Mortal Allies (56 page)

The only problem was that when he and his security detail had planned and publicized that schedule, they were unaware the alliance’s protocol officer was owned by North Korea.

That, I’d finally concluded, was why Choi wanted Harry Elmore in his stable. Elmore had access to the plans that involved VIP visits. He knew what the security arrangements were. He was one of the two or three guys who controlled access to VIPs. His office printed the passes, and took the requests, and decided who would and who wouldn’t get within spitting distance of the high and mighty. Even if the event was controlled by the State Department, all Harry had to do was call his counterpart, the protocol officer at the embassy, and tell him he needed two dozen passes. I’m sure they talked all the time. They probably horse-traded back and forth like Belgian gem merchants.

“Hey, Harry, I hear the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders are coming over for a military morale visit. Think you could slide me thirty tickets under the table?”

“Hey, no problem, Bill, but listen, I’ve got twenty Korean buddies climbing all over my ass because they want to be seen in the proximity of the American Secretary of State. How about passes for that?”

Buzz had several guys sitting in a room right now combing over the lists of those who’d gotten passes to be inside the ropes. We knew it was hopeless. Whoever Choi sent to do the dirty deed would either use a false name or a name we wouldn’t recognize anyway.

Thus, we were reduced to what we were doing. Mercer had one of his guys inform the head of the Secretary’s security detail what we suspected, and the rest of us were combing through the crowd, looking for familiar faces or suspicious activities.

Part of the problem was these were North Koreans we were talking about. The same guys who walk around with poison pellets hidden in their teeth. Professional security people will tell you that any assassin willing to end his or her own life has something like a 90 percent chance of success. It’s generally true, too. Remember Lincoln’s assassination? President Garfield’s? Bobby Kennedy’s? John Lennon’s? Those all involved assassins crazy or willing enough to get close, to trade their chances of escape and survival to get their target.

Anyway, we finally ran into Carol and found a spot where we could overwatch the crowd and put our heads together.

Carol’s eyes roamed the crowd. “I’m bothered by something.”

“What?” her boss asked.

“Why would the North Koreans kill the American Secretary of State?”

I said, “Good question. Why would they?”

Mercer said, “Yeah. It would be too stupid for words. Even if it didn’t cause a war, we’d never pull another soldier off Korean soil until North Korea was a distant memory. That’s the last thing they’d want.”

Sometimes, even when you’re not trying, you come to a moment of truth. It just hits you in the face.

The assassin or assassins would have to be somebody you’d never connect to North Korea. But if a South Korean murdered the Secretary of State, the alliance really would be a trashheap.

And wouldn’t you know, just at that moment a large crowd of protesters came streaming around a street corner, headed our way. They were yelling and hollering and moving fast. They were carrying banners, and most of them were wearing white medical masks the way a lot of Asians do to protect their lungs from smog, or to screen their faces from being ID’ed by cops when they’re ready to rumble.

It was ten after nine. The dinner was supposed to be over in five minutes. The protesters had obviously planned their arrival to coincide with the Secretary of State’s departure from the Blue House. They wanted all those television cameras and reporters to see that the symbolic, everything’s-been-healed meal was a farce, that the South Korean people were still furiously angry over the death of Lee No Tae and wanted the lawless American troops off their soil.

On the other hand, it was a known fact that North Korean agents and sympathizers had thoroughly penetrated South Korea’s student and labor movements and could spark a protest or riot pretty much at will.

I looked at Buzz Mercer and he looked at me, and we exchanged a telepathic aw-shit. Somewhere in that crowd of protesters were probably one or two people with passes to get past the police lines.

T
he Secretary of State chose that moment to stride purposefully out the entrance of the Blue House and begin walking between the ceremonial files of soldiers toward his car.

Whoever planned this thing had an exquisite sense of timing, not to mention a thorough knowledge of South Korean crowd-control methods. Because there’d been no application to the city authorities for this protest, only a small contingent of blue-suited crowd-control troops were on hand.

A platoon, thirty or so men, was loitering by a gray bus. They weren’t expecting trouble, so they didn’t have on their riot gear. Most were hunched over small stoves, cooking rice or noodles and preparing to eat.

Maybe ten uniformed policemen were present — a token force — because the folks crowded around the Blue House were all supposed to be friendly. Then there was the honor guard whose job it was to make a snazzy cordon for the Secretary of State to pass through on his way to the car. They had rifles, but it was doubtful those had ammunition.

The thing that became instantly apparent was that nobody had planned for this. There was no central, controlling authority capable of organizing an orderly response to the unfolding situation. I could see the leader of the blue-suited troops screaming at his men to get their riot gear on and get in line, even as he was yelling into a radio, probably calling for reinforcements. It was a hopeless gesture. Nobody could get here in time.

The army guard did what ceremonial troops normally do. They stayed stiffly in their cordon and held their rifles at the salute position for the distinguished man walking between them.

Suddenly the crowd of rioters lunged forward and began running pell-mell down the block toward the Blue House. They hurtled straight into the crowd of peaceful gatherers and reporters, shoving people aside and carrying others along with their speed and mass. They were yelling and screaming and waving their placards and protest signs in the air. At the same instant, the small group of kids in blue suits rushed out to meet them. They carried their helmets and shields and batons in their hands, in a breathtakingly valiant effort to throw themselves between the crowd and the diplomatic party.

The Secretary’s security detail had a split second to decide. They could turn the Secretary around and shove him back inside the Blue House. Or they could push him forward, toward the bulletproof black sedan waiting at the curb. The car door was being held open by a South Korean soldier. The car was closer.

It did look like the best choice at the time. They literally lifted him off his feet, and began carrying him forward, when suddenly the natty-looking soldier holding the car door flew forward and the door slammed shut. The soldier lay flat on the ground, like he’d been nailed on the back of the skull with a blackjack, or, considering this was Asia, a nunchaku.

At moments like this, a fraction of a second means everything. And I’ll give the Secretary’s security guys credit. They instantly threw him on the ground and two of them piled themselves on top of him, while the other two drew their pistols and turned about and faced the crowd. They instinctively recognized the situation was out of control, and we had warned them there was a grave risk, so they weren’t taking any chances.

Buzz Mercer and I were running toward the Secretary of State when we heard the first loud bang, even over the noise of the crowd, and one of the Secretary’s security men flew backward with a big spray of blood spewing from his head. Then
Bang
! The other standing security guard grabbed his gut, sank to his knees, and fell over.

Then
Bang! Bang! Bang
! — three more shots were fired. But by this time, Carol and I were there. So were seven or eight South Korean uniformed policemen with their pistols drawn.

You sometimes wonder about the difference two seconds would make. Or what would’ve happened if Clapper hadn’t called and woken me up. Or if I hadn’t been so bored that I’d been channel-surfing through Korean newscasts. Things would’ve turned out quite differently, because I was probably the only guy in the crowd who would’ve recognized him and the threat he posed.

He was holding up his police shield and pointing his pistol, and you could’ve sworn he had every right to be there, that he was just doing his job. He even had the proper security pass pinned to his lapel.

Choi Lee Min, experienced policeman that he was, blended right in with the other cops.

I ended up right next to him. I looked at him, and he turned his head and saw me, and there was one of those shocked milliseconds that seem to last forever.

Then he spun his body to shoot me, and despite all those years of hand-to-hand training I’d had in the outfit, I knew in that instant I didn’t stand a chance. I saw the pistol aimed at my stomach and I instinctively knew that no matter how fast I moved, it wouldn’t be fast enough.

But before he could pull the trigger a hand crashed down on his forearm and knocked the weapon loose. It landed on the cement at his feet and we both turned to see who’d smacked him. Allie stood right next to him, glaring at his face.

Choi’s eyes turned to the ground; just as he started to bend over to retrieve his pistol, Allie threw her stiffened fingers straight into his throat. An explosion of pain must have raced through his synapses. She’d hit him hard. She’d meant to. She’d driven his Adam’s apple right into his larynx, like a nail jabbed into a balloon. His head drove forward and a sickening gurgling, choking sound came from his mouth. He buckled to his knees and his hands flew to his throat, trying to get some air into his lungs.

I threw myself down on the ground and scrambled around for his pistol. In one way, that proved to be the right thing to do. But in another way, it wasn’t.

Because here’s what happened: I looked up just in time to see a Korean rioter pushing his way through the crowd. In his hand I saw a black metal ball that an experienced soldier like me would recognize immediately as a hand grenade.

He was so close that even with my awful marksmanship I couldn’t miss. I didn’t even think. I just picked up the pistol and shot him. Right in the forehead. And since I was firing up from the ground, the bullet lifted him off his feet and sent him flying backward.

Then there were two loud booms. The first was not nearly as noisy as the second. In fact, it was hardly more than a quick pop. I mean, it sounded loud to me, but that first one was only a pistol shot. The second boom was the one that got everybody’s attention. It was so loud it was deafening. That was the hand grenade going off in the middle of the crowd.

Here’s what they figured out later. Choi had gotten his security pass from Harry Elmore. He’d used that pass to get past the barriers and blend in with the other Korean cops. None of the other cops remembered him being there throughout the evening, so he probably hadn’t risked showing his face until right before the assassination was supposed to go down. He was there to run interference and see that everything went down right.

It was probably Choi who used his pistol butt to clobber the Korean soldier at the Secretary of State’s car door, and then slam the door closed in front of him.

The protester was armed with a grenade because that was the weapon of choice for their plan. Say Choi hadn’t been able to get the car door slammed in the Secretary’s face, then he would’ve been shoved into the backseat by his guards. But the car wasn’t going anywhere, because protesters were cluttered in front of it, and even an American Secretary of State, oddly enough, isn’t allowed to run over a dozen or so foreigners inside their own country. Therefore his car would’ve been stranded by the curb and the protester would’ve flung the armed hand grenade underneath it. Now, here’s a fact: Bulletproof cars aren’t invulnerable to large explosions on their undersides. That’s where the gas tank is located. Also, the undersides of those behemoths don’t have all that thick armor plating. There would likely have been a huge explosion.

But Choi did get the car door closed. So he prepared the way for the second contingency. The Secretary’s security detail, if they ever saw Choi, assumed he was on their side. He was holding up his police shield as he shot the security guards and cleared the way for the kid with the grenade to jump on top of the Secretary and blow them both to pieces. Ballistic tests proved that the bullets that killed three of the Secretary’s security detail came from Choi’s pistol.

As it was, the suicide bomber killed another four people and wounded nine more. It was lucky for the Secretary that I’d fired my shot up from the ground, because that sent the bomber flying backward into the crowd and made the grenade roll backward out of his hand, so some other hapless souls ended up absorbing the explosion and shrapnel meant for him.

As for the suicide bomber, he was a senior at Kwangju University about 120 miles south of Seoul. He was as South Korean as they come. He was born and raised in the city of Kwangju, the capital city of a South Korean province that was known as a virulent hotbed of antigovernment and anti-American sentiments. Twenty-two years before, his father, as well as many other citizens of Kwangju, had been killed by South Korean troops who were brutally suppressing a huge revolt in the city. Korean lore had it that the troops who went into the city to suppress the revolt were there at the behest and encouragement of the American military command. It wasn’t true, because they had actually been sent in by an angry, ambitious military dictator, who afterward distorted the facts to deflect the blame away from himself. But the myth persisted. The kid had been very active in campus antigovernment groups. He was known around the school as a hothead and a fanatical anti-American.

He was the perfect cutout. Which was exactly why Choi picked him. Had he killed the Secretary of State, and had Choi simply vanished back into the crowd and made his escape, it would’ve looked like a South Korean extremist had assassinated a key American government official right on the steps of South Korea’s presidential palace.