The Captains Read online

  Sixty seconds later he was over the water and safe.

  He thought that if Roxy’s silk brocade and the nearly transparent, 300-year-old tea set got shot up, she’d really be pissed.

  With the canopy closed and the engine throttled back to cruise, conversation was possible.

  “Captain,” the major said, “thank you very much.”

  “My pleasure,” MacMillan said.

  MacMillan realized there was going to be a confrontation between him and Colonel Jasper B. Downs, Deputy Chief, Office of Military Government, Headquarters, Supreme Commander, Allied Powers, the minute he touched down at Kimpo Airfield in Seoul.

  Colonel Downs was sure to be waiting for “his” L-17 to land, more than a little pissed that “his pilot” had taken the aircraft assigned for his use on a flight without his permission. Colonel Downs was very much aware of his status as a senior member of the SCAP staff. In the present emergency, the chair-warming sonofabitch would see his duty clearly: He would be obliged to return to his headquarters immediately.

  Fuck him.

  It was not that Captain MacMillan was in the habit of frustrating the desires of his seniors, or for that matter, even privately questioning any orders he received. It was simply that he thought of himself as a warrior, and of Colonel Downs as a rear-echelon desk trooper. For the first time since he had arrived in the Far East—for that matter, for the first time since he had been in a drainage ditch in Belgium in the closing days of War II—MacMillan was sure of what he was doing.

  As far as he was concerned, there were only two kinds of soldiers. There were those who lost their heads at the sound of hostile fire, and those who didn’t. The warriors and the chair-borne. MacMillan believed himself to be a warrior, despite his present status as an army aviator. He had won the Medal as a paratrooper. And perhaps more important, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, SCAP himself, was a warrior. He’d gotten the Medal in War I, and he liked to have people with the Medal around him.

  All of these things combined to convince Captain Mac MacMillan that there was nothing really to worry about with Colonel Jasper B. Downs, even if the chair-warming sonofabitch would be waiting at Kimpo with his balls in an uproar.

  MacMillan’s prediction that Colonel Downs would be impatiently, even furiously, waiting for the Navion to return was quite accurate. Moreover, Colonel Downs was accompanied by Miss Genevieve Home, a Foreign Service officer attached to the U.S. Embassy, Seoul, to whom (with, of course, the permission of the ambassador) he had offered transportation out of Korea. Obviously, there were going to be few cultural exchanges in the near future (Miss Horne was deputy cultural attaché), so her presence was not only not essential to the conduct of the Embassy’s affairs, but actually an impediment to it. Flying her to Tokyo in the L-17 would not only insure her safety, and take advantage of passenger space that otherwise would be wasted, but would also give the colonel and Miss Horne the opportunity to spend some time together in Tokyo before she had to go back to Seoul after this incident with the North Koreans blew over.

  Colonal Downs was therefore more than a little annoyed when he and Miss Horne and her luggage arrived at Kimpo Airfield and found his L-17 was gone. While it would be an exaggeration to say that Colonel Downs panicked when he couldn’t find either the L-17 or anyone who knew what had happened to it, it would not be an exaggeration to say that he was enraged when he finally learned where the L-17 was. And when the plane touched down, he was quite prepared to give Captain MacMillan the benefit of his thinking.

  Also waiting at Kimpo Field were two officers from KMAG, bearing with them a note scrawled on a message form by the acting commander, KMAG, authorizing them to commandeer any KMAG aircraft for the purpose of conducting an aerial reconnaissance of the land approaches to Seoul. While they knew full well that the L-17 was not assigned to KMAG, they approached it nevertheless the moment it taxied up before the army hangar. If the pilot was not impressed with their authority to commandeer, perhaps he would listen to reason.

  MacMillan did just that, over the violent protests of Colonel Downs, which included both a recitation of the urgent need of his services at the earliest possible moment in Tokyo and a direct order to Captain MacMillan that he make immediate preparations to board himself and Miss Horne and fly them there.

  “I’ll split it down the middle,” MacMillan said to the KMAG captain. “I’ll take one of you guys with me for a recon. One hour. No more. The other one stays here and sits on that fuel truck. I don’t want anybody blowing it up while I’m gone.”

  “Goddamnit, MacMillan,” Colonel Downs said, with mingled disbelief and rage, “I’ve given you a direct order, and I expect to be obeyed.”

  “While I’m gone, Colonel,” MacMillan replied, “you ask the lady to get what she really has to have into one of those suitcases. We can’t take all of them.”

  Colonel Downs resisted the temptation to tell MacMillan what he intended to do with him when they got back to Tokyo. If he went too far, MacMillan conceivably would not return to pick him up at all. He could settle his hash in Tokyo. Congressional Medal or not, captains do not go around refusing to obey direct orders from colonels.

  MacMillan actually gave the KMAG officer a two-hour recon flight. It took that long, and that’s all there was to it. He landed at Kimpo again at a quarter past one, and it was another forty-five minutes before he could refuel the Navion and take off for Pusan.

  MacMillan took on thirty gallons of gasoline in Pusan, more than enough for the Pusan-Kokura leg of the flight over the Straits of Korea, but not enough to fill the tanks. He was over Maximum Gross Weight as it was. If he had topped off the tanks, he’d never have gotten the Navion into the air.

  When he landed at Itazuke Air Force Base near Kokura, he noticed unusual activity and had some trouble getting somebody to fuel the Navion. The ground personnel were too busy with fighter aircraft to bother with a little army liaison airplane.

  It was nearly 0300 hours when MacMillan landed the Navion at Tachikawa Airfield at Tokyo. The long ride had done nothing to calm Colonel Downs’s rage, and possibly it had been fueled by the last, long, Itazuke-Tachikawa leg, during which he had ridden in the somewhat cramped back seat. Miss Horne had requested that she be allowed to ride up front, and of course there was no way he could refuse her. Neither had he been able to participate in the long conversations she had had with MacMillan, because they were conducted via earphones and microphones, and the back seat was not equipped with them.

  He would have been even more disturbed had he been able to eavesdrop on the conversation.

  “Can I ask a personal question?” Miss Horne had asked MacMillan, over the intercom.

  “Sure.”

  “Isn’t that the Congressional Medal of Honor?”

  “Yeah,” MacMillan replied and actually flushed.

  “I really don’t know what to say,” she said. “I’ve never met anybody before who had the Congressional Medal.”

  “There’s a bunch of them around,” MacMillan said.

  “Oh, no, there’s not!” Miss Horne insisted, touching Captain MacMillan’s arm for emphasis.

  “Yeah, there is,” MacMillan insisted.

  “I feel a whole lot better, I don’t mind telling you,” she said, “with someone like you around. I was really getting worried back there at Kimpo.”

  “There was no reason to be worried,” MacMillan said. “I wouldn’t have taken those KMAG guys on that recon flight if I didn’t think there was time to do that and pick you up, too.”

  “Jasper, I mean, Colonel Downs was very worried.”

  MacMillan said nothing.

  “I suppose,” Genevieve Horne said, “that someone like yourself thinks clearly under stress. I mean, I wish I had known who you were before you left us standing on the field.”

  “I have this rule,” MacMillan said. “I never leave pretty women stranded.”

  She chuckled with pleasure.

  “I’ll bet your wife has to watch yo
u closely around women,” Genevieve Horne said.

  “She tries hard,” MacMillan said.

  “And does she always succeed?”

  “Not always,” MacMillan said. “I took a course in evasive action one time.”

  “If it wasn’t for the circumstances, I’d say that meeting you has been quite an experience, Captain MacMillan.”

  “Does the colonel watch you pretty closely?” MacMillan asked.

  “I don’t think he’s going to have much time to do that,” she said.

  “You’ll be staying at the State Department’s transient hotel?”

  “And probably bored out of my mind,” she said.

  “Maybe I could do something about that.”

  “I’m pretty good at evasive action myself,” Genevieve Horne said.

  Colonel Downs knew only that a conversation was taking place. He had no idea what was being said. He passed the time composing and relishing the words he would say to MacMillan as soon as they were on the ground at Tachikawa and out of the airplane:

  “Captain MacMillan, you will consider yourself under arrest to quarters. You will go directly to your quarters and remain there until you receive further orders.”

  He would later explain to Genevieve Horne the gravity of Captain MacMillan’s offense against good order and discipline; he simply could not ignore it.

  Colonel Downs was not given the opportunity to discipline Captain MacMillan for disobedience of a direct order, however. The L-17 was met by a half dozen officers, the senior of them the special assistant to the SCAP chief of staff, a full colonel senior to Colonel Downs and with whom Colonel Downs had previously had personality clashes.

  The special assistant to the SCAP chief of staff informed them they were wanted immediately in the G-3 Conference Room at the Dai Ichi Building to render a firsthand report of what they had seen in Korea; they were the first eyewitnesses to be available. The airplane itself would immediately return to Kokura, carrying three SCAP staff officers. The 24th Infantry Division at Kokura had already received an Alert for Movement order, just in case it would be necessary to intervene in Korea.

  At the Dai Ichi Building, to Colonel Downs,’s enormous surprise, considering the hour (it was 0415 when they got there), the Supreme Commander, Allied Powers was in the G-3 Map Room, studying a map. He was dressed in a zippered leather jacket and an ancient, washed-smooth khaki shirt and trousers.

  “What say you, Mac?” the SCAP said to MacMillan. “Is that the faint rattle of musketry I hear over the far hill?”

  “I think we got us a war, General,” MacMillan said to MacArthur. “You don’t send tanks on a border incident.”

  “But do we know there are tanks? Or is this something somebody has heard, and repeated with dramatic amplification?”

  “I counted 112 myself, General,” MacMillan said. “In just two places.”

  “Be good enough, MacMillan,” the Supreme Commander said, placing a hand on MacMillan’s elbow and leading him to an enormous map of Korea, “to show me precisely where they were.” And then he remembered Colonel Downs, or very nearly: “Howard, isn’t it?”

  “Downs, sir,” Colonel Downs replied.

  “I presume you were with Mac, Colonel Downs?”

  “No, sir,” MacMillan said. “I asked the colonel to stay behind at Kimpo to make sure we would have fuel to get back here.”

  “Did you confer with the KMAG staff, Colonel?” MacArthur asked.

  “No, sir,” Colonel Downs replied. “There wasn’t time, sir.”

  “You have nothing, then, to contribute?” MacArthur replied. He did not wait for an answer. He simply turned his back to Colonel Downs and examined the map while MacMillan showed him where he had seen the Russian-built T34 tanks heading toward Kaesong, Uijongbu, and Ch’unch’on.

  II

  (One)

  The Hotel Continental

  Paris, France

  28 June 1950

  Mr. and Mrs. Craig W. Lowell, their three-year-old son, Peter-Paul, and Mrs. Lowell’s father, Count Peter-Paul von Greiffenberg (who had, only a few days earlier, been released from a Siberian concentration camp) had been placed in a four-room suite on the fourth floor of the hotel. The master bedroom’s windows opened on both the Rue de Castiglione and the Rue de Rivoli. The other rooms, a sitting room and two bedrooms, opened on the Rue de Rivoli and the Tuileries beyond.

  When the telephone rang, Mr. and Mrs. Lowell were asleep in their bed. Mrs. Lowell, a blond, pert-breasted woman of twenty-one, was naked save for a pair of flimsy pale blue underpants. Mr. Lowell, a large, smoothly muscled, mustachioed man of twenty-three, was completely naked. During the night, the sheet that had covered them had been kicked to the bottom of the bed, and in her sleep, Mrs. Lowell had turned on her side and curled up for warmth. Her husband lay sprawled on his stomach, one hand resting possessively on his wife’s leg.

  He was instantly awake when the telephone rang, rolling over on his back and reaching out for the old-fashioned telephone on the table beside the canopied bed. As he brought the instrument to his ear, he sat up and swung his legs out of bed.

  “Yes?” he said, and then remembering where he was, added, “Oui?”

  “Did I wake you up?” his caller asked, concern in his voice.

  “Hold on, Sandy,” Lowell said. “I want to change phones. Ilse’s asleep.”

  He placed the ornate handset gently on the bedside table and stood up, crossing the room to a chaise longue, where the maid had laid out his dressing gown. The dressing gown was silk, and there was a large monogram embroidered over the breast. It had come from Sulka’s, across the Rue de Castiglione from the Hotel Continental. But the monogram was not Craig Lowell’s, and the first time that he had ever been in Sulka’s was late the previous afternoon, when they had arrived in Paris, and had gone there—mainly because it was the closest store—to get his father-in-law some underwear and some off-the-shelf shirts.

  The dressing gown had belonged to Lowell’s father. Like the five-piece matched set of leather luggage stacked by the door awaiting a porter to carry it off for storage, it had just been too good to give to the Salvation Army, although the Salvation Army had been given his father’s shirts and shoes and underwear.

  At home he never wore a dressing gown, or even a bathrobe. So far as he was concerned, a man was either dressed or he wasn’t, and there was no reason for an intermediate step. Ilse had packed the dressing gown for him, so that his barbarian beliefs would not be evident to the people who worked in hotels. Ilse was concerned about things like that, he had come to decide, not because she was concerned what anyone would think about her, but about him.

  As he jammed his arms into the sleeves of his father’s dressing gown, he was glad that she had packed the damned thing. Otherwise, he would have had to get dressed before going to the phone in the other room. Either get dressed, or run the risk of giving the shock of her young life to Mademoiselle Whatsername, the nurse the bank had arranged to meet them in the hotel.

  It was not that he believed that Mademoiselle had never seen the undressed male form. It was the zippers and extra assholes that upset people the first time they saw him.

  The zippers and the extra assholes, so called because that was what they resembled, were the result of what the official medical records had termed “moderate to severe lacerations of the torso and upper arm, caused by shrapnel from artillery and/or mortar projectiles” and “two (2) penetrating entrance and exit wounds, in the upper left arm and extreme upper left torso, at the arm juncture, caused by small arms fire, either rifle or light machine gun.”

  The wounds had long since healed, but his body would be marked forever.

  He started for the door, but then stopped. He went back to the bed and very tenderly pulled the sheet on the bed over his wife. He thought again, as he had the very first time he had ever looked at her asleep in his bed, that she looked like a child, much too young, too innocent, to be in bed with a man.

  He walked in
to the sitting room, and was surprised, almost startled, to see his father-in-law sitting on the floor with his son. The older man was wearing one of the shirts they’d bought at Sulka’s the day before. Its collar was opened and the sleeves rolled up.

  Christ, Lowell thought, he looks like a fucking cadaver.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  “I hope we didn’t wake you up,” his father-in-law replied.

  P.P. smiled at his father.

  You don’t have to talk, Squirt, his father thought. That smile of yours would charm the balls off a brass monkey.

  “No, I have a call,” Lowell said. “I’m going to take it out here.”

  He sat down on one of two opposing couches and picked up the telephone on the coffee table between them and told the operator to put through the call on the bedroom phone.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  His caller told him.

  “OK,” he said. “You’re nearly here. Look out the window, and you can see the Opera. It’s a straight shot from the Opera here. You’ll see a big thing in the middle of the street about two blocks away. That’s right in front of the Ritz. Go around it. The street dead-ends on the Rue de Rivoli two blocks beyond. And that’s it. We’re on the right side, on the corner. I’ll order up some breakfast.”

  He hung up the telephone.

  “Captain Felter,” he explained to his father-in-law. “He’s at American Express.”

  His father-in-law nodded. Lowell went into the bedroom, hung that phone up, and then returned and picked up the extension and asked for the desk.

  “This is Mr. Lowell,” he said. “Captain Felter and his family are about to arrive. They’re my guests. I don’t want them given a bill for anything, including gratuities. You understand?”

  When he hung up the phone again, his father-in-law said, “You are very gracious. Perhaps even generous to a fault.”

  “I’m rich,” Lowell said. “It’s easy to be gracious and generous if you’re rich.”