Griffin W.E.B. - The Corps 09 - Under Fire

"Goddamn it," Howe said, and then asked, "What are you going to do?"

"For the next twenty-four hours, I'm going to hope- pray-that you-and George-are right, and that the only problem is Zimmerman's radio."

"And then?"

"I'm going to Pusan to see what my station chief there thinks about sending the Wind of Good Fortune back up there."

[FIVE]

EVENING STAR HOTEL

TONGNAE, SOUTH KOREA

2105 23 AUGUST 1950

"Oh, shit!" Captain George F. Hart said, as the headlights of the Jeep swept across the courtyard of the hotel.

"Oh, shit what, George?" Brigadier General Fleming Pickering asked.

"Pick's..." Hart said, and stopped.

"Pick's what?" Pickering said.

"I was about to say Pick's girlfriend is here," Hart said. "Or maybe it's somebody else with a war correspondent's Jeep. At the corner?"

"I don't need her right now," Pickering said. "But I'm afraid you're right."

"Maybe Major Whatsisname..."

"Dunston," Pickering furnished.

"... Dunston's got a Jeep like that," Hart said, as he pulled the nose of the Jeep, which had been more or less cheerfully furnished to them-along with directions to the hotel-by Captain James Overton, the Marine liaison offi-cer at K-l.

"Could be," Pickering said. "I really hope it's not her." "She was a little excited the last time we saw her, wasn't she, boss?" Hart asked.

"It has been some time since I have been called `a treacherous sonofabitch,"' Pickering said. "Especially with such sincerity."

"I think her exact words were `you miserable, treacher-ous sonsofbitches,' plural," Hart said. "She seemed to be a little annoyed with me, too."

"Well, I couldn't let her go back to Tokchok-kundo, even if the English would have let her get on the de-stroyer."

"No, you couldn't," Hart said seriously, as he pulled the nose of the Jeep up to the wall of the hotel. "And I don't think you could have explained that to her."

Before they reached the door, other headlights an-nounced the arrival of another Jeep at the hotel.

"That must be him," Hart said. "The Killer said he looked like an Army Transportation Corps major."

"Ken also said he struck him as very bright," Pickering said. "Keep that in mind."

"Major" William Dunston walked up to them. "General, I'm Bill Dunston, your station chief here. I'm sorry you got here before I did, and delighted that you could find the place at all."

"George is a cop when he's not working for me," Picker-ing said. "He's good at finding things."

"Bill Dunston, Captain," Dunston said, offering Hart his hand. "I understand you've been with the general a long time."

"Yeah, we go back a ways," Hart said. "How are you?

Who's the war correspondent?"

"Jeanette Priestly," Dunston said.

"What's she doing here?" Pickering asked.

"The bottom line is that I didn't know to keep her away," Dunston said.

"What she asked for was if she could stay here rather than in the press center. What she's doing, obvi-ously, is hanging around here as probably the best place to learn what's going on in the Flying Fish Channel. She said that you wouldn't let her go back up there."

"I don't think she put it that diplomatically, did she?" Pickering asked.

"The words `betrayed' and `broken promises' did enter our conversation," Dunston said. He hesitated, then went on: "One of the reasons I wasn't here at eight-thirty, as you requested in your message, was that I was hoping to have word of Major Pickering. I had some agents come back across the line at nightfall..."

"And?"

"The good news is that there's no intel that the NKs have a Marine pilot in their POW lockups," Dunston said. "The bad news is that's all the intel. I'm sorry, sir. I think every-thing that can be done is being done."

"I'm sure it is," Pickering said. "Thank you."

"How good are your sources?" Hart asked.

"I own an NK field police major," Dunston said. "If there was a Marine pilot POW, he'd know."

"And he'd tell you?" Hart pursued, more than a little sar-castically.

"Hey, George," Pickering cautioned.

"It's all right, sir," Dunston said. "Yeah, he'd tell me. I have his father."

"Captain McCoy said you were very good at what you do," Pickering said.

"I seem to be laying one egg after another about Major Pickering, sir."

"Well, keep working on it, please," Pickering said.

"General, how much can I tell Miss Priestly about Major Pickering?"

"How much have you told her so far?"

"Only that we're looking for him."

`Tell her what you find out," Pickering ordered.

"In all circumstances, sir?"

"If we're both thinking the same thing, tell me before

you tell her. If at all possible, I'd like to... break the news of that circumstance to her personally."

"Yes, sir."

"Am I allowed to ask what's going on in the Flying Fish Channel?"

"That's why I'm here," Pickering said. "There's a very good chance that the operation is blown. We haven't heard from Zimmerman in seven days. McCoy and Taylor were put off a British destroyer at 0430 on the twentieth and should have reached Tokchok-kundo an hour later. There has been no word of them, either."

"The storm may have knocked out their radio," Dunston said. "Or it simply failed again."

"We're working on that slim possibility. I wanted to..."

There was a flash of light as the hotel door opened.

Jeanette Priestly, in Army fatigues, was standing in the door, holding a carbine in one hand.

"Well, look who's here," she said.

"Hello, Jeanette," Pickering said.

"I'd ask what's going on, except I know that I couldn't believe a goddamn word any of you said."

"I really like a woman who can hold a grudge," Hart said.

"Shut up, George," Pickering said. "I'll tell you what's going on, Jeanette, and you can make up your mind whether to believe me or not."

She turned and went inside the hotel. The men followed her inside.

"Oh, Jesus," Jeanette said. "Everything is really fucked up, isn't it?"

"We don't know that," Dunston said. "I keep getting back to the idea that their radio is out."

"Again, admitting that slim possibility," Pickering said, "then the solution is to get them another radio. There are problems with that. I am unable to get my hands on a ra-dio right now that is (a) suitable to be dropped onto Tokchok-kundo from a Marine aircraft, and is (b) powerful enough to communicate with either Pusan or Japan. All that's available that can be dropped with a reasonable chance of it landing intact are the standard emergency ground-to-air radios carried in airplanes. They have the power to communicate only with another airplane operat-ing in the area. If we have aircraft orbiting over Tokchok-kundo, the NKs are going to know it and wonder why. So that's out.

"The Army has some experimental radios that may work, operative words, `may work,' and they're being air-shipped to Tokyo. But the shortest time in which it is reasonable to expect them is six days from yesterday. Sometime tonight-it may already be here-the Yokohama signal depot is ship-ping another SCR-300 and a gasoline generator to power it to K-l. Our thought was that if we could get that loaded aboard the junk tonight, and the junk could sail in the morn-ing, it could make Tokchok-kundo in thirty-odd hours."

"If the Wind of Good Fortune goes, I go," Jeanette an-nounced.

"No, you don't," Pickering said. "The last thing we want to do is give the NKs the war correspondent of the Chicago Tribune."

"I'm willing to take my chances on that," Jeanette said.

"I'm not," Pickering said. "The NKs would wonder what was so important about Tokchok-kundo that a war correspondent had ridden a junk up there. That's not open for discussion, Jeanette. The next time you see Tokchok-kundo will be from the deck of the Mount McKinley on 15 September."