Martin Limon - Mr. Kill

One of the captors kicked me. “You know how to dig holes?”

I shook my head.

He kicked me again. “Speak up!”

“No!” I shouted.

“I didn’t think so. So we’ve already dug a hole for you. Check under that bunk over there. You have ten seconds to find it.”

Ernie and I crawled forward and beneath a rickety wooden bunk there was flooring made of the same splintery planks. Ernie clawed at them and within seconds managed to pull one of the planks up. I pulled another and soon we had revealed a dark pit that dropped into the ground.

Behind us, automatic fire. Blanks, I knew, but the sound reverberated like thunder and the air filled with acrid smoke.

“Beat it!” one of the captors shouted. “Get out! Through the tunnel!”

Ernie slid down first. I followed.

It was completely dark down here and so narrow that my shoulders dragged against dirt. The air was tight. Occasionally Ernie’s boots kicked mud back into my face.

What were we doing down here? We should’ve arrested those guys up in the shack, but if they resisted we probably wouldn’t have been able to take them both down. Besides, we weren’t even sure yet which one was Sergeant Amos. If it was the black guy, I was toast. I was betting it was the white guy. He was about the right height and he was certainly strong enough to overpower the women and make his escape over the high fences at Anyang. But so far, because of his cap, I hadn’t even seen the color of his hair.

Also, his nose wasn’t big enough to justify the huge proboscises that had been drawn in the witness sketches. Besides, there were probably other trainers at the end of this tunnel.

The tunnel seemed endless. I remembered that the shack was sitting alone, far from any obvious place to come back up to the surface. We kept crawling.

How sure was I that this guy, Sergeant First Class Walker R. Amos, was actually the Blue Train rapist? Fairly sure. We’d meticulously eliminated every other American G.I. who could have been on the two trains involved. If this Amos guy had carte blanche to take the ration-control cards to Seoul, he’d be able to travel on the Blue Train pretty much at will. I had to assume that he could be dangerous. Very dangerous.

The tunnel closed in on me. Was it getting narrower, or was it just my imagination? No, it was definitely narrower. I had to pull my shoulder in and constrict my chest, making it more difficult to breathe. For a second, I considered turning around, until I realized that was impossible. I had to go forward wherever it led, which maybe was the point of this training.

Finally, Ernie’s boots kicked back strongly and then I realized that his body was twisting upward. Ahead of him light glimmered. Then he was gone. I breathed fresh air, and strong hands were pulling me up to freedom. I inhaled deeply, enjoying the rich oxygen, my eyes squinting at the bright lights of the fluorescent bulbs overhead. We were in some sort of aid station. One G.I. lay on a cot, a blue-smocked medic hovering about him. A much larger group of G.I. s sat at two picnic tables pushed together, munching on crackers and sipping cool drinks and staring back at us, smirking.

Amidst this calm scene, Ernie was wrestling with someone.

The man went down on the floor with a thump and others started shouting, and then we had all gathered around the two wrestling men. Ernie sprang to his feet, triumphant.

“Got him,” he said.

The man lying on the ground, his eyes wide, was Caucasian, about six feet tall, and his hands were trussed firmly behind his back. The name tag on his field jacket said Amos. Medics started to shove Ernie, but I jumped in front of them and pulled out my badge.

“CID,” I said. “Back off. Or you’ll be interfering with an arrest.”

“Arrest?”

Everyone was incredulous.

Ernie pulled the handcuffed man to his feet.

“Good to meet you at last,” I said.

“Meet me? We’ve never met before.”

“But I know of you,” I said. “I’ve been studying your movements on the Blue Train.”

Then the light of understanding entered the man’s eyes. “You mean this,” he said, looking down at his field jacket. “The name tag.”

Ernie kept a tight hold on his arm.

“You think I’m Amos,” he said finally.

We waited.

“This isn’t my field jacket. It’s cold in here so I just borrowed it from Sergeant Amos. He left it here when he changed into the Warsaw Pact uniform.”

“He’s one of the two guys at the other end of the tunnel?” I asked.

“Right. But he couldn’t have done anything to be arrested for. He’s a fine man.”

“Never mind that,” Ernie said. “Which one is he? The white one or the black one?”

“The black one,” the guy said. “He’s the preacher who conducts our nondenominational services every Sunday.”

Colonel Laurel was livid. But I was pretty angry too. So was Ernie. Neither one of us really cared about whether we got court-martialed for insubordination, and we let him have it.

“The Blue Train rapist could strike again at any moment,” I shouted. “More women could be hurt. More children scarred for life. But instead, all you can think about is the insult to your integrity. I need to know where everyone has been for every minute of the last few weeks. Once I know that, I either find the Blue Train rapist or I eliminate all of your men and we go on our way.”

Colonel Laurel’s mangled jaw was clamped shut. His eyes shot blue lasers of hatred. After word spread about what we’d done, training had halted and a gaggle of Green Berets, led by Sergeant Warnocki, had escorted us to Colonel Laurel’s Quonset hut.

“Damn you!” he shouted. He paced around his office, in front of the flags of the United States, the Republic of Korea, and the United Nations. For a moment, I thought he was going to smack us. Instead, he stopped pacing and spoke.

“All right, then. You have one hour. Warnocki! Escort these men to the orderly room. Let them examine the morning report, leave records, temporary duty orders, anything that will allow them to trace the whereabouts of the members of this command. But no classified material.

Understood?”

“Understood, sir.”

Warnocki jammed his thumb toward the door.

Ernie and I saluted Colonel Laurel. He didn’t bother to respond.

It took me twenty minutes to gather all the information I needed. Warnocki slouched in a vinyl chair. Ernie gazed at me quizzically but I didn’t want to tell him what I’d found. Not yet, not in front of Warnocki.

“Let’s go,” I said.

As we walked out the door, Warnocki followed.

“Aren’t you going to report to the Colonel?” he asked.

“Later. Where will he be this afternoon?”

“Out with the haenyo. Teaching diving techniques.”

“They have scuba gear?” Ernie asked.

“Naw. He teaches ‘natural’ techniques. How to hold your breath, how to gradually increase the depth of your dives, how to use the currents to your advantage, stuff like that. The way the haenyo do it.”

Ernie and I returned to the Nokko-ri Yoguan and changed out of our muddy clothes.

The truth of the matter was that I was devastated. All of my theories had been shattered. Sergeant First Class Amos couldn’t be the Blue Train rapist, because all the eyewitness reports had agreed that the culprit was a white man. Amos was black. Since he was such a frequent rider of the Blue Train, I did briefly interview him and ask if he’d noticed anything suspicious. Although he’d heard about the attacks, he’d noticed nothing unusual himself. On the day the Blue Train to Seoul had stopped to allow the funeral procession of the late First Lady to pass, he’d been on an earlier train.

Once we changed back into our civvies, Ernie said, “Now what?”