospital, here was Specialist Four Wilfred R. Fenton, Counter Intelligence Agent, 501st MI Battalion.

“Assume the position,” I told him.

He did, leaning up against the guard tower. Ernie brought out a length of rope he’d found in the command shack and reached for Fenton’s wrists. Faster than I figured he could move, Fenton turned and swung his right fist around in a huge arc. Ernie tried to duck, but the punch caught him at the top of the head, and much to my surprise, Ernie dropped to the ground. Fenton charged me. I could’ve shot him, but if whoever was in the bunker heard it, that might be the end of Miss Kim. Instead, I backed away, and his roundhouse punch landed on my shoulder. This should’ve been ineffective, but pain rang through my left shoulder like a ten-thousand-volt shock of lightning. Then I saw them: brass knuckles in his right palm. Ernie was trying to raise himself to his feet, but before he could, Fenton swung at me again.

I was backing up quickly now, trying to regain my wits from the disorienting anguish emanating from my left shoulder. I lowered the rifle at Fenton. He grinned and kept swiping at me, knowing that I wouldn’t pull the trigger. I backed away again, this time to my right, tracing an arc around the base of the guard tower. I was trying to turn him around and stall. As he continued in pursuit, he dared me, “Shoot! Go ahead, shoot!”

Ernie was up now. But he was still too groggy to raise himself completely. Instead, he knelt in the dirt holding his .45 with both hands. I feinted toward Fenton, and the move startled him just enough for him to stand still for a moment. Ernie fired. Fenton’s chest pushed out as if he’d been stabbed in the back with a lance and continued to explode forward. Above the gore, he gave me the strangest look, grinning as if pleasantly surprised, and then pirouetted in a large, graceful circle, balancing on the toes of his dirty combat boots, and collapsed to the ground.

A bloody mass of flesh had erupted in the center of what should’ve been Fenton’s chest. His carotid artery had stopped beating and his wide, surprised eyes were glassy in death. A wicked-looking pair of homemade brass knuckles lay loose in his fingertips; probably something he’d made in high school metal shop. I ran to Ernie.

“I’m okay,” he said, pushing my hand away, but he clearly wasn’t. I helped him stand, leaning him against the guard tower and making sure he switched on the safety of his .45. Then he threw up. When he finished spitting, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, “They must’ve heard that.”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

What to do now? Miss Kim was in the command bunker with Captain Blood and perhaps more soldiers, and had been alerted to our presence. Our only option was to talk.

I loosened the sling of the rifle and slipped it over my head. With the M-16 secure against my back, I climbed the ladder of the guard tower. At the top, I knelt before the blinking field radio. I picked up the mic and started punching buttons. Something buzzed. Then a voice yelled, “What the hell just happened?” I paused for a moment, and he screeched again, “What the hell’s going on, Fenton?”

I swallowed to moisten my dry throat and said, “It’s all over, Blood.”

“Who’s this?”

“Who do you think?”

“Sueno. What’d you do with Fenton?”

“We’ve subdued him. Do you have Miss Kim?”

“Of course I do. And if I let her go, I get free passage out of here. No KNPs, understood? You two are going to escort me out.”

“Where are you planning on going? This is South Korea. You’re boxed in.”

“Not completely,” he said.

And then it struck me what he was planning. Korea was a peninsula, bordered by sea on three sides. Its only embarkation points were Kimpo International Airport and the port cities, including Inchon and Mokpo and Pusan. But he knew the Korean authorities would be ready to apprehend him at all of those exits. The only other way out of the country was across the heavily reinforced Demilitarized Zone. It was delusional for Blood to think we could make it across, even if he’d enlisted Commander Ku’s help.

“You get it now, Sueno? That’s why I brought you up here. So you could escort me across Liberty Bridge and up north with your emergency dispatch and Criminal Investigation ID.”

“We’d never make it across,” I said. “We’d be shot dead or blown to pieces by a land mine.”

“Better than rotting in Leavenworth.”

I had to think fast, stall him.

“Look, Blood,” I said, “your situation’s not hopeless. Turn Miss Kim over to us. That’ll show your goodwill. Then hire a Stateside lawyer, keep your mouth shut, and once the JAG people take over the case, cut a deal.”

There was a long pause.

“You don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?” I asked.

“Nam didn’t spill.”

Then there was another pause, a long one this time. In the background I heard Miss Kim say, “I’m here, Geogie.” Then a loud slap, sounding almost like a crack.

“Shut up!” Blood told her. “Keep your trap shut.”

“Dalun salam do issoyo?” I asked. Are there other people there?

“Aniyo,” she replied. No.

A loud crash rang through the receiver, so loud I instinctively moved it away from my ear. Then another. “I told you to keep your trap shut!”

Miss Kim shuffled away from the radio.

“Hurting her isn’t going to do any damn good, Blood.”

He picked up the mic and growled, “Don’t tell me what to do.” He inhaled to calm himself, and then continued. “The KNPs will keep after Nam. He’ll spill eventually.”

“Spill what?”

“My deal with Ku.”

“Which was?”

“Maybe too rich for my own good. But this was my last chance at that promotion to Major. If I didn’t make it, I was out on my ass. I couldn’t walk back out into civilian life with nothing. After all that hard work, all these years of sacrifice. It’s wrong to put a person in that position. Whatever happens, it’s the Army’s fault. They forced me to do this.”

“Do what?”

“What the hell do you think? What would the North Koreans pay anything for? What’s the most important information they could want?”

I tried to figure it out, but I was too worried about how to save Miss Kim and stop Blood from carrying out his insane plan. “I don’t know,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me.”

“Fine,” he said. “I will. Hold on a minute.”

He set the mic down and lowered the receiver volume, and then I heard a vague rustling in the background. Miss Kim said a couple of words. I couldn’t make out what they were, but she was clearly being compliant. She was trying not to make him angry.

What followed was silence. I started to fiddle with the knobs, wondering if the radio had gone on the blink. Just as I was about to give up, cement scraped loudly on cement.

I leapt to my feet and looked down. Someone was opening the door to the command bunker. I quickly began climbing down the ladder. Ernie, who’d had two years of combat experience in Vietnam, had done the right thing. He’d grabbed Fenton’s rifle and made his way to the opposite side of the bunker. That way, once I reached the ground, we would have whoever was emerging in a crossfire.

Before I was halfway to the ground, red tracers lit the night and a line of bullets stitched the dirt below me.

From a prone position, Ernie fired.

Whoever had let loose the first burst ceased their assault. I reached the bottom and lay flat on the ground in the open, aiming my rifle at the dark opening. And then something emerged, low and dark, running to my right away from the command center. I followed it with the crosshairs of the M-16, but realized that Blood’s bulk was accompanied by someone else’s small frame. Ernie held his fire because he was afraid of the same thing, that the second person was Miss Kim.

The dark figures ran to a large Quonset hut near the main entranceway and disappeared around the corner. Both Ernie and I sprinted after them, but before we reached the domed building on the far side, an engine coughed to life.

“The three-quarter-ton!” Ernie shouted.

The Quonset hut was twenty yards long, and we reached the end just as a pair of headlights burst to life around the corner. We were temporarily blinded. The engine roared and the truck careened toward us. Neither of us fired, again for fear of hitting Miss Kim. The truck scraped the tin edge of the Quonset and would’ve hit us if we hadn’t tumbled backward. Then it sped off. We stood by helplessly as the taillights swerved in a semicircle, heading for the main gate of Camp Arrow and the road that led downhill to Tuam-dong. We ran to the gate, but before we could get there, the bumper of the three-quarter-ton smashed into the wood-frame and barbed-wire construction and burst it open. The big doors were still rebounding as we ran through them. We stopped at the cliff overlooking the winding mountain road, watching red taillights swerve down the sinuous path. In the distance, a string of bright lights shone across the expanse of Liberty Bridge.

“There’s movement down there,” Ernie said.

He was right. Tons of it. At least a dozen vehicles. “KNPs,” I replied.

“Will Kill know to stop him?”

I raised my M-16 and pointed it toward North Korea. I fired off three quick shots, then three slower shots, and three quick shots again. Then I changed the clip and repeated the process, signaling SOS.

Now all we could do was stand and watch. A line of police vehicles moved toward the intersection between the road from Camp Arrow and the Main Supply Route.

“He’s not gonna stop. They’ll blast him with everything they’ve got,” Ernie said.

If the KNPs ordered Captain Blood to halt and he didn’t, they would almost certainly open fire. And if he shot at them first, which I believed he would, the Korean National Police would unleash every ounce of artillery they possessed.

“We have to stop him,” I said. We couldn’t live with ourselves if Miss Kim got caught in the crossfire. We had promised to protect her and we had failed.

Ernie raised his rifle. “I can hit his gas tank,” he said. “That’ll force him to stop.”

“If you manage to aim that well,” I said, “it’ll explode.”

Ernie lowered his rifle. “Yeah,” he said. “Well, maybe the KNPs will use caution.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

It was a bet against the odds. But all we could do was watch. And hope.

“Look!” Ernie said. I squinted but couldn’t see anything. “In front. They’re fighting.”

And then I spotted it in the weak moonlight. The truck was slowing and occasionally veering away from the road, then back onto it. On the left side of the cab, the burly figure of Captain Blood, nothing more than a shadow from this distance, seemed to be swaying from side to side. But in the right side of the cab I couldn’t see anything.

“She must be lying down on the seat,” Ernie said, “kicking him.”

It was the smartest thing she could do. Captain Blood’s upper body strength was clearly much greater than Miss Kim’s, but her legs were almost as strong as his arms. And if she braced herself against the door and kicked with all her might while Blood was trying to navigate down a steep mountain road, he’d more than have his hands full.

The three-quarter-ton truck reached level ground, but there was a deep depression before the road rose again and hooked up with the main highway. The truck slowed. Probably because of Miss Kim’s assault, Blood seemed to be having trouble shifting into a lower gear. Before he could pick up speed again, a dark figure rolled out of the side of the cab.

“It’s her!” Ernie shouted. “She jumped out of the damn truck.”

But Blood didn’t stop the three-quarter-ton. On the contrary, he seemed relieved to be rid of his troublesome hostage. He revved the engine so loudly we could hear it all the way from the edge of the cliff, and the truck picked up speed as it breached the rise, the back wheels sliding until it straightened up and sped directly toward the center of the line of KNP vehicles. Gunfire erupted. The truck rammed into a blue patrol car and plowed to its right, then more gunfire rang out and the three-quarter-ton swiveled almost completely around, its engine whining as if in anguish. Just as it was about to regain traction, more bullets whistled through the night, and the front of the three-quarter-ton burst into flame. Still trying to escape, the burning truck left the KNP vehicles behind, but as its distance from the broken line of cars increased, the flames leapt higher, fanned by the air. For a moment, it seemed as if Captain Blood might get away. Until the explosion.

The truck, now a giant ball of fire, inexplicably continued to speed in a straight path down the road. Finally it wobbled and careened sideways, struggling to regain traction. It stabilized temporarily, but then lost control again, sliding and eventually flying like a burning comet off the edge of the road down a gradual incline of at least a hundred feet. Near the bottom, it shuddered to a stop before imploding. The flames roasted and growled, charring metal and presumably flesh on the shore of the churning river.

Ernie and I ran downhill from Camp Arrow so fast that both of us stumbled and fell a couple of times, skinning our knees and our palms. Finally, we reached the ravine where Miss Kim had jumped from the three-quarter-ton, and using a flashlight, I found her. She was moaning and bruised, but alive and breathing.

“Geogie,” she said when she saw me.

“Yes,” I replied, kneeling close. “Stay still. Help is on the way.”

Then she spotted Ernie. For a moment her eyes held a pleading look, but then it was as if she remembered something, and she abruptly turned away. Ernie grabbed her hand anyway and held it until a small Korean ambulance rolled up the rocky dirt road.

We waved the medics over and supervised as they hoisted her onto a stretcher. Like praetorian guards, Ernie and I escorted the stretcher until it was slid safely into the back of the medical van. The door was shut. We both stood and watched as Miss Kim was driven away.