W.E.B. Griffin - Retreat, Hell!

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.

Chapter Three

[ONE]

Hangar 13

Kimpo Airfield (K-16)

Seoul, South Korea

22O5 28 September 195O

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.