Retreat, Hell! Read online

  “I’m glad you’re here, General Howe,” Almond said. “I know that’s important to the Supreme Commander.”

  “Good morning, General,” Howe said.

  Almond looked at the backseat of the jeep.

  “Good morning, Miss Priestly.”

  “Good morning, sir,” Jeanette said with a warm smile, and very politely.

  “McCoy,” Almond said.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “I’ve been informed General Pickering is on the Bataan,” Almond said. “Have you got some good news for him?”

  “Not good news, but not bad news, either, sir.”

  Almond looked at his wristwatch.

  “I’ve also been informed the Supreme Commander’s ETA is 0950,” he went on. “So we have some time. Have you got a few minutes for me, General?”

  “Of course,” Howe said. “McCoy, why don’t you take Miss Priestly aside and tell her what you know about Major Pickering?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where did you get the Russian jeep, McCoy?” Almond asked.

  Howe answered for him: “He took it away from a North Korean colonel.”

  Almond leaned over the vehicle and inspected the interior.

  “Interesting,” he said, then turned to the tall captain.

  “Al, why don’t you set up the convoy,” he said, “while General Howe and I ride over to the other side of the field.”

  He gestured for Howe to go to his staff car.

  “Yes, sir,” the captain replied.

  Howe turned to Jeanette Priestly.

  “You are going to behave, right, Jeanette?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said docilely.

  Howe walked to Almond’s staff car.

  They went through a little “After you, Alfonse.” / “No, after you, Gaston” routine dance at the door, but eventually Almond got in first, Howe slid in behind him, the tall captain closed the door, and the car, preceded by an MP jeep, drove off across the airfield.

  “Interesting woman,” Almond said. “What’s she doing with you?”

  “She’s . . . romantically involved . . . with young Pickering, and she knows McCoy’s been looking for him.”

  “Without success, apparently.” Almond said. It wasn’t a question.

  “He thinks he missed him yesterday by no more than a couple of hours,” Howe said.

  “That’s a really awkward situation, isn’t it? Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “I asked McCoy. He says he has everything he needs.”

  Almond grunted.

  “Where are we going?” Howe asked. “May I ask?”

  “As I understand it, General, you can ask anyone anything you want to,” Almond said, chuckling. “We’re going to look at something my Army Aviation officer enthusiastically assures me will ‘usher in a new era of battlefield mobility.’ ”

  “The secret helicopters?” Howe asked.

  “You do hear things, don’t you, General?” Almond said. “Yeah, the secret helicopters.”

  “And are they going to ‘usher in a new era of battlefield mobility’?” Howe asked.

  “Not today or tomorrow, I don’t think,” Almond said. “Eventually, possibly, maybe even probably. Between us?”

  “That puts me on a spot, General. I’m supposed to report everything I think will interest my boss.”

  “So you are. Well, what the hell, you’ve been around, you’ll see this for yourself. What this is, is a dog and pony show, intended to inspire the Supreme Commander to lean on the Joint Chiefs to come up with the necessary funding to buy lots of these machines. Apparently, the Joint Chiefs are first not very impressed with these machines, and even if they do everything the Army Aviation people say, the Joint Chiefs will believe that if it flies, it should belong to the Air Force.”

  “So they’re staging a dog and pony show for you? And you’re supposed to work on General MacArthur?”

  “No. They’re working on the Supreme Commander directly, ” Almond said. “He gets the show. When I got his revised ETA, I was also informed that the Bataan will taxi here after it lands to afford General MacArthur the opportunity to see these vehicles, and to have his picture taken with them.”

  Howe shook his head in amazement.

  “Yeah,” General Almond said. “Following which General MacArthur will turn over the liberated city of Seoul to President Syngman Rhee.”

  “I spent last night with Colonel Chesty Puller’s Marine regiment,” Howe said. It was a question.

  “Seoul is liberated enough, General,” Almond responded, “to the point where I feel the ceremony can be conducted with little or no risk to the Supreme Commander or President Rhee. I would have called this off if I didn’t think so.”

  “I understand,” Howe said.

  “With a little luck, the artillery will fall silent long enough so that we can all hear General MacArthur’s remarks on this momentous occasion,” Almond said evenly.

  Howe smiled at him.

  “Well, here we are,” Almond said as the Chevrolet stopped before the bullet-riddled hangar.

  Major Alex Donald, the X Corps’ assistant Army Aviation officer, walked briskly up to it, opened the door, and saluted.

  General Howe got out first, his presence clearly confusing Major Donald. Then General Almond slid across the seat and got out.

  “Good morning, sir,” Major Donald said. “Everything is laid on, sir.”

  “Good,” Almond said. “General Howe, this is Major Donald.”

  They shook hands.

  Howe spotted Captain Howard C. Dunwood, USMCR, standing close to the closed hangar doors with eight other Marines.

  “Good morning, Captain,” Howe said.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “Baker Company, 5th Marines, right?” Howe asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Both Captain Dunwood and General Almond were visibly surprised that General Howe was possessed of that information. Almond admitted as much.

  “How did you know that?” he asked.

  Howe winked at him.

  “Well, Donald, let’s have a look at these machines before the Supreme Commander gets here,” Almond said.

  [THREE]

  As the staff car carrying Generals Almond and Howe started down the road beside the runway, McCoy paused long enough to wonder where they were going, then turned and motioned to Jeanette Priestly to get out of the Russian jeep.

  He had given a lot of thought to Jeanette and to her relationship with Pickering.

  Pick Pickering—a really legendary swordsman, of whom it was more or less honestly said he had two girls and often more in every port—had taken one look at Jeanette Priestly just over two months before and fallen in love with her.

  And vice versa. The second time Jeanette—known as the “Ice Princess” among her peers in the press corps because no one, and many had tried, had ever been in her bed or pants—had seen him she had taken him to bed.

  Everyone knew that “Love at First Sight” was bullshit, pure and simple, that what it really meant was “Lust at First Sight” and had everything to do with fucking and absolutely nothing to do with love.

  Everybody knew that but Major Kenneth R. McCoy, USMCR. He knew there was such a thing as love at first sight because it had happened to him.

  The first time he had seen Ernestine Sage he had known he would love her forever even though the chances of having her in his bed, without or with the sanction of holy matrimony, had ranged from zero to zilch, and he damned well knew it.

  Ernie was from Pick’s world. Her mother and Pick’s mother had been roommates at college. Her father was chairman of the board of—and majority stockholder in— American Personal Pharmaceuticals. Everyone thought that Pick and Ernie would marry.

  There was no room in Ernestine Sage’s life for a poor Scots-Irish kid from Norristown who had enlisted in the Marine Corps at seventeen, been a corporal with the 4th Marines in Shanghai, and was now a second lieutenant primarily
because he had learned how to read and write two kinds of Chinese, Japanese, and even some Russian and the Marine Corps was short of people like that, and thus willing to commission them, temporarily, for wartime service.

  A week after Ernie Sage had seen Second Lieutenant McCoy sitting on the penthouse railing of her parents’ Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park, his feet dangling over the side, she had told her mother that she had met the man whose babies she wanted to bear and intended to marry him just as soon as she could get him to the altar, or some judge’s chambers, whichever came first.

  Pick, and Pick’s father, thought that was a splendid idea. Everybody else, including Lieutenant McCoy, had thought it was insanity, that their marriage just wouldn’t—couldn’t—work.

  But Ernie had known it was love, and could not be dissuaded, even though Ken had firmly declined the offer of her hand in wedded bliss. She had followed him around, proudly calling herself a camp follower, whenever and wherever he was in the United States during World War II.

  She had written him every day, and when, toward the end of the war, he’d come home from a clandestine operation in the Gobi Desert a major on Presidential orders to attend the Army’s Command and General Staff college, he was denied his final argument against their marriage—the very good chance that he either would not come home at all, or come home in a basket—she’d finally got him to the altar.

  With conditions. He was a Marine, and wanted to stay a Marine. He would not take an entry-level executive training position with American Personal Pharmaceuticals—or with the Pacific & Far East Shipping Corporation—and she would not press him to do so. And they would live on his Marine pay, period.

  There had been good times and bad in their marriage, but it had worked. The good times had included their year with the Army at C&GSC at Fort Leavenworth and a year at Quantico, which was close to Washington, so Ernie had a chance to see a lot of her parents. The Quantico assignment had ended when he had been reduced to captain, not because he’d done anything wrong, but because the Corps had shrunk and didn’t need as many officers.

  The Corps had a—maybe unwritten—policy that if you were reduced in grade, you were transferred, and that had seen them sent to Japan, where he had been a junior intelligence officer on the staff of the Commander, Naval Element, Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers.

  There, after a year or so, things had really gone wrong. He had come across what he believed to be compelling evidence that the North Koreans were going to invade the south. He’d worked long and hard to put it down on paper, and then turned it in to the Commander, Naval Element, Supreme Headquarters.

  First, he got a “well done.”

  Then the Commander, Naval Element, Supreme Headquarters, called him back in and said, in effect, (1) “McCoy, you have never written an intelligence analysis of any kind regarding North Korean intentions, and certainly not one that had concluded ‘war is inevitable,’ ” and (2) “Start packing. The Marine Corps has no further need of your services as a commissioned officer, and you will be separated from the Naval Service 1 July 1950. It will be determined later at what enlisted grade you may reenlist in the service if you desire to do so.”

  So far as Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers, was concerned, McCoy’s “war is coming” analysis no longer existed. Worse, it never had. All copies, McCoy was informed, had been destroyed.

  McCoy found out why:

  Major General Charles A. Willoughby, the Supreme Commander’s intelligence officer, had just informed General MacArthur that there was absolutely no indication that the North Koreans had hostile intentions, and in any event their armed forces were incapable of doing anything more than causing mischief along the 38th Parallel. He did not want his judgment questioned by a lowly Marine captain.

  When he had told Ernie he was getting the boot, Ernie had told him she wouldn’t mind being a sergeant’s wife.

  He had realized then that it was his turn to make a few sacrifices.

  What the hell, I might even like selling toothpaste and deodorant for American Personal Pharmaceuticals.

  Once he had made that decision, there was one more decision to make, a big one. The Commander, Naval Element, Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers, was wrong. All of the copies of McCoy’s analysis had not been destroyed. He had his own copy of his analysis, his last draft before he had typed the whole thing over again before turning it in. He could not bring himself to either forget it or burn it.

  After thinking hard and long, and fully aware that doing so could—probably would—see him facing a court-martial, he had given his draft copy of his analysis to Fleming Pickering.

  Pickering was no longer a brigadier general and had no security clearance, and the Office of Strategic Services in which they had served in World War II no longer even existed. But he figured that Pickering could probably get the document into the hands of somebody who should have his information.

  Whistling in the wind, he had told himself that the Corps might have a hard time court-martialing a civilian for the unlawful disclosure of a Top Secret document that wasn’t supposed to ever have existed.

  On his final, delay-en-route leave before reporting to Camp Pendleton for separation, he had been offered a civilian job he thought he might even really like, helping to develop an island off the coast of South Carolina as a retirement area.

  It was the idea of Colonel Ed Banning, USMC, who was about to retire himself. Zimmerman, then stationed at Parris Island, had been enlisted in the project. He, like McCoy, had worked for Banning throughout World War II. As he and Ernie drove across the country to California, the idea of working with Colonel Banning and Ernie sounded like a hell of a better way than spending his life selling toothpaste and deodorant.

  Orders were waiting for him when he reported into Camp Pendleton the night of 1 July 1950, but not the Thank you for your service, and don’t let the doorknob hit you in the ass on your way out ones he expected, which would have ordered him to his home of official record.

  Eight hours after reporting into Camp Pendleton—early the next morning—he had found himself sitting in the backseat of an Air Force F-94 taking off from Naval Air Station Miramar. He was traveling on orders bearing the code of the highest priority in the Armed Forces: DP. It stood for “By Direction of the President.”

  In Washington, he found out what had happened to the analysis he couldn’t bring himself to burn.

  Pickering had taken it to Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillencoetter, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, which had taken the place of the OSS. Hillencoetter had told Fleming Pickering that he didn’t believe the analysis, but—Pickering had come to his office accompanied by Senator Richardson K. Fowler, and Pickering had been the Assistant Director of the OSS for Asia—he said he would look into it.

  Before that could happen, the North Koreans invaded South Korea.

  When President Harry S Truman had demanded of Admiral Hillencoetter, in effect, “You mean to tell me you had absolutely no idea the North Koreans were going to do this?” the admiral had replied that there was one thing, and told him that the World War II Director of the OSS for Asia, the shipping magnate Fleming Pickering, had come to his office with Senator Fowler carrying an analysis written by a Marine captain predicting the North Korean invasion was inevitable.

  The President had had some trouble getting Pickering on the telephone in the penthouse of the Foster San Franciscan Hotel on Nob Hill.

  When the operator said, “General Pickering, please, the President is calling,” it had been difficult to convince Mrs. Patricia Pickering that it wasn’t one of her husband’s drinking buddies thinking he was clever.

  But eventually the President got through, and shortly thereafter—after a cross-country flight in an F-94— Pickering found himself facing the President of the United States in the Foster Lafayette Hotel suite of his friend, and Truman’s bitter political enemy, Senator Richardson K. Fowler, Republican of California.

  After first d
emanding of the President that he give his word that no harm would come to Captain McCoy for his having turned his analysis over to him, Pickering told the President as much as he knew.

  When he had finished, the President said, in effect, “I gave you my word because I wanted to, not because I had to.”

  Then he picked up the telephone, asked to be connected with the Commandant of the Marine Corps, and when, in less than sixty seconds, that officer came on the line, said, “This is the President, General. I understand you’re acquainted with Brigadier General Fleming Pickering, USMC Reserve?”

  There was a very short pause while the Commandant said, “Yes, sir.”

  “Please cause the necessary orders to be issued calling the general to active service for an indefinite period, effective immediately, and further placing him on duty with the Central Intelligence Agency,” Truman ordered. “It won’t be necessary to notify him; he’s with me now.”

  The President had hung up and then turned to General Pickering.

  “So far as this Captain McCoy is concerned, I’ve ordered that he be brought here as soon as he can be located. I want to see him myself.”

  Within days, Brigadier General Pickering, Captain McCoy, and Master Gunner Zimmerman were on a plane for Tokyo. The President had told Admiral Hillencoetter it was pretty obvious to him that a very good way to find out what had gone wrong with CIA intelligence-gathering procedures in the Far East—and to make sure the situation was corrected—was to send the man who’d run Far Eastern Operations for the OSS during World War II back over there.

  General Pickering was named Assistant Director of the CIA for Asia.

  This time Ernie had not sat dutifully and docilely at home while her husband went to war. They had been in Tokyo only a few days when there was a message saying Mrs. Kenneth McCoy would arrive in Tokyo aboard Trans-Global Airways Flight 4344 at ten the next morning.

  She was now residing at No. 7 Saku-Tun, in the Denenchofu section of Tokyo, Japan. And she had told her husband that she had not only deceived him when they had been stationed in Tokyo—she had told him that she had found a very nice house at a rent they could afford that would keep them out of the small quarters they would have been given by the Navy, when the facts were she had bought the house—but also that, since the Marine Corps had already let him know what they really thought of him, she had no intention of pretending any longer that they had only his pay to live on.