Vasquez turned out to be my favorite kind of soldier: the hair-trigger obedient type. He spun back around, downshifted into neutral, jammed the gas pedal to the floor, then shifted into gear. The car nearly leaped off the ground. The tires screamed as they got traction, and Vasquez wisely shoved down hard on the horn, adding to the racket.
All of a sudden the mob focused on the big, noisy black sedan bearing down on them. That look of the maddened crowd evaporated. I guess they realized there’s a fundamental difference between chasing a group of outnumbered, scared MPs and eating the front bumper of a speeding car.
Rioters dove all over the place. We raced through the narrow gate, then Vasquez took a hard right turn, with more squealing tires, and drove madly through a bunch of skinny twisted streets with tightly packed shops on both sides. It took about three minutes before we cleared the village of Osan and made it to a country road that led to the Seoul-Pusan highway.
Captain Wilson’s fingers had a death grip on the back of Vasquez’s seat. His face was chalky white. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he moaned. “That was a real bad idea.”
“How come?” I asked.
He shook his head and gave me an exasperated look. “ ’Cause we’re gonna get an official complaint. No doubt about it. You coulda hurt some of those people.”
“Hey Chucky, you got things backward. They wanted to hurt us. Besides, Osan Air Base is military territory. We have an agreement with the South Koreans. Those people were trespassers. If we’d hit one, it would’ve been perfectly legal. Trust me.”
He gave me a dubious look. “What makes you so damn sure of yourself?”
“I ought to be,” I told him. “I’m a lawyer.”
“A lawyer?” he asked, like he’d just discovered a big gob of smelly dog doo on the sole of his shoe.
“Yeah, you know. A JAG officer. One of those guys with a license to practice law.”
His face got this very pained expression. “You mean… you mean, I went through this shit to get a JAG officer?”
With the tension and all, he just blurted that out. I didn’t take offense, though. See, in the Army, JAG officers aren’t real high on anybody’s be-sure-to-invite-to-the-party lists. We’re regarded as geeky, bookish, wimpy types without a lot of redeeming virtues. Lawyers aren’t all that popular in the civilian world, either, but at least they inspire envy with the money they earn.
Military lawyers, nobody envies us. We shave our heads and dress somewhat funny, and our pay’s only a hairsbreadth away from minimum wage.
I leaned back into my seat and crossed my recently tanned legs. “So what’s got the natives up in arms this time?”
Wilson let loose his grip on Vasquez’s seat and drifted back also. “What happened was that three American soldiers raped and murdered a South Korean.”
“That’s too bad,” I said in a casually offhanded way. “Regrettable, I’m sure, but that kind of thing’s happened over here plenty of times. Anything special about this one?”
“I’d say.”
“What?”
“It was a fag rape.”
I nodded, but “Umm-hmm” was all I said.
“That’s not the least of it, either. The kid they raped and murdered was a Katusa.”
I nodded and umm-hmm’d some more. Katusas are South Korean soldiers assigned to American units. The term actually stands for “Korean Augmentees to the U.S. Army” – more proof that the military can convolute anything into an acronym. Katusas are almost all highly educated college graduates who speak English if not fluently, at least with some degree of proficiency. Most Korean kids consider Katusa duty to be the most agreeable way to perform mandatory military service.
With good reason, too, because the Korean Army is a brown-shoe affair, much like the American Army back in the thirties, where a common soldier’s lot is fairly spartan. The pay stinks, the barracks are rustic and unheated, the food’s just enough to keep you from starving, and Korean sergeants believe fervently that if you spare the rod, you spoil the child. Hazing and beatings are fairly common.
The American military, on the other hand, is inarguably the world’s most spoiled and pampered. Barracks are like college dorms, food’s… well, at least ample, and if a sergeant so much as raises an open hand in the direction of a private, he’s going to need a good defense counsel, like me.
Naturally, any Korean kid with an iota of sense wants to be a Katusa. And just as naturally, any Korean kid with rich or powerful parents usually gets his way.
I looked at Chuck. “I can see where that would be ugly.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” he replied, sighing very visibly. “The Katusa’s name was Lee No Tae. Of course, since nearly everybody who lives here’s named Lee or Kim, I don’t expect you to see the significance of that. His father is Lee Jung Kim. Ever heard of him?”
“Nope.”
“He’s the defense minister of the South Korean armed forces.”
I felt a sudden wrenching in my gut. I mean, here I am, a JAG officer, and I get this panicky call from the Judge Advocate General, the two-star general in charge of the entire Army’s JAG Corps, ordering me to terminate my vacation and haul my butt up to Andrews Air Force Base to catch the next military flight to South Korea. Worse, he wouldn’t say why. He just said I’d find out when I got there.
It was my turn to squeeze the back of the seat in front of me. “Has this got anything to do with why I’ve been brought over here?”
It was a rhetorical question, of course.
“No sir,” he said, sounding completely resolute. “Not a thing.”
“Yeah? How do you know?”
“ ’Cause, according to the papers, the Organization for Gay Military Members – some group back in the States – hired a bunch of civilian attorneys to come over here and represent the accused.”
A relieved sigh escaped from my lungs. I don’t mean to sound squeamish, but in my eight years as an Army lawyer, I’d managed to never once be involved with a court case related to homosexuality. There aren’t a lot of experienced military lawyers who can say that. I could, though. I was damned glad of it, too.
The thing about flying twelve hours with my bladder pumped full of coffee and that six-pack of Molson I now sorely regretted having smuggled aboard was that I couldn’t sleep for fear I’d awaken with a big wet spot in my lap. I smelled foul and was wrung out, so I told Captain Wilson to wake me up when we got to Seoul.
CHAPTER 2
Corporal Vasquez flapped his arms and chewed on his lips as he inspected the big pockmarks on the car’s roof, and I felt sorry for him as I yanked my gear out of the trunk. He was no doubt scared witless about how he was going to explain those ugly dimples to the motor pool sergeant who’d loaned him the car. If you know anything about Army sergeants, you’ll understand.
I walked through the entry into the Dragon Hill Lodge, a military-owned and -run hotel located smack in the middle of Yongsan Garrison, the military base located in the heart of downtown Seoul. This is where the big cheese headquarters is located.
Captain Wilson, being a good sport, followed me across the cavernous, marble-floored lobby and waited while I checked in. The girl at the desk found my reservation, traded my Visa for a magnetic key, then peered intently into her computer screen and informed me I had a message.
A message already? Wasn’t I the popular guy?
“Kam sam ni da,” I charmingly said, tossing out one of the few Korean phrases from my sparse inventory.
She handed an envelope to me and I tore it open with a finger. The message said I had an appointment to be in the office of the Commander in Chief of the United Nations Command and the Combined Forces Command, at exactly 1500 hours. This was the big cheese himself, a four-star named Martin Spears whom I’d never met, but who was known for being frighteningly smart and painfully demanding.