Retreat, Hell! Read online

  “What’s going on, Kil—Major?” Zimmerman asked.

  “I just had one of my famous inspirations,” McCoy said. “Major, would you ask one of the pilots who flew over Inchon if he would join us?”

  “Sure,” Donald said, walked to the nearest H-19, and returned with a young-looking captain.

  “This is Captain Schneider, Major,” Donald said.

  McCoy shook his hand, then asked, “When you flew here yesterday, Captain, did you fly over Inchon?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There’s supposed to be an Army vehicle depot there. Did you see it?”

  “I saw a motor park of all kinds of vehicles, sir.”

  “Was there someplace in this motor park where you could land one of these aircraft?”

  “I’d have to make a couple of passes over it to make sure there’s no telephone or power lines, but yes, sir, there was plenty of room to land the H-19s.”

  “Okay. This is what I’m thinking. We need vehicles. We need them,” he said, pointing to Dunston, Zimmerman, Jennings, and then himself. “And you need them. And the Marines need them. The original plan was to go there and dazzle whoever’s in charge with our CIA identification and orders. We’re authorized vehicles, but we get hung up in the bureaucracy. It just occurred to me that if we flew in there in these helos, showed them our orders, and said we needed the vehicles right now, they’d be double dazzled and we’d be out the gate before they had time to think things over—and try to get permission from somebody who would need three days to make a decision.”

  Major Donald and Captain Schneider smiled.

  “How many vehicles are you going to need to support the helicopters and your men?” McCoy said. “Make a list right now. You, too, Dunwood.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Dunwood said.

  “If you had a tank truck, or tank trailers, could you get AvGas somewhere?” McCoy asked.

  “From the Air Force,” Donald said. “I don’t know if there’s a tank park at Inchon or not.”

  “Make sure you have tank trucks, or plenty of trailers, on your list,” McCoy said.

  “Yes, sir,” Major Donald said.

  “On the helos, I want enough men to drive what vehicles we’re going to take, plus enough to manhandle the food and whatever else we’re going to draw from the Quartermaster Depot,” McCoy said.

  [SIX]

  After the H-19s were pushed outside the hangar, Major McCoy managed with some difficulty to climb into the cockpit of one, and then—with some assistance from Major Donald—to strap himself into the copilot’s seat.

  Donald then handed him a headset and a microphone, and showed him how to press the microphone button to talk, and the switch that allowed selection of TRANSMIT and INTERCOM.

  “Got it?” Donald’s voice came through the earphones.

  McCoy checked to make sure the switch was set on INTERCOM and then pressed the microphone button.

  “Got it,” he said.

  Donald put his face to the open cockpit window.

  “Wind it up, Schneider,” he called to the other H-19.

  A moment later, there came the whine of the engine cranking, a cloud of blue smoke, and a lot of vibration.

  For the first time, McCoy realized that he and Donald were practically sitting on the engine.

  The rotor blades began to turn very slowly, and then ever faster, over them. And produced more vibration.

  He looked around Donald at the other helicopter and saw Zimmerman, who looked as uncomfortable as he felt, sitting beside Captain Schneider.

  Donald checked a baffling array of instruments on the control panel and exercised the controls. McCoy had no idea what Donald was doing.

  After about a minute, Donald’s voice came over the earphones.

  “You about ready, Schneider?”

  “Anytime, sir,” Schneider’s metallic voice replied.

  "K-14, Army 4003,” Donald’s voice said.

  “Go ahead, Army 4003,” a new voice responded.

  “Army 4003, a flight of two H-19 helicopters, on the tarmac in front of the hangar across from base ops. Request takeoff permission for a low-level flight on a departure heading of 250 degrees.”

  “4003, where are you going?”

  "K-14, Inchon. We will not exceed 1,000 feet en route.”

  “4003, understand departure heading 250 degrees, destination Inchon, flight level under 1,000. Be advised that there are multiengine aircraft in the pattern making an approach to runway 27. The altimeter is two niner niner. The winds are negligible. K-14 clears 4003 for immediate take-off on a departure heading of 250 degrees. Advise when clear of the field.”

  “Roger, K-14. Army 4003 lifting off at this time.”

  Donald did something to the controls. The sound of the engine changed. There was more vibration. The tail of the helicopter seemed to rise, and then they were moving very slowly across the tarmac, just a few feet off the ground. The helicopter turned at the edge of the hangar, seemed to both accelerate and rise a few more feet off the ground.

  Then, when it had passed over the airport boundary, it turned and climbed to about 500 feet.

  Jesus Christ, Major Kenneth R. McCoy thought, you can see just about everything from up here! This noisy goddamn machine is really going to be useful!

  [SEVEN]

  HANEDA AIRFIELD TOKYO, JAPAN 0905 30 SEPTEMBER 1950

  Captain Paul R. Jernigan, who would command Trans-Global Airways Flight 908—City of Los Angeles—Lockheed Constellation Service from Tokyo to San Francisco with fuel stops at Wake Island and Honolulu, had no idea at all that he would be carrying Fleming Pickering until he looked out the window and saw him approaching the aircraft.

  He pushed himself out of the seat, told his copilot and the flight engineer that “Jesus Christ, Pickering himself is getting on!” and then left the cockpit so that he could personally welcome aboard the man who owned the airline.

  “Welcome aboard, sir,” he said. “My name is Jernigan.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Pickering said, offering his hand. “This is another kind of captain, George Hart. My name is Pickering.”

  “Yes, sir. I know. It’s a pleasure to have you aboard, gentlemen.”

  The senior stewardess who had been counting heads in the rear of the airplane saw the captain standing by the door and came quickly forward and saw who it was.

  “We heard you were coming with us, Commodore,” she said. “Welcome aboard. We have you in 1A, the window seat, and 1B.”

  Never thought to tell me, huh, you airhead! Captain Jernigan thought rather unkindly. He had been known to comment that if he had his choice between flying B-17s over Berlin, which he had done, or flying Connies with six stewardesses aboard, as he was doing now, he would take Berlin anytime.

  “Thank you,” Pickering said, and found his seat.

  “You want the window, George?” he asked.

  “Up to you, boss. I don’t care either way.”

  Pickering slid into the window seat.

  “Once we’re in the air, please feel free to come to the cockpit, Commodore,” Captain Jernigan said. He had picked up on the title, and heard it was what they called the senior of a group of ship captains.

  “Thank you,” Pickering said.

  “Commodore,” the senior stewardess asked, “can I get you anything? Coffee? Something stronger? While we’re waiting for our clearance?”

  “No. Thank you very much,” Pickering said, and then, a moment later: “Hold on. Bring me a Bloody Mary, please. Better make it a double.”

  George Hart looked at him in surprise. Pickering rarely drank at this time of day. Then he saw the silvered cast-aluminum plaque attached to the bulkhead before them, where they would see it all the way across the Pacific.

  THIS TRANS-GLOBAL LOCKHEED

  CONSTELLATION

  “CITY OF LOS ANGELES”

  ON JUNE 1, 1950

  SET THE CURRENT SPEED RECORD

  FOR COMMERCIAL

 
; AIR TRAVEL BETWEEN SAN FRANCISCO

  AND TOKYO

  CAPTAIN MALCOLM S. PICKERING

  CHIEF PILOT OF TRANS-GLOBAL AIRWAYS

  WAS IN COMMAND

  Pickering saw Hart looking at him.

  Hart turned to the stewardess.

  “Make it two of those, please,” he said.

  VI

  [ONE]

  8023 RD TRANSPORTATION COMPANY (DEPOT, FORWARD) INCHON, SOUTH KOREA 0935 30 SEPTEMBER 1950

  Captain Francis P. MacNamara, Transportation Corps, his attention caught by the fluckata-fluckata-fluckata sound of rotor blades, stepped outside his office—a canvas fly—and looked skyward.

  MacNamara, a stocky, redheaded thirty-five-year-old Irishman from South Boston, had earned a commission in World War II, risen to captain, decided he liked the Army, and elected to remain in service when the war was over. In 1946, while assigned to the Army of Occupation in Germany, he had been told that he was about to be RIF’d.

  RIF’d was an unofficial but universally understood and used acronym. The Army didn’t need as many Transportation Corps officers as it had during the war, and there was consequently a Reduction In Force program involuntarily releasing from active duty those officers it no longer needed. Those selected to be released were said to be RIF’d.

  He had also been told that he could enlist as a master sergeant. He had been a PFC when he had gone to OCS. There was a lot to be said for being a master sergeant, and he had also learned that he could retire from the service after twenty years of service at fifty percent of his basic pay, and further that he could retire at the highest grade held in wartime—in other words, as a captain. He reenlisted.

  First Sergeant Francis P. MacNamara, Headquarters and Headquarters Company, the Transportation Corps School, Fort Eustis, Virginia (Captain, TC, Reserve), had been recalled to active duty five days after the North Koreans crossed the 38th Parallel.

  His first assignment had been at the Anniston, Alabama, Ordnance Depot, where he had been responsible for the acceptance by the Transportation Corps of wheeled vehicles stored by the Ordnance Corps, and then seeing them moved to the port of Mobile, Alabama, for shipment to the Far East. During this period, the 9th Transportation Company (Provisional) was activated, and he was given command.

  The five officers and 145 enlisted men of the 9th Transportation Company, and 608 wheeled vehicles ranging from jeeps to tank transporters, sailed from Mobile to Yokohama, Japan, aboard the Captain J.C. Buffett, a Waterman Steamship Line freighter pressed into service. On arrival in Yokohama, the 9th Transportation Company (Provisional) was redesignated the 8023d Transportation Company (Depot, Forward) and Captain MacNamara was told that it would shortly sail aboard the Captain J.C. Buffett for Pusan for service with the Eighth U.S. Army.

  That didn’t happen. The Captain J.C. Buffett lay anchored in Yokohama Harbor until 10 September, when it weighed anchor and joined the fleet of vessels bound for the Inchon Invasion.

  On 14 September, the Captain J.C. Buffett dropped anchor just outside the Flying Fish Channel leading to Inchon, from which position the next morning they could see the warships and attack transports sail into the channel for the invasion.

  Commencing 20 September—once Inchon was secure—the 8023d and its 608 vehicles began to debark. This took some time, because of the tides at Inchon, which saw the Captain J.C. Buffett forced to hoist anchor, sail into Inchon, and off-load as many vehicles as possible before the receding tides made it necessary for her to go back down the Flying Fish Channel, drop anchor again, and wait for the next high tide. The off-loading procedure was further hampered by the shortage of equipment in Inchon capable of lifting the tank transporters, heavy wreckers, and other outsized wheeled vehicles.

  But finally everything and everybody was off-loaded, and Captain MacNamara set about setting up the company. Its purpose was to exchange new vehicles for vehicles that had either been damaged in combat or had otherwise failed, and then to make an effort to repair the damaged vehicles that had been turned in, so they could be reissued.

  MacNamara had done much the same sort of thing in France during World War II, and most of his men were skilled in performing “third-echelon maintenance” on wheeled vehicles. All he had had to do was get everything running. He felt that he was ahead of schedule. He had found a building in which, once the Engineers got him some decent electrical power, he could perform the duty assigned to the 8023d.

  The first thing to do was get what he thought of as “the pool”—the vehicles he had shepherded all the way from Anniston, Alabama—up and running. Actually, that was the second thing he had to do. The first was to lay barbed wire around the pool and set up guard shacks.

  There were two things Captain MacNamara had learned in France. One was that an unguarded pool of vehicles would disappear overnight, and the other was that if you listened to some bullshit pull-at-your-heartstrings story of why some guy really needed a vehicle, and why he didn’t have a vehicle to exchange for one from the pool, the pool would disappear almost as quickly.

  MacNamara believed—after some painful experiences in France—that the Army knew what it was doing when it set the policy, the very simple policy, of “something happens to the vehicle you’ve been issued, take it to an Ordnance or Transportation Depot, turn it in, and they’ll issue you a serviceable one.”

  Unspoken was: “No vehicle to turn in, no new vehicle.”

  The reason for that was pretty obvious. If you didn’t have to turn a vehicle in, every sonofabitch and his brother would show up and take a vehicle. And the problem with that was that some colonel would show up with a half-dozen wrecked or shot-up jeeps and expect to get half a dozen replacements, and when you didn’t have half a dozen jeeps to give him—you’d given every vehicle to every sonofabitch who’d shown up with a hard-luck story—he would ask, “What the hell happened to your pool?”

  That had happened to MacNamara in France. They’d as much as accused him of selling vehicles on the black market, and he’d had the MPs’ Criminal Investigation Division following him around for months, and he’d gotten a letter of reprimand.

  He often thought that letter of reprimand was the reason he had been RIF’d. Now that he was a captain again, because they needed him, he was determined not to fuck up again. Being a captain was better than being a master sergeant, and maybe, if he didn’t fuck up again by passing out the Army’s vehicles to people who weren’t supposed to have them, they’d let him stay on as a captain when this war was over. He might even make major if he didn’t fuck up.

  Captain MacNamara had spent a good deal of time on the way from the States writing a Standing Operating Procedure for the company that would make it absolutely impossible for anyone who didn’t have a busted-up vehicle to turn in to get one from his pool.

  He was looking over the SOP when he heard the fluckata-fluckata-fluckata of rotor blades.

  He had heard the fluckata-fluckata-fluckata the day before, and had gone outside and seen two enormous helicopters—he didn’t know they made them that big—flying over Inchon headed for Seoul.

  He had wondered what the hell they were yesterday, and he wondered what the hell they were now.

  And then he was more than a little surprised to see first that they seemed to be heading for the 8023d, and then even more surprised when the first of them, and the second, stopped fifty feet over the open area where he was going to store the turned-in vehicles, and then fluttered to the ground.

  The sound of their engines died, and the rotors seemed to be slowing.

  Captain MacNamara marched toward the machines, his experience telling him that the passengers on something like this were almost certainly going to be heavy brass.

  He got, instead, a somewhat rumpled-looking major of the Transportation Corps.

  “Good morning, sir,” MacNamara said as he saluted.

  “Good morning, Captain.”

  Then he got two more majors, who climbed down from the cockpit—one of them an Arm
y major and the other a Marine. MacNamara saluted again.

  “Captain MacNamara,” he reported. “Commanding 8023d TC Company.”

  “You’re the senior officer?” the Marine asked him.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The major took a leather wallet from his pocket, unfolded it, and extended it for MacNamara to read. It identified the major as a field officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. It was Captain MacNamara’s first contact with the CIA.

  “Yes, sir?” he asked.

  “Read this, please, Captain,” Major McCoy said, extending a business-size envelope to him.

  “Yes, sir,” MacNamara said, opened the envelope, and took out a single sheet of paper. He read it.

  THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON, D. C.

  JULY 8TH, 1950

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

  BRIGADIER GENERAL FLEMING PICKERING, USMCR, IN CONNECTION WITH HIS MISSION FOR ME, WILL TRAVEL TO SUCH PLACES AT SUCH TIMES AS HE FEELS APPROPRIATE, ACCOMPANIED BY SUCH STAFF AS HE DESIRES.

  GENERAL PICKERING IS GRANTED HEREWITH A TOP-SECRET/WHITE HOUSE CLEARANCE, AND MAY, AT HIS OPTION, GRANT SUCH CLEARANCE TO HIS STAFF.

  U.S. MILITARY AND GOVERNMENTAL AGENCIES ARE DIRECTED TO PROVIDE GENERAL PICKERING AND HIS STAFF WITH WHATEVER SUPPORT THEY MAY REQUIRE.

  Harry S Truman

  HARRY S TRUMAN

  PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

  1ST INDORSEMENT

  1 SEPTEMBER 1950

  THE UNDERSIGNED DESIGNATES THE FOLLOWING MEMBERS OF MY STAFF AS FOLLOWS, WITH THE ATTENDANT SECURITY CLEARANCES AND AUTHORITY TO ACT IN MY BEHALF.

  KENNETH R. MCCOY: EXECUTIVE OFFICER

  ERNEST W. ZIMMERMAN: DEPUTY EXECUTIVE OFFICER

  GEORGE F. HART, CAPT, USMCR: ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICER

  Fleming Pickering

  FLEMING PICKERING

  BRIGADIER GENERAL, USMCR

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Captain MacNamara said.

  “We’re going to need some vehicles,” McCoy said. “And right now. Is that going to cause any problems?”