Retreat, Hell!

by W. E. B Griffin

Do you call them “Master Gunner,” as you would call a major “Major”? If not, then what?

  “May I help you, sir?” Lieutenant Hills finally asked, even though she knew that as a lieutenant j.g. she outranked the master gunner and therefore he was not entitled to be called “sir.”

  “Major Pickering,” the master gunner said.

  “What about Major Pickering?” she asked.

  “Where is he?”

  I think he was supposed to say, “Where is he, ma’am?”

  “He’s in 404,” Lieutenant Hill said. “But he’s on Restricted Visitors. If you want to visit him, you’ll have to go to . . .”

  The master gunner nodded at her, then turned and marched down the corridor toward room 404.

  “Just a minute, please,” Lieutenant Hills called after him as firmly as she could manage. “Didn’t you hear me? Major Pickering is on Restricted Visitors. You have to have permission of the medical officer of the day—”

  When she realized she was being totally ignored, she stopped in midsentence.

  She came from behind the nurses’ station counter and looked down the corridor in time to see the gunner enter room 404.

  Master Gunner Ernest Zimmerman, USMC, marched to the foot of the cranked-up hospital bed in which Major Malcolm S. Pickering was sitting and looked at him without speaking.

  “Look what the goddamn tide washed up!” Pick cried happily. “I’ll be goddamned, Ernie, it’s good to see you!”

  “You won’t think so in a minute, Pick,” Zimmerman said. “Can you handle some really shitty news?”

  There was a just-perceptible pause, long enough for his bright smile to vanish before Pickering asked, “Jesus Christ, not the Killer?”

  “Not the Killer,” Zimmerman said.

  “Dad? Has something happened to my father?”

  Zimmerman opened the straps on his canvas bag and extended it to Pickering.

  “What’s this?” Pick asked, but looked, and then reached inside without waiting for an answer.

  He came out with a fire-blackened object that only after a moment he recognized as a camera.

  “Jeanette’s camera,” Zimmerman said, and then when Pick looked at him curiously, went on: “I picked it up yesterday near where the plane went in.”

  “Jeanette’s?” Pick asked. “What plane?”

  “An Air Force Gooney Bird headed for Wonsan,” Zimmerman said. “It clipped a mountain and blew up. Nobody got out.”

  “Jeanette was on the Gooney Bird?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re sure?” Pick asked softly.

  “Yeah.”

  “How can you be sure? How did you get involved?”

  “From the top?”

  “From the fucking top, Ernie,” Pickering said, struggling to keep his voice from breaking as a tear slipped down his cheek. “Every fucking tiny little fucking detail.”

  Lieutenant Hills went back behind the nurses’ station aware that she had two choices. She could ignore what had happened, or she could report it. She had just decided to ignore the breach of orders—

  What harm was really being done? It wasn’t, after all, as if Major Pickering was at death’s door. What they were trying to do for him was fatten him up, and making sure the dysentery wouldn’t recur. And having a visitor might make him feel better. He looked so unhappy, which was sort of funny because he was just back from escaping from the enemy, and you’d think that would make someone happy.

  —when she was forced to reverse it. The hospital commander, Captain F. Howard Schermer, MC, USN, was now standing at her nurses’ station.

  With him was a very pretty, very pregnant young woman.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” Lieutenant Hills said.

  “This is Mrs. McCoy, Lieutenant,” Captain Schermer said. “She is to be the exception to the Restricted Visitors on Major Pickering. They’re old friends, and she just came from Tokyo to see him.”

  Schermer had received a telephone call that morning from Major Pickering’s father, who was a Marine brigadier, saying that Mrs. McCoy, “the wife of one of my officers,” was on the way to Sasebo to see his son.

  “They’re very close, they grew up together. They’re like brother and sister.”

  “We’ll be happy to take care of her, General.”

  “You may have to. She’s very pregnant and traveling against medical advice.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Hills said.

  “Four oh four, right?” Captain Schermer asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Hills said. “Captain, Major Pickering already has a visitor.”

  “Who would that be?” Captain Schermer asked, not very pleasantly. “You were aware, were you not, of the Restricted Visitors?”

  “Sir, I tried to tell him, but he just ignored me.”

  “A journalist? Was the person who ignored you a journalist? Is that why he thought he could ignore you? Because he was a journalist?”

  “No, sir. Sir, it’s a Marine, a master gunner Marine. . . .”

  “About this tall?” Mrs. McCoy said, holding up her hand. “Built like a tank?”

  Lieutenant Hills smiled and nodded.

  “That has to be Ernie Zimmerman,” Mrs. McCoy said. She turned to Captain Schermer and added, “He works for General Pickering.”

  “I see,” Captain Schermer said with a somewhat strained smile. “Well, why don’t we . . . ?” He waved Mrs. McCoy down the corridor toward 404.

  Master Gunner Zimmerman stopped in midsentence as the door swung open.

  Major Malcolm S. Pickering looked angrily at Captain F. Howard Schermer, USN, and was about to say something when Mrs. K. R. McCoy brushed past the captain.

  “I’ve seen you looking better,” she said, and went to the bed and bent over him and kissed him. “But I’m glad to see you anyway.”

  “I guess you haven’t heard, huh?” Pick said.

  “Heard what?” Ernie replied, and turned to Zimmerman. “What’s going on, Ernie?”

  “Obviously, you haven’t,” Pick said. “Carry on, Mr. Zimmerman. Maybe you better start from the top again.” Then he looked at Ernie McCoy and added: “I think maybe you better sit down, mother-to-be. I don’t think you’re going to like this.” He gestured toward a folding chair, then made a go on gesture to Zimmerman.

  “Well,” Zimmerman began, “we don’t know how she got from Pusan to Seoul—”

  “She being Jeanette?” Ernie McCoy asked. “You mean Jeanette doesn’t know we’ve got Pick back yet? Jesus Christ, why not?”

  “Let him finish, Ernie,” Pick said. “And I meant it, sit down.”

  “I think I will,” Ernie said, and lowered herself into the folding chair.

  “—whether on the Air Corps medical Gooney Bird or some other way,” Zimmerman went on. “She wasn’t on any manifest that we could find.”

  “Okay,” Pick said. “But clever fucking OSS agent that you are, you have deduced that she was on the fucking medical Gooney Bird when it took off from Seoul for Wonsan, right? Because she was on it when it crashed?”

  “Oh, my God!” Ernie said. “Is she all right?”

  Zimmerman looked at her.

  “Sorry, Ernie,” Zimmerman said.

  “You were saying, Mr. Zimmerman?” Pick said.

  “What Dunston did was, when the general found out we hadn’t told her about you and sent him to find her, was go out to K-16 and ask the Air Corps guy what possibilities there were,” Zimmerman said. “The only thing he could think of was that maybe she’d hitched a ride aboard the Gooney Bird that had gone missing. Then he—the Air Force guy—found out they’d located the crash site.”

  “What made him think Jeanette was on this plane?” Ernie McCoy asked.

  Zimmerman ignored the question.

  “They’d gone looking for it after it had gone missing,” he went on. “There were no Maydays or anything. Anyway, they found the crash site near the top of a goddamn mountain, but (a) they hadn’t been able to get anybody t
o it, because it was in middle of nowhere, and (b) it had exploded and burned, and there were no signs of survivors, and it was . . . Getting to the site could wait until they’d been to other crash sites where there could be survivors.”

  “So?” Pick asked.

  “So Dunston called me—”

  “Where’s the Killer been all this time?” Pick interrupted.

  Zimmerman took a look at Captain Schermer, then shrugged.

  “He’s in North Korea, listening to the Russians,” Zimmerman said. “We’re going to pick him up tomorrow morning at first light.”

  “You had to tell her that, right?” Pick snapped. “Sometimes you have the sensitivity of an alligator.”

  “I’m a big girl, Pick,” Ernie said. “I know what Ken does.”

  “Captain,” Zimmerman said to Schermer. “With respect, do I have to tell you that whatever is said in here has to stay here?”

  “I understand,” Schermer said.

  “So Dunston called me, gave me the coordinates, and at first light this morning, we went to the site.”

  “We is who?” Ernie McCoy asked. “And I thought you said getting to the site was difficult?”

  “We is me, a doggie major—real good guy—named Alex Donald, who flew the Big Black Bird, and four Marines in case they were needed.”

  “By which, Ernie, he means a great big Sikorsky helicopter painted black,” Pick said. “Your husband has a couple of them.”

  “And?” Ernie replied, impatience in her voice.

  “Well, we found the crash site. The Gooney Bird clipped the top of a mountain, went in, exploded, and then slid down the mountain. Nobody walked away from the crash. And it was quick. No question about that.”

  “Well, that’s comforting,” Pick said sarcastically. “To know it was quick. And you found—what’s the euphemism? —the remains of those on board?”

  “We found four bodies,” Zimmerman said. “There was a three-man crew on the Gooney Bird. We figured, even before I found the camera, that the fourth had to be Jeanette.”

  “You couldn’t tell?” Ernie asked.

  “There was a lot of fuel on the Gooney Bird,” Zimmerman said. “They topped off their tanks at K-16. They were planning to go on to Pusan, and maybe all the way to Japan, after Wonsan. There wasn’t much left of the bodies.”

  “So where are the remains?” Pick asked.

  “We took them to Seoul, to Eighth Army Graves Registration. It’ll take them at least a couple of days to identify them.”

  “Well, that’s no problem, really, is it?” Pick said. “There’s no rush, right? As a matter of fact, who the hell cares?”

  “Pick,” Ernie McCoy said. “Oh, Pick, I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah, so am I,” Pick said unpleasantly. “But I should have known better. Something that good was never really going to happen to me.”

  “Pick,” she said, and started to push herself out of the chair.

  Her face suddenly showed pain and went pale.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” she said faintly but angrily.

  “Mrs. McCoy, are you all right?” Captain Schermer said as he walked across the room to her.

  “No, I don’t think I am,” Ernie said. “Goddamn it all to hell!”

  Captain Schermer took a close, if brief, look at her.

  “Young woman, you stay right where you are,” he ordered, and then went to the door.

  “Nurse!” he called loudly. “Get a gurney in here!”

  He went back to Ernie.

  “Doctor, I don’t want to lose this baby,” she said softly.

  “Of course you don’t,” Captain Schermer said. “And we’re going to do everything we can to see that you don’t.”

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Pick said.

  “Hang in there, Ernie!” Pick called as the gurney rolled out the door.

  “Oh, shit,” Ernie Zimmerman said when the gurney was gone and the door had swung closed. “Why the hell did I tell her about Jeanette?”

  “She would have found out,” Pick said. “If you are looking for the culprit in this little tragedy, you have to look no further than me.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Zimmerman asked.

  “Think about it, old buddy,” Pick said. “If I hadn’t been engaged in trying to become the first locomotive ace in Marine Corps history, I wouldn’t have been shot down, would I?”

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, Pick,” Zimmerman said.

  “And if I hadn’t been shot down, then Ernie wouldn’t have been worried about me for all that time, would she?”

  “We were all worried about you,” Zimmerman said.

  “Yeah, but I don’t think you love me, old buddy, and, more to the point, you are not with child,” Pick said. “This is the fourth time she’s tried to make the Killer a daddy. Did you know that?”

  “He told me.”

  “And having been shot down, and not having the balls to do the decent thing, I hung around for all that time, until God, in his infinite wisdom, made that Army convoy make a wrong turn, so I could find them and thus save my miserable ass.”

  “Jesus!”

  “And if I had not been flown here, then Ernie would not have felt obliged to take a daylong train ride in her delicate condition to come all the way down here to welcome the hero home, would she?”

  “Coming here was dumb,” Zimmerman agreed.

  “Where, upon arrival, you told her that the hero’s girlfriend, her friend because of me, was now a corpse burned beyond recognition. . . .”

  “Jesus, I told you I feel sorry as hell about that. I should have known better.”

  “And I told you she would have found out,” Pick said. “This isn’t your fault, old buddy, it’s mine.”

  The door opened and Lieutenant (j.g.) Rosemary Hills entered the room.

  “Mrs. McCoy has been taken to the women’s ward,” she announced. “There are several very skilled gynecologists on staff—”

  “Whoopee!” Pickering said sharply.

  “Captain Schermer says that you are to wait here for him,” Lieutenant Hills said to Zimmerman. “He wants to talk to you.”

  “Okay,” Zimmerman said.

  “And he wants the telephone number of her sponsor.”

  “What the hell is a sponsor?” Pick asked.

  “Her husband, for example.”

  “Her husband doesn’t have a telephone right now,” Zimmerman said.

  “He’s in Korea?” Lieutenant Hills asked. Zimmerman nodded. “Then we’ll want to send a message to his unit,” she said.

  “That’s not possible,” Zimmerman said.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “I can’t get into that,” Zimmerman said.

  “You’re going to have to explain that,” she said.

  “I don’t have to explain anything to you,” Zimmerman said flatly.

  “What would you say, Florence Nightingale,” Pick asked, “if I were to tell you that the lady’s husband, as we speak, is in enemy territory, behind the lines, so to speak, eavesdropping on the Russians?”

  She looked at him almost in horror.

  “And if it’s all the same to you,” Pick went on, “I would rather not have him learn right now that the man the poor bastard thinks of as his best friend has caused his wife to have another miscarriage.”

  “Pick, shut the fuck up,” Zimmerman said.

  Lieutenant Hills looked between them, then fled the room.

  [THREE]

  THE USS DEHAVEN (DD-727) 39 DEGREES 36 MINUTES NORTH LATITUDE 128 DEGREES 43 MINUTES EAST LONGITUDE THE SEA OF JAPAN 0725 19 OCTOBER 1950

  The vessels transporting the X United States Army Corps from Inchon to Wonsan—attack transports, cargo ships, tankers, and the “screening force” to protect them against any potential danger—were spread out over miles of the Sea of Japan.

  At the head of the screening force as it steamed north was the destroyer DeHaven. Her commander, Comm
ander J. Brewer Welsh, USN, a lithe thirty-seven-year-old with closely cropped brown hair, was on the bridge.

  “Captain,” the officer of the deck said. “I have a radar target five miles dead ahead.”

  Captain Welsh was interested but not alarmed. There was no reason to believe the target in any way posed a danger to the invasion fleet. Carrier aircraft were patrolling the area. They would have reported the presence of any naval force long before the DeHaven’s radar picked it up.

  Captain Walsh looked at the radar screen.

  “Probably a fishing boat of some kind,” he opined. “He’s about to get a surprise, isn’t he?”

  He nevertheless reached for the ship-to-ship microphone.

  “McKinley, DeHaven,” he said.

  The USS Mount McKinley was the command vessel of the convoy. It carried aboard both the senior Naval officer of the convoy and the senior officer of the Army and Marine Corps troops who were to be landed.

  “Go, DeHaven,” an officer on the bridge of the McKinley replied.

  “I have a radar target at about five miles, probably a fishing vessel.”

  “And?”

  “I’m waiting until I have him in sight until I do anything.”

  “There’s some Corsairs overhead. I’ll have them take a look, and advise.”

  “Roger, thank you. DeHaven out.”

  0728 19 OCTOBER 1950

  Two Navy Corsairs approached the DeHaven from dead ahead at less than a thousand feet, dipped their wings, and then began to climb.

  0729 19 OCTOBER 1950

  "DeHaven, McKinley, the Corsairs report it’s a junk. I think that they probably woke them up, and they’ll get out of the way.”

  “Thank you, McKinley.”

  0731 19 OCTOBER 1950

  “McKinley, DeHaven, I have the junk in sight. Unless they’re blind, they have to see us, but they are not changing course. And it looks to me as if she’s under power.”

  “Junks don’t have power, DeHaven. They are propelled by what are called ‘sails.’ ”

  “Thank you so much.”

  “They’ll probably get out of the way when they see more than one vessel headed their way. Advise.”

  “Will do.”

  0735 19 OCTOBER 1950

  “McKinley, DeHaven, my junk is not changing course.”