Nightmare Range Read Online Free PDF

reenlist in the army. And besides, he’d put down the heroin now—you couldn’t buy it in Korea anyway—and replaced it with the duty-free, shipped-at-taxpayer-expense, happy-hour-priced booze that gushed from the army warehouses like crude from a grounded tanker.
    A Korean man wearing sandals, a T-shirt, and loose-fitting gray work pants rode past us on a sturdy bicycle.
    Ernie elbowed me. “Must be the pickup, pal.”
    The produce displays kept the man from seeing us, and Ernie and I got up, taking our beer with us, and faded deeper into the darkness of the grocery store.
    The man parked his bicycle in front of the doll’s front gate and rang the bell. In less than a minute the door opened and the man went through, carrying some flattened cardboard boxes and some string.
    We sat back down and finished our beer. Ready for action.
    A rag dealer pushing a wooden cart on oversized bicycle tires rolled past us. He clanged his big rusty metal shears and wailed something incomprehensible to his prospective customers. A woman down the street, across from the doll’s house, came out from behind her big metal gate and bartered with the rag dealer for a while, finally selling him a brown paper bag filled with flattened aluminum cans.
    The Koreans have been recycling for centuries.
    The rag dealer tried to interest her in some bits of clothing but she shook her head and demanded money instead. A few coins changed hands, the woman went back behind her protective walls, and the rag dealer clanged down the road, turned left, and was out of sight.
    In the distance his clanging and wailing stopped for a while and I figured he must have found another customer.
    The man on the bicycle reappeared carrying two large cardboard boxes wrapped in string. He struggled beneath their weight but managed to hoist them up onto the heavy-duty stand on the back of his bicycle. He secured the boxes with rope, hopped on the bike, and rode off. The gate behind him had long since been closed.
    “Let’s go, pal.” Ernie and I trotted down the hill after him, and then jumped in our Jeep and followed at a safe distance as he crossed the Main Supply Route and went about a half mile farther into the heart of Itaewon.
    A steep alley turned up a hill, and the man jumped off his bicycle and pushed it slowly up the incline. Ernie pulled over, and I got out of the Jeep. I followed the man to the top of the hill and down a couple of alleys, and watched as he parked in front of a small house surrounded by a decrepit wooden fence. He unloaded his boxes and entered. Then he took his bicycle in and closed the gate.
    On the way back to the Jeep I stopped at a public phone and called the Korean National Police liaison officer.
    By the time I returned to where Ernie was waiting, a small blue and white Korean police car was just pulling up. Two uniformed KNPs got out, and the four of us walked up into the catacombs of the Korean working class neighborhood.
    They kicked the door in. In about ten seconds the man was face down on the floor of his home, his wrists handcuffed securely behind him. Some of the fruit was smashed and the US-made canned goods rolled slowly across the room. They took him to the Itaewon police station.
    Ernie and I popped back to the doll’s house and knocked on the door. There was no answer. We waited for a while and then a GI sauntered toward us carrying a briefcase. He was tall and thin, with a pencil-line mustache and the strut of a Southern aristocrat.
    The insignia on his neatly pressed khaki uniform identified him as Chief Warrant Officer Three Janson. Medical Corps.
    “What do you want?”
    I flashed my badge. “To question your wife concerning black market activities.”
    “No way.”
    Janson opened the door and told us to wait, but it didn’t take long because we barged in when we heard his scream.
    The voluptuous Oriental doll lay dead on the floor, blood seeping from a hole in her side where her ribs should have been.
    The big red