Retreat, Hell! Page 9

  She bowed to McCoy, he bowed back, and she poured a cup of coffee for him. She asked him what he wanted for breakfast, and he asked what was available, and she told him, and he ordered what Gunner Zimmerman had had— ham, eggs up, home-fried potatoes, and toast.

  When she passed through the door to the kitchen, McCoy sat down across the table from Zimmerman.

  “I wonder what the other Marines in Korea are having for breakfast this morning,” he said, helping himself to a piece of Zimmerman’s toast.

  “My mother used to try to make me eat oatmeal by telling me about the starving kids in India,” Zimmerman said. “Same answer. I don’t give a damn what’s on anyone else’s plate.” He pointed at his plate. “This is the only one that counts.”

  “I’m shocked at your cruel selfishness,” McCoy said in mock indignation.

  “Neither do you, Killer,” Zimmerman said, chuckling. “Be honest.”

  McCoy smiled.

  “You know what I was thinking, though?” Zimmerman asked.

  “No.”

  “What did finding your next day’s uniform sitting all pressed and shipshape on your bed last night remind you of?”

  “Shanghai, 4th Marines, houseboys?” McCoy responded. “Sergeant Zimmerman and Corporal McCoy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hard whiskey and wild, wild women, before we became respectable, married, officers and gentlemen?”

  “What I was thinking was we haven’t come that far in ten years,” Zimmerman said.

  “Then, ten years ago, I would have been happy to think I could make staff sergeant in ten years,” McCoy said.

  “So now you’re a field-grade officer, and I make as much money as a captain—”

  “And own half of Beaufort, South Carolina. . . .”

  “—and people are still shooting at us.”

  “Nobody shot at us yesterday, Ernie.”

  “With you and that goddamn Russian jeep, we almost got blown away by our own side,” Zimmerman said.

  The door from the foyer opened and two middle-aged men in mussed and soiled Army fatigues walked in. One of them had a Garand rifle slung over his shoulder; there were two eight-round clips of ammunition on the strap. The other carried a U.S. Submachine Gun, Caliber .45 ACP M-3, in his hand. The weapon, made of mostly stamped parts, was called a Grease Gun because it looked like a grease gun.

  Zimmerman glanced up at them, and then in a Pavlovian reflex jumped to his feet and barked, " ’Ten’hut on deck!”

  McCoy, in another Pavlovian reflex, stood to attention.

  “As you were,” one of the two newcomers said, then added, “Good morning.”

  “Good morning, sir,” McCoy and Zimmerman said, almost in unison.

  Major General Ralph Howe, NGUS, walked to the table and hung his Grease Gun over the back of one of the heavy chairs and sat down. He looked at Zimmerman.

  “Ernie,” he said. “I thought I told you I’d rather you didn’t do that every time I walk into a room.”

  “Force of habit, sir,” Zimmerman said. “Sorry, sir.”

  The other man, whose sleeves carried the stencil-painted chevrons of a master sergeant, shook his head in resignation, then hung his rifle over the back of another chair and sat down.

  General Howe gestured with his hand for McCoy and Zimmerman to sit down.

  “To judge by your spiffy appearance, I guess you heard who’s due at Kimpo at 0900?” he said.

  “I got a message from Hart, sir, to be at Kimpo at 0900,” McCoy said. “No names were mentioned.”

  “El Supremo is going to turn Liberated Seoul back over to Syngman Rhee at about eleven,” Howe said. “Maybe it’ll really be liberated by then. Some of the North Koreans apparently didn’t get the word.”

  McCoy chuckled.

  “And Charley said that if anyone could get us a bath, a shave, and clean uniforms, it would be you two,” Howe said.

  “And maybe something besides powdered eggs for breakfast?” Master Sergeant Charley Rogers said.

  He, too, was a National Guardsman. He had been Captain Howe’s first sergeant and had been with him ever since. That meant when President Harry S Truman had ordered—actually asked, “Ralph, I need you”—General Howe to active duty, the first thing General Howe had done was ask just about the same question of Charley Rogers.

  Zimmerman got up and went through the door to the kitchen.

  “Are you going to have good news for your boss, Ken?” General Howe asked. “I am presuming he will be with the imperial entourage.”

  “I sent General Pickering a message last night, sir. Pick . . . Major Pickering . . . is out there somewhere, within a fifty-mile radius of Suwon. I don’t think we missed him by more than a couple of hours, and I don’t have any reason to believe he’s in trouble.”

  “He’s in trouble—we’re all in trouble—until we get him back, Ken.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What’s the problem, Ken? And how do we get around it?”

  “The scenario is this, sir. Whenever they can, Colonel Dunn’s pilots look for the messages he leaves, ones he stamps out in rice paddy mud. Sometimes they eyeball them, sometimes the photo interpreters pick them out from aerial photographs. So we’ve had a rough idea where he is ever since he was shot down. Locating him precisely is part of the problem. And then, even if we do that, picking him up will then be the problem. The ideal way to do that is with a helicopter. The problem there—”

  “—is that there aren’t very many helicopters,” General Howe picked up. “And those that exist are being used to haul wounded—”

  “—or brass,” McCoy began, and corrected himself: “—senior officers—where they have to go. And General Pickering doesn’t want to take a chopper away from hauling the wounded to look for Pick or pick him up.”

  Zimmerman came back into the dining room, followed by the Korean housekeeper, who carried a tray with a silver coffee service on it.

  “You were right, Charley,” General Howe said. “While we’re drinking three-day-old coffee from canteen cups, these two—”

  “I told her to make ham and eggs, sir,” Zimmerman said. “Will that be all right?”

  “If that’s the best you can do, Mr. Zimmerman, I guess it will have to do,” Master Sergeant Rogers said.

  Howe chuckled, then said: “We can’t afford to have Major Pickering captured, Ken. We may have to borrow a helicopter for a while, General Pickering’s feelings aside.”

  It was an observation more in the nature of a decision, and thus an order. While legally Major General Howe had no authority to order anyone to do anything, he was in Korea bearing orders signed by Harry S Truman, as President and Commander-in-Chief, which ordered that “all U.S. military and governmental agencies provide General Howe with whatever assistance of whatever kind he deems necessary for the accomplishment of his mission. ”

  Howe, who had been a captain with Captain Harry S Truman in France in World War I, and who had risen to Major General in World War II, was in Korea as Truman’s eyes.

  No one from MacArthur down was going to refuse him anything he asked for.

  McCoy didn’t reply.

  The door opened again, and “Major” William R. Dunston walked in.

  “I just heard you were here, sir—” he began.

  “Mooching breakfast,” Howe interrupted him. “And, I hope, a shower, shave, and some clean fatigues.”

  “Not a problem, sir,” Dunston said.

  “If you didn’t know that General MacArthur’s due at Kimpo sometime around nine, Bill, I’d be very surprised.”

  “I heard, sir,” Dunston said. “Good morning, Charley.”

  Master Sergeant Rogers nodded and smiled.

  “Did your guy get anything out of my guy, Bill?” McCoy asked.

  “I was going to ask you to sit in on that,” Dunston said. “You and Ernie. They’re still in the basement.”

  “I’m in the dark,” General Howe said simply.

  “We to
ok some prisoners yesterday, sir, ” McCoy began. “We were on our way here, and they just came barreling up the highway. The senior one’s a lieutenant colonel. Arrogant sonofabitch. I’ve got a gut feeling he’s somebody important. Ernie and I couldn’t get anything out of him. The other four I turned over to 25th Division.”

  Howe nodded.

  “I thought he might react to a senior officer, and Bill has had an ROK colonel interrogating him,” McCoy went on.

  “I can’t believe anyone could get more out of a prisoner than you two can,” Howe said.

  “I don’t think he knows anything about troop dispositions, that sort of thing,” McCoy replied. “And if he does, he won’t tell us. But I thought he might let something slip when trying to impress a senior officer with his own importance.”

  “And has he, Bill?” Howe asked.

  Dunston looked uncomfortable.

  “What does your man say he got from this fellow, Bill?” Howe persisted.

  “I’m afraid Colonel Lee thinks he got more out of the prisoner than is the case, General,” Dunston said.

  “What?” Howe asked. There was now a hint of impatience in his voice.

  “Something I would much rather not pass on, especially to someone as senior as you, until I had a hell of a lot to back it up,” Dunston said.

  “Specifically, what?” Howe demanded.

  “Colonel Lee thinks this guy has information that the Chinese are coming in,” Dunston said. “He didn’t say that, in so many words. It’s more of a gut feeling on Lee’s part.”

  “Interesting,” Master Sergeant Rogers said.

  “General,” Dunston said, “the first thing I was going to do—did—was ask Major McCoy and Mr. Zimmerman to talk first with Colonel Lee, and then the prisoner, and see what they think. And even—no offense—if they thought there was something to it, think long and hard before passing it on.”

  Howe grunted.

  “Afraid of calling, ‘Wolf, wolf’?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Dunston said, and added, “General, you’ve got me on a spot, sir—”

  He was interrupted in midsentence by the Korean housekeeper, who entered the room with Howe’s and Rogers’s breakfasts.

  No one spoke until she had laid the plates before them, poured coffee, and left the room.

  “I understand, Bill,” Howe resumed.

  “General, I think the Chinese will come in,” Dunston said. “But I don’t want to be—you said it, sir—crying wolf until I have a lot more than this to back it up.”

  “I understand,” Howe repeated, and started to say something else when the door from the foyer opened and another man came in.

  This one was wearing a USMC flight suit, to the breast of which was fixed a leather patch bearing stamped-in-gold -leaf Naval aviator’s wings, and the legend W.C. Dunn, LtCol USMC.

  Lieutenant Colonel William C. Dunn, who was five feet six inches tall and weighed not quite one hundred forty pounds, was visibly surprised and discomfited when he saw the two silver stars of each collar point of General Howe’s soiled and rumpled Army fatigues.

  “I beg the general’s pardon, sir,” he said, coming almost to attention. “I didn’t know the general was in here.”

  “Colonel Dunn, right?” Howe asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Your reputation precedes you, Colonel,” General Howe said. “Please sit down. Have you had your breakfast?”

  General Howe thought: With that pink skin and blond crew cut, he really does look like “an overage cheerleader,” which is how Ernie Zimmerman described him.

  “That’s very kind, sir, but I fear I’m intruding.”

  “Not at all,” Howe said. “And I was hoping for a chance to talk to you in the next day or so. My name is Howe.”

  He put out his hand.

  “Yes, sir. I thought that’s who you probably were,” Dunn said.

  “The old man in need of a shave and a bath is Master Sergeant Charley Rogers,” Howe said. “I guess you know everybody else.”

  “Yes, sir, I do,” Dunn said, and then rose out of his chair to offer his hand to Rogers. Zimmerman got up and went into the kitchen.

  “I didn’t expect to see you here, Colonel,” Howe said.

  “I happened to be in Seoul, sir, and I wanted to talk to Major McCoy,” Dunn said.

  “You ‘happened to be’ in Seoul?” Howe asked, smiling.

  “Yes, sir, I had an early-morning mission—flying cover for a pair of enormous Army helicopters they flew off a transport into Kimpo—and I thought I’d take advantage of the opportunity.”

  McCoy’s curiosity got the best of him.

  “Enormous helicopters?” he blurted.

  Dunn nodded.

  “Sikorskys, I think. I saw a photo of them a while back.”

  “Why were you flying cover for them?” Howe asked.

  “I guess they didn’t want them shot down before they even got here, sir.”

  “How’s the Army going to use them?” Howe asked. “You have any idea?”

  “Not a clue, sir.”

  “You get my message last night, Colonel?” McCoy asked.

  “I got it. One of the things I wanted to tell you was that both of the Corsairs with me—there were three of us—are going to take a lot of aerials over those coordinates you gave me—”

  “Which were the coordinates for?” Howe interrupted.

  “The last place we know Pick was for sure, General,” McCoy said.

  “—on the way back to the Badoeng Strait,” Dunn finished his sentence.

  Zimmerman came back into the room.

  “Chow’s on the way, Colonel,” he announced.

  “Colonel, what I wanted to talk to you about is Major Pickering,” Howe said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How do we get him back, Colonel?”

  Lieutenant Colonel Dunn was respectful of, but not cowed by, Major General Howe.

  “With respect, sir, I’m an airplane driver. The Killer and Zimmerman are the experts in that sort of thing.”

  Howe chuckled. “You must really be old and good friends. I understand that’s the only way you can get away with calling him that.”

  “Yes, sir. We are. We go back a long way.”

  “Let me rephrase, Colonel: If you were, say, the commanding general of the 1st Marine Division, and you were ordered to return Major Pickering to U.S. control, how would you do that?”

  Dunn thought his answer over a moment before speaking.

  “General, just about what’s happening now. Giving Major McCoy whatever—”

  “Much better. Thank you, sir,” McCoy said.

  “Ken, I’m sorry, it just slips out,” Dunn said.

  “You were saying, Colonel?” Howe said.

  “The best way I can think of to get Major Pickering back, sir, is just what’s happening now. Giving Major McCoy whatever he thinks he needs to do it.”

  “Is that happening, Ken?” Howe asked. “You have everything you need?”

  “Yes, sir. It is. And I can’t think of anything else I need. I’ve even managed to borrow an infantry company—actually about two platoons—from lst MarDiv, in case we need them.”

  “The backup people for the Flying Fish Channel operation? ” Howe asked.

  “Yes, sir. They’re at Kimpo.”

  “Probably wondering what the hell is going on,” Zimmerman offered.

  “In case you need them how, Ken?” Howe asked.

  “Nothing specific, sir. But if we have to go any farther from our lines to grab Pick than we have so far, I’d rather have more people along.”

  “When you say you have everything you need, you mean, ‘except of course for the helicopters that we don’t want to take from hauling the wounded,’ right?” Howe went on, looked at McCoy for a moment, and then turned to Dunn.

  “Okay, Colonel,” Howe said. “You say you’re an airplane driver. So, for the sake of argument, let’s assume you have a helicopter—hell, say four h
elicopters—at your disposal. How would you, as an airplane driver, use them to get Major Pickering back?”

  Dunn, visibly in deep thought, did not immediately reply.

  “Add this unpleasant reality to your equation, Colonel,” General Howe went on. “Stop thinking of Major Pickering as a Marine pilot. Start thinking of him as someone we simply cannot afford to have fall into the enemy’s hands.”

  Dunn met his eyes but still did not instantly reply.

  Finally, he exhaled audibly.

  “The one sure way to keep Major Pickering out of the enemy’s hands is to locate him positively within a one-hundred -yard circle and then napalm the hell out of the circle,” he said.

  “Jesus Christ, Billy!” McCoy exploded.

  “General, I want you to understand that I understand what’s at play here,” Dunn said. “Pick Pickering was my wingman at Guadalcanal. I love the bastard. But I also understand he’s General Pickering’s son.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to napalm,” Howe said. “And let’s get back to your having four helicopters at your disposal.”

  “Sir, with respect, I drive airplanes. Other people—in this case, that would be Major McCoy—tell me what they would like me to do with them.”

  “Okay,” Howe said. “Okay, Ken. You have four helicopters at your disposal. How are you going to use them?”

  McCoy didn’t immediately reply.

  “Certainly, Ken,” Howe said, not unkindly, “you’ve thought about it.”

  “If we can find him, precisely locate him—which, so far, we haven’t been able to do—then the standard Marine Corps procedure would almost certainly work. We arrange for fighter cover, send in one helicopter, and pick him up. I’ve already got that set up.”

  “What do you mean, you’ve already got it set up?” Howe asked.

  “I’ve talked to the helicopter pilots. If we locate him, they’ll go after him.”

  “I thought the decision has been made that helicopters will not be diverted for that purpose.”

  “If we can locate him,” McCoy repeated, “a helicopter will be available to pick him up.”

  “Against orders?”

  “We’ll have to worry about that later.”

  “You took it upon yourself to order the pilots to disobey their orders?”