Retreat, Hell! Read online

  McCoy and Zimmerman pulled chairs—one heavy and of carved wood matching the table, the other a GI folding metal chair—to the table and sat down.

  “What’s with the Coleman lantern?” McCoy asked by way of greeting. “I heard the generator. . . . The perimeter floodlights are working.”

  “No lightbulbs,” Dunston replied. “I’m working on it. Probably tomorrow.” He paused, then went on: “I was getting a little worried about you, Ken.”

  “We’re all right,” McCoy said. “But I’m hungry and thirsty.”

  “Hard or soft? There is also a case of Asahi cooling in the fridge.”

  “I think one medicinal belt, and then beer,” McCoy said. “Food?”

  “There’s steaks and potatoes, no vegetables.”

  “Hot water?” Zimmerman asked.

  Dunston nodded. “And your laundry awaits,” he said.

  “I’m going to have a beer, a shower, a drink, and a steak, in that order,” Zimmerman said.

  A door opened, and a middle-aged Korean woman stood in it waiting for orders.

  Dunston, in Korean, told her to bring beer and whiskey and to prepare steaks.

  “I think if you had found him, you’d have said something, ” Dunston said.

  “Close, goddamn close, but no brass ring,” McCoy said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he saw us looking for him.”

  “But you think he’s alive?”

  “I’m pretty sure he was alive six, eight, maybe twelve hours before we found his arrow.”

  “Did you tell the general?”

  McCoy nodded.

  “I sent a message through the 25th Division G-2,” he said, “and sometime tonight, I want to get a message out to the Badoeng Strait.”

  The USS Badoeng Strait (CVE-116) was the aircraft carrier—a small one, dubbed a “Jeep Carrier”—from which Major Malcolm Pickering had taken off on his last flight. His wing commander, Lieutenant Colonel William “Billy” Dunn, USMC, was doing all he could to locate and rescue Pickering; McCoy wanted him to know what had happened on this last ground search mission.

  “No problem,” Dunston said.

  “What’s going on here?” McCoy asked.

  “It says in here,” Dunston said, dryly, tapping Stars and Stripes, “that Seoul has been liberated. I guess nobody told the artillery.”

  “I wondered what all that noise is,” McCoy said. “But that’s not what I meant. I got a message from Hart saying to be at Kimpo at 0900. What’s that all about?”

  “El Supremo’s flying in. He’s going to turn Seoul over to Syngman Rhee. I guess the general’s coming with him.”

  El Supremo was General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander, Allied Powers, and, since shortly after the Korean War began, Commander, United Nations Forces in Korea.

  “They sent you a message?”

  Dunston shook his head no.

  “I’m a spy, Ken. I thought I told you. I’ve got a guy at Haneda. The Bataan’s being readied as we speak.”

  McCoy chuckled. Haneda was the airbase outside Tokyo where the Bataan, MacArthur’s personal Douglas C-54 transport, was kept.

  “I wish I had better news for the boss.”

  “That he’s alive is good news.”

  “Yeah, and six hours after I tell him that, we’ll find his body.”

  “The bastard walks through raindrops, Killer,” Zimmerman said. “You know that.”

  “Where’s General Howe? And did you tell him that MacArthur and the boss are coming?” McCoy asked.

  Major General Ralph Howe, a World War I crony of then-Captain Harry S Truman, was in the Far East as the personal representative of the President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief of its Armed Forces.

  “I got a message from him about six o’clock, saying he’s with Chesty Puller’s Marine regiment,” Dunston said. “And no, I didn’t tell him—(a) I figured they’d get word to him, and (b) I didn’t want him to ask how come I knew.”

  The Korean woman came into the room carrying a tray. It held quart bottles of Asahi beer, a quart bottle of Famous Grouse scotch, and ice and glasses.

  “Where’d you get all the booze?” Zimmerman asked.

  “I paid a courtesy call on General Almond,” Dunston said. “That general knows how to go to war. With a trailer-load of hootch and cocktail snacks, and clean white sheets. Almond told his aide—Haig?—to take care of me.”

  “Why did Almond tell El Supremo Seoul’s been liberated? ” McCoy asked, indicating the pounding rumble of the heavy artillery with a finger pointed at the ceiling.

  He reached for the bottle of whiskey and poured two inches in one of the glasses. Zimmerman picked up one of the beer bottles. Dunston slid him a bottle opener.

  “I think it was the other way around,” Dunston said. “And Almond is too smart to disagree with El Supremo. MacArthur said he wanted Seoul liberated within two weeks of the landing at Inchon, and by God, it has been liberated.”

  “We bagged a North Korean lieutenant colonel—” McCoy began.

  “And his Russian jeep,” Zimmerman interjected.

  “And his jeep?” Dunston asked, smiling. “What are you going to do with that?”

  Zimmerman opened the bottle, and then left the room, drinking from the bottle as he walked.

  “—who I turned over to Paik Su,” McCoy went on, “with instructions to put him in the basement, feed him, and make him comfortable. I think he’s important. Probably an intelligence officer, maybe a political commissar, but somebody important. I think he should be interrogated by somebody besides Zimmerman and me—or, for that matter, you. This guy is not impressed by a couple of clowns riding around the boondocks in a jeep. But I think he might respond to somebody he thinks is important.”

  “Paik is very good at getting people to tell him things,” Dunston said.

  “And there is always thiopental sodium, but that also requires that the interrogator know what questions to ask. What we may get from this guy will be something—and I have a gut feeling there will be something—that he lets slip, not something Paik, or a needle in his arm, ‘persuades’ him to tell us.”

  “I know just the guy, an ROK bird colonel,” Dunston said. “I’ll handle it. Go get a shower and something to eat, Ken. You look beat.”

  “After I get a message off to the Badoeng Strait.”

  “I can do that, too, if you’d like,” Dunston said.

  “Thanks, Bill, but I’d rather do it myself,” McCoy said.

  He stood up and held the whiskey glass out. “And before I have another of these and go to sleep. I’m beat.”

  “You’ve been up since four, and I don’t think you got much sleep last night,” Dunston said. “Ken, if all you’ve got to tell Colonel Dunn is where Pickering was—or wasn’t—I can use that overlay and send the message.”

  “I’d rather do it myself,” McCoy said. “But for the second time, thanks, Bill.”

  He walked out of the library and climbed the stairs to the radio room on the third floor. Coleman lanterns were on each landing. The radio operator on duty was a not-unattractive Korean woman in her thirties. She sat at a table on which was an aluminum teapot on an electric stove, an ashtray, a typewriter, and a fully automatic M-2 .30-caliber carbine. The radio room had a lightbulb dangling naked from the ceiling.

  McCoy nodded his head and said, “Di-San.”

  Possibly to restrain the romantic tendencies of McCoy’s Marines, Dunston had told them that Di and her husband had been prewar employees, and that after torturing the husband for several hours, the North Koreans had finally killed him, then, after subjecting the woman to multiple rape, had for some reason let her go.

  Her head barely moved in a nod acknowledging McCoy.

  “I’ll have a short message for the Badoeng Strait,” McCoy said.

  Her head bobbed almost imperceptibly again, and she turned to one of the radio sets and began to make the necessary adjustments.

  McCoy took a map of Korea an
d a translucent overlay from a table drawer, put the overlay on the map, and made a pencil note of the coordinates on the overlay. Lieutenant Colonel Billy Dunn, on the aircraft carrier, had an identical overlay. Without the overlay, the coordinate keys would be useless.

  Then he sat down at an old Underwood typewriter, which already—in anticipation of incoming messages—had paper in it. He paused thoughtfully for a moment, and then began to type.

  SECRET

  2125 28SEP50

  FOR MOTHERHEN

  FROM TROJANHORSE

  POSITIVE INDICATIONS HOTSHOT AT COORDINATES CHARLEY SEVEN SEVEN TWO, MIKE ZERO FOUR ZERO TWO TO TWELVE HOURS PRIOR TO 0900 28SEP50. NO CONTACT. TROJANHORSE AT MONACO 0900 29SEP50. END.

  He unrolled the sheet of paper from the typewriter and handed it to the Korean woman. She read it, looked at him, then said, “I will encrypt it if you like.”

  He nodded.

  “I’m going to get something to eat, and then go to bed,” he said in Korean. “If I don’t hear from you, I will presume Badoeng Strait acknowledges.”

  She nodded.

  “Thank you, Di-San,” he said.

  She nodded again.

  McCoy left the radio room and walked back down the stairs to the ground floor. There was the glaring white light and hissing of a Coleman lantern coming from the dining room, and he went in there.

  “I didn’t wait,” Zimmerman said, unnecessarily, as he mopped the last meat juices from his plate with a piece of bread. “I was starved.”

  “I got a message off to Billy Dunn,” McCoy said.

  Zimmerman grunted, and then got up.

  “Make sure they wake me for breakfast,” he said, and walked out.

  McCoy nodded and sat down at the table. The older Korean woman came in almost immediately with a steak and french fried potatoes on a plate. She left and returned in a moment with a bottle of red wine.

  The steak was enormous, and he couldn’t eat all of it. He drained the wineglass, stood up, and left. He climbed the stairs to the second floor and walked down a dark corridor to and through a heavy door into a large, sparsely furnished room. There was a double bed, neatly made up with sheets and Army blankets. Beside it was a chair. There was a large wooden desk with a Coleman lantern glowing white on it.

  Neatly folded on the bed were freshly washed linen, a freshly washed and starched set of Marine utilities, two towels, a facecloth, and a bar of Pond’s soap. McCoy wondered where Dunston had found that. Next to the bed was a pair of Army combat boots. Shined Army combat boots.

  McCoy sat on the bed and took off the Marine boots he was wearing. Then he took off the fatigue jacket, held it for a moment, and dropped it onto the floor. He stood up, took a Model 1911A1 Colt .45 ACP pistol from the small of his back, and put it on the chair beside the bed. Then he stripped off the rest of his clothes, leaving everything in a pile on the floor.

  He took the freshly pressed and starched uniform from the bed and laid it over the pistol on the chair. Then he picked up the clean linen and the towels from the bed and walked to the bathroom door, returning in a moment for the Coleman lantern.

  It took a long time for the hot water to work its way up from the boiler in the basement, but finally there was a steady, heavy stream of hot water. He stood under it a long time after he was clean.

  Then he put on the underwear, carried the Coleman lantern back into the bedroom, sat on the bed, turned the lantern off, and got between the sheets.

  In thirty seconds, he was asleep.

  III

  [ONE]

  HANGAR 13 KIMPO AIRFIELD (K-14) SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA 2205 28 SEPTEMBER 1950

  As Major McCoy slipped between the clean white sheets of his bed, Captain Howard C. Dunwood, USMCR—who three months before had been named “Salesman of the Month” at Mike O’Brien’s DeSoto-Plymouth Agency in East Orange, New Jersey—sat in his underwear on the edge of his cot in a shrapnel-riddled hangar forking cold ham chunks and baked beans from an olive-drab Army ration can by the light of a small candle.

  And like Major McCoy, Dunwood was fresh from his personal toilette: He had just shaved, then washed his face and crotch and his armpits with water held in a steel helmet. He had then used the same water to wash his change of socks and underwear, using a tiny chunk of soap that had come with a package of Chesterfield cigarettes, a small pack of toilet paper, and some other “comforts” with the field rations.

  He actually felt a little guilty about the cot, having been taught, and believing, that officers should enjoy no creature comforts not available to their men. There were only ten folding wooden cots available to the men of Baker Company, 5th Marines.

  His supply sergeant—Staff Sergeant Al Preston, USMC, who three months before had been on recruiting duty in Montgomery, Alabama—had “borrowed” them that morning from an Army ration dump in Ascom City, near the port of Inchon, while collecting their daily rations and the mail. There had not been very many rations, and almost no mail.

  Preston had passed seven of the ten cots out to the senior noncoms of the company, then carried the remaining three into the officers’ quarters—what had apparently been small offices off the hangar floor—and started setting them up.

  “Can you go back and get some more cots for the men?” Dunwood had asked.

  “Ten’s all they had, sir,” Preston had replied, then had taken the meaning of the question and added: "R.H.I.P., Skipper.”

  Dunwood doubted that “Rank Hath Its Privileges” justified his other two officers and himself, and the seven noncoms, having cots when none of the other men of Baker Company would, but he let it go.

  The floor of the officers’ quarters was concrete, and he wasn’t as young as he had been when he had made the Tarawa and Okinawa landings in War Two.

  He decided that there was nothing wrong with being as comfortable as he could for as long as he could. Their current status was bound to change, sooner or later and probably sooner than later, and when it changed, things would almost certainly be worse.

  Right now, despite the spartan and miserable living conditions in the shrapnel-holed hangar and the lousy rations, things were pretty good, considering the alternative, which was doing what they were supposed to be doing, fighting as a Marine infantry company on the line.

  The lines of ambulances and the sound of the firing had made it obvious that taking Seoul back from the North Koreans had been a nasty job. To judge by the sound of artillery, it still was a nasty job.

  Baker Company hadn’t been involved. They were officially in what some G-3 major had told him was “Division Special Reserve.” Exactly what that meant Dunwood didn’t know, but he knew the result.

  Since Baker Company had landed at Inchon eleven days before, with the exception of some minor harassing and intermittent fire, they had not been involved in any combat at all, and that meant there had been zero KIA, zero WIA, and zero MIA.

  It hadn’t been that way in the Pusan Perimeter, where the Army general, Walker, admitted publicly that he had used the 5th Marines as his “Fire Brigade,” rushing its men in all over to save the Army’s ass when it looked as if the North Koreans were about to break through.

  There had been a lot of Killed in Action and Wounded in Action in Baker Company in the Pusan Perimeter. When they were pulled off the line so they could board ships and make the Inchon Landing, Baker Company had been down to three officers and ninety-eight men. They were supposed to have five officers and two hundred four men. Dunwood had been able to report zero Missing in Action in the perimeter; he took a little quiet pride in knowing he hadn’t left any of his Marines behind.

  When they got to the piers in Pusan, expecting to board the USS Clymer or the USS Pickaway, or another of the attack transports that would carry them to Yokohama, where the 1st Marine Division was being assembled, Baker Company had been loaded instead aboard LST-450. And they were the only Marines loaded, although she was big enough to carry a hell of a lot more people.

  Just about as soon as
they were out of the harbor and the LST’s skipper, Lieutenant John X. McNear, USNR, had time for a little chat, he told Dunwood three things.

  First, that he was, like Dunwood, a reserve officer involuntarily called up for Korea (he had been the golf professional at Happy Hollow Country Club, Phoenix, Arizona). Second, that he had just now sailed LST-450 from Bremerton, Washington, where she had been moth-balled. And third, that they were now headed for Sasebo, not Yokohama. He said he had learned that only when he opened a sealed envelope on which was typed “OPEN ONLY WHEN AT SEA,” and he hadn’t any idea what was going on.

  Dunwood had searched his mind for a possible explanation and had come up with very little, except the possibility that Baker Company would be reequipped and brought up to authorized strength at Sasebo.

  When they got to Sasebo, Dunwood quickly learned that was not to be the case. Baker Company, the lieutenant colonel in charge of a team from 1st Marine Division Headquarters told him, had been selected for a “special mission of crucial importance to the landing at Inchon.”

  The lieutenant colonel made it sound like an honor. Dunwood’s experience as a Marine made him suspect it was a euphemistic description of a mission that would get a lot of Marines—probably including him—killed.

  Baker Company was shortly thereafter assembled in the gymnasium of the U.S. Naval Base, Sasebo, where, after the windows were covered and guards posted at the doors, the colonel described their mission to them.

  It seemed that to reach the landing beaches at Inchon, the invasion fleet would have to traverse the thirty-odd-mile -long Flying Fish Channel. In the channel were a number of islands, two of which, Taemuui-do and Yonghung-do, had to be invested and neutralized twenty-four hours before the invasion fleet arrived, otherwise the enemy could blow large holes in the sides of the transports with ordinary field artillery.

  Baker Company had been given the mission, the honor, of investing Taemuui-do and Yonghung-do. Before they landed on the islands from Higgins boats, the islands would of course be subject to an enormous barrage of naval gunfire, which would effectively reduce to minimal the enemy’s ability to resist Baker Company’s invasion.