“And could he?”
“Natural flair for languages. Maybe natural is not the right word. Supernatural flair, maybe. Eerie flair.”
“So you put him to work?”
“I had to do so without letting the colonel know,” Banning said. “So what I did was send him on the regular truck convoys we ran between Shanghai and Peking, and other places. They took anywhere from five days to a couple of weeks. McCoy would disappear from the convoy for a few hours—or a few days—and have a look at what the Japs were up to. God, he was good at it!”
“And the Chinese ‘bandit’ incident?”
“The Kempae Tai would hire Chinese bandits to attack us whenever they thought they could get away with it. They particularly liked to attack the convoys. The Japs paid them, and what was on the trucks was theirs. They made the mistake of attacking one that McCoy was on. He and a buck sergeant named Zimmerman were waiting for them with Thompsons. And they were very good with Thompsons. The ‘bandits’ left twenty bodies behind them. McCoy and Zimmerman loaded them on trucks and took them to Peking. That, sir, is where ‘Killer’ got his name.”
Pickering had not yet told Banning that Lieutenants Pickering and McCoy were friends, but he had Pick in his mind as Banning spoke of Killer McCoy.
It meant, of course, that when Malcolm S. Pickering had been in his first year at Harvard, starting to work his way through the pro forma resistance to copulation of the nubile maidens of Wellesley, Sarah Lawrence, and other institutions of higher learning for the female offspring of the moneyed classes, McCoy had been a Marine in China; that when Pick had been earning a four-goal handicap on the polo fields at Ramapo Valley, Palm Beach, and Los Angeles, McCoy had been riding Mongolian ponies through the China countryside keeping an eye on the Imperial Japanese Army at a considerable risk to his life.
“How did he get to become an officer?”
“The Corps put out the word to recommend NCOs for Officer Candidate School. I thought McCoy would make a fine officer. The colonel saw sending him to the States as a good way to get him out of Shanghai. I think I was the only officer in the Marine Corps who thought he would get through officer training.”
“He had some trouble getting through,” Pickering said. “With some officers who didn’t think a corporal with no college degree should become a Marine officer.”
“How do—?” Banning blurted, and stopped.
“ ‘How the hell do you know that’?” Pickering finished the uncompleted question. “My son was in his class; they became quite close. They are quite close.”
“Well, he got through,” Banning said.
“And then he volunteered for the Marine Raiders?” Pickering asked, but it was more of a statement than a question. He knew that McCoy had been a Raider.
“Yes, sir. But not quite the way that sounds.”
“I don’t understand. . . .”
“McCoy’s language skills—and his China service— came to the attention of the G-2,” Banning said. “He decided McCoy was just the man he was looking for.”
“As an interpreter, you mean?”
“No, sir. To keep an eye on Colonel Evans Carlson, the commander of the Marine Raiders.”
“Now, that I don’t understand,” Pickering said.
“There were a number of officers in the Marine Corps who thought that Carlson had dangerous ideas,” Banning said. “And some who suspected he was a Communist.”
“My God!”
“So the G-2 called McCoy in and asked him to take that assignment.”
“I knew McCoy was in the Raiders,” Pickering said. “But I didn’t know about this.”
“He came back from the Makin Raid—where he was hit, by the way—and reported that Colonel Carson was not a Communist. And then I found him in the hospital in San Diego and had him transferred here. He was hoping to stay with the Raiders, but he belongs here.”
“Yes, I’m sure he does,” Pickering replied.
“It’s . . . as if he was born to be an intelligence officer,” Banning said.
“It sounds that way, doesn’t it?” Pickering had agreed.
II
[ONE]
NO. 7 SAKU-TUN DENENCHOFU, TOKYO, JAPAN 1745 1 JUNE 1950
Ernestine Sage McCoy spoke to the woman who had come to the door in the wall—in what sounded to Pickering like fluent Japanese—and very quickly, before McCoy had finished making Pickering a drink, a plate of hors d’oeuvres appeared.
“Welcome to our home, General,” McCoy said, touching his glass to Pickering’s.
“General is a long time ago, Ken,” Pickering said. “What I am now is a figurehead. You know what a figurehead is? The wooden-headed figure on the bow of a ship?”
There was dutiful laughter.
Not only dutiful, but strained.
Neither one of them is in a laughing mood.
Christ, I must have walked in here just before she was going to throw a frying pan at him. I wonder what the hell he did?
Or what she did?
Pickering relayed the love of his wife, and told her that Patricia, the last time he heard, had been going to have dinner with her father and mother in New York, and Ernie said to give Patricia their love when he got home.
“How long are you going to stay in Japan, General?” Ken McCoy asked.
“Three or four days, no more.”
This was followed by a painful silence.
Pickering searched his mind for something to say, and found it:
“I thought I’d look around,” he said, and added, “The last time I was here, I arrived five days before the war was over.”
“I remember,” McCoy said.
“Five days before the war was over?”
“Right.”
“I never heard that story,” Ernie said.
“You said,” McCoy said, and for the first time there was a suggestion of a smile on his face, “that it was the first time El Supremo ever asked for an OSS intel report.”
“First and only,” Pickering said.
“Tell me about it,” Ernie said.
At least it will break the silence.
“Major McCoy and I were on Okinawa,” Pickering began.
And the first word out of your mouth is a disaster, reminding him, reminding them, that he was busted back to captain after the war.
“. . . and Sid Huff . . .”
“Who?”
"MacArthur’s aide.”
“He still is,” Ernie said.
“So I heard,” Pickering said. “Anyway, Sid showed up on Okinawa, from Manila, where El Supremo was at the time. He announced that MacArthur wanted me to go in on the first plane. Of course, he couldn’t phrase it that simply. . . .”
" ’General,’ ” McCoy said, accurately mimicking Huff’s somewhat pompous manner of speech, “ ‘it is the Supreme Commander’s desire that you proceed to Tokyo with the initial party ...’ ”
“Very good, Ken,” Pickering said, chuckling.
“What happened, sweetheart,” McCoy said, “is that El Supremo originally intended to send Huff, but changed his mind at the last minute and told him to ask the Boss here . . .”
Sweetheart? That means he’s in the doghouse. I wonder what he did. Or she thinks he did.
“Darling, let him tell the story.”
Darling? That doesn’t sound like a grossly annoyed wife.
“He won’t tell all of it, baby,” McCoy said. “Huff couldn’t make up his mind whether he was unhappy at being denied the chance to be on the first plane to land in Japan, or happy. There was a lot of talk that the Japs were out of control, and the first Americans to land might get their heads chopped off. In that case, Huff figured better that the Boss’s head roll . . .”
Sweetheart? Darling? Baby? These two aren’t fighting, at least with each other. What the hell is going on?
“I will give Colonel Huff the benefit of the doubt that he was disappointed at being denied the chance to be on that C-46,” Pickering said.
/> “What’s a C-46?”
“Curtiss Commando. Two-engine transport,” McCoy replied.
“But what C-46?”
“I don’t remember the date, exactly, but it was after we dropped the second atomic bomb, and the Emperor decided to surrender, August fifteenth, ’forty-five, I think.”
“15 August 1945,” McCoy confirmed.
“My husband remembers every date he’s ever heard, except two,” Ernie said, smiling at McCoy. “Our anniversary and my birthday.”
Whatever he did, he’s apparently forgiven.
“So on the twenty-sixth, I remember that date, it had been decided to send in one airplane, to Atsugi, on the twenty-eighth, to get the lay of the land,” Pickering went on. “I thought about going, but decided against it. There were better-qualified people than me who should have gone.”
“ ‘General, it is the Supreme Commander’s desire that you proceed to Tokyo with the initial party . . .’” McCoy parroted again.
“So I went,” Pickering said. “We left Okinawa at oh dark hundred . . .”
“Oh four hundred,” McCoy corrected.
“And flew into Atsugui, where the Japs met us with bowed heads.”
“I would have guessed there was a fifty-fifty chance that something would happen,” McCoy said.
“Proving, of course, that K. McCoy, the perfect intelligence officer, has in fact made a bad guess at least once,” Pickering said, chuckling. “Absolutely nothing happened. I got in a car—an old English limousine, not a Rolls, something else—and a Jap drove me to the Imperial Hotel, where I reserved a wing for Major McCoy and other deserving OSS types, soon to arrive from Okinawa. . . .”
McCoy and his wife exchanged glances.
What the hell did I say to cause that?
What the hell is going on?
To hell with it. All they can do is tell me to butt out!
“Will somebody please tell me what’s going on here? What’s wrong?”
“Sir?” McCoy asked.
Too innocently.
Pickering looked at Ernie. She looked close to tears.
“What’s up, honey?” Pickering asked, gently.
She looked between Pickering and her husband for a moment.
“They’re throwing us out of the goddamned Corps, Uncle Flem,” she said. “That’s what’s up.”
I can’t have heard that right.
“I didn’t get that, honey,” he said.
“They’re throwing us out of the goddamned Marine Corps,” Ernie said, clearly. “We’re being shipped home. They’re taking Ken’s commission.”
“What the hell happened?” Pickering asked.
“He wrote a report that nobody liked,” she said. “And refused to change it.”
“A report on what?”
“He won’t tell me,” she said. “But I know it’s about Korea. ”
Pickering looked at McCoy.
“They’re throwing you out of the Marine Corps? You’re not talking about a court-martial?”
“I’m talking about a TWX from Eighth and Eye,” Ernie said.
A TWX was a teletype message. Eighth & Eye meant Headquarters, United States Marine Corps, which is at Eighth and I Streets in Washington, D.C.
“A TWX saying what?” Pickering asked.
“ ‘You are relieved of your present duties and reassigned to Camp Pendleton, California, effective immediately. You are being involuntarily released from active duty as captain, USMCR, effective 1 July 1950, and are advised that an evaluation of your records is under way to determine in which enlisted grade you may elect to enlist, if that is your desire, following your separation. I have the goddamned thing committed to memory.”
“This is hard to believe,” Pickering said.
“Isn’t it?” she said, bitterly.
“I shouldn’t have to say this,” Pickering said, “but whatever I can do to help, I’ll do.”
He said it first to Ernie, then looked at McCoy. McCoy looked at him, but it was impossible to read what the look meant.
Then McCoy got out of his chair and walked out of the room.
“He doesn’t like it that I told you,” Ernie said.
“Hey! I’m glad you did. You’re family, Ernie. You and Ken.”
She smiled wanly at him.
McCoy returned a moment later, carrying a leather briefcase. A handcuff on a steel cable hung down from it.
I haven’t seen one of those in a long time.
What the hell is the matter with the goddamned Marine Corps? Ken McCoy is the best intelligence officer I ever met, and that includes Ed Banning.
McCoy set the briefcase down on the coffee table before the couch on which Pickering was sitting, worked the combination lock, and took from it a half-inch-thick stack of paper fastened together with a metal clip. He handed it to Pickering.
The document was covered with a sheet of manila board on which were printed three diagonal red stripes at either end of the words TOP SECRET.
“What’s this?” Pickering asked, as he started to flip through it.
The second page, which had TOP SECRET printed at the top and bottom, answered his question:
TOP SECRET
Document No. NE/May50/2333 Copy 3 of 4 Duplication Forbidden
Naval Element
Headquarters
The Supreme Commander for Allied Powers
Room 2022 The Dai Ichi Building,
Tokyo, Japan
(APO 901/FPO 3347, San Francisco, Cal.)
23 May 1950
SUBJECT: Intelligence Evaluation/Korea
TO: The Supreme Commander, Allied Powers
ATTN: Major General Charles A. WilloughbyForwarded herewith is “An Evaluation of Probable Hostile Action Within Ninety Days Against the Republic of South Korea by the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea.”
The Evaluation, and Attachments I through VII, were prepared primarily by Captain Kenneth R. McCoy, USMCR, of Naval Element, Hq, SCAP.
Edward C. Wilkerson
Edward C. Wilkerson
Captain, USN
Chief, Naval Element SCAP
One (1) Enclosure as follows:
Evaluation, Subject as above, w/attachments:
I: Summary, Agents’ Reports
II: North Korean Order of Battle (Including Strength), Infantry Units
III: NKOB(IS), Artillery Units
IV: NKOB(IS), Armored Units
V: NKOB(IS), Motor Transport
VI: NKOB (IS), Aviation Units
VII: NKOB Depots, POL, Ammunition
Viii: nkob: Logistic facilities (Rations, Medical, POW Compounds, Misc.)
IX: Chinese Communist Order of Battle (Including Strength) Infantry Units Within 300 miles of North Korean Border
X: ChiComOB Artillery Units Within 300 miles of NK Border
XI: ChiComOB Armored Units Within 300 miles of NK Border
XII: ChiComOB Motor Transport Within 300 miles of NK Border
XIII: ChiComOB Aviation Units Within 300 miles of NK Border
XIV: ChiComOB Logistic facilities (Rations, Medical, POW Compounds, Misc.) Within 300 miles of NK Border
TOP SECRET
“Jesus Christ!” Pickering said when he’d read the transmittal letter. “Are you sure, Ken?”
“About as sure as I can get, General.”
“Is that the report?” Ernie asked. “Do I get to see it?”
“No, baby. Sorry. It’s classified Top Secret.”
“Ken, I haven’t had a Top Secret clearance—any clearance—in years. Why are you showing this to me?”
“Maybe you can do something with it,” McCoy said.
“I don’t understand,” Pickering said. “I don’t understand any of this. ‘Do something with it’?”
“I can’t get it past Willoughby,” McCoy said, simply. “Which means it won’t get out of the Dai Ichi Building, and somebody at Eighth and Eye should know what’s coming down.”
Major General Charles A. Willoughby,
who had been General Douglas A. MacArthur’s intelligence officer in the Philippines and throughout World War II, was now performing the same function for him in the grandly named Office of the Supreme Commander Allied Powers, which was really the Army of Occupation in Japan.
Pickering had had more that one run-in with General Willoughby during the Second War; several of them had involved McCoy.
That sonofabitch again!
“He give you any reason, Ken?” Pickering asked, but before McCoy could reply, he asked, “Where did you get this?”
“I stole it,” McCoy said, simply.
“And what’s going to happen to you when it turns up missing? My God, Ken, you just can’t make off with Top Secret documents!”
“You can if the document doesn’t exist. That one doesn’t. There’s no longer a record of it.”
“Let me get this straight,” Pickering said. “You prepared this evaluation?”
“Yes, sir.”
“On your own, or officially?”
“The Korean part officially. The Chinese part on my own.”
“And you submitted it to this Captain Wilkerson?”
“And he sent it up to Willoughby. And the next day Wilkerson called me in and told me (a) I was relieved; (b) the evaluation didn’t exist; (c) I should start packing.”
“Why?”
“I can only guess,” McCoy said.
“Guess.”
“Remember when there was no possibility of guerrillas in the Philippines?” McCoy asked.
It had been the official position of the Supreme Commander, Southwest Pacific Ocean Areas—MacArthur— that it was absolutely impossible for any American guerrillas to function in the Japanese-occupied Philippine Islands.
“Before you went ashore on Mindanao and established contact with General Fertig, you mean?”
They were both smiling.
Goddamn it, why are we smiling? If that’s what’s going on, it isn’t funny.
“I think it’s entirely possible that Willoughby has just assured El Supremo that there is absolutely no risk of trouble in Korea,” McCoy said. “And doesn’t want his opinion challenged by a captain. I can’t think of any other reason. . . .”
“But what if you’re right?”
Under Fire Page 5