Finders Keepers
Through the five-day holiday strung between Chuseok and National Foundation Day, Ki-jo rested only on Chuseok itself and worked every other day straight through. His worksites did the same. Neither the nation's great holiday nor a golden long weekend counted as a red-letter day when there was money to be made right in front of them.
The sites at Samcheok and Yeongwol were running around the clock, opening a coal mine and putting up a cement plant, and the American used trucks that had come back aboard the ship returning from a tungsten export run arrived in Busan and rolled up to Seoul. Fifty trucks to a freighter, and from July the fleet had grown by a hundred vehicles a month. By October, Cheongsan Transport owned some three hundred and fifty trucks in all. Its subcontractor, Hanjin, had added fifty of its own, so the trucks Ki-jo could actually call upon numbered more than four hundred.
The trucks were multiplying faster than he could find men to drive them, so he simply bought land in Jegi-dong, opened a driving school, and set about training drivers himself. Ma-ryang and Seo-gwang had let go of the work at Miwon and were sweating through the job of turning out a hundred drivers a month at the Jegi-dong school.
Ki-jo's plan was to train a thousand truck drivers. By the end of 1955 he meant to push Cheongsan Transport's fleet past five hundred and lock in an overwhelming capacity to haul. In the original history, it was not until 1960 that Hanjin's Cho Choong-hoon assembled five hundred trucks. Ki-jo wanted that milestone pulled forward by five years. It was a super-gap strategy: become the firm in the Republic of Korea that owned the most trucks, and make it so no other company would dare lay a hand on U.S. military logistics.
On October 5, the day after the holiday ended, he headed for Eighth Army headquarters with Choong-hoon. Inside the Mercedes Choong-hoon was driving, they talked over the latest word from the peninsula.
"They say six Chinese divisions will pull out of North Korea sometime in October."
"That so? How many men in one of their divisions?"
"Fifteen thousand each. Ninety thousand in all."
"The way those Chinks are clearing out in a hurry, they must be relieved to see the Americans leaving."
From 1954 on, both the American and Chinese armies had been withdrawing from the peninsula a step at a time. Unlike the steady course of the Syngman Rhee government, with its policy of destroying communism and unifying the country by a march north, the situation on the peninsula was drifting toward peace. It was not an open reconciliation, but both sides were easing military tension by pulling their forces out in stages. Japan, quick to notice, was already trading with North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union.
"If the Americans keep pulling out, our work shrinks with them. That's a real problem...."
Ki-jo was adding trucks hand over fist, and Choong-hoon worried as the U.S. garrison in Korea kept thinning.
"Even if the Americans leave, there's still opportunity, isn't there? Someone has to haul the withdrawal cargo."
"Right. We turn into a moving company. Ha ha."
Ki-jo knew better. Even if the Americans left, the work would not shrink in proportion. In the short run the volume of freight would explode, because of the enormous household goods the U.S. forces would be taking home. In that season the Americans adopted a policy of contracting their transport out to Korean private firms. Using Korea's cheap haulers cost far less than keeping an American transport unit stationed in the country.
"Then again, the Eighth Army commander was replaced in June and the whole staff turned over. I do worry something unpleasant might change."
General Maxwell Taylor had been promoted from commander of the Eighth Army to Chief of Staff of the United States Army and had gone home. His successor, General Lyman Lemnitzer, had taken up the post in Korea. Ki-jo no longer had a single general he knew inside the Eighth Army. He would have to deal with the Americans on ability alone.
"I hope this proposal of ours lands."
"If we make the case well, won't we get ten out of the hundred things we want? We've got nothing to lose."
"You're right."
Choong-hoon stopped the car before the gate of Eighth Army headquarters. By now even the American sentries recognized Ki-jo. The MPs glanced over the passes he and Choong-hoon held out and raised the barricade.
The man he had come to see was Lieutenant Colonel Neil, who was tearing his hair out over the four divisions now leaving Korea. Most of the troops had already gone back to the United States, but the materiel from their garrisons was still in the country, and sorting it, gathering it, and shipping it home was no small labor. Ki-jo spoke to Neil, whose face had gone sallow under the crushing load of work.
"Colonel. You've been very busy lately, haven't you?"
"As if that weren't enough, a Korean government man walked into headquarters yesterday. Wants to buy the withdrawal materiel. I've got to deal with that too. I'm about ready to lose my mind."
Ki-jo already knew. The Korean government had proposed that the four departing American divisions not bother hauling their stocks home the hard way, but sell them cheap instead. As he remembered it, what the government meant to buy came to twelve million dollars in all. That money was itself aid received from the United States, of course, but taking the withdrawal stocks at a bargain was still a better deal than spending the same sum to buy supplies overseas. The government then sold the goods on to private buyers and took a profit. In truth, the largest enterprise in Korea in the 1950s was not Samsung. It was the government of the Republic of Korea, selling every bit of incoming aid materiel to civilians and plugging the hole in its tax revenue.
But because Ki-jo knew what was coming, he also knew that what the government meant to buy was only a twentieth of the whole. Scattered the length and breadth of Korea lay some two hundred million dollars' worth of American withdrawal materiel. It was the richest vein among all the hidden bonanzas in the country.
"Might I see the Korean government's list of purchase requests?"
"Of course. It's right here."
Neil tapped the stack of papers piled on his desk. Ki-jo took the list, went over it line by line, and smiled. Choong-hoon wondered what the smile was for. Ki-jo handed the list back and explained why he had come.
"Cheongsan would like to take part in hauling the U.S. withdrawal materiel."
"Is that so? You've got more trucks now...?"
Choong-hoon passed over the business plan Ki-jo had drawn up. Neil read it and nodded.
"Four hundred trucks.... That's quite an increase. And you're saying you'll move the American cargo down to Busan Port for half the going rate, and that you'll demolish the bases they leave behind, completely?"
"That's right."
Ki-jo nodded. Even at half price, hauling the cargo the Americans would load at Busan was still a paying job. Offering to tear the bases down for nothing made sense as well, because the scrap that came out of a demolition was considerable enough to cover the wages and still leave a profit. He had once heard of a man who went onto a U.S. base demolition, carried out the heaps of American magazines left behind, and sold them. It was an age when even the magazines the soldiers had read and thrown away were worth money — when American trash itself was money.
"Very well. I'll send the plan up the chain."
"And this as well...."
Ki-jo drew Lieutenant General Martin's letter of recommendation from his coat and laid it on top of the plan.
"Now you're finally using a recommendation the way it's meant to be used."
Neil laughed.
"I taught him that."
Choong-hoon clapped Ki-jo on the shoulder and laughed with him. They left the proposal with Lieutenant Colonel Neil and walked out of Eighth Army headquarters. As they passed through the main gate, Choong-hoon asked,
"So why did you look over the government's list of withdrawal materiel?"
"I'm thinking of buying some of the American stocks myself."
"You are?"
"Yes."
Ki-jo said it as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
"But isn't that something only the government can buy?"
Choong-hoon asked it according to the common knowledge he had.
"No. Besides the government, there is one other place that can purchase surplus American materiel."
"There is? Where?"
"That's a secret."
"What? Little brother Ki-jo! You're keeping something even from me? Ah... now that really hurts."
Choong-hoon said it in play, giving him a light thump to show how wounded he was. Ki-jo answered him evenly.
"The man who can buy surplus American materiel won't want it talked about. If he gives me leave to tell anyone else, you will be the first to hear it, brother."
"Mm. Could be, at that. If word got out that someone can buy surplus American goods, people would come crawling and make a nuisance of themselves...."
Choong-hoon looked at the closemouthed Ki-jo and grinned. The longer they spent together, the better he liked him.
"Brother, don't go to Jongno. Take me to Hannam-dong."
"Hannam-dong? You moved to Jongno. Going to your brother-in-law's?"
"Yes. Drop me in front of his house."
"Yes, sir, Mr. Prime Contractor! I'll have you there at once!"
Choong-hoon spun the wheel and put his foot down, and the Mercedes slid away toward Hannam-dong.
Ki-jo stepped out in front of Ma-ryang's house in Hannam-dong, and once the Mercedes carrying Cho Choong-hoon had gone, he turned toward the house next door. He rang the bell, and Chung Soon-yung, Chung Ju-yung's second younger brother, came out.
"Chairman Lee Ki-jo! Please, come in!"
"Have you been well?"
"Of course. Come in, come in."
Chung Soon-yung received him with extreme courtesy, and no wonder. The man who had given him the house he now lived in, free of charge, was Ki-jo himself.
The grueling work on Goryeong Bridge had ended in May of 1955. The debt Hyundai Construction had taken on to finish it came to fifty-five million hwan in all. To pay that debt down, Chung Soon-yung had sold the house in Samseon-dong, and Chung Ju-yung's brother-in-law, Kim Yong-ju, had sold the house in Donam-dong as well. Because of it, the two of them had been living in a shack thrown up beside the bridge at Chodong. They looked no better than beggars. Sorry for them both, Ki-jo had readily handed over the house he had originally meant to sell to President Chung Ju-yung. The families of Chung Soon-yung and Kim Yong-ju now lived together in the spacious mansion in Hannam-dong.
Kim Yong-ju must have heard that Ki-jo had come. He came running out to the entryway in his stocking feet and bowed.
"Chairman Lee, you've come?"
"Have you been well?"
Ki-jo shook his hand as well.
"Please come in. All the brothers of the Hyundai family are gathered."
Inside, he found Chung Ju-yung's brothers assembled in one place — men who, after the Goryeong Bridge work, had lost their homes and been living off their wives' families. Chung In-yung was there, of course, and so was Chung Shin-yung, the reporter for the Dong-A Ilbo. Only the fourth brother, Jung Se-young, the man known as Pony Chung, was absent, away at school in the United States.
The moment Chung Ju-yung saw Ki-jo, he opened his arms and came forward to embrace him.
"You been well, Chairman Lee? Ha ha ha!"
"Have you been well, President Chung?"
The look Chung Ju-yung turned on him was something special. More than once, money Ki-jo had sent at just the right moment had carried him through a crisis. Whenever the workers, furious over unpaid wages, seemed ready to beat him to death, Ki-jo's money arrived. Even so, what remained of the debt was fifty-five million hwan at eighteen percent interest. The road ahead was pitch dark, but there was still hope he might find a way through.
Not long ago Ki-jo had told him to bid on the new construction of Pier 4 at Busan Port, and he had won the contract. Under the promise Ki-jo and Chung Shin-yung had made, any government job had to split its profit fifty-fifty with Cheongsan Construction — but it was something, at least. And Cheongsan was offering to provide the heavy equipment Hyundai Construction did not possess. The Goryeong Bridge job had driven home to Chung Ju-yung, in his very bones, how much that equipment mattered.
"Just as Chairman Lee asked, all of us brothers are here. Let's hear why you called us together."
Chung Ju-yung dropped onto a floor cushion as he spoke. Ki-jo sat down among the brothers and their brother-in-law and told them why he had asked them to gather.
"I need to borrow Hyundai Construction's strength."
"You need to borrow our strength?"
Chung Ju-yung was startled. Hyundai Construction, as it stood, was a wreck from top to bottom. Once the Goryeong Bridge work ended, the employees had left in disgust. Even Kim Yeong-pil, a skilled engineer out of the old Joseon branch of Shimizu Construction, had gone, and so had Chief Lee Yeon-sul, from the civil engineering course at Waseda Technical High School. His friend Oh In-bo, the head of the books, had spent years holding off the creditors and then left as well, saying he would not look at another ledger. No money, and the talent gone. A company with nothing but its empty hands.
"What would you like us to do for you, Chairman Lee?"
Chung Ju-yung asked. Ki-jo smiled faintly.
"Hyundai Construction has something no other firm in the country has, doesn't it?"
"Our credit?"
"No. Cheongsan has credit too."
"Then what?"
Chung Ju-yung scratched his head. Ki-jo looked at him failing to find the answer and laughed out loud.
"Come on, say it. Don't keep us hanging."
President Chung, impatient by nature, was itching to know. Ki-jo opened his mouth to tell Chung Ju-yung and his brothers the secret weapon Hyundai Construction held.