Free G.I. Bones by Martin Limon Page B

their way into all the usual haunts that the Seven Dragons frequented: nightclubs, bars, brothels, the black-market warehouses. But Snake, Horsehead, and Dragon’s Claw Number One, along with their four brethren, were nowhere to be found.
    Neither was Moretti.
    Judging by the shape they’d found the three truck drivers in, the MPs thought that Moretti was probably dead. The Seven Dragons must have taken his body because they wanted to eliminate all evidence of the crime. Without a body to prove that a murder had been committed, and without weapons to prove how the murder had been perpetrated, the likelihood of the Seven Dragons being indicted— much less convicted—was virtually nil.
    The reaction at 8th Army headquarters was outrage. Not at the men who’d perpetrated this crime but at the MPs who’d gone on their midnight rampage in search of Mori Di. The Korean newspapers were flooded with reports of Korean citizens being ripped cruelly from their homes in the middle of the night, of innocent black-market entrepreneurs being interrogated and slapped around by long-nosed foreigners, and of the Korean National Police being shamed in their own precincts by burly American MPs who showed no regard for the sanctity of Korean law.
    All of the responding MPs were brought up on charges.
    The civil affairs operation that Moretti had run in Itaewon was curtailed. His headquarters building was decommissioned by 8th Army and turned over to the ROK Ministry of the Interior. Construction operations, financed by American money, were no longer run by 8th Army Engineering but shifted to Korean subcontractors approved by the ROK government. This was supposed to help strengthen the Korean economy. But the real reason was to insure that there was not another Itaewon Massacre.
    After a hearing conducted by the judge advocate general, the MPs who responded to Moretti’s distress call that night were formally reprimanded though not brought up on court-martial charges, and all of them were shipped back to the States.
    When the dust settled, the hunt for Moretti had been forgotten. As was the hunt for the seven men who had assaulted him. Forgotten by everybody, that is, except for an MP investigator named Cort.
    The progress report I turned into Staff Sergeant Riley at the 8th Army CID office indicated that our search of Itaewon the previous night for Corporal Paco Bernal had turned up negative results.
    “You mean he’s not there?” Riley asked us.
    I shrugged. Ernie was busy fixing himself a cup of coffee poured from the big silver urn behind Miss Kim’s desk.
    “I can’t tell the first sergeant this shit,” Riley said, “that you didn’t find nothing.”
    “Why not? That’s what happened.”
    “So you don’t have any leads on the whereabouts of this guy?”
    I shrugged again. “We’re working on it,” I said.
    “The provost marshal wants positive, measurable progress,” Riley said. “Estimates of when a goal will be attained. Not just ‘we didn’t find nothing.’”
    “If they want positive,” I said, “they’ll just have to wait.”
    “No, they won’t,” Riley said, grabbing a pencil. He spoke as he wrote. “Ongoing searches of the areas the suspect was known to frequent are expected to turn up results prior to the next reporting period.”
    “Bullshit.”
    Riley looked up from his work. “What do you think we do here?”
    Ernie finished his coffee.
    The two of us left the CID office and drove over to the barracks at the 21 T Car motor pool. According to the head houseboy, Paco Bernal had not returned to his room. A couple of the G.I.s who knew him couldn’t provide any new information and, moreover, they didn’t seem concerned about Paco’s fate.
    As we walked back to the jeep, Ernie said, “They really watch out for one another in this unit, don’t they?”
    As we left 21 T Car and drove out Gate 9, heading toward Itaewon, I surprised Ernie by telling him to turn left on the road leading toward Namsan