Ping-Pong Heart

– 36-

I’d been brushing up on tactical missiles.

When I asked Strange about it, he just about had a heart attack.

“Do you realize how highly classified that information is?” he asked. His empty cigarette holder bobbed on his moist lips. “It’s Top Secret Crypto-freaking-zipto. As high as you can get, then a little higher. You can’t be messing with that.”

“Why not?”

We were sitting at our usual table in the crowded 8th Army Snack Bar. He leaned in closer. “The word is, we’ve equipped some of those missiles with nuclear warheads, just to show those North Korean Commies who’s boss.”

“All of them, or just some of them?”

He sat up straight. “How would I know? When a document like that comes through my distribution cage, it’s hand-carried by an officer of at least captain’s rank or higher.”

“You don’t get a chance to peek?”

“Nope. And no desire to peek,” he added. “I like living here and not in a cozy cell in Fort Leavenworth.”

“You got something against Kansas?” Ernie asked.

“A lot of things,” Strange replied.

“Like what?” Ernie asked.

“Like it’s cold and then it’s hot, and the land’s too flat, and there are too many agricultural misdemeanors.”

“‘Agricultural misdemeanors?’”

“Farm boys chasing livestock.”

I sipped on cold coffee and set the mug back down. “Would Captain Blood have had access to information about the missiles?”

“At the Five Oh First?” Strange thought about it. “No way. They’re counter-intel. They wouldn’t have a need-to-know.”

“What if they claimed someone was haunting the installations that housed the missiles?”

“Still no need-to-know,” Strange replied. “Whether or not the missiles were nuclear-tipped wouldn’t be their concern.”

“So if Blood wanted to get that information, how would he go about it?”

“He’d have to talk to someone in the missile command. Someone with rank. Or . . .”

“Or what?”

“One of the silly-vilian technicians at Raytheon might be able to clue him in.”

This confirmed my earlier suspicions. “How much do they know?”

“They’re the ones who hook up the wires and check the fuse boxes and whatever in the hell else. Without them, nothing ignites, nothing flies, and nothing goes kaboom.”

I paid for Strange’s hot chocolate. We must’ve really shaken him, because we managed to leave before he asked if we’d had any strange lately.

The Raytheon technicians were mostly middle-aged men. Ernie and I were too young, and our hair too short, to be believable as veteran electronics workers. We brainstormed candidates for the role and finally found the perfect one right under our noses: Staff Sergeant Riley.

When we first proposed it to him, he said he was way too busy and besides, he had a date on Saturday night.

“A date with a bottle of Old Overwart?” Ernie asked.

“And a dolly to pour,” Riley replied.

“Tell her to take a rain check.”

“I don’t have any way to call her. She doesn’t own a phone.”

“So who does? When she arrives at Gate Five and you don’t show, she’ll get the message.”

“If I stand her up, I might never see her again.”

“A great loss for romance.”

Riley thought it over and finally said, “Fine. What do you want me to do?”

By the time we turned Riley over to Nam, he was drunk. They made quite a pair: Sergeant Riley in civvies, a coat and tie, stumbling half-looped through a narrow Munsan alleyway, and former real estate magnate Mr. Nam still hurting from the beating he’d taken at KNP headquarters, wobbling just as badly, but a lot less fluidly.

Mr. Kill had decided that we couldn’t afford to risk exposing the operation by posting officers nearby.

“North Korean operatives are well-trained and very disciplined,” Kill told us. “Commander Ku will probably have the Sejong Inn staked out for at least two days before the meeting. Anything suspicious and they’ll abort.”

“How will they react to Nam bringing an unknown American to the meeting?”

“If nothing else spooks them, they’ll be curious. They know Nam is on the take and desperate for money. They might figure he’s trying to speed up negotiations so he can get his hands on quick cash.”

“Maybe.”

“It’s risky. But we have to force Commander Ku to commit quickly. If we give him too much time to think, he might back away.”

The Sejong Inn was well chosen. First of all, Munsan was about forty kilometers northwest of Seoul, just a couple of miles from the North Korean border. The inn itself sat in the center of a labyrinth of tiny hooches in a dirt-poor section of the town, with a dozen narrow pedestrian alleyways running off in every direction like the legs of a monstrous spider. About an hour before midnight, as Riley and Mr. Nam staggered their way through the unlit lanes, we sat with Mr. Kill in the Munsan Police Station, studying a map and outlining possible escape routes.

“In order not to frighten him away, we had to keep our forces very far back,” Kill said. “Should he flee, Ku will be able to escape fairly easily.”

“Unless we get lucky,” Ernie said. “One of your roving police cars might spot him.”

“They might. The problem is, we don’t know what he looks like.”

Ernie nodded. “How long do you figure this meeting will take?”

“No more than a half-hour. I told Nam that if it takes longer than that, he can expect us to come in.”

“Why only a half-hour?” Ernie asked.

“Commander Ku will come straight to the point. He’ll want to find out what information they’re offering, and once he knows that, he’ll offer a sum. They’ll either agree to the deal or they won’t.”

“If they don’t?”

Mr. Kill shook his head. “He’ll kill them.”

I leaned forward on the wooden bench, putting my elbows on my knees. “You’ve known the North Koreans to operate that way before?”

Kill nodded grimly. “But Nam knows too. He’ll agree to whatever Commander Ku offers. He might try to wheedle a little more out of him for show, but he’ll agree.”

I suddenly felt guilty about pressuring Staff Sergeant Riley into taking this assignment. But we’d prepped him with some buzzwords that missile technicians might use: radiation casing, booster gas canister, high explosive lens, tritium and deuterium. If they asked him to explain the more technical aspects, he’d play cagey and pretend not to want to reveal too much classified data until the money was forthcoming. Drunk and greedy wasn’t too much of a stretch for Riley. And he’d promise to provide not only the wiring diagrams the techs used, but also their schedule of maintenance visits, which compounds they were going to visit first and how long they’d be there. All this had been faked, of course, but we were hoping that the North Koreans would believe that they could use the information to pinpoint the location of any missiles equipped with something other than conventional warheads.

The time for the meeting came and went. Nothing happened. Apparently, the owner of the Sejong Inn had a phone. Riley called us just before midnight.

“No-show,” he growled. “You’re wasting my time.”

“Maybe they’re checking the place out,” I told him. “Be patient.”

“Well, I’m not waiting around. Some old broad here is bugging the crap out of me, trying to talk me into buying fresh octopus. The little fucker keeps pushing his tentacles up over the edge of the bucket. Creeps me out.”

“All right. We’re on our way.”

I set the phone down and looked at Mr. Kill. I’d been holding the receiver a few inches from my ear and he’d heard what had been said. His face had turned pale. Without speaking to me, he barked an order at one of the uniformed officers waiting outside his office. The man stepped into the open doorway, listened to the commands, bowed, turned and ran down the hallway.

“What is it?” I asked.

Ernie was on his feet.

“No time,” Mr. Kill said, immediately up and sprinting toward the door. Ernie and I ran after him.

Inspector Oh, out of her nightclub apparel and back in uniform, slammed on the brakes as Mr. Kill hopped out, Ernie and I in hot pursuit. These catacomb-like pedestrian lanes weren’t wide enough for cars. They were barely wide enough for Mr. Kill, Ernie, and me to hop single-file through the darkness, avoiding open sewage drains and slapping at low-hanging cobwebs.

Ahead I saw the blue and red neon sign that blinked in hangul: sejong inn. Footsteps, men shouting and the waving beams of flashlights converged all around us. Mr. Kill was apparently familiar with these dark passageways, and pulled ahead a few yards. I was about to speed up and close the gap when a small figure burst out of an indentation in the darkness. I skidded to a halt, Ernie bumped into me. From the glare of moonlight, I looked down on a round, wrinkled face. One eye seemed to be closed shut.

“You buy?” she asked, holding up a bucket that smelled of the sea. A small tentacle gripped the metal lip. She smiled a gap-toothed smile and tilted back the lid. Inside, murky water sloshed. Something fleshy, lined with what seemed to be at least a dozen suction cups, wriggled and groped for the sky. I touched a meaty shoulder covered in felt and moved her gently to the side.

“Not now, ajjuma,” I said.

She offered the bucket to Ernie. He wrinkled his nose and said, “Maybe later.”

We continued running toward blue and red neon. We took one wrong turn and then another, but finally reached the pathway in front of the gate that led into the small courtyard of the Sejong Inn. Over a half-dozen uniformed Korean National Police officers milled about, waving their flashlights, checking the grounds in front of the low wooden porch. Ernie and I slipped off our shoes and walked inside.

Behind an open oil-papered sliding door, Staff Sergeant Riley sat cross-legged on the vinyl floor. On a cushion opposite him sat Mr. Kill.

“She was an old hag,” Riley told him, “trying to sell us octopus.”

“Did she speak English?” Mr. Kill asked.

“A little. Broken English, like she’d been selling useless shit to GIs for centuries.”

“And Nam went with her?”

“He said he wanted to buy some whatever-you-call-it.”

“Nakji.” Octopus.

“His wife likes it.” Riley shuddered. “I don’t know how anybody can put those creepy little suction cups in their mouth. Gross.”

Chief Homicide Inspector Gil Kwon-up reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a rumpled pack of Turtleboat cigarettes. He offered them around to me, Ernie, and Riley but we all refused. We weren’t health freaks or anything, but somehow none of us had ever acquired the habit-too busy boozing, I suppose.

Kill pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and puffed contentedly. Then he looked at Riley and said, “You’re lucky to be alive.”

“What do you mean?”

“That woman,” he said, “the one you called an old hag. She’s a high-ranking officer in the North Korean People’s Army.”

“Her?”

Ernie and I glanced at one another.

“Yes. The woman who was trying to sell you fresh octopus. I believe she is the operative Mr. Nam has been calling Commander Ku.”

“He never said Commander Ku was a woman,” I replied.

“Maybe he didn’t know. Or maybe he held back, hoping to make his escape. If so, it worked.”

“But . . . they can’t have gotten far,” Ernie said. He was about to admit that we’d just seen her outside, but swallowed his words. Professional pride, I suppose.

Kill shook his head. “She must have had an escape route well planned. Yes, we might get lucky and stumble upon them, but if I were a betting man, I’d save my chips. She’s gone, and even if she weren’t, I don’t know that we’d be able to bring her in. Not alive, anyway.”

I thought about what Kill had just said and realized that, even within the past few minutes, she could have traveled far outside the perimeter the KNPs had set up. There wasn’t anything more I could do, but I did have one question: “Why’d she go to all this trouble just to pull Nam’s butt out of the fire?”

“They want to interrogate him, of course. See what we wanted. But also they want to send a message to those who cooperate with them that if they’re caught, they won’t just be left to their cruel fate.”

“What will the North Koreans do with him?”

Kill shrugged. “Maybe put him on a new assignment, give him a new identity down here in the south. Or smuggle him north.”

“They can do that?”

“There are plenty of fishing boats in the Yellow Sea. We can’t monitor them all.”

I turned to Riley. “So what’d she ask you?”

He shrugged. “Routine stuff, like where I was stationed. Told her I was a civilian. She seemed impressed and asked me how much money I made.”

“What’d you say?”

Riley quoted a fantastic sum.

“Sure, in your whiskey-fed imagination you make that much,” Ernie said.

“Hey!” Riley replied. “I was undercover.”

“Did you tell her you repaired missiles?” I asked.

Riley nodded. “I told her about the canisters and deuterium and all that stuff.”

“What’d she say?”

“She said I don’t look that smart.”

Ernie barked a laugh. Even Kill seemed amused. Riley’s face turned red, and he looked like he wanted to punch somebody.

“You did a good job,” I told him, standing up. “Let’s get out of here.”

Before we left, Riley accepted one of Mr. Kill’s cigarettes. Officer Oh drove us back to the Munsan Police Station, where Ernie, Riley, and I switched to the new 21 T Car motor pool jeep.

“Hey,” Riley said, when he climbed in the back seat. “What happened to the tuck-and-roll?”

Ernie flipped him the bird. “Sit on it and rotate, Riley.”

“I risk my life for God and country, and this is the thanks I get?”

A few minutes later, we were on the Main Supply Route, rolling south. Riley made himself comfortable on the canvas seat in back, and soon he started to snore.

“Octopus,” Ernie said.

“Yeah,” I replied. “We should’ve bought some.”