Under Fire Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  Afterword

  W.E.B. GRIFFIN’S CLASSIC SERIES

  THE CORPS

  The bestselling saga of the heroes we call Marines . . .

  "THE BEST CHRONICLER OF THE U.S. MILITARY EVER TO PUT PEN TO PAPER.” —Phoenix Gazette

  "GREAT READING. A superb job of mingling fact and fiction . . . [Griffin’s] characters come to life.”

  —The Sunday Oklahoman

  “THIS MAN HAS REALLY DONE HIS HOMEWORK . . . I confess to impatiently awaiting the appearance of succeeding books in the series.” —The Washington Post

  “ACTION-PACKED . . . DIFFICULT TO PUT DOWN.”

  —Marine Corps Gazette

  HONOR BOUND

  The high drama and real heroes of World War II . . .

  “ROUSING . . . AN IMMENSELY ENTERTAINING ADVENTURE. ” —Kirkus Reviews

  “INTRICATELY PLOTTED and packed with those accurate details that fans of Griffin have come to expect.”

  —Booklist

  “A TAUTLY WRITTEN STORY whose twists and turns will keep readers guessing until the last page.” —Publishers Weekly

  “A SUPERIOR WAR STORY.” —Library Journal

  BROTHERHOOD OF WAR

  The series that launched W.E.B. Griffin’s phenomenal career . . .

  "AN AMERICAN EPIC.” —Tom Clancy

  "FIRST-RATE. Griffin, a former soldier, skillfully sets the stage, melding credible characters, a good eye for detail, and colorful gritty dialogue into a readable and entertaining story.” —The Washington Post Book World

  “ABSORBING, salted-peanuts reading filled with detailed and fascinating descriptions of weapons, tactics, Green Beret training, army life and battle.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A CRACKLING GOOD STORY. It gets into the hearts and minds of those who by choice or circumstance are called upon to fight our nation’s wars.”

  —William R. Corson, Lt. Col. (Ret.) USMC, author of The Betrayal and The Armies of Ignorance

  “A MAJOR WORK . . . MAGNIFICENT . . . POWERFUL . . . If books about warriors and the women who love them were given medals for authenticity, insight and honesty, Brotherhood of War would be covered with them.”

  —William Bradford Huie, author of The Klansman and The Execution of Private Slovik

  BADGE OF HONOR

  Griffin’s electrifying epic series of a big-city police force . . .

  "DAMN EFFECTIVE . . . He captivates you with characters the way few authors can. ” —Tom Clancy

  "TOUGH, AUTHENTIC . . . POLICE DRAMA AT ITS

  BEST . . . Readers will feel as if they’re part of the investigation, and the true-to-life characters will soon feel like old friends. Excellent reading.”

  —Dale Brown, bestselling author of Storming Heaven and Fatal Terrain

  “COLORFUL . . . GRITTY . . . TENSE.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “A REAL WINNER.” —New York Daily News

  MEN AT WAR

  The legendary OSS—fighting a silent war of spies and assassins in the shadows of World War II . . .

  “WRITTEN WITH A SPECIAL FLAIR for the military heart and mind.” —The Kansas Daily Courier

  “SHREWD, SHARP, ROUSING ENTERTAINMENT.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “CAMEOS BY SUCH HISTORICAL FIGURES as William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., David Niven and Peter Ustinov lend color . . . suspenseful.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Titles by W.E.B. Griffin

  HONOR BOUND

  HONOR BOUND

  BLOOD AND HONOR

  SECRET HONOR

  BROTHERHOOD

  OF WAR

  BOOK I: THE LIEUTENANTS

  BOOK II: THE CAPTAINS

  BOOK III: THE MAJORS

  BOOK IV: THE COLONELS

  BOOK V: THE BERETS

  BOOK VI: THE GENERALS

  BOOK VII: THE NEW BREED

  BOOK VIII: THE AVIATORS

  BOOK IX: SPECIAL OPS

  THE CORPS

  BOOK I: SEMPER FI

  BOOK II: CALL TO ARMS

  BOOK III: COUNTERATTACK

  BOOK IV: BATTLEGROUND

  BOOK V: LINE OF FIRE

  BOOK VI: CLOSE COMBAT

  BOOK VII: BEHIND THE LINES

  BOOK VIII: IN DANGER’S PATH

  BOOK IX: UNDER FIRE

  BOOK X: RETREAT, HELL!

  BADGE OF HONOR

  BOOK I: MEN IN BLUE

  BOOK II: SPECIAL OPERATIONS

  BOOK III: THE VICTIM

  BOOK IV: THE WITNESS

  BOOK V: THE ASSASSIN

  BOOK VI: THE MURDERERS

  BOOK VII: THE INVESTIGATORS

  BOOK VIII: FINAL JUSTICE

  MEN AT WAR

  BOOK I: THE LAST HEROES

  BOOK II: THE SECRET WARRIORS

  BOOK III: THE SOLDIER SPIES

  BOOK IV: THE FIGHTING AGENTS

  BOOK V: THE SABOTEURS

  PRESIDENTIAL AGENT

  BOOK I: BY ORDER OF THE PRESIDENT

  BOOK II: THE HOSTAGE

  BOOK III: THE HUNTERS

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  UNDER FIRE

  A Jove Book / published by arrangement with G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  Copyright © 2002 by W.E.B. Griffin.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. For information, address: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-4406-3903-6

 
JOVE®

  Jove Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  JOVE is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “J” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  THE CORPS is respectfully dedicated to the memory of

  Second Lieutenant Drew James Barrett III, USMC

  Company K, 3rd Battalion, 26th Marines

  Born Denver, Colorado, 3 January 1945

  Died Quang Nam Province, Republic of Vietnam,

  27 February 1969

  and

  Major Alfred Lee Butler III, USMC

  Headquarters 22nd Marine Amphibious Unit

  Born Washington, D.C., 4 September 1950

  Died Beirut, Lebanon, 8 February 1984

  and

  To the memory of Donald L. Schomp

  a Marine fighter pilot who became a

  legendary U.S. Army Master Aviator

  RIP 9 April 1989

  “Semper Fi!”

  Prologue

  In 1944, Vice President Henry A. Wallace was perceived by many—perhaps most—highly placed Democrats to be a genuine threat to the reelection of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  He was cordially detested by the Republicans—and many conservative Southern Democrats—both for his liberal domestic policies and his unabashed admiration of the Soviet Union.

  Perhaps equally important, the poor—and declining— health of President Roosevelt, while carefully concealed from the American public, was no secret to many Republicans, including their probable candidate for the presidency, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York.

  There was a real threat that Dewey might make it an issue in the campaign: “Roosevelt, if reelected, probably won’t live through his term. Do you want Henry Wallace in the Oval Office? Or me?”

  Wallace, it was decided, had to go.

  For his running mate, Roosevelt picked Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri, who, while an important senator, was not part of the President’s inner circle.

  It was a brilliant political choice. Truman had earned nationwide recognition for his chairmanship of a Senate committee investigating fraud and waste by suppliers of war materials. “The Truman Committee” was a near-weekly feature on the newsreels at the nation’s movie palaces, showing a nice-looking man visibly furious at contractors caught cheating the government and the military officers who’d let them get away with it.

  And he couldn’t be accused of being antimilitary, either, for he had served with distinction as a captain of artillery in France in World War I, and he had retired as a colonel from the Missouri National Guard.

  The Roosevelt-Truman ticket won the election in a landslide. Vice President Truman appeared with Roosevelt at the inauguration, and then was more or less politely told to go away and not make a nuisance of himself while Roosevelt and his far-better-qualified cronies ran the country.

  During the first eighty-one days of his fourth term, President Roosevelt met with Vice President Truman twice, and they were not alone on either occasion.

  On the eighty-second day of his fourth term—April 12, 1945—while vacationing in Warm Springs, Georgia, with a lady not his wife, Franklin Delano Roosevelt died suddenly.

  That made it urgently necessary to bring President Harry S. Truman up to speed on a number of matters it had been decided he really didn’t have to know about, including a new weapon called the Atomic Bomb.

  And to tell him of some disturbing theories advanced by the intelligence community—most significantly the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—that Josef Stalin had no intention of going back to Mother Russia to lick his war wounds, but rather saw the inevitable postwar chaos as an opportunity to bring the joys of communism to the rest of the world.

  There had already been proof:

  The U.S.S.R—which was to say Stalin—had forced the King of Romania to appoint a Communist-dominated government; Tito’s Communists had assumed control of Yugoslavia; Communists were dominant in Hungary and Bulgaria (where a reported 20,000 people had been liquidated) . In Poland, when Polish underground leaders accepted an invitation to “consult” with Red Army officers, they had been arrested and most of them had then “vanished. ”

  And Stalin had made no secret of his intentions. Shortly before the end of the war, the OSS reported, he had told Yugoslav Communist Milovan Djilas, “In this war each side imposes its system as far as its armies can reach. It cannot be otherwise.”

  President Harry S. Truman had been in office less than a month when—at 2:41 A.M. on May 8, 1945, at General Dwight Eisenhower’s Reims, France, headquarters—Germany surrendered to the Allies.

  Three days later, on May 11, 1945, Truman abruptly ordered the termination of Lend-Lease aid to the U.S.S.R. But then, on the advice of left-leaning Harry Hopkins, Truman made what he later acknowledged was a major mistake. To assure Stalin of American postwar goodwill, he kept silent about the “vanished” and imprisoned Polish leaders, and then recognized the “new” Polish government in Warsaw as legitimate, although he knew that it consisted almost entirely of Soviet surrogates.

  In July, Truman met with Stalin at Potsdam, Germany, outside Berlin. Truman came away convinced that Roosevelt was wrong: “Uncle Joe” could not be treated like a difficult senator and bribed with a couple of highways and a new post office in his hometown; he had every intention of taking over the world.

  Truman returned from Potsdam, thought it over, and ordered that the atomic bomb be used against Japan. Use of the bomb would, he reasoned, primarily save the lives of the 500,000 American servicemen whom the military experts expected to die in a “conventional” invasion of the Japanese home islands.

  It might also, Truman hoped, convince “Uncle Joe” to behave. Only a fool or a maniac would risk war against a nation equipped with the most devastating weapon ever developed.

  On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was literally obliterated by an atomic bomb. On August 8, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. The next day, as the Red Army marched into Manchuria against the Kwantung Army, which could offer only token resistance, a B-29 dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

  On September 2, 1945, aboard the battleship USS Missouri, in Tokyo Harbor, Japanese foreign minister Shigemitsu Mamoru, on behalf of Emperor Hirohito, unconditionally surrendered the Japanese empire to General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, the officer Truman had designated as Supreme Commander, Allied Powers.

  Even before the official Japanese surrender, senior Navy and Marine officers knew—again, substantially from reports of OSS agents in China—that the civil war in China, between the Communists under Mao Tse-tung, and the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek, was a threat to world stability that the United States was going to have to deal with, and that the Marines would most likely be sent there to do the dealing.

  Less than forty-eight hours after the surrender, a warning order was issued to the Marines—who had been gathered together in the III Amphibious Corps, and who had been training for the invasion of the Japanese home islands—to prepare to move to China.

  In October 1945—a month later—Truman, by Presidential Directive, “disestablished” the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

  The joke whispered around Washington was that it was the only way Truman could see to get rid of William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, who had headed the organization since its birth—also by Presidential Directive—in June 1942.

  Donovan, who had won the Medal of Honor in France in World War I, had been a law school classmate of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and a lifelong crony. While there was little doubt that it was an effective tool of war, it—and Donovan—was cordially detested by the military establishment, and there is little doubt the very senior brass encouraged the new Commander-in-Chief, whenever they had his ear, to quickly put it out of business

  Whateve
r the reasons, the OSS—its detractors said that OSS meant “Oh, So Social”—was “disestablished” and the vast majority of its 12,000 men and women almost instantly released to their civilian pursuits. The very small percentage of OSS personnel who were members of the “regular” military establishment were returned to the regular Marine Corps, Army, and Navy, where they were most often greeted with less-than-wide-open welcoming arms.

  Truman, who was never reluctant to admit he’d made a mistake, had by the early months of 1946 decided he’d made one in killing off the OSS.

  By then, Soviet intentions were already becoming clear, and the bureaucratic infighting of the newly “freed” independent intelligence services of the Army, Navy, and State Department had made it clear that the nation did indeed need a central intelligence agency, whether or not the various Princes of Intelligence liked it or not.

  Truman, in yet another Presidential Directive, gave it one. He “established” the Central Intelligence Group and the National Intelligence Authority. Then, in 1947, he pushed through the Congress a bill making it law. The Central Intelligence Agency was born. Possibly as a sop to the regular military establishment, and possibly because he was singularly qualified for the post, Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, USN, was named first director of the CIA.

  On March 5, 1946, in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, British wartime Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill said, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”

  That was certainly true, but it wasn’t Soviet Russia’s only iron curtain.

  There was another one in Korea, a peninsula extending into the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan from the Asian continent. It had been ruled, rather brutally, by Japan since 1895.

  Almost casually, when the Soviet Union finally agreed to enter the war against Japan, it was decided that the Soviets would accept the surrender of Japanese forces in the north of Korea, and the Americans in the south. The 38th parallel divided Korea, just north of Seoul, into roughly equal halves, and the 38th parallel became the demarcation line.

  Immediately upon moving into “their” sector of Korea, the Soviets put in power a Korean Marxist named Kim Il Sung, and promptly turned the 38th parallel into an iron curtain just as impenetrable as the one in Europe.