Free Jade Lady Burning by Martin Limon Page A

been looking for you guys,” Riley said, as we sauntered in.
    “Isn’t he always?”
    “It’s about this KPA bullshit again.”
    Ernie wandered over to Miss Kim’s desk. She stopped typing and looked up, smiling. He sat down on the edge of the desk and looked at her. Then he offered her a breath mint. She accepted it, smiled, and turned back to her typing. Ernie just stayed there, staring at her. Sometimes I wondered if they weren’t autistic.
    Riley shuffled through some papers and handed me one.
    “It’s one of those guys from KPA. He put in this written complaint and now he wants to talk to the first sergeant. Top wants you and Ernie to sit in.”
    “He’s here now?”
    “Yeah. His appointment’s in ten minutes.”
    I sat down to read the complaint. The Korean Procurement Agency is the civilian arm of the Eighth Army that uses American taxpayer money to buy local goods and services. Stuff that we were not going to go to the trouble of shipping over. Anything from a head of lettuce to a new command bunker extending three stories down into the ground. It was a huge operation with millions of dollars’ worth of contracts flowing through it every year. Most of the monitoring was done by accountants sent out by the Army Auditing Agency, but corruption and influence peddling was not always reflected in the credit and debit ledgers.
    The guy who was making the complaint was an American, of course, hired from the States, and judging from his manic drive to get everything straightened out, he probably was on his first tour in the Far East.
    I figured Top mainly wanted Ernie and me in the office as witnesses, so the guy couldn’t make accusations against him later. Most of this sort of work was done by Burrows and Slabem, but they were out at the Yongsan District Police Headquarters, monitoring the ROK activities on the Pak Ok-suk murder case. They were the experts at handling this KPA kind of situation. Not me and Ernie.
    I read over the complaint. Routine. Korean businessmen were turning in bids on U.S. government contracts. Okay so far. But the Americans required three bids from three different companies on each contract. The businessman making the bid, of course, already had a connection with one of the Korean career bureaucrats within KPA so he knew exactly how much money was budgeted for a particular project. What he did was get three different stationery letterheads and put in three bids, ostensibly from different companies, and each signed by a different executive, with all three bids hovering right at or just below the budgeted appropriation.
    The bidding was open to competitors, but through the network of Korean power brokers they would be warned off if they seriously tried to butt in. It was a syndicate, in effect, milking the American government. Nothing new. They’d been doing it for years.
    And the work they did was not shoddy. It was efficiently produced and, for the most part, brought in on time. That’s why the U.S. Army lived with the system. It got results. Of course, they still went through the charade of all the regulatory purchasing requirements. The Koreans didn’t mind this. They liked paperwork: It produced jobs. And they understood the need to save face. Over the years there’d been a number of attempts to reform the system but in the end the Koreans had always patted the petulant American reformer on the head as he headed back to the States.
    The American who was complaining this time only knew that someone was turning in three bids under three different cover companies and that the guy was buddies with one of the Koreans in the agency who let out the contracts. He saw only what looked like corruption to him. He didn’t see the cultural machinery that had evolved over four thousand years that kept disputes to a minimum and allowed for the smooth running of a society.
    I had no plans to explain all this stuff to the bean counter or to the first sergeant. I would just keep my mouth shut