W E B Griffin - Corp 09 - Under Fire

by Under Fire(Lit)

  "I'm not talking about nailing her," McCoy said.

  He pointed to the telephone on Overton's desk.

  "Can I get the Eighth Army PIO on that?"

  "You can try," Overton said.

  "Ernie, go to Eighth Army. Get her. Take her out to the Evening Star."

  "What if she doesn't want to come?"

  "Take her out to the Evening Star," McCoy repeated. "I don't care how you do it."

  "How are you going to get back there?"

  "Dunston said he would send Major Kim out there in a Jeep. I'll have Kim pick me up here. And I'll call Eighth Army-if I can get through-and get word to Miss Priestly that you're on the way."

  "You want her to see the Evening Star?"

  "I don't want her to write a story based on what she thinks she knows."

  "And if she asks about Pick?"

  `Tell her I'll tell her everything she wants to know," Mc-Coy said.

  Captain Overton touched McCoy's arm and pointed out the window. An Avenger had taxied up in front of the Base Operations building.

  "There's your Badoeng Strait COD," Overton said.

  "Get going, Ernie," McCoy said.

  [FIVE]

  EVENING STAR HOTEL

  TONGNAE, SOUTH KOREA

  1215 5 AUGUST 1950

  When McCoy and Major Kim drove around the hotel to the pier, there was a U.S. Army water trailer backed up to the shore end of the pier behind one of the freshly painted USMC Jeeps. A white legend on it read "Potable Water ONLY!!!" But what was coming out of the faucet and be-ing fed into five-gallon jerry cans was obviously not water. As soon as one of the jerry cans was full, one of the South Korean national policemen carried it onto the pier, to the side of the junk, and hoisted it high enough so that another Korean on the junk could reach it and haul it aboard. Then an obviously empty jerry can was lowered over the side to the man on the pier, who carried it back to the "water trailer" and took up his position in line.

  There were four men engaged in filling the jerry cans and carrying them to the junk, and they wasted little effort. Still, the trailer held five hundred gallons, which meant the procedure would have to be repeated one hundred times. McCoy wondered how long they had been at it.

  "They brought the diesel about twenty minutes ago," Lieutenant Taylor called out, as if he had been reading Mc-Coy's mind.

  McCoy looked up and saw Taylor leaning on the rail of the high stern.

  "This is going to take a little time," Taylor added, and pointed to a wood-stepped rope ladder on the side of the junk forward of the stern.

  McCoy got out of the Jeep and went to the ladder. He was hoping Major Kim would wait for an invitation to join him-he needed to talk to Taylor privately-but Kim fol-lowed him to the ladder.

  What the hell, he's just trying to make himself useful.

  McCoy climbed the ladder to the deck. There were three hatches, and all were open. He walked down the deck and looked into each. The farthest aft hold was just about empty. The center hold held a Caterpillar diesel engine and its fuel tanks, one on each side. They each looked larger than the water trailer on shore, which translated to mean the fuel capacity was over one thousand gallons, informa-tion that was useless unless one knew how much fuel the Cat diesel burned in an hour, and how far the junk would travel in that hour.

  The forward hold was half full. There were a dozen wooden crates with rope handles, all marked as property of the Japanese Imperial Army. Three of them had legends saying they held ten Arisaka rifles; the others held ammu-nition for them.

  McCoy pushed open a door in the forecastle and saw that it was combination bunking space and a "kitchen." There were crude bunks, eight in all, mounted on the bulk-heads. Against the forward bulkhead was a table. In the center of the space was a square brick stove, on which sat three large, round-bottomed cooking pans.

  Woks, McCoy thought. I wonder who invented that pan? The Chinese? The Japs? The Koreans? They're all over the Orient.

  Under one of the bunks he saw a wicker basket full of charcoal.

  He walked aft, and pushed open a hatch leading to space under the high stern. There were three doors off a center corridor, and crude sets of stairs leading down and up to the open area where he had seen Taylor. He started up those, aware that Major Kim was still on his heels.

  Taylor, who was still leaning on the rail, looked over his shoulder as McCoy came onto the deck.

  McCoy saluted him.

  "Permission to come aboard, sir?" he said.

  "Granted," Taylor said, returned the salute, and then asked, "Is that what they call McCoy humor?"

  "No," McCoy said. "I wanted to make the point that knowing a hell of a lot less than a Marine officer should know about things that float, you're in charge, Captain."

  "This your first time on a junk?" Taylor asked, smiling.

  "No, but this is the first time I didn't pretend that I knew all about junks and wasn't particularly impressed with what I was seeing."

  Taylor chuckled and smiled.

  "You want a quick familiarization lecture?"

  "Please."

  "Okay. This one, according to her stern board, was chris-tened'-maybe Confucius-ed?-the Wind of Good Fortune. She's about ten years old, I would guess, and I suspect she was made somewhere in China. Good craftsmanship, good wood. You don't often find that in Korean junks. The Cater-pillar, I'll bet, was installed in Macao. I found some papers in Portuguese, and the Macao shipbuilders have been cater-ing to the smuggler trade since Christ was a corporal. Nice installation. It cost the former owners a fortune. I suspect she'll make maybe thirteen, fourteen knots."

  "And we have enough fuel to go how far?"

  "I'll guess that Cat will burn ten, twelve gallons an hour. Say twelve. Hell, say fifteen-her hull may be six inches deep in barnacles. I figure we have twelve hundred gallons in those two tanks. Twelve hundred gallons divided by fif-teen is eighty hours' running time at a reasonable cruising speed-say, twelve knots. Eighty hours-provided the winds and tides are not really against us-at twelve knots is 960 miles."

  "Major Kim, will you please excuse us for a minute?" McCoy said, as politely as he could. "I need a word with Lieutenant Taylor."

  "Yes, of course," Kim replied, smiling. He came to at-tention for a brief moment, then went down the stairs.

  McCoy waited until he appeared on the deck.

  "In other words, we have enough fuel to reach the Tokchok-kundo islands?"

  "Easily, even running at full bore," Taylor replied.

  "At regular cruising speed, how long will that take us?"

  "It's about four hundred miles from here. At twelve knots-I think we can do that without sweat, but I won't know until we're actually at sea-that's four hundred di-vided by twelve: thirty-three point forever. Call it thirty-four hours."

  "And at fourteen knots?"

  "Call it thirty," Taylor said. "But I'd rather not push her unless I have to."

  "What I want to do as soon as we can is get to Tokchok-kundo, get ashore, have a look around, and get the SCR-300 up and operating."

  Taylor nodded his understanding.

  "Are you planning on staying?"

  "I'm going to leave Zimmerman there, and Major Kim. If Kim's there, he can't tell Dunston what we have in mind."

  "Did the Marines come through with aerial photo-graphs?" Taylor asked.

  "Lots of them," McCoy said. "But until I can compare them against maps, I don't know what I'm looking at."

  "Charts, Captain McCoy, charts."

  "I beg the captain's pardon," McCoy said, smiling.

  "You'll have thirty-four hours to do that," Taylor said. "We can shove off in about an hour. That soon enough?"

  "We have to wait for a passenger," McCoy said.

  "Am I allowed to ask who?"

  McCoy reached into his pocket for Jeanette Priestly's note, and handed it to Taylor.

  "Jesus!" Taylor said when he read it. "This is that female war correspondent who wrote that piece about you an
d Zimmerman?"

  "Yeah."

  "What's her connection with Pickering's son?"

  "She knows him. The guy at K-l thinks she has the hots for him. I don't know how she found out what the general does for a living."

  "Do I understand this? You want to take her along?"

  McCoy nodded.

  "Can I ask why?"

  "Because I can't think of anything else to do with her," McCoy said. "I can't let her write a story saying who Pick-ering's father is."

  "What makes you think she'll be willing to go?"

  "She'll be on board when we sail, Captain."

  Taylor looked at him a long moment, but said nothing.

  "Captain," Major Kim called, and both Taylor and Mc-Coy walked to the railing and looked down at him.

  "Captain, my sergeant reports the fuel tanks are full."

  `Tell him thank you, please," Taylor called back, and then looked at McCoy.

  McCoy turned from the railing and spoke softly, in En-glish.

  "He was talking to you. He picked up on me making it clear you're the captain."

  "Good man, I think," Taylor said.

  "The trouble with good men is that they tend to be pissed when they find out you've been lying to them," Mc-Coy said.

  "Your orders, Captain?" Major Kim called.

  `Tell him to wait a minute," McCoy said.

  "Stand by, please, Major," Taylor called, in Korean.

  "We'll be taking Major Kim, and a dozen of his people, and their equipment," McCoy said. "Plus eight of the Marines and Zimmerman. And their equipment."

  "Plus the lady war correspondent," Taylor interjected.

  "Where do we put them all?"

  "There's three cabins below," Taylor said. "One is the mess and kitchen for the officers. There's a captain's cabin, more or less-we can put the lady in there-and another cabin for you, me, Zimmerman, and Major Kim. The weather's nice. If it stays that way, we can sleep on deck. The officers up here, the men on the main deck."

  "And if the weather is foul?"

  "As soon as it starts to turn nasty, the men are going to have to go in the holds, with the hatch covers battened."

  "That's not going to be much fun."

  "It'll be more fun than capsizing," Taylor said.

  "What are you going to do for a crew?" McCoy asked.

  "Three of Kim's men were sailors. They can show the others what to do. There's not much to know about the rig-ging on a junk. The sails are square-Okay, oblong-and they're stiffened with bamboo. They're like Venetian blinds, you open-raise-them by pulling on a rope. There's no wheel, just this thing..."

  He pointed to a six-inch-square handle, lashed to the stern.

  "... the rudder. The rudder is huge; it also serves as the centerboard when you're under sail. Sometimes-to turn sharply-you need more than one man on it. Same thing when you're under way with the engine. There's one pro-peller, mounted forward of the rudder. All the power of the engine is directed at the rudder. If you can hold the rudder, you can make really sharp turns."

  "I don't see any engine controls, or a compass," McCoy said.

  Taylor walked to the forward rail and pulled backward on what McCoy had thought was a sturdy support for the railing. Inside was a control panel for the Caterpillar diesel engine, and a compass. They were chrome-plated, and completely out of place on the junk.

  "Like I said, McCoy, Macao shipbuilders know what they're doing," Taylor said.

  He reached down into the small compartment and threw several switches. The compass and the engine instrument dials lit up and became active. There was a red light-ob-viously a warning light of some kind.

  McCoy was about to ask what it was when it went out. Taylor reached into the compartment again and pressed a button. There was a rumble, and then the diesel engine started.

  "I'll be damned," McCoy said. "Very nice."

  Taylor shut the engine off again.

  "You're confident we can use this to make the land-ings?" he asked.

  "Hell no, I'm not," Taylor replied, shaking his head. "I don't know much about the waters off Yonghung-do and Taemuui-do, but I've never seen a junk tied up at a pier ei-ther place. That makes me think the adjacent waters are too shallow, even at high tide, to take a junk's rudder. We're going to have to get boats somewhere."

  "Jesus!"

  "I was thinking we could get some from the Navy," Tay-lor said. "A couple of shore leave boats would be perfect."

  "And asking for them would make the Navy very curi-ous about what we planned to do with them...."

  "And we'd have to tow them from Kobe or Yokohama or someplace."

  "We have to think about that," McCoy said. "Goddamn it!"

  Taylor shrugged.

  "I'm going ashore to see if I can find out where Zim-merman and that goddamned woman are," McCoy said. "And we better start loading everything we're taking with us. You tell Kim."

  Taylor gave a thumbs-up sign, and McCoy started down the ladder to the main deck.

  [SIX]

  EVENING STAR HOTEL

  TONGNAE, SOUTH KOREA

  1625 5 AUGUST 1950

  Master Gunner Zimmerman drove right to the pier, fol-lowed by a Jeep with a war correspondent sign mounted below the glass of its windshield. Zimmerman got out of his Jeep, and collected his Thompson and a can-vas musette bag from the Jeep.

  Miss Jeanette Priestly of the Chicago Tribune, who was dressed in U.S. Army fatigues much too large for her and had her hair tucked up inside her fatigue cap, got out of her Jeep, then leaned over the rear seat and took a notebook and a Leica camera from a canvas bag and walked toward McCoy, who was leaning on a pier piling.

  "What's going on, McCoy?" she greeted him, stopped, opened the Leica's leather case, and raised the camera to take a picture of him with the Wind of Good Fortune in the background.

  McCoy put one hand, fingers extended, in front of his face, then extended the fingers of the other hand in an ob-scene gesture.

  "You sonofabitch!" she said. There was a tone of admi-ration in her voice, then, smiling, she asked: "How long are you going to stand there with your hand in front of your face?"

  "Until you put the camera away," he said.

  After a moment, she closed the Leica's case and he took his hand from his face.

  `Tell me about Pick Pickering," she said.

  "If you take that camera out of the case again without permission, I'll take it away from you," he said.

  "Jesus Christ!"

  "Having said that, I think I can guarantee you some pic-tures for your newspaper," he said.

  "Are you going to tell me about Pickering, or not?"

  "Once we get under way," he said. "Get on the junk."

  "The hell I will!"

  "Suit yourself," he said, and started to walk down the pier.

  After a moment, she went back to her Jeep, took a car-bine and a musette bag from it, and trotted after him. When she caught up with him, he mockingly bowed, and ges-tured that she should climb the ladder ahead of him.

  When she had started up the ladder, McCoy signaled for Zimmerman to get the rest of her things from her Jeep.

  The Marines lining the rail of the Wind of Good Fortune watched the female war correspondent climbing the ladder with great interest.

  When-not without effort, she had the carbine, the Le-ica, and her musette bag all hanging around her neck-she finally made it to the deck, she found herself facing Lieu-tenant David R. Taylor, USNR.

  She flashed him a dazzling smile.

  "I'm Jeanette Priestly of the Chicago Tribune," she said.

  "Welcome aboard," he said.

  Jeanette smiled and waved at the Marines.

  McCoy came over the rail.

  "Permission to get under way, sir?" Taylor asked.

  "Granted," McCoy said.

  Taylor walked aft and went up the exterior ladder to the junk's stern. Jeanette followed him. She did not see Zim-merman come aboard carrying the rest of her things.

 
Taylor began to issue orders in Korean.

  McCoy came up the ladder.

  "Permission to come on the bridge, sir?" he asked.