Mortal Allies (36 page)

I looked up from the floor and saw two gentlemen in civilian clothes seated at a long wooden table. One was Korean and one was American. One was named Chief Warrant Officer Three Michael Bales, and the other could’ve been called Chop Suey for all I knew. I was so spitting mad, I almost couldn’t see straight. All I wanted to do was punch somebody’s lights out.

“God damn it, Bales,” I mumbled through badly swollen lips. “Get off your ass and come help me. I’ve been beaten silly.”

I was on my knees and wasn’t sure I could get up, but I was still a major, and Bales was still a warrant officer, and Army rank isn’t supposed to shed its obligations outside the gates.

He smiled. “Fuck you, asshole. Get yourself up.”

I shook my head and tried to clear my ears. Did I hear that right? What the hell was happening here? Did those words come from the lips of Michael Bales, the ace investigator, the all-American midwestern boy?

I grabbed the corner of a chair and struggled to my feet. Having been in a few interrogation rooms in my day, I knew the drill. I fell into a seat and studied the room. What I saw I instantly disliked. Unlike American interrogation cells, this one didn’t have a two-way mirror, and as best I could tell there were no video cameras in the corners of the ceiling. This was not a hopeful sign. Those cameras and two-way mirrors are to keep interrogators from acting out their most extreme fantasies, if you get my drift.

I studied Bales’s face and didn’t like what I saw there, either. He was smiling, only it wasn’t anything close to a friendly smile. It was the merciless kind of smile.

Considering his expression, I opened with, “I want to see an attorney. I’m not saying a word until I have an attorney present.”

Bales chuckled and started to study his fingernails. “The crimes you’re accused of were committed on Korean territory, Drummond. They’re running this show. And they don’t believe in all that crap.”

“Then I want a representative from the embassy. I’m an American citizen. I have that right under international protocols.”

The Korean bent forward. “I’m Chief Inspector Choi and I’m in charge of this investigation. I decide what the rules are, not you. This is my country, Drummond.”

Then, almost faster than I could see it coming, and certainly faster than I could do anything about it, his fist flew across the table and landed on my jaw. I careened backward and somersaulted off my chair, ending up somehow on my stomach. I had to shake my head a few times to be sure it was still connected to my body.

A man’s got to be pretty damned strong to throw a punch that hard from a sitting position. I made a mental note of that.

“Get up, asshole,” Bales ordered.

I scrabbled around for a few seconds trying to get some balance and finally made it to my feet. I was woozy and kept slipping on the blood that was pooling on the floor. My blood — from my shoulder, from my leg, from my nose, and God knows where else.

I bent over, lifted up the chair, and sat back down.

I very politely said, “May I ask what I’m charged with?”

“Murder,” Choi said.

To which I replied, “I didn’t murder him. I saw him shooting into the crowd at the gate. I chased him down and he killed himself.”

Bales leaned back into his chair and stroked his chin. He looked terribly amused by this whole thing.

Choi said, “Actually, double murder. The civilian you murdered was named Kang Soon Moo. He was a retarded adult, forty-two years old, and you shot him right in the head. The police officer you murdered was Lee Kim Moon. He has been an officer in this precinct for twelve years. He has been decorated for courageous service four times. He was a reliable, dedicated, outstanding police officer. He has a wife and two young daughters.”

And I said, “I’m telling you, I saw him up on the hillside with an M16 pouring rounds into the crowd.”

Now Bales bent forward and sarcastically asked, “And what? You broke out of the crowd and charged him. Without a weapon? You made him drop his M16 and run?”

“That’s exactly what happened,” I angrily snarled, realizing how ludicrous it sounded.

Bales snickered. “I would’ve thought a lawyer should be able to come up with a better alibi than that.”

For some reason that really pissed me off. “Up your ass.”

This time it was Bales who swung his fist across the table and punched me. But I only fell backward and landed on my bottom. Bales wasn’t nearly as strong as Choi. I added that to my mental notes.

When I finally looked up, Bales was standing over me. He kicked me twice in the stomach and I made big “ooof” sounds and folded up like a beach chair. His kick was harder than his punch. Much harder.

While I was struggling to get some air back in my lungs, Choi said, “There was only one shooter at the gate, Drummond. And he jumped into a car and was chased halfway around the city before he got away. And it wasn’t Officer Lee.”

I slowly got to my knees and Bales was still standing over me, so I begged him, “Please. Please don’t kick me again.”

He stood there a moment, and then took a step backward. I thought he was going to leave me alone, but he suddenly twisted around on his heel and let loose a roundhouse kick that caught me in the head.

I’m not sure how long I was out, but when I came to, Bales and Choi had hoisted me back up onto a chair, and I was wet all over. I guessed they’d thrown a bucket of water to try to revive me. I hurt about everywhere a man could hurt, except maybe my groin, which, all things considered, could be counted as a hidden blessing.

I couldn’t work up enough strength to get my eyelids open. I heard Choi laughing and telling Bales, “Damn it, Michael, be careful with your feet. I warned you of that with Jackson. You almost killed him.”

Bales halfheartedly chuckled. “The little fag sang, didn’t he?”

“And I had to write a report that he was beaten senseless by his cellmate. Don’t press your luck.”

All things considered, the best thing I could do at this point was play possum. I was feeling spectacularly sorry for myself, and I’d had more ass-kickings than any one man should rightly get, so I kept my eyes shut and played dead. And let me tell you, that’s damned hard to do when you hurt all over and you can feel blood trickling out of various cuts and wounds.

Choi finally got tired of waiting for me to revive, so he criticized Bales for his kick again and left to get some officers to drag me to a cell.

The two cops came in and each took a hold under my armpits. I hung limp, although my left shoulder, where the bullet had grazed me, burned like somebody had dropped acid on it.

They laid me on a sleeping mat, and, much as I would’ve loved to sleep, the pain was too great. I could peek through one of my eyelids, although the other one seemed to be fused shut. A guard was positioned right outside the bars, reading a skin magazine and apparently waiting for a sign I was conscious. Choi probably had told him to let him know as soon as I was awake so they could bring me back in the interrogation room and ass-kick a confession out of me.

I, of course, did some thinking about the Whitehall situation, although I will admit it was not at the top of my give-a-shit list at that moment.

I had badly misjudged Michael Bales; that was obvious. He wasn’t Dudley Do-Right at all. He was Dirty Harry with a little extra malice thrown in. And he and his buddy Choi had knocked the crap out of Private Jackson, and probably Moran also, to extract their statements.

Anyway, so what, because I was facing another of their physical interrogations. The thought nearly made me sick. I was sure Choi was in there telling him, “Hey, Michael, stick with your fists so we can get this jerk-off to break.” Two hours passed, and just as it was starting to become late afternoon, I heard footsteps and keys jingling, and I guessed they had run out of patience. I lay still and played dead and prayed desperately for myself. Korean voices chattered in the distance. I felt so hopeless I wanted to die. I’d been lying perfectly prone long enough for my body to stiffen and my bruises and wounds to begin to ache terribly.

I couldn’t withstand another beating. If Bales or Choi wanted me to confess to killing everybody in that crowd, I’d do it and take the chance I could sort it out later.

I felt myself being lifted by a couple of pairs of strong hands. I moaned pitifully until I heard a voice.

“Oh God, Sean, what the hell did they do to you?”

I opened one eyelid, because the other was swollen completely shut from Bales’s final kick. I tried to smile but my lips were pretty swollen so it probably looked awful.

I never thought I’d be happy to see Katherine Carlson. I was, though. If my legs weren’t so wobbly, I would’ve rushed across the cell and hugged and kissed her.

But that was an empty, fleeting thought, anyway, because my body finally decided to give my nerve endings a break. I fainted.

Y
ou’ll never guess the first face I saw when I regained consciousness. Captain Wilson Bridges, M.D., was standing, head bent at the neck, studying what appeared to be my medical chart. The good news was he was operating in his capacity as a surgeon rather than pathologist. His medical coat had lots of dried blood all over it. The bad news was a fair amount of it was mine.

I said “Hello, Doc,” but that’s not how it came out. I sounded like a bullfrog with laryngitis.

His eyes shifted from the chart to my face, and he moved closer. Holding a finger in front of my eyes, he said, “Follow this.”

I did so as he moved it back and forth.

Then he squeezed my left wrist and looked down at his watch, and I didn’t say a word because I didn’t want to disturb his concentration. It was my body he was scrutinizing. This was no time for him to make mistakes.

He jotted something on that ubiquitous clipboard and placed it back on a hook. I saw two IVs going into my arms.

Captain Bridges smiled. “You’re going to live, Major.”

To which I grumpily replied, “I hurt so damned much, I don’t want to live.”

He chuckled.

“Yeah. Yuck, yuck,” I said.

He chuckled again, which was easy for him, because he hadn’t been shot, knifed by a piece of glass, and had the shit kicked out of him by too many people to count.

“How long have I been here?”

“Since yesterday afternoon. We sent an ambulance to get you after your lawyer called. By the way, you’re a big hero.”

“Yeah? Tell me about that,” I insisted. After all, how often do you go from being a kung-fu punching bag to a hero?

“One of the network news cameras filmed you running through the crowd and chasing off a shooter. It’s been on all the news. Even CNN’s carrying it.”

This, I suppose, explained how Katherine got me released from the Itaewon station.

I said, “How bad was it?”

“You mean the massacre?”

The fact that he chose that particular word to describe what happened was my first indication. I nodded.

He shook his head. “We lost two more this morning. That makes fourteen dead. Ten of the wounded are here; the rest are being treated in Korean hospitals around the city. Our little basement morgue couldn’t handle it. We had to rent a refrigeration van for all the bodies. If you hadn’t chased away one of the shooters there’d probably be two or three more vans parked outside.”

Remember that old saying about how “all politics is local”? Apparently the same applies to hospital departments. The guy was more concerned about morgue space than the pathetic fate of the folks who got in the way of a bullet. Down the hall was probably some little old lady complaining about how many forms she had to type. Three doors away was a supply clerk moaning about . . . Well, you get the point.

And on that thought, I asked, “And how am I doing?”

“Not bad. You’re probably going to walk with a cane for a few weeks. You’ve got two broken ribs, but from the X rays it seems you’ve broken some ribs before, so you know the drill. I’ve taped them and you’ll have to refrain from exercise or strenuous activity for a while.”

This was no problem as far as I was concerned, because, oddly enough, I’d lost that urge I usually felt to get up and run a marathon.

He reached over and grabbed a hand mirror and placed it in front of my face. I took one look and immediately felt an elephantine wash of pity for the poor ugly bastard staring back at me. You could barely see a single square inch that wasn’t bruised or swollen or scabby. One tooth was missing and another was broken in half. My nose was skewed at an odd angle.

“You were beaten up pretty badly,” Bridges said, in what had to rank as the understatement of the year.

“Oh Jesus,” I murmured, barely able to recognize myself. He quickly yanked the mirror away.

“Hey, you won’t be getting any dates for a while, but it’ll all heal,” he assured. “And you’ll get some shiny enamel teeth that won’t get any cavities.”

Captain Bridges, I was learning, had the bedside manner of a rottweiler puppy.

He grinned and said, “Anyway, there’s a lady waiting outside to see you. She’s been here since you were brought in. In fact, I was instructed to keep you in isolation until she spoke with you. I can throw a towel over your face or put a blindfold on her and lead her in.”

Did I say a rottweiler puppy? I was wrong. A full-grown pit bull.

I was expecting Katherine, but in walked the heartless, bloodthirsty Miss Carol Kim. She stopped at my bedside and looked at my face, then picked up the doctor’s clipboard and studied something. Like I needed this. She was checking the name on the board to make sure the battered wreck on the bed was indeed me.

“Wow, you look awful,” she murmured, studying the clipboard.

I straightened a lock of my hair. “How’s that? Better?”

“Much,” she said with a cold smile, then lowered her tight little butt onto my bed.

She reached out and lowered the bedsheet to my waist. She clinically examined my body, and I looked down, too; there were more black-and-blue patches fairly regularly spaced. There was a bandage on my shoulder, and white tape running around my ribs.

“Wow, they really kicked the stuffing out of you.”