“Maybe I joined the wrong service,” I told Ernie.
“You?” Ernie said. “A squid? Floating for months at a time? You couldn’t stand it.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
Light filtered through huge plate glass windows in the metal superstructure looming above us. Behind them, shadows scurried.
We wandered below deck, peeking in offices, until I saw a tired-looking sailor slumped behind a desk.
“Who handles classified documents?” I asked.
“Who wants to know?”
I slipped out my badge and flopped it open.
“Investigative Services,” I said.
I was stretching the truth a bit. Naval Investigative Services was the navy’s equivalent of the army’s Criminal Investigation Division. No sense advertising that soldiers were aboard the Kitty Hawk. You might as well tell them they’d been infected with the bubonic plague.
He barely glanced at the badge.
“This must be about Harrelson,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s right.” I tried to hide my surprise. “What’s the status?”
“Still in sick bay. Whoever did it cracked his skull wide open.”
“Will he live?”
He lifted his hand and rocked it from side to side. “They’re not sure yet.”
“What did the guy get?”
“How in the fuck should I know? They don’t tell me shit.”
“But Harrelson worked with classified documents, didn’t he?”
“Damn right. That’s why Chief Longo is so pissed.”
“Longo’s in charge of classified documents?”
“In charge of security for the whole ship.”
“Where can I find him?”
“Down to the next ladder, one deck above. The office is marked.”
“Thanks.”
We left the clerk, found the ladder, climbed upstairs, and wandered the hall until we found an office with the stenciled letters: Security.
It was a roomy office, with six desks and a dozen filing cabinets. A heavyset man was on the phone. He wore the uniform of a chief. A group of sailors milled about, trying to look busy. Everyone seemed upset.
“Yes, sir. Yes.”
The chief slammed down the phone. I walked toward him.
“Chief Longo?”
He checked us out, letting his eyes linger on our wrinkled blue jeans.
“Yeah?”
I pulled out my badge and the identification behind its plastic holder and barely opened it, asking the question as I did. “How’s Harrelson?”
“Stable. That’s about the best they can say.” He scowled.
“I’m Investigator Sueno. This is my partner, Investigator Bascom.”
Ernie nodded slightly.
“So fast?” The scowl hadn’t left his face.
“We happened to be in the area. I need a rundown of the type of documents that were compromised.”
The chief rubbed his forehead and eyes with a big hairy paw. The man was obviously exhausted. Good.
“You know you need clearance, even an investigator needs clearance, before I can discuss weaponry.”
Weaponry! What the hell was Shipton after? I took a chance. “Only if it’s nuclear,” I said firmly.
The chief snapped, “What the fuck do you think I’m talking about?”
He looked around, as if suddenly realizing that he’d shouted.
“Oh, sorry. It’s just that Harrelson was a good kid.” He shook his head glumly. “Right here on the Hawk.”
“Did anybody get a look at the perpetrator?”
“Nobody. I doubt even that Harrelson did. The blow came from behind. It was twenty-three hundred hours, maybe he wasn’t as alert as he should’ve been. The guy broke into the classified locker.”
“But only went after the documents concerning weaponry?”
“That’s what it looks like so far. Jesus, I don’t know. I think we’d better go talk to the captain.” The chief rubbed his eyes again. “So you guys just happened to be in the area.” He was looking at Ernie. “What detachment are you with?”
“Seoul.”
His big hand stopped rubbing. “Seoul? There isn’t a Naval Investigative Detachment in Seoul.”
“Temporary duty,” I said. “From the Philippines.”
“They sent a whole detachment on temporary duty from the Philippines?”
“Listen,” Ernie said. “You got a head around here? We been wandering around the ship and all I’ve had so far this morning is coffee. My eyes are about to turn yellow.”
“Sure. Down the hallway.”
Ernie took a step toward the door.
“I got to piss like a racehorse myself,” I said. “Be right back, Chief.”
He grunted and picked up the phone again.
When we reached the hallway, voices drifted after us.
“Those guys can’t be navy,” somebody said. “Did you see those jackets?”
“Naval Investigation didn’t say nothing about agents arriving this soon.”
We strode quickly toward the ladder and slid down it without touching any rungs.
“When those squids realize we’re army,” Ernie said, “we’ll be in a world of shit.”
“And we have too much to do to sit in a brig until it gets sorted out.”
“Shipton could be on his way to the PX right now.”
Somehow I doubted that, not here in Pusan. It would be too risky so soon after hitting the Kitty Hawk. But we didn’t have time to argue the fine points.
We kept dropping down ladders and sprinting down hallways, not caring anymore who saw us or what they thought. When we finally reached the hatch in the side of the hull, a launch was shoving off.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Hold that boat!”
“Aren’t you supposed to say ‘belay’or something like that?” Ernie said.
That Ernie, always a stickler for the right word. The chief at the gangplank made a hand signal that held the boat.
“All right, you two,” he said, frowning. “You’re lucky I held it. Let’s see your liberty chits.”
I pulled out my CID identification.
“We don’t need liberty chits,” I said. “We’re Criminal Investigation agents and we’re on a case, Chief. A man’s life could be at stake.”
The chief stared at all the stamps and squiggles and officialese in my leather wallet. Ernie opened his badge, too, and slammed it shut impatiently. The chief was surprised, but too much of a lifer to want to fight all that documentation.
“Army?” he said. “What are you doing on the Kitty Hawk?”
“You don’t have a need-to-know!” Ernie snapped.
We scurried down the ladder and climbed aboard the launch. It pulled away and the startled face of the chief receded and grew blurry in the mist. About thirty yards out, a siren sounded aboard the ship.
“Step on it, Smitty,” one of the sailors said to the helmsman. “Get us ashore before they cancel liberty or some such shit.”
Smitty nodded and the engine roared.
35
First we caught a cab back to Hialeah Compound. I wanted to get as far away from the U.S. Navy as possible.
After showing our ID at the pedestrian gate, we went over to the MP Station. No unusual blotter reports. Everything had been quiet on Hialeah Compound last night.
“That’s because Shipton was busy elsewhere,” Ernie said.
Busy is right. Possibly offing his sixth victim, Seaman Harrelson, of the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk, and stealing who-knows-what kind of top secret information.
I wasn’t sure what to do next. The PX office wasn’t open yet, so we finally did the sensible thing and grabbed a couple of trays at the post snack bar. We went through the line and ordered ourselves some breakfast.
As I sipped on hot coffee and listened to the tinkling of glassware and the rustling of newspapers, I tried to put things in perspective.
Shipton’s primary goal was the theft of classified documents. Who knew how much he’d gotten away with in the last three months? Maybe the suspicions of Strange and his ilk were blown way out of proportion. Or maybe they were just the tip of the iceberg. Hard to tell. But what I did know for certain was that Shipton now had access to information on “tunnels” from the army and “weaponry,” probably nuclear, from the navy. Valuable stuff.