Sohn Won-yil
Through Lee Man-ik, Kijo confirmed Lieutenant Kim's whereabouts. The lieutenant was in custody with the naval military police stationed in Busan.
Kijo put the question to him.
"Why would the naval military police be holding an army lieutenant?"
"I suspect that man Kwak Young-joo used his head."
"Kwak Young-joo?"
"If the army's own military police had made the arrest, someone who knows the lieutenant might have looked after him, or cleared him of an unjust charge. I expect Kwak feared as much."
Kijo nodded. The army, the navy, and the air force had each kept their own military police, but Syngman Rhee, bent on tightening his grip over the armed forces, had established a Military Police General Headquarters over the objections of all three services. What he wanted was a special arm that could seize any general of the army, navy, or air force on a single word from him. Its commander could direct the military police of all three services as he pleased. Let Kwak Young-joo ask a favor of Commander Won Yong-deok, and naval police could haul in an army officer as easily as one of their own.
They had given the case to a naval unit with no tie of any kind to Lieutenant Kim — a sly little maneuver, so the charges Kwak had hung on him could be driven through with no one inclined to interfere.
"If this Lieutenant Kim insists upon his innocence to the very end, they will send him up to Seoul. The General Headquarters will interrogate him themselves."
"I imagine so."
Kijo thought the lieutenant would try to carry the matter all the way to a court-martial. It was the only road by which he could prove he had been wronged — and only if he held out against coaxing, threats, and torture.
"Thank you for the counsel."
Taking that counsel to heart, he judged that Lieutenant Kim had to be gotten out while the man was still in Busan. Kijo had not a single connection in the navy, so he pulled every string he possessed. The answer, sure enough, lay with a man born to the sea.
Over the telephone, Oh Yang-soo told him of his own tie to the navy.
"I know Admiral Sohn Won-yil."
"You do?"
"I do. Years back, when the admiral was raising money to buy the Baekdusan, I went to him myself and gave him every last bit of three months' wages."
The Baekdusan was the Republic of Korea's first warship. In 1949 Admiral Sohn Won-yil had gathered donations from the navy's sailors and contributions from the people, gone to America in person, and brought her home.
"Brother, please come up to Seoul. Introduce me to Admiral Sohn."
"All right. I'll leave at once."
Oh Yang-soo reached Seoul that very night.
Drawing on what he knew of Sohn Won-yil from the future, Kijo made his request.
"Please call on the admiral tomorrow."
"I don't even know where the man lives. After he stepped down as Minister of National Defense, I heard he'd gone off around the world."
"He'll be at his house in Gongdeok-dong."
In July of 1957 Sohn would be named ambassador to West Germany. Kijo reckoned he had come back to Korea and was lingering in Seoul, making ready to take up the post — and that he was deep in study just now, learning a diplomat's work.
The next day, exactly as Kijo had expected, Sohn Won-yil was in Mapo. Oh Yang-soo met him, made the introduction, and Kijo laid out the wrong that had been done to Lieutenant Kim.
"Hm. So that is what happened."
The admiral nodded, and then went on.
"The owner of the plant that makes the fragmentation mines says he suffered no loss on Lieutenant Kim's account — that the charge is nothing but impudence, for stopping a high police official who tried to force his way into the factory. I am inclined to believe him."
To Kijo's relief, Sohn Won-yil had taken the situation in at once.
"I would ask that the naval military police investigate Lieutenant Kim and close the case with a finding of no charges."
He believed it could be done. In the Korea of the 1950s, the navy was the least political of the services, and it had been so from its birth. No former soldiers of the Japanese army or the Manchukuo army stood in its ranks, and Admiral Sohn Won-yil, the navy's own chief, was descended from independence fighters — and had himself been tortured for taking part in the independence movement.
"Yes. You may trust the chief of the naval military police. I know the man. If I speak to him, he will believe in Lieutenant Kim's innocence. But..."
What he feared was plain: the moment the naval police let the lieutenant go, the army or the air force would simply be sent to take him again.
"You need not worry on that score, Admiral."
Kijo had an idea of his own.
When their business was finished, Sohn Won-yil turned to old times with Oh Yang-soo.
"It comes back to me — the day you sought me out, Mr. Oh, and gave so freely, calling it several months' wages."
He laughed.
"If you had not brought the Baekdusan home in '49, Admiral, we would have been in a desperate way."
Just as Oh Yang-soo said, the ship won a great distinction the moment war broke out. At nine o'clock on the night of June 25, 1950, the Baekdusan sank an armed North Korean transport making to seize Busan. Six hundred men of the North Korean naval landing force were aboard. Had she not been there, Busan — the last bastion of the war — might have fallen to the northern army, and the fighting might have ended altogether in those opening days.
"We were able to buy the Baekdusan only because the people gave. The sailors contributed ten percent of their pay, or seven, or five, according to rank, and still we were far short."
He remembered that even after the Navy Wives' Association held a bazaar to swell the fund, the money had not been enough.
"Even so, I scraped together fifteen thousand dollars and went up to Gyeongmudae, and His Excellency President Syngman Rhee put an envelope in my hand. There were forty-five thousand dollars inside."
He laughed again. Kijo listened closely. If Sohn Won-yil was granting what he asked, the least he owed the man was a proper hearing.
"There was a place in San Francisco they called the ship graveyard — a harbor where the decommissioned warships were kept. We had the money, but America would not sell. By then we had bought the Baekdusan for about twenty thousand dollars, so forty thousand remained."
"I see. What did you do?"
"I raised a storm in front of the State Department official in charge of Korea. Mr. Chang Myon, our ambassador to the United States at the time, had come with me, and he had a miserable time trying to hold me back. He dragged me out by force."
Sohn Won-yil laughed, long and easy, and recalled going on to the Department of Defense to insist all over again that he would buy decommissioned ships — and receiving the very same answer.
"But in the midst of the talking, I learned there were also decommissioned warships the American government did not administer."
And so, he said, he had sought out vessels already stripped of their armament and passed into civilian hands, and bought them.
"Jewish traders were picking those ships up cheap and selling them dear in South America and Asia. So I collared the fellows and threw a proper tantrum, and came away with several more."
Kijo knew that part of the tale. Against merchants so tightfisted that pricking them drew no blood, Sohn Won-yil had bought three further decommissioned warships at a discount of fully forty percent. It was a story from the years when Koreans played the scoundrels of Asia with enough nerve to take even Jewish traders at their own game, and he could not help a smile.
"I brought our own technicians to America, had the ships repaired there, and sailed them home. The men suffered. They ate and slept aboard while they did the work."
Hiring American technicians to mend the vessels would have cost far too much.
"When our navy came in with four warships from America, the tears ran down my face. Every sailor wept."
Kijo sat with Oh Yang-soo and heard the admiral out, and before they parted he made one last request.
"Admiral, I would like the naval military police to hold Lieutenant Kim for as long as they possibly can. I ask you to see that it is so."
"Is that so? Very well. I will tell them to investigate carefully, one step at a time."
Walking out of Admiral Sohn's house, Kijo felt a quiet pride at having bound himself to the man who would one day be ambassador to West Germany.
On the way back to the broadcasting station, Oh Yang-soo asked him, "If they turn Lieutenant Kim loose from the naval police, the way the admiral means to, some other service's police will only grab him again. You got a plan for that?"
"Are the Republic of Korea's military police the only military police in this country?"
"What?"
Kijo smiled, just slightly.
He moved as he had planned.
The next place he went, to save Lieutenant Kim, was the headquarters of the U.S. Eighth Army.
Face to face with Hausman, he began with the Claymores.
"Advisor, have you looked over the test results on the Claymores the Americans took?"
The U.S. military regularly collected Claymores produced in Korea. Kijo was certain they were checking the performance of the Korean-made mines. Not once had they reported back on what they carried off — but if that were not the reason, they would have had no cause to take them on a fixed schedule.
"No. I haven't."
"Please look into it."
"Why?"
"They were made on your instructions, Advisor. Take an interest, just this once. I am sure you will be pleased."
Hausman was amused to find Kijo treating him with more and more ease. The fellow had walked in unannounced and launched into a scolding — pay some attention to those fragmentation mines — and Hausman wondered what, exactly, the young man imagined him to be. Even so, he was glad of a Korean who was not afraid of him. Koreans were forever ill at ease in his presence; it was no bad thing to have one who treated him as a familiar. And Kijo, besides, had a better head than most Americans.
"Kijo. What have you been running around doing lately? I hear you're trying to start weather forecasts."
"Yes, Advisor. What America does, I would like Korea to do as well."
Rather admirably, he was trying to plant an American-style system of weather forecasting in Korean soil.
"Want me to put a word in for you?"
"No, Advisor. Only find out what sort of evaluation the fragmentation mines are receiving."
"Heh. What's got you so curious? You sound like a student who wants his teacher to check his marks."
"If I am to be graded, I would rather be an honor student."
"All right. I'll look into it."
After Kijo had gone, Hausman requested an inquiry into the performance of the fragmentation mines made in Korea. A few days later an evaluation report came in through the CIA.
"Well, I'll be..."
The results were astonishing. The fragmentation mines Kijo produced performed far beyond those built with ordinary explosives, thanks to the plastic explosive the U.S. military had supplied — C-4. Then, once he raised a factory in Busan and production began, penetrating power rose by another twenty percent. What he was making already surpassed the Claymores America had developed and was still testing.
Hausman summoned him to headquarters.
"Kijo. How did you improve those fragmentation mines? What in the world did you do?"
"A Korean officer helped."
"A Korean officer?"
Kijo lied, and said the help had come from Lieutenant Kim, who had stood guard at the main gate. In truth it was the teardrop-shaped steel balls Professor Kim Moon-hwan had turned out by mistake. Air resistance had fallen, and range and penetrating power had simply grown.
He explained who the lieutenant was.
"He is a graduate of the first class of the regular Korea Military Academy. First when he entered, first when he graduated. They say that in all his years there, he never once yielded the top place."
"Is that right? A mind like that, standing guard at a factory? He ought to be raised as a staff officer."
"I understand it was what he himself wanted."
It was the doing of history, altered because Kijo had come back from the future. The moment Lieutenant Kim Seong-jin heard that Korea's first defense plant was to be built, he had volunteered for the transfer. As a cadet his nickname had been the math genius. His gift for the sciences was such that he would later study in the United States and take doctorates in both physics and mechanical engineering.
Nor was that all. In the years to come he would serve as a researcher at the Agency for Defense Development, as Minister of Communications, and as Minister of Science and Technology — drawing up a plan for the growth of communications against the coming information age, and driving the national backbone computer network.
A scientific genius of that order, watching the first new-weapons factory of the 1950s come to life, had simply been unable to restrain his curiosity. And now that same man had crossed Kwak Young-joo and stood to have his career cut short. Kijo could only grieve at it.
Someone who would do so much for the nation ought to go on drawing the state's pay and grow into a public servant — not be stripped of his uniform merely so that Kijo might employ him.
"Where is this genius officer now?"
"In custody with the naval military police."
"What? Has the Korean military lost its mind? They put a prodigy on factory guard, and then they lock him up?"
Hausman was struck speechless.
You know perfectly well the Korean military is a shambles, and still you carry on like this...
Watching him work himself into a fury over something he had long understood, Kijo laughed inwardly.
"I'll have to get that man out of there."
Without even being asked, Hausman was already moving. To that Hausman, Kijo said,
"Advisor. You must not pull him out at once."
"Why not?"
"The circumstances are complicated."
"What circumstances?"
Hausman looked straight at him.