“We set up another message, an emergency message, a phrase meaning change your frequency to another and be prepared to communicate. George and I just came from the commo center, where we watched Sergeant Keller send that code phrase every ten minutes for an hour and a half. There was no response.”
“Which proves, I suggest, only that Zimmerman’s radio is out again. There was trouble with it before, wasn’t there?”
“You always look for a silver lining in situations like this,” Pickering said. “What I’m hoping now is that if the North Koreans went to Tokchok-kundo and discovered our people there, they will think that it was nothing more than an intelligence-gathering outpost, and won’t make a connection with the invasion of Inchon.”
The first thing Howe thought was that Pickering was being unduly pessimistic, but then he remembered that this wasn’t the first covert operation Pickering had run, and that his pessimism was based on experience.
“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 officer at K-1.
“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, treacherous 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 destroyer. ”
“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 announced 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,” Pickering 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, obviously, 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 everything 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 sarcastically.
“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 radio right now that is (a) suitable to be dropped onto Tokchok-kundo from a Marine aircraft, and is (b) powerful enough to com
municate 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 operating 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 shipping another SCR-300 and a gasoline generator to power it to K-1. Our thought was that if we could get that loaded aboard the junk tonight, and the junk could sail in the morning, it could make Tokchok-kundo in thirty-odd hours.”
“If the Wind of Good Fortune goes, I go,” Jeanette announced.
“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.”
“What’s the Mount McKinley?” Dunston asked.
“The command ship for the Inchon invasion.”
“The Palace Guard will make sure I don’t get a press space for that,” Jeanette said.
“You’ll have a CIA space,” Pickering said. “Sid Huff called me and said El Supremo told him to ask me how many cabins I would require on the Mount McKinley. I told him I would have two people with me and would need two cabins. You’re one of the two people. Trust me, Jeanette, it will take a direct order from MacArthur to keep you off the Mount McKinley.”
She looked at him closely for a moment and then said, “Well, maybe you’re not such an unmitigated sonofabitch after all.”
“So the invasion is definitely on for the fifteenth?” Dunston asked.
“And so, unless we can grab those islands beforehand, is the planned attack on them on D Minus One,” Pickering said. “Which brings us back to the people we may have on Tokchok-kundo without a radio. What George and I came up with is to have only one American—to operate the radio—aboard. He will go on the air to report that they’re about to reach the island. Then he will make himself as invisible as possible while your South Korean crew sails her into Tokchok-kundo. If our people are there, we’re home free.”
“And if they’re not?” Jeanette said.
“With a little luck, the junk simply goes back to sea,” Pickering said.
“And if Lady Luck is looking the other way,” Jeanette said, “everybody on the Wind of Good Fortune gets bagged, and after interrogation, gets shot as spies.”
“She’s right, boss,” Hart said.
Pickering started to say something in reply, and then didn’t. He turned instead to Dunston.
“Do you think the idea has merit, Dunston?”
“Yes, sir, it does,” Dunston said.
“And would you be willing to take the junk there?”
“Yes, sir, of course.”
“That would be stupid,” Hart announced.
“Excuse me?”
“For one thing, it would be foolish to risk his getting bagged. The NKs must know who he is. For another, you need him here. I’ll ride the goddamn boat.”
“That’s out of the question,” Pickering said, without thinking.
“Why? Who else have you got?” Hart said. “I can be spared, and I can do it. That looks pretty simple to me.”
“I guess you’re not, either,” Jeanette said.
“Either what?”
“An unmitigated sonofabitch,” Jeanette said.
“Are you sure, George?” Pickering asked.
“I’m sure, boss,” Hart said.
XX
[ONE]
TOKCHOK-KUNDO ISLAND 0605 24 AUGUST 1950
Major Kim Pak Su, Korean national police, Captain Kenneth R. McCoy, USMCR, Lieutenant David Taylor, USNR, and Master Gunner Ernest W. Zimmerman, USMC, all attired in black cotton shirts and trousers, stood looking down at the two panels laid on the ground between the two houses on the hill.
On one panel was written the letters R, A, and D, and on the other the letters I and O. The letters were written large, from the tops of the eight-by-ten-foot panels to their bottoms. They were written in mud, of which there was an abundant supply, and was the only thing they had.
Master Gunner Zimmerman was embarrassed that he hadn’t thought of using the panels to make a message board as soon—twenty-four hours before McCoy and Taylor had arrived—as the storm had taken out the generator, but McCoy pointed out that the rain had stopped only hours before his arrival, and that the rain would have washed the letters away as soon as they could be written.
“Anyway, Ernie, it’s a hell of a long shot,” McCoy said. “We don’t know when there will be another flyover, or whether he will be taking aerials, or whether he . . .”
There was the sound of aircraft engines.
The three officers moved to the side of the area between the houses and started to scan the sky.
Not quite two minutes later, two Corsairs suddenly appeared, flying down the Flying Fish Channel from the lighthouse at five hundred feet, making maybe 250 knots. Not flat out, in other words, but slower than they would have been flying had they not been interested in the islands around the Flying Fish Channel, and still fast enough so that if anyone on the North Korean-held shore happened to see them, it would not appear they were having a really good, close look at the Channel Islands and wonder why.
They didn’t divert from their course, and thirty seconds after they appeared, they disappeared in the direction of Inchon.
They would, McCoy suspected, engage targets of opportunity in Inchon before either flying a little farther north, or returning directly to their carrier, once they had, so to speak, justified their presence in the area to the enemy.
“You were saying, Mr. McCoy?” Taylor said.
“We don’t know if those guys either (a) saw the panels, or if they did, could make sense of them, or (b) were taking pictures,” McCoy said. “Or, (c) if they were taking pictures, that they got a shot of the panels clear enough to be read by the photo interpreters, or (d) if they saw them, and could read them, that the pictures’d wind up in the hands of someone who can do us any good. As I just observed to Mr. Zimmerman, Mr. Taylor, it’s a long shot, a very long shot.”
“What the hell, Killer, we gave it a shot,” Zimmerman said. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”
“I don’t like the idea of just sitting here waiting for the other shoe to drop,” McCoy said.
“Meaning what, Ken?” Taylor asked.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, Major Kim, but your best guess of the North Korean strength on Taemuui-do is thirty people, under a sergeant, with their heaviest weapons a couple of machine guns?”
“That’s my best information,” Major Kim said.
“And on Yonghung-do?”
“There were a total of twenty-six men, including the lieutenant in charge and his sergeant. But we also learned that they’ve put people on Taebu-do—”
“Which is the little island to the south?” McCoy interrupted.
“From here, moving north, the nearest island is Taemuui-do, then Taebu-do, and then Yonghung-do. I would guess—if I were the lieutenant, it’s what I would do—that he probably sent six, seven, eight men, under his sergeant, to the smaller island. That would leave him sixteen men, plus himself. And he’s got two machine guns—”
“He probably sent one of them to the little island,” Zimmerman chimed in.
“That’s a total of fifty-six NK soldiers, give or take, right?” Taylor said. “
We have ten Marines, counting you two, and fifteen national policemen, including the major . . .”
“And, of course, you,” McCoy replied. “And the local militia . . .”
“Cut to the chase,” Taylor said. “What are you thinking, McCoy?”
“That if the NKs have a radio, or had one, it—and the generator for it, and fuel for the generator—would probably be with the lieutenant,” McCoy said.
“And if they lost theirs, too, in the storm?” Taylor asked.
"Then we’re no worse off than we are now,” McCoy said.
“Let me make sure I understand you,” Taylor said. “What you’re suggesting is that—”
“We get off the dime,” McCoy interrupted. “And it’s not a suggestion, Dave.”
Taylor ignored that, and continued:
“—we load our twenty-six people in the lifeboats, and try to take Yonghung-do—the most distant island—first—”
“Because that’s where their CP and their radio, if they have one, is.”
Taylor ignored that, too, and went on:
“—to do that, our little invasion fleet would have to sneak past both Taemuui-do and Taebu-do, which means we’d have to do that in the dark because if we did it in the daylight, two lifeboats and three fishing boats under sail—”
“I guess you weren’t listening when I said this is not a suggestion, Dave,” McCoy said.
“It’s not?”
“No, it’s not,” McCoy said, evenly, but there was a steely I will be obeyed tone of command in his voice.
Taylor met his eyes for a long moment.
“Can I ask why Yonghung-do first?” he asked, finally.
“If we took Taemuui-do first, the lieutenant on Yonghung-do would know it. If nothing else, he would hear the gunfire. And we’ll probably have to use grenades if they put up much of a scrap. If he has a radio, he’d report that to the mainland. And then would probably try to send help to Taemuui-do, whether or not he got orders from the mainland. This way, we’ll knock out the radio, if there is one, and the lieutenant, too. And from what I’ve seen of the North Koreans, the sergeants on the other islands aren’t going to do anything without orders.”
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