Her face was stony, and she ignored the greeting and the hand.
The smile vanished from Harriman’s face, and he turned and walked directly toward the stairway.
“Jesus, Pat,” Pickering said.
“Mr. President,” Patricia Pickering said, “I’m not among Averill Harriman’s legion of female admirers. . . .”
“I somehow sensed that,” the President said.
“I’m one of those old-fashioned women who think husbands should not sleep with other people’s wives, and if they can’t manage that level of decency, they should at least not flaunt their infidelity in their wife’s face.”
“I’m married, oddly enough,” Truman said, “to a woman who shares that philosophy. I’m going to have to get you and Bess together, Mrs. Pickering.” He paused, and added: “It was nice to see you again.”
He started toward the Independence.
Pickering looked at his wife.
“Was that necessary?”
“I thought so,” his wife replied.
They looked at each other a moment.
“Bring Pick home, Flem,” she said softly.
“I’ll damned sure try, honey,” he said.
She nodded, then wrapped her arms around him.
She stayed that way a moment, then raised her face to his and kissed him.
Then he walked quickly to the steps to the Independence, where George Hart was waiting for him.
As soon as they had gone through the door, the steps were pulled away and there came the sound of an engine starting.
[SEVEN]
There were no layovers. The Independence stopped at San Francisco, but just long enough to take on fuel and food, and to give the President and his aides time to deal with the messages that had come in for him while they were flying across the country. No one got off the airplane.
There was a Presidential compartment and two others— one occupied by General Bradley and the other by Ambassador Harriman—on the Independence and there was a steady stream of visitors to all three. Pickering did not expect to be summoned to any of the meetings, and he wasn’t. He wasn’t at all sure why Truman had ordered him to make the trip, and he suspected that Harriman would probably do his best to have the President ignore him.
At San Francisco—not surprisingly, it was Trans-Global’s headquarters—there were four Trans-Global Lockheed Constellations, one of which sat, its engines idling, at the end of the runway when the Independence took off for Hawaii.
Pickering thought that not only was it a far more graceful-looking aircraft than the Presidential Douglas, but it was also a hundred miles an hour faster. He wondered why the President wasn’t furnished with the fastest aircraft available, and then he thought, again, how wise Pick had been in insisting that Trans-Global buy the Lockheeds, rather than take advantage of the surplus Air Force Douglas transports available so cheaply.
He then thought that the war was making a good deal of money for Trans-Global. The Air Force had not only contracted for as many contract flights as Trans-Global could make aircraft available for but also was filling every seat made available on the regularly scheduled flights, and there were now far more of those than there had been when the war started.
That was the good news, Pickering thought. The bad news was that Chief Pilot Pickering wasn’t around to see how well his airline was doing. Worse than that, Pickering was growing less and less confident that Pick would be found. He refused to allow himself to dwell on the details of why that was likely, even probable, as all of them were unpleasant to contemplate.
He had no idea how he was going to deal with Patricia if his growing fears turned out to be justified.
From San Francisco, the Independence flew across the Pacific to the Barber’s Point Naval Air Station, which is about fifteen miles from Honolulu.
As they were making their approach to the airfield, Pickering idly wondered if they would wake the President—there were beds in all three compartments—for the landing. The question was answered immediately after the airplane stopped moving when Truman, obviously freshly shaved, appeared in the rear compartment and went around making small talk with everyone there from Army Secretary Pace through Brigadier General Pickering to a young man in civilian clothes whom Hart had identified to Pickering as an Army warrant officer cryptographer.
Truman went down the stairway to both greet Admiral Arthur W. Radford, Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, and to stretch his legs a little while the aircraft was being fueled and fresh food brought aboard. His walk was cut short when another batch of messages requiring his immediate attention was brought to the aircraft.
They were on the ground less than an hour.
Pickering had just about made himself as comfortable as possible in his seat for the Hawaii-Wake Island leg of the flight when one of the Air Force stewards touched his shoulder.
“The President would like to see you, General,” he said.
Truman, now in his shirtsleeves, was alone in his compartment when Pickering entered it. The Presidential bed had been returned to its couch function, and Truman was sitting on it before a table covered with documents.
“You wanted to see me, Mr. President?”
Truman held out two sheets of message paper.
“Have a look at this, please, and tell me what you think, please,” the President said.
TOP SECRET/PRESIDENTIAL
OPERATIONAL IMMEDIATE
DUPLICATION FORBIDDEN
FROM SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
VIA WHITE HOUSE COMMUNICATIONS CENTER
0905 WASHINGTON TIME 14OCTOBER1950
TO COMMANDER IN CHIEF PACIFIC
EYES ONLY ADMIRAL RADFORD
PLEASE INSURE FOLLOWING MESSAGE FROM CHIEF PRESIDENTIAL MISSION TO FAR EAST TO THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET/PRESIDENTIAL IS DELIVERED TO THE PRESIDENT ONLY REPEAT TO THE PRESIDENT ONLY ON ARRIVAL AT BARBERS POINT
BEST PERSONAL REGARDS
GEORGE C MARSHALL
BEGIN PERSONAL MESSAGE FROM MAJOR GENERAL HOWE
1235 TOKYO TIME 13OCTOBER1950
DEAR HARRY
WONSAN ON EAST COAST OF KOREA FELL TO CAPITAL ROK DIVISION SEVERAL HOURS AGO
MACARTHUR NEVERTHELESS INTENDS TO CONTINUE WITH PLAN TO MOVE X CORPS BY SEA TO WONSAN AND TOLD ME THAT DESPITE QUOTE BRILLIANT PERFORMANCE ENDQUOTE OF ROKS THEY DO NOT HAVE THE NECESSARY TRANSPORT AND HEAVY ARTILLERY HE FEELS IS NECESSARY TO SUPPORT RAPID MOVEMENT TOWARD CHINESE BORDER AT YALU RIVER
IN MY OPINION HE IS CORRECT AS ROK FORCES ARE STILL EQUIPPED MOSTLY WITH HAND-ME-DOWNS
I ALSO HAVE THE FEELING THAT HE WANTS A STRONG AMERICAN PRESENCE THERE TO INSURE (A) THE CAPTURE OF PYONGYANG AS SOON AS POSSIBLE (B) THE ROKS DO NOT GO ANY FARTHER THAN THE YALU AND (C) THE ROKS PAY MORE ATTENTION TO THE GENEVA CONVENTION THAN THEY PROBABLY WOULD IF AMERICANS WERE NOT AROUND
WHAT THE NORTH KOREANS DID TO THE SOUTH KOREANS DEFIES DESCRIPTION AND THEY WILL CERTAINLY SEEK VENGEANCE UNLESS HE SITS ON THEM
MACARTHUR ALSO SAID HE IS QUOTE THINKING ABOUT ENDQUOTE TRYING TO FORM AN ARMORED COLUMN TO TAKE PYONGYANG EVEN SOONER THAN X CORPS COULD GET THERE
HE SAYS HE IS REASONABLY CONFIDENT ORGANIZED RESISTANCE WILL END BY THANKSGIVING AND THAT HE HAS QUOTE REASONABLE HOPES ENDQUOTE OF BEING ABLE TO WITHDRAW EIGHTH ARMY TO KOREA BY CHRISTMAS
THE REPORTS OF AGENTS INSERTED BY CIA (MAJOR MCCOY)IN THE EAST AND LTCOL VANDENBURG IN THE WEST IN WHICH I PLACE MORE FAITH THAN INTEL MACARTHUR IS GETTING FROM HIS SOURCES ALL REPORT (A) BREAKDOWN OF NORTH KOREAN EFFECTIVENESS (B) THAT NORTH KOREANS MADE STRONG EFFORT TO TAKE OUR POWS WITH THEM
VANDENBURG TELLS ME HE THINKS RESCUE OF GENERAL DEAN BECOMES MORE UNLIKELY BY THE DAY ALTHOUGH HE AND MCCOY ARE PREPARED TO STAGE RAID USING HELICOPTERS IF HE CAN BE LOCATED
MCCOY INSISTS NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS ABOUT PICKERING’S SON
I CAN ONLY HOPE HE’S RIGHT
MCCOY SAYS HE IS GETTING QUOTE UNCONFIRMED AND THUS UNRELIABLE
ENDQUOTE REPORTS OF EXTENSIVE MOVEMENT O
F CHINESE TROOPS TOWARD YALU
REMEMBERING HOW RIGHT MCCOY WAS THE LAST TIME I CAN ONLY HOPE HE WILL BE WRONG NOW
GENERAL WILLOUGHBY AND MACARTHUR FEEL INTERVENTION IS NOT EVEN A REMOTE POSSIBILITY
I STILL THINK PICKERING WOULD HAVE BEEN BEST CHOICE TO STRAIGHTEN OUT THE CIA BUT I UNDERSTAND YOUR CHOICE OF BEDELL SMITH WHO VERY MUCH IMPRESSED ME THE FEW TIMES I MET HIM
RESPECTFULLY
RALPH
END PERSONAL MESSAGE FROM GENERAL HOWE
TOP SECRET/PRESIDENTIAL
Pickering read it and handed it back to the President.
“Anything in there you don’t agree with?” the President asked.
“I don’t think General Howe is right about me and the CIA, Mr. President.”
Truman smiled.
“Anything else?”
“No, sir.”
“I’m sorry there’s no better news about your son, General, ” the President said. “But I’m one of those people who believe that the opera isn’t over until the fat lady sings.”
“I’ve heard that, Mr. President,” Pickering said.
“That’ll be all, General,” the President said. “Would you ask one of the sergeants to ask General Bradley to come up here?”
“Yes, sir.”
X
[ONE]
NO. 7 SAKU-TUN DENENCHOFU, TOKYO, JAPAN 0915 14 OCTOBER 1950
Clad only in underpants and brassiere, Miss Jeanette Priestly, of the Chicago Tribune, bent over a bed while stuffing an Army-issue rucksack. She looked up as Mrs. Ernestine Sage McCoy—whose exquisitely embroidered kimono almost but not quite concealed the evidence of her advanced pregnancy—came into the bedroom.
Jeanette smiled as Ernie carefully lowered herself onto the foot of the mattress.
“I used to have one of those,” Ernie said.
“A rucksack?” Jeanette replied, surprised. “You were a Girl Scout?”
“I meant a flat belly, with a cute little navel that used to drive the boys wild when I wore a bikini,” Ernie said. “Now look at me!” She patted her stomach. “I look like a boa constrictor that just swallowed a whole pig.”
Jeanette laughed. “Not quite that bad,” she said.
“Bad enough,” Ernie said.
Jeanette’s tone turned serious. “Can I offer a word of advice?”
“No,” Ernie replied sharply, then softened the edge. “Thank you, but no. I know what you’re going to say: Go home and have the baby.”
“I feel like a shit leaving you alone in your condition,” Jeanette said.
“I’m not due until the middle of December,” Ernie said. “You’ll be back before then, right?”
“I’ll be back in a week,” Jeanette said. “But I don’t want to walk in here a week from now and . . . hear something unpleasant.”
“You want to be here when something unpleasant happens, right?”
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it,” Jeanette said. “But yeah, if something does go wrong—and so far you have a lousy record of going all the way through the childbearing process—I’d like to be here.”
“What’ll happen will happen,” Ernie said. “I’m doing everything the doctor told me to do, which really means not doing anything on a long list of things I’m not supposed to do. I’ll be all right.”
“If I say, reassuringly, ‘Certainly, you’ll be all right,’ you’ll use that as an excuse not to go home. If I say—”
“Jeanette, this is home. This is the first house Ken and I have ever owned.”
“A fact—you told me—you carefully concealed from him until very recently.”
“I thought of it as my house, our house,” Ernie said. “You know why I couldn’t tell him. He was trying to be a good Marine officer.”
“And for being a very good Marine officer, they started to kick him out of the Marine Corps. There’s a moral in there somewhere.”
Ernie exhaled audibly.
“So what happens to him when this war is over?” Jeanette asked. “Which it may be by the time I get to Korea, from what they’re saying at the Dai Ichi Building.”
“I wish I knew,” Ernie said. “He doesn’t say anything— good Marine officers don’t criticize the sacred Marine Corps—but he has to be bitter about what they did to him.”
“What would you like to happen?”
“What almost did,” Ernie said. “When we thought he was being ‘involuntarily released,’ which is the euphemism for getting kicked out, we went to see Colonel Ed Banning and his wife, and the Zimmermans, in Charleston. . . .”
“Who’s Banning?”
“He and Ken and Ernie go all the way back to the 4th Marines in Shanghai. He’s the one who sent Ken to Officer Candidate School. They were together all through World War Two. Anyway, before this goddamn war came along, Banning—who was about to retire—and Zimmerman were going to develop an island. . . .”
“Develop an island?” Jeanette parroted.
“You know, build houses on it and sell them. Their idea was to sell them to retired Marines. But I saw the island, and I think they could sell them to just about anybody. The island is just off the coast, and it’s just beautiful. Anyway—”
“Where are they going to get the money to do something like that?” Jeanette interrupted.
“Banning owns the island; he has money,” Ernie replied. “A lot of money. He was Ken’s role model for living on Marine pay, but he doesn’t have to play poor when he retires. And Ernie’s wife has the King Midas touch. They own a half-dozen businesses outside Parris Island. Anyway, they asked Ken to go in with them. He seemed to think it was a good idea. But that was when his choices were going back to being a sergeant or the island. Now . . . now they gave him his golden major’s oak leaf back. I don’t know what he’ll do.”
“You want to do this island-building thing?”
“Oh, yeah, I want to do the island-building thing.”
“Then tell him, ‘I’ve been chasing you around for all this time, now it’s your turn to do what I want for a while.’ ”
“He would, but it’s not that easy. As you’re about to find out.”
“Meaning what?”
“You got the brass ring,” Ernie said. “You will have succeeded—or will, as soon as Ken gets Pick back—in getting Don Juan Pickering to the altar, succeeding where God only knows how many women have tried and failed. But it’s not going to be easy. You better win the Pulitzer prize now, because when you march down the aisle to the strains of ‘Here Comes the Bride,’ you’ll have taken yourself out of the competition.”
“Two questions, and no bullshit, please. Do you think Pick’s coming back?”
“Yeah, I do. No bullshit. I think I would know if he wasn’t. I really love the sonofabitch; he really is like my brother. Next question?”
“You don’t think Pick would like it if I kept working? Maybe get a job on a newspaper in San Francisco?”
“You never thought about this, huh? Your girlish mind was full of visions of the Sugar Plum Fairy? Moonlight? Violins playing ‘I Love You, Truly’ to the exclusion of everything else?”
“Don’t be a bitch, Ernie,” Jeanette said, and added, thoughtfully, “No, I guess I never did.”
“Looking into my crystal ball, I see you, seven months after you march down the aisle, in this condition,” Ernie said, and patted her swollen belly.
“I like the notion,” Jeanette said. “I don’t know how I’m going to like actually going through what you’re going through.”
“I think you’ll like it,” Ernie said. “There’s something really satisfying about being pregnant. Anyway, shortly after that, you’ll have a baby. When that happens, I don’t think you’ll really mind being a wife and mother, instead of a dashing war correspondent. To answer the question: No, I don’t think Pick would like it at all if you kept on working. Knowing him as I do—and I know him, I think, better than anybody—what he will expect of you, when he comes home from setting a speed record between Sa
n Francisco and Timbuktu or wherever, will be to find you at the door wearing something very sexy, with the bed already turned down, champagne on ice, and the baby asleep in clean diapers.”
“I just can’t stop working, for Christ’s sake!”
“It’ll be your choice,” Ernie said. “Like I say, I know him. He’s really a great guy. But he’s not a saint. What he is is a man, and all of them are selfish. They want what they want, and all we can do is learn to live with it. If we can’t do that, we lose the man.”
“Jesus Christ! And here I was feeling sorry for you.”
“Don’t feel sorry for me. I like my life—I love my life—with Ken.”
“Yeah, that shows,” Jeanette said. “Jesus Christ, Jeanette Priestly, wife, mother, and diaper changer!”
“Jeanette Pickering,” Ernie corrected her.
“That does have a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?” Jeanette asked.
She closed the rucksack and pulled the straps tight.
“You noticed, I’m sure, that amongst my delicate feminine apparel were two sets of GI long johns?”
“I noticed.”
“They itch,” Jeanette said. “But Korea is cold at night. It is better to itch and scratch than to freeze your ass. Write that down.”
Ernie laughed.
“You don’t have to go with me to Haneda,” Jeanette said.
“Yeah, I do,” Ernie said.
Jeanette reached down to the bed and picked up and put on an olive-drab undershirt and a pair of olive-drab men’s shorts. Over this, she put on a set of fatigues, then slipped her feet first into Army-issue woolen cushion sole socks and then into combat boots.
She looked at Ernie.
“How do I look?” she asked.
“Oddly enough,” Ernie said, “very feminine.”
“Bullshit, but thanks anyway.”
She picked up the rucksack and walked out of the bedroom.
[TWO]
NEAR JAEUN-RI, SOUTH KOREA 1145 14 OCTOBER 1950
Major Malcolm S. Pickering, USMCR, who had at first known to the minute how many days and hours and minutes it had been since he had had to set his Corsair down— how long he had been on the run—now didn’t have any idea at all.
Retreat, Hell! Page 30