“I don’t know.”
“You better find out.”
“Why?”
He tossed a pink phone message on the front of his desk. “This came in for you last night, to the MP desk officer.”
After sipping my coffee, I staggered back to his desk, grabbed the message and sat down heavily in a gray Army-issue vinyl chair. I stared at the message but couldn’t focus.
“Some guy named Singletery,” Riley said. “The desk sergeant said the connection was bad but Singletery seems to think that you need to get up there real quick. He has a lead for you.”
I studied the note. It was garbled, written in pencil in a childish script. I willed the pounding in my head to subside and tried to concentrate. It was a long message, filling up the entire pink square, finally trailing off at the end, but I got the gist of it. I set the note down on Riley’s desk
“He’s in danger,” I said.
“Who?”
“Singletery.”
For once, Riley didn’t make a smart remark. “Where’s Ernie?” he asked.
“Not in the barracks.”
“Out in the ville?”
I nodded.
“I’ll call the MP duty patrol to take you out there.”
I nodded again.
I found Ernie with one of the Lucky Seven waitresses who lived in the same complex of hooches as Sunny. He came wide awake when he saw me.
“What is it?”
“Singletery. He identified the guy called Smoke.”
Ernie shoved back the silk comforter. “That’s good, isn’t it?”
“Very good. But according to his phone message, the guy called Smoke has identified him too.”
“He knows Singletery’s our snitch.”
“You got it.”
Ernie sprang to his feet and started searching for his pants. The waitress sleeping on the mat next to him pulled the comforter over her head and groaned. In about a minute, Ernie was dressed and we were outside and striding through the narrow lanes of Itaewon.
“You bring your forty-five?” Ernie asked.
“Got it,” I said, patting the shoulder holster beneath my nylon jacket.
“Do we have time to get mine?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out his brass knuckles. “At least I got these.”
Camp Pelham looked deserted. The MP at the gate emerged from the guard shack and said, “They’re on move-out alert.”
“Where’d they go?” Ernie asked.
The MP frowned. I pulled out my CID badge. “We’re on a case,” I said, “involving one of the guys in Charlie Battery.”
“Across Freedom Bridge,” the MP said. “That’s all I know.”
We thanked him and Ernie turned the jeep around. The village of Sonyu-ri looked deserted too, as did the compound at RC-4. No GIs to spend money, no business, no activity.
At the approach to Freedom Bridge we were waved to halt by another MP. This one wore a heavy parka with a fur-lined hood. The wind blew cold off the Imjin River. I showed him my identification.
“We’re looking for the Second of the Seventeenth Field Artillery,” I told him, “particularly Charlie Battery.”
“They’re all together,” he told us. “Turn right after Camp Greaves and follow the road back to the river. You’ll find them about four klicks upstream at Dragon Tail Canyon. That’s where they’re conducting the bridge-crossing exercise.” We started to roll away and he shouted, “Better hurry or they’ll be south of the river before you get there.”
We veered onto the wooden roadway, gigantic iron struts looming above us. Every few yards an armed American MP, wearing gloves and winter gear, stood guard watching the vehicles rolling slowly past him and searching below for any attempt at sabotage. The churning Imjin flowed rapidly, an occasional chunk of mountain ice crashing into the huge cement stanchions below.
On the far side, a long line of military vehicles, both Korean and US, waited to cross the river. We sped past them on the two-lane highway and soon Camp Greaves was on our right. Then the road divided. If we went left we’d continue north to Camp Kitty Hawk and the truce village of Panmunjom, which sat smack dab in the middle of the Demilitarized Zone. Instead we turned right, as the MP had advised. After about ten minutes the road swerved south and once again we could see the rapidly flowing waters of the Imjin.
The river was narrower here at Dragon Tail Canyon and therefore moving faster. The banks on this side were low and sandy, like a beach, but on the far side loomed three- or four-story high red bluffs. Already, the river crossing exercise had begun. Huge pontoons held flat wooden barges, large enough to hold two deuce-and-a-half ton trucks along with two 105mm howitzers. The guns and their crews were aboard the low-lying craft and being propelled forward by huge outboard engines. As powerful as the engines were and as much smoke as they were giving off, they still could not propel the barge straight across the river. The current was so strong that the barges were being swept about a half-mile downriver, where they abutted a wooden quay. They hit there with a heavy bump, then were tied up by another crew so the guns and the trucks could drive off onto dry land.
“Combat engineers,” Ernie said.
The same unit I’d seen running PT outside of their compound on RC-4. Upstream a thick bank of fog was rolling in like a huge cloud of mist.
“Our visibility won’t last long,” I said. “Do you see Charlie Battery?”
“Over there. They’re about to load up.”
“Come on.”
Ernie drove the jeep down a narrow dirt road that led to the beach. He pulled up in a cloud of dust. I spotted Sergeant Singletery’s huge hunched shoulders and his bow legs. “Over there.”
We climbed out of the jeep and trotted toward Singletery. He was supervising the loading of the last of Charlie Battery’s howitzers onto the last barge.
“Chief of Smoke,” I said.
He turned, startled. “About time,” he said, grinning.
“We came as soon as I got your message.”
He stood with his hands on his hips, facing us. “I was thinking about what you said. About three guys, about one of them called ‘Smoke,’ about them maybe wanting to brag about what they did and maybe wanting to do it again. I asked around. It ain’t just Chiefs of Firing Batteries.”
“What isn’t?”
“They ain’t the only ones called ‘Smoke.’ ”
“Who else?”
Singletery turned and nodded toward the barge. A crewman had thrown off the last heavy line. “Them,” Singletery said. “Come on.”
We didn’t have time to discuss it further. It was the last barge and it was leaving. Signletery trotted onto the quay and we followed. When the barge was about a yard from the end and floating free, the three of us leapt aboard.
The fog upstream was even closer, engulfing us like a giant nightmare.
“So who else is called ‘Smoke’?” I asked.
Singletery turned and, as if to answer my question, stared down at the far end of the barge. Three men stood there, three combat engineers. Next to them was a huge contraption that looked like an electrical generator with some sort of tubing attached, like a short-barreled mortar. As we stared at the men, one of them aimed the tubing at us.
“Is he gonna fire that thing?” Ernie asked.
“It don’t fire,” Singletery said.
“Then what the hell is it?”
Before he could answer, the full force of the bank of fog slid silently over the barge. Within seconds it swallowed up the wooden planking and the canvas-covered trucks and the glistening metal barrels of the 105mm howitzers. We were enveloped in darkness.
“We better get ’em,” Singletery said, “before they start that thing up.”
“What is it?” I asked but already he was moving away from us, just a dark shadow in the mist. I grabbed Ernie’s elbow and pulled him forward and together we followed Sergeant Singletery and then, before we could reach the end of the barge, we heard an engine coughing, choking, and then starting to life-and then roaring.
“Shit,” Singletery said. He stopped abruptly and we bumped into him.