by Pat Frank
DEDICATION
For the United States Marines
CONTENTS
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Pat Frank
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter One
CAPTAIN SAM MACKENZIE clung to his dream as long as he could. The dream was of his wife, Anne. She eased across the bed, and pulsed in his arms, but she was strangely cold, and he was bewildered. “Come closer,” he whispered, and she moved tight against him, but she was still cold, and no relief to his desire.
Then in the half light that lies between sleep and consciousness he recognized, as if his mind stood apart from him and passed judgment, that it was a dream. Yet he retained hope that it was real, for he was sure he could feel her, and while it was not at all a satisfactory dream, still it was better than waking, and he tried not to awaken. Mackenzie shook his head and opened his eyes. He was embracing his carbine, under his parka. He had slipped the gun under the parka the night before, so the breech would not freeze and jam, in case there was an alarm and a fire fight in the blackness. Now the steel barrel lay against his cheek, a chill finger.
Mackenzie sat up and rubbed his shoulder blades against a knob of the rock wall towering straight up at his back. He looked about him and in the milky pre-dawn he saw the loom of his last two jeeps. He felt for his cigarettes, and he had none, and he spat the bad taste of night out of his mouth, and rubbed his face with his gloves. He discovered his knees would still bend, which was a surprise. A gaunt, old, old man of thirty, with sunken, bloodshot eyes and icicles growing from his beard, he walked stiffly over to the jeeps. He labored with them, and cajoled them, and prayed to them and God, but there was no answer.
The jeeps were frozen solid and the three wounded mercifully dead, so now Mackenzie counted those of his command he presumed alive, although they lay in their parkas like sacks embedded in the stiffened earth. There were sixteen, all that was left of Dog Company, which had been assigned the terrible duty of covering the regiment’s retreat. For an endless haze of time, from the Changjin Reservoir to Hagaru, and from Hagaru to Koto-Ri, and beyond, they had fought off Chinese numerous as stones strewn on the Asian steppes, and with faces as hard and weathered and indistinguishable. Now, spent, the Marines had come to this scowling gorge. Captain Mackenzie tried to kick them to their feet.
All of them moved, or groaned, or uttered the meaningless obscenities of soldiers, but only two of them could rise. One was Ekland, his communications sergeant, a cocky and determined young man whom the captain had marked for decoration, and as officer material, even before Changjin. The other was little Nick Tinker, the youngest of them all, who claimed to be eighteen and was probably seventeen, and astonishingly beardless. “All right, you two,” the captain said, “let’s get things moving.”
“Check the jeeps, sir?” asked Ekland. Mackenzie noted that Ekland was rolling on his heels like a punchy fighter. They’d had their last rations at noon the day before.
The captain shook his head, no. “I’ve done it already. Batteries dead. Not a spark. Oil’s rigid. Always knew it was the wrong oil. Must’ve been ten, maybe twenty below last night.”
“Must be twenty below now,” said Ekland.
“It’ll be better when the sun gets up.”
The sergeant stared up at the sky and didn’t say anything. Mackenzie knew what he was thinking. The sky was like gray-brown armor plate, and at this altitude it reached down to compress and crush them into the alien soil. There would be no sun this day, and no whistling jets and friendly Corsairs to harass and fend off the enemy. “We’ve got to get rid of those,” the captain said. He nodded at the three burdened litters silent under the useless protection of the dead jeeps.
Nick Tinker, in a voice plaintive as that of a small boy dreading a household chore, said, “Do we have to bury them, sir?”
Mackenzie crossed the narrow, washboard road, and scuffed with his toe at the cracked mud of the ditch. It was like iron. “No. Just move them. Move them to a quiet place, out of the way.”
Tinker and the sergeant lifted the bodies to a quiet place in the lee of a sentinel rock, and the captain knelt to see that their faces were covered, and sheltered from the wind.
Mackenzie did not want to look at these faces, for one was the face of Raleigh Couzens, the argumentative southerner who had been his friend, and tentmate, and the reliable leader of the Second Platoon. Yet he found it necessary. He peered at Couzens’ face as if to pry from dead eyes what had not issued from live lips. Lieutenant Couzens had inexplicably been returned by the Chinese after capture. Then, carelessly and recklessly and for no good reason, Lieutenant Couzens had thrown away his life.
Back when they were staged at Pendleton, and Couzens had joined the regiment, his eyes had been the merriest at the “O” Club bar, and his tongue the sharpest. Couzens could, and sometimes dared, spit a senior major on the bayonet of his wit. Everyone agreed he should have been a trial lawyer, or perhaps a politician. Now the merry blue eyes were glazed by a patina of ice. In this distorted face, and in his own mind, Mackenzie could find no solution.
The captain rose. “Now somehow,” he told the sergeant, “we’ve got to get these men up and going, because if we stay here we’ve had it.” A glint from the hilltop on the other side of the gorge caught his eye. In the front seat of the lead jeep he found his musette bag, opened the clasps with fumbling, gloved fingers, and brought out his glasses, his fine, six power Zeiss glasses for which he had traded a Samurai sword in another war, and another life, a long time ago. He had trouble focusing. His vision wasn’t behaving properly, and he steadied his elbows on the hood of the jeep.
For a moment a swirl of cloud hid the hilltop, but presently it thinned, and out of the scud, and out of the past, emerged two figures. They were strange figures with no proper right in this century—squat, armed men on short-coupled, hairy ponies—motionless as an old print of Red Indians spying on a wagon train.
Mackenzie was fascinated. These were not American Indians. Theirs was an older and more savage heritage. He knew he looked upon a patrol of Mongol cavalry, the lineal descendants of Genghis Khan, and Kublai Khan, and Timur and the Golden Horde that hundreds of years before had ravaged Asia and burst open the gates of Europe. And since he was a thoughtful and studious man, Mackenzie was frightened, for he also knew that from that dark day, until this very moment, the barbarians had not looked down on civilized man with such cruel hatred, and contempt.
Nick Tinker was squatting on the ground, sighting his carbine. “No, son,” said Mackenzie, quietly. “They’re not in range of that weapon.” He was thinking of something else. If the patrol was fired on, and knew itself discovered, it would be quicker to report the Americans’ presence in the pass, and bring another screaming mob down upon them. And he would have less time to organize the remnants of Dog Company for defense, not that he thought it would make much difference, but still it was a professional matter.
And then the captain noticed that Ekland was sitting on the ground, with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, and he was shaking his head slowly, as if something inside his head tormented him. “Ekland!” the captain snapped. “Did you see that? Did you see up on that hill? We’ve got to get the hell out of here!”
Ekland kept on shaking his head. “I can’t go, captain,” he said. “I just can’t go.”
The captain knew that if Ekland couldn’t go, then nobody could go, except perhaps Tinker, and Tinker couldn’t go it alone. And the captain recognized that he had reached the end of his command. He could neither bury his dead nor save his living, and he knew that the time had come for him to open his bottle of Scotch.
Mackenzie groped deep into his worn, old-style musette bag and brought out what at first appeared to be a tightly bound bundle of long johns. This he unwrapped carefully as if unswaddling a baby, and at last held in his hand a bottle guard of soft, handsomely tooled Morocco leather. Stamped on the side, in faded gold letters, was “S.M.—A.L. ’42.” He took the glove off his right hand and rubbed the lettering tenderly with his blackened fingers, as if touching the face of a child, or a girl. He quickly replaced the glove. It was too cold, and there might be too little time, for overlong sentiment.
Tinker, who had been watching curiously, finally asked, “What’s that, sir?”
“A bottle of Scotch.”
“A bottle of Scotch!” Tinker’s voice was shrill, and Mackenzie could hear the echoes bouncing across the gorge.
Ekland suddenly stopped shaking his head and swayed to his feet, and the captain noticed movement from the others on the ground. They had been watching, listening.
“Is that honest-to-God a bottle of Scotch in there?” Ekland asked.
“It is. Wonderful twelve-year-old Scotch. No. Older than that. I’ve had it since 1942.”
“You been saving it all this time?”
“I have.” The men were getting up now, one by one, and gathering around him, regarding him in wonder and bewilderment. “I’ve been saving it for now.”
“Why now, sir?”
“Well, I’ll tell you, Ekland,” the captain said, raising his voice a trifle so they all could hear. “This Scotch was given to me by a young lady and she told me to save it for a really important occasion, and I consider this an important occasion.” He didn’t feel it necessary to explain further. The most important thing that happens in a man’s life is death, its conclusion. Now that they were no longer completely benumbed, they would understand that. It would sink into them. They would understand his words, and prepare themselves.
Tinker, with the tactlessness of the very young, asked, “Who was the lady, captain?”
“My wife.” He added, “She wasn’t my wife then, but she was my girl. It was just before we sailed for New Zealand to be staged for The ’Canal.” He looked across the gorge. On the opposite side, the north, the hills rose in almost perfect cones, bare of vegetation and flying ghostly banners of snow. On his side, the south, were perpendicular cliffs. He was thankful that the road pressed close to the cliff, for it was his only flank protection, or had been thus far. The Mongol horsemen were still black specks on the hilltop directly across the ravine. He kept staring at them, but his mind was not in this bleak land.
He was in that penthouse cocktail lounge, “The Top of the Mark,” on a spring night so perfect that the Bay bridges were pendants of diamonds, instead of pearls as they seemed on nights less clear, and every light in San Francisco was like a cut jewel. It was their last night together, and they were holding hands under the table, and whenever they didn’t think people were looking, they kissed. He had been a senior at Stanford when she was a junior, and now that she was a senior he was a freshly created second lieutenant of Marines, his bars shining embarrassingly, like spurious gold.
And she had this package with her, wrapped in silver paper and red ribbon in the way of women, and he had been kidding her about it the whole evening, and then all of a sudden she was no longer gay, and she’d said, “Sam, I’m going to give you this now.”
“Oh, it really is for me!”
“Yes, Sam, it’s for you. Now, stop trying to grab it! Before I give it to you you have to promise me something. Promise not to use it until there is a really important occasion.
“Isn’t this an important occasion? I’m leaving you. I’m going away. I’m going somewhere out there.” He nodded towards the Pacific. “And it’s the last time I’ll ever leave you. All that’s important, isn’t it?”
“Sure, Sam, but there’ll be bigger days. I can just look forward and see them. Can’t you?”
“What’s in it?” he joked, hefting the package. “Female magic charm to keep the boy from harm? Hand grenade, new type?”
“Don’t unwrap it, Sam. Not now. There’ll be times when you’ll need it more. Wait and see. Promise me you won’t take it out of the box until you’re aboard ship.”
He saw how grave she was, and promised, and kissed her without caring whether anyone watched or not. And they drank a last Scotch and fizz, and lifted their glasses to the stars, and he said:
“I cry warning.
“Night is falling.
“Sleep not, lest there be
“No dawning.”
She said, “That’s cute. Who wrote it?”
“I don’t know,” he lied. Sometimes he made up in his head little bits and pieces of verse, but at that time he never told anybody about them.
He drove Anne back to her home in Los Altos, and they tiptoed across the gravel in the patio, so as not to wake her parents, and he did not leave until dawn’s first breath blew the morning’s mists back into the sea.
That last night in Los Altos he would always treasure in the locket of his heart. Even now, watching the wind off Siberia whip plumes of snow from the hostile hill, he could almost see and feel her lithe and vivid dark beauty, and kiss the throb in the arch of her throat, and smell the rich jasmine which that night she had worn. Now, when he was bone cold, she warmed him with the thought of her body.
Then someone jostled his arm, and he turned in anger.
Beany Smith, the Jersey City boy who couldn’t hold his liquor and had been in the punishment detail for seven days back in Pusan, and who even now should be in the brig for attempted rape at Ko-Bong, crowded forward, his eyes alight. “You goin’ to divvy that up with us, captain?”
For a moment Mackenzie didn’t speak. He hated anyone to touch him. He hated to be shoved. He controlled himself, and said, “Sure.” He unzipped the top of the leather bottle guard with his teeth. From its safe bed of soft wool thick as rabbit fur peeked the top of the bottle, crowned by its black and gold foil.
Beany Smith counted heads. “Seventeen of us. That makes one good slug apiece, captain.”
“I don’t drink,” said Ackerman, the quiet Pennsylvanian who was bazooka man and a corporal. “I’m an Advanced Adventist.”
“So can I have your slug, Ack?” Beany Smith asked quickly.
“You’ll be damn lucky to get a smell of it, Smith,” said the captain. “You’ve been trouble ever since I saw you, you son-of-a-bitch. I had to lose a hundred and sixty-odd men and still have you!”
Mackenzie stopped suddenly. It was ridiculous for him to be eating out Beany Smith at this time, and place, when he had accepted destruction and dissolution for himself and for all of them. He looked around at the circle of grubby faces and frost-cracked noses peering at him with interest from under the hoods of the parkas, and it was then that he realized that in the last few minutes there had been a definite change in the condition, and the morale, of Dog Company. His men were on their feet, and therefore they could march and handle their weapons, and he would be derelict as a commander if he did not use the capabilities of his company to the utmost, and inflict maximum damage upon the enemy.
This was his decision, and he instantly took under consideration the first tactical problem—the effect of one drink of Scotch on one completely exhausted Marine with a stomach utterly empty. It would start them moving, all right, and they’d feel hopped up and warm for forty-five minutes to an hour. But when the alcohol died within them there would come inevitable depression, and if they collapsed again, they were through. He determined his course. “You’re each going to get a drin
k,” he said. “But you’re not going to get it until we’re back inside our own lines.”
He waited for their groans, and they came, and then subsided. Sergeant Ekland said, “Do you think it’s far, sir?”
“Not too far,” Mackenzie said, “and the poop is that there’s an evacuation fleet waiting for us at Hungnam.” He was not at all sure of this. Like most small unit commanders he had only the most general idea of the strategy of battle outside his own sector, and depended upon the Stateside short wave, or Armed Forces Network, for news of what he could not see with his own eyes, or learn from his patrols, or what he was told by Battalion and Regiment. But in the hazy past, during the fighting at the Hagaru air strip, Dog Company had saved the life of a Major Toomey, of the Division Staff, and the major had told him he thought there’d have to be an evacuation from Hungnam, and that was the poop of which the captain spoke.
He began to give orders. They were to take only light weapons, except for one bazooka, and Ekland’s BAR, and one grenade to a man. They were to carry two litters, and two of the six jericans of gas still strapped to the jeeps. “What’re we going to need gas for,” asked Tinker, “with no jeeps?”
“You’ll find out,” Mackenzie said, “and meanwhile you and Smith will carry them. Lay ’em in one of the litters. They’ll be easier that way. Every man will take his turn with the jericans. Nobody’s going to bugger off on this duty.”
The captain looked up at the hilltop. The patrol was still there, waiting like human vultures. Well, the longer they waited, the better, and the further Dog Company might get. He eased himself into the seat of the lead jeep, removed a glove, took his map from his pocket, and tried to concentrate on it.
It was a makeshift map, issued in a hurry. This was understandable. The company had been living in the luxury of tents, and everyone knew the war was practically over, when the Chinese attacked. So the map was bad, but it did show, as a twisting, thin blue line, the secondary road over which Dog Company had fought to protect the regiment’s flank and rear. To the south, winding through a parallel pass, the map showed the main road from Koto to Hamhung, over which the bulk of the regiment had retreated with its heavy equipment. Hamhung was the industrial city, and supply depot, six miles inland from the port of Hungnam.
