"But I'm a good guy."
"Sure you are, Ernie." I glanced at the damage the M-l had done to the wood-slat wall and the crates. "I don't think that guy's zeroed his weapon."
Ernie examined the trajectory. "No. If he had, Uncle Snaps would've had to cough up all thirty thousand bucks of your Serviceman's Group Life Insurance."
The whistles of the KNPs grew louder. We didn't have time to spend all morning explaining to them what had happened.
Ernie helped me over the wall Herman had climbed. From the top, I pulled him over.
With the KNPS alerted and swarming around the village, Ragyapa would be cautious. If Ragyapa got locked up for possession of an illegal rifle, Herman would be sure to make good his escape with the skull.
But that didn't mean Ragyapa would give up. His boys were out there somewhere, searching for Herman.
After climbing the wall, we checked with the owner of the hooch in front. He pointed us away from the market. As we moved down the cobbled lanes, I stopped and asked every pedestrian and shop owner and street vendor I saw if they'd seen Herman. I used the description Ernie had given me. A human bowling ball, probably sweating by now and breathing hard.
It wasn't as if Herman the German was easy to miss. Almost everyone noticed him. They kept pointing us north, away from the market, away from the main gate of Osan Air Force Base.
Finally, we emerged from the alleys onto a main road. Across the street was the Songtan bus station. Nothing more than a half-acre blacktop area with a tin shack on the side for selling tickets.
As we darted across the street, dodging honking kimchi cabs, we scanned the crowd awaiting transportation.
I pushed my way to the front of the line. The ticket office wasn't much larger than a coffin. I leaned over and spoke through the little glass window to the sales clerk. She was surly and didn't remember anything about a foreigner buying a ticket. When I flashed my badge and pressed her, she told me she never looked at faces, only hands and change. Did you see any fat, pale hands with tufts of brown hair on them? No.
A dirty-faced girl with long black braids stood next to Ernie, holding a box of chewing gum and candy in her soiled fingers. They were haggling over the price of a double pack of ginseng gum.
The girl turned to me, probably hoping for another sale. I asked her about Herman. When I called him a bowling ball, she covered white teeth with dirty fingers.
"Oh, yes," she said, "the bowling ball man just got on a bus."
"Which bus?"
"Number nine. Already go."
"Where does number nine go?"
"I don't know. I never ride bus."
Ernie pulled a wad of gum out of his mouth. "Hey, this stuff is stale."
"No," the girl said, bowing. "It is very good gum. Number one."
"Shit." Ernie tossed the pack back to her, his face sour. The girl snatched the gum and slipped it carefully into her pocket.
We started to walk away. I had to find out more about bus number nine. The girl ran after us and tugged on my sleeve.
"Hey, I talk to you, you supposed to buy gum!"
I handed her a hundred won coin-about twenty cents-and shrugged her off.
A brown-skinned man in a gray coat and a gray cap stood near the street waving a red banner, guiding the buses in and out of the lot.
I asked him about bus number nine.
"Yes. It goes to Chon-an."
"Express?"
"No. Many stops."
"How many?"
"Three. Maybe four."
"Did you see a foreigner get on?"
"Yes. Bus driver laugh. Say he take two seats."
THE ROAD FROM OSAN TO CHON-AN IS PEACEFUL, A SPARSELY traveled two-lane highway frequented only by buses or open-topped tractors or the occasional country kimchi cab. Green rice fields spread out on either side of us, and the ribbon of blacktop was lined with quivering juniper trees. Villages appeared intermittently: straw-thatched roofs, women pounding laundry by a stream, farmers threshing grain in the open air.
None of this idyllic setting cut much ice with Ernie.
"I'm gonna pound that fucking Herman."
"Easy, Ernie."
"He did it to his own little girl. He let them take Mi-ja. Just so he could wrap his grubby paws around that damn skull."
"We don't know that for sure yet."
Ernie swerved the jeep around a slow-moving bus. "Now you're sounding like one of those lawyers over at JAG."
I checked the number of the bus. Not number nine. We'd be lucky if we caught up with it before it reached Chon-an. But Ernie was trying like hell. He held the speedometer at a steady eighty kilometers.
"Watch out!"
A thin man in gray tunic and pantaloons, back bent, hands clasped behind his back, sauntered across the road ahead of us.
Ernie slammed on the brakes, downshifted, and, once he was around the old man, gunned the engine and slammed it back into high gear.
"These pedestrians wouldn't last long in Seoul," he grumbled.
The sky was clearing. Monsoon clouds floated northward. In the fields, white cranes stepped gingerly through green rice shoots, searching for amphibians.
We had reached the outskirts of Chon-an when I spotted omething rumbling ahead of us.
"That's it. Bus number nine."
Black diesel smoke spewed from the rear exhaust.
"I'll cut it off," Ernie said.
"Okay. But let's not get crushed beneath the wheels."
Ernie pulled up alongside the bus driver, leaning on his horn. I held my badge up and waved for him to pull over. The suspicious-eyed driver glared, turned his eyes back straight ahead, and kept rolling.
"Son of a bitch won't listen to us," Ernie said.
"We don't have any jurisdiction out here," I said. "He knows that."
"Fuck jurisdiction!"
Ernie jerked the steering wheel to the right: The little jeep slammed into the front bumper of the bus. Sparks flew. Metal grated on metal. The driver above us cursed and honked his horn. Ernie swerved over again, bumping harder this time, grinding paint and metal off the side of bus number nine.
Faces gawked at us out the side windows. Ernie pulled in front of the bus and slammed on his brakes. We were bumped from behind.
"He's gonna run us over."
"No, he won't," Ernie said. "Killing foreigners causes too much paperwork."
Ernie was right. Gradually, the bus slowed, pulled over to the side, and came to a stop.
Before we could climb out of the jeep, the bus driver was already out of the door: red-faced, waving his hands, cursing. Spittle erupted from his mouth like water from a spigot.
He charged Ernie. I thrust my body between them.
The driver kept raving, cursing Ernie for being a reckless driver, and I held up my hands, bowing and apologizing profusely.
Ernie acted as if the driver didn't even exist. He pulled his. 45, stepped around us, and climbed up into the bus. There were a couple of screams when the passengers saw the gun, but for the most part they took it well.
Ernie emerged from the bus about thirty seconds later.
"He's not here."
I started to question the driver about a foreigner, but he ignored my questions and kept ranting about what a fool Ernie was. I didn't bother to translate any of it. Ernie just crossed his arms, the big. 45 still clutched in his fist, and smirked.
I boarded the bus. The stewardess was a young girl of about sixteen with a red jacket and a helmet of black hair. I asked her if there had been a foreigner on this bus.
"Oh, yes," she said. "He took up two seats."
"Where did he get off?"
"In Pyongtaek."
I should've figured that. Pyongtaek was only a few miles from the village of Anjong-ri, which sits outside the big army helicopter base at Camp Humphreys. When he was in trouble, Herman always gravitated toward the military.' He probably felt safer there.