“Bail?” I said.
“They made me sign a chit. Taking responsibility for you two lowlifes and guaranteeing you’d un-ass the Division area.”
“What about the Threets investigation?”
“Finished,” Riley said. “Done. Kaput.”
“It ain’t finished,” Ernie said, growling.
“It’s finished up here,” Riley said. “Come on.”
We followed him out into the hallway.
The MPs wouldn’t give us Ernie’s jeep back, not until we were out of the Division area. Instead, two of their MPs drove it, their headlights tailing me and Ernie and Riley in Riley’s green army sedan. Just past the last Division checkpoint, we pulled over onto the side of the dark road. The two MPs hopped out of Ernie’s jeep and walked over to the floodlight illuminating the checkpoint. Soon they were bullshitting with the checkpoint guards, exchanging cigarettes, apparently waiting for transportation back.
Riley drove south in his sedan. Ernie and I jumped in his jeep and followed. Speeding off, Ernie leaned out of his side of the door, held his arm high, and flipped the Division MPs the bird.
“It’s past midnight,” I told him. “They can’t see what you’re doing.”
Ernie shrugged. “It’s the thought that counts.”
The compound known as ASCOM, the Army Support Command, sits about fifteen kilometers west of Seoul, just outside the city of Bupyong, not too far from the shores of the Yellow Sea. Ernie and I left early and drove on a two-lane elevated highway that wound through fallow rice paddies and past clusters of straw-thatched farmhouses. Metal chimneys spewed ribbons of charcoal smoke into the blue sky. At the ASCOM main gate, an MP checked our dispatch and rusty wheels squeaked as a Korean gate guard rolled the barbed-wire fence open. We drove through onto a small compound composed mostly of tin Quonset huts, which looked like all the other US military compounds in the country except that it was interspersed with massive concrete buildings that had been constructed before World War II by the Japanese Imperial Army, supposedly for ammunition storage.
One of those huge storage bunkers was surrounded by another chain-link fence with a small administration building out front. The sign at the entranceway said: welcome to the 8th united states army stockade. authorized personnel only.
At the front desk, we showed our badges to a bored clerk. A couple of phone calls were made and then, after about ten minutes, an MP with a steel helmet and a plastic faceguard motioned to us with his truncheon. We followed. A long hallway led into the heart of the concrete bunker and, once inside, the world changed. Sounds were amplified. Metal clanging on metal and the sharp shouts of commands echoed down whitewashed corridors. We followed the MP through one of those corridors, turned right, and finally reached a door marked prisoner conference room. He pulled out a ring of keys, unlocked the door and waved us in.
“I’ll be right outside the door,” he said. “Have a seat. The prisoner will be brought in shortly.”
Ernie and I pulled straight-backed chairs out from beneath a counter and sat down. The partition reached from floor to ceiling and the windows were made of thick plastic with a metal mesh to speak through.
“Where are the telephones?” Ernie asked.
“What?”
“In the movies,” he said, “the prisoner sits on one side and his visitor sits on the other, talking through telephones.”
I studied the little metal duct.
“I guess Eighth Army couldn’t afford them,” I said.
Ernie peered through the thin wire. “You can spread germs through this thing.”
Five minutes later, a burly MP, similarly masked with a metal helmet and a plastic visor, escorted in the prisoner. He wore army fatigues, but without rank insignia or a belt to hold up his baggy pants. Instead, he clutched them with his right hand, which was handcuffed to his left. His name tag said Threets. Peering at us, he remained standing until the guard pointed at the chair with his nightstick. Immediately, Threets sat down. The guard backed out of the room and shut the door behind him.
Ernie glanced at me. I think I knew what he wanted to say. Threets looked like a child. The flesh of his face was soft and without whiskers, and even though he was rail-thin, baby fat rounded his cheeks. He wore Army-issue horn-rimmed glasses and his hair was tufted out a little too long for Army regulation.
“Hey, buddy,” Ernie said. “How’s it going?”
Threets didn’t answer. Mostly, he stared at his hands in his lap, but occasionally his eyes popped up to study us. Ernie introduced us and then said, “Monk up at Charley Battery says hello.”
Threets’s eyes lit up. “Monk?”
“Yeah. We smoked some reefer together. He says he wants to testify on your behalf, but so far they won’t let him.”
Threets glanced back down. “I don’t do no reefer.”
“Yeah, I know,” Ernie said. “They told me.” He paused, glancing at me to see if I wanted to say anything, but this was his show. Ernie cleared his throat and stared again. “So Monk said it was an accident. You didn’t mean to shoot nobody.”
Threets kept his eyes down. In reply, he raised and then lowered his narrow shoulders. This wasn’t good. The unwillingness to answer, in the military mind, meant agreement.
Ernie didn’t push it. “They say Smoke was riding you.”
“Smoke” meant Sergeant First Class Vincent P. Orgwell, formally the chief of Firing Battery.
When Threets didn’t answer, Ernie said, “You’re a gunner. Young for a gunner. But Monk and the other guys tell me that you can work the numbers in your head. Lay the gun faster than any other gunner in the battery. The chief of smoke knew that. He knew you were good.”
Ernie paused. Still Threets said nothing.
“Maybe that’s why he rode you,” Ernie said. “Because you’re young and you’re smart.” Ernie let the silence hang. Finally, he said. “And because you’re black.”
Threets’s mouth tightened. Still, he didn’t speak. When he finally did say something, it was almost a whisper. Both of us leaned forward to hear what he said. He repeated it, louder this time.
“He didn’t ride me because I’m black,” he said.
Ernie waited again, longer than he had before. For some reason it hung in the air, the feeling that what Threets was about to say was something that neither Ernie nor I really wanted to hear. It was intuition, I suppose, although I don’t really believe in those things. Somehow, mysteriously, both Ernie and I sensed that what was coming wouldn’t be good.
“It wasn’t because I was black,” he said. “It was because he wanted to train me.”
“To be a better gunner?” Ernie ventured.
For the first time Threets showed some emotion. Violently, he shook his head and in an exasperated voice he said, “No. Nobody understands.”
“Understands what?” Ernie asked.
“Nobody understands what Smoke really is.” For the first time Threets looked up at us, in turn, staring us both in the eye. “He told me to report to him, after work, but to tell no one. ‘For extra training,’ he said. I met him in the training room. It was empty, just him and me, and then he . . .”
Suddenly, Threets lost his nerve and stared at the ground.
“Then he what?” Ernie asked.
This seemed to enrage Threets. “What are you, stupid? Don’t you get it?” He stood up. The helmeted MP burst into the room. As he grabbed Threets by the arm, Threets twisted away and screamed at us. “Don’t you get it? Smoke is a fag. He’s a goddamn fag!”
The MP pulled Threets away.
This was not good news.
Homosexuality was a crime in the US Military, and 8th Army brass didn’t like dealing with it. It was too touchy. Nobody wanted to be assigned to a “homo investigation”; nobody wanted to type up the formal accusation, and field-grade officers didn’t like to be appointed to the boards of inquiry or, worse yet, the courts-martial that had to prosecute such a case. Still, it was our sworn duty and it had to be done. And it would explain why Threets turned his weapon on the Chief of Smoke. He was being coerced by a senior noncommissioned officer, a man older and more experienced than him, into doing things that he didn’t want to do.