by Pat Frank
They laid him down on the litter gently and Ekland said, “Sir, do you hear me, sir?”
“Yes. Water. My mouth is dry.”
Ekland poured water into the captain’s mouth and Mackenzie choked and spit. “Can’t you hold it down, sir?”
“More.” Mackenzie’s voice was strained with agony.
Ekland gave him more water, and this time Mackenzie held it down, and Ekland wondered whether he was doing right. One thing he ought to do, he ought to stop the captain’s pain. “Should I give you that last syrette, sir? It’s in your bag, isn’t it?”
The captain shook his head, no. “It might get worse. Besides I don’t want to use it. So long as I don’t use it we’ve always got it—we’ve always got that one. We’ve got something to fall back on. How’s Tinker?”
“Still knocked out.”
“He might wake up. If he wakes up and starts to scream, then you use it, you hear me, sergeant? Then you use it.”
The captain’s head fell back, and they thought he was dead, but he kept on breathing. Ekland turned to Beany Smith, kneeling beside the captain. “Smith, give me that bottle! He needs it! He needs it now!”
The captain’s hand moved, and closed on his pocket. “No!” he said. “Not yet! We don’t open it yet.”
“Yes, sir,” said Ekland, for the captain still commanded. “Four men to this litter. Move!”
They moved, but they moved very slowly now. Their stomachs ached in emptiness, and their legs had been bastinadoed and beaten by the hills, and their shoulders screamed protest against each necessary strap across them, and they were aware of the weight of each round of their ammunition, what little was left. Their feet would no longer behave, such was their exhaustion. Their feet would no longer move straight ahead. And their heads would not behave. Their heads wanted to dream. Their heads told them to stop, and lie down, and dream.
After he crossed the coastline, Second Lieutenant Telfair, in his pinwheel, caught himself a little altitude. He crossed over those sensitive spots in the Ten Corps perimeter from where the massed guns thundered, laying a ring of fire around the evacuation. Unless you were in a pin-wheel, you were pretty careful about flying over your own guns and anti-aircraft batteries. You made your recognition signals quite clear. This was not necessary with a pin-wheel. Everybody knew a pinwheel, and knew only the Americans had them, and laughed at them as they proceeded across the sky like lazy dragonflies crabbing against the wind. Of course this worked both ways. Usually the Commies, the first time they saw a pinwheel, were frightened, and hid. But when they learned it did not carry bombs, or rockets, or indeed anything that could kill you from the air, they enjoyed shooting at them with small arms. They did not, however, use anti-aircraft guns on pinwheels, for they had learned this was an indiscretion. If they missed with the first shot, then the pinwheel would call down the wrath of God, in the shape of massed artillery, upon the anti-aircraft position.
After he worked the helicopter to a thousand feet, Second Lieutenant Telfair sat back and enjoyed his matchless view. He could see everything that was happening, and the burning of the stores and ammunition dumps at Hamhung especially intrigued him. He had heard about smoke rising six or eight thousand feet from an ammunition fire, and had not believed it, but now he saw it was true. There would be turbulence in that smoke, he thought, just like a thunderhead.
He looked at the map clipped to the board on his knee, and he saw how the roads were, and looked ahead and compared them with the map. The map was not exactly accurate, but it was easy to pick out the main road that ran down from the reservoir to the perimeter, because troops were still moving on it, and using the main road as a guide, he looked until he saw the secondary road. It wasn’t much of a road. You could see that from the air. He didn’t see anything on it, not anything at all, except a wisp of smoke at the crossroads. He got almost under this smoke, and then allowed the pinwheel to drop straight down several hundred feet.
When he was close to the road he saw that it could be a burned-out tank that smoked, and it was easy to see the bodies, about a dozen, he thought, lying around in the snow. But from the air, he couldn’t tell whose tank it was, or discern the nationality of the bodies. He was pretty sure the tank and the bodies had nothing to do with the company he was looking for. A dozen bodies didn’t make a company.
So Second Lieutenant Telfair caught himself some more altitude and headed up the road again, in the general direction of Koto-Ri. He soon saw he couldn’t go far, because a few miles ahead the clouds butted into the peaks. And as he approached this point he saw tiny red sparks flickering. He swiveled the helicopter, and allowed it to dip for a closer look, and he saw that the people who were shooting at him were mounted on horseback. “What kind of a war is this?” he asked himself aloud. “What kind of a war is this when cavalry can scare away a helicopter? By rights they shouldn’t have any cavalry, anyway.”
Now Second Lieutenant Telfair, unknown to anyone aboard the Leyte, and against orders, carried with him several hand grenades whenever he went on a mission with his pinwheel. He had never found a desirable target for what he thought of as his bombs, but this was it, if he was ever going to find it. He waggled the pinwheel wildly to distract the horsemen’s aim, and then went into what he considered a dive, meanwhile fighting to pry open, against the blast of wind, a section of his plexiglass cocoon.
When the opening was large enough, he pulled the pin of the grenade and dropped it towards earth, and banked the pinwheel to see what would happen. He saw that his bomb wasn’t going to kill anyone, because the horsemen were racing off. They were no longer shooting at anybody. They were just running. “I wonder whether this pinwheel scared those horses?” he said, disappointed. When he was flying he always talked aloud to himself like that. Sometimes this made him think he was crazy, and once he had told a Navy doctor about it, and the doctor had just laughed at him. “Doesn’t a pinwheel make a big racket?” the doctor had asked.
“Sure,” Lieutenant Telfair had said. “You can’t even hear yourself think.”
“Well, that’s why you talk aloud, so you can hear yourself think,” the doctor had said, and the doctor had laughed until he cried. This, Lieutenant Telfair did not understand, but he knew that he thought better, on a mission, when he talked to himself. “I guess I’d better go back,” he told himself.
So he stopped his pinwheel in midair, backed it around, and started towards the coast again, but he decided that on the way back he would take another, and closer, look at the burned-out tank, because nobody had bothered to shoot at him the first time. He swept along the road, low. He moved fast, too. His air speed was one hundred. A helicopter is deceptively clumsy, like a pelican. A helicopter is not really so slow. A helicopter flies faster than a duck, and enemy riflemen forget to lead them, for they are so fat and ungainly, and that is why so many second lieutenants like Slaton Telfair are still alive.
When he came in low over the tank he was pretty sure that it was a Chinese tank. It looked just like the turret of a T-34. “If that is a Chinese tank,” he said, “then there must be Americans around. Maybe all those dead are Americans. Maybe they fought the tank and they killed the tank and the tank killed them.”
He stopped the helicopter again, and allowed it to settle towards the ground, directly over the tank and the dead. He hovered twelve feet over the dead. The dead were Chinese, all of them. “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Lieutenant Telfair. “There ought to be Americans somewhere. Where are they?”
He began to look.
On the ground, Dog Company had seen the helicopter approach, of course, and they had screamed and yelled, and waved their arms. The helicopter had sailed over them, serenely, and on up the road towards their bivouac of the night, and the hill where they had seen the Mongol horsemen.
They cursed him. They cursed him, and the Air Force, and the Navy, and the high command. “Know what he’s doing?” said Petrucci. “He’s out looking for the Chinks. He doesn’t give a damn ab
out us.”
“Why they don’t even know we’re here,” said Heinzerling.
“Know what would happen if that screwball pinwheel saw us?” said Heinzerling. “He’d call down fire on us, that’s what he’d do. He’d have the Mo laying sixteen inchers in our laps.”
“That’s all we need,” said Petrucci.
Far back the road they heard the rattle of rifles, and then an explosion that could have been a mortar, or a grenade. “Hope they got him,” said Heinzerling.
“They won’t,” said Petrucci. “Them pinwheel pilots are shot with luck. They live forever.”
Apparently Petrucci was right, for presently they heard the pinwheel again. They looked back and they saw it stop over the tank, and then it started moving again, down the road towards them.
Ekland knew he had to do something, and he had to do it fast. He had no flares, or even any tracer ammunition any longer, or anything at all to attract the attention of that pinwheel. The pinwheel might just happen to see them on the road, but this was unlikely, because of the overhang of the cliff, and the condition of the road, icy mud churned and filthy and frozen, exactly like their clothing. They were almost perfectly camouflaged. They might be seen in clean snow, and he looked off the road, and he saw clean snow. “Follow me!” Ekland yelled, and he ran out into the snow-covered flat, where his filthy parka would be marked against the clean white, and the others followed him, and they waved.
When the pinwheel was almost overhead it slowed down, and then stopped, and then began a weird revolving motion. It was as if the pinwheel said, “Who are you? Who are you down there? Friend or foe? Make some sign.”
“He wants us to make a sign,” said Ekland, and then he thought of what to do. “We make an SOS. We make an SOS in the snow.”
“With what?” asked Beany Smith.
“With ourselves,” said Ekland. He detailed them. “You, you, and you, you’re an S. You three, you’re the O. You three here, you’re the other S.”
Nine men lay down in the snow, as Ekland arranged them, and the pinwheel came down beside them, and a face in the pinwheel grinned, and a hand in the pinwheel jabbed down at the loaded basket litters.
They unloaded the supplies, and loaded Tinker into one of the basket litters, and they were about to lift Mackenzie when Mackenzie waved his hand and shook his head and said something, but they could not hear him, because of the noise of the pinwheel’s engine. Mackenzie pointed to his musette bag, and then he pointed to Ekland, and they all knew what the captain meant. And then Mackenzie touched the pocket of his parka, and Ekland leaned over him and took out the bottle of Scotch.
They strapped the captain into the basket litter, gently. The pinwheel rose straight up, and was soon gone. Twenty-five minutes later it descended on the deck of the Leyte, and the trained crash crews, seeing its basket litters were loaded, ducked under the rotor.
Second Lieutenant Telfair went below for coffee. Adjoining the ready room, the Leyte maintained a snack bar, and soda fountain, for the men of its air group. The commander, Air Group, saw Telfair drinking his coffee there, and he said, “Well, what’d you get?”
“Two wounded,” Telfair said.
“Three more and we’ll make you an ace,” said the commander, and everybody laughed.
Chapter Fourteen
DOG COMPANY NOW had more of everything than it needed. It had more than it could comfortably carry, but Ekland insisted they carry it all. He insisted they bring the litters with them, and he insisted they load the litters with the extra magazines of ammunition, and extra cartons of food. He allowed them to eat all the combat rations they wanted, or all they could chip from the cartons with their bayonets, but then Ekland got tough.
He ordered them on, immediately. They no longer had fuel, so it was necessary they keep moving.
With a fresh magazine in his BAR, and his stomach growling at its work, John Ekland felt better. He walked at the head of the column, as Mackenzie had. He had unloaded his pack on one of the litters; and over his shoulder, now, he carried the musette bag with the company records. Under his arm was the bottle guard, as Mackenzie had carried it.
He counted his men, altogether there were now fourteen. It was awful. It was worse than Iwo. But so far as Ekland could figure out, it was still an intact command, and he was at the head of it.
If necessary, Ekland knew, Dog Company could fight again. Back there at the crossroads they had had a small victory, although they had lost the captain. A victory was the richest and most stimulating food you could put in their stomachs.
Then Ekland saw a line of skirmishers coming towards him, backed by armor, hopelessly out-numbering him. Dog Company was cut off from the friendly sea. “Hit the ditch!” he yelled behind him. “Ostergaard, bring up the bazook! Who’s got the bazook rockets? Bring up those damn rockets!”
Then, over the sights of his BAR, he examined the people coming towards him, and something in the way they moved, their steady and yet almost careless progress, heedless of ambush in the ground or enemies in the sky, told him they were friendly. He dropped the BAR, rose, and began to wave his arms. He didn’t know it, but he was weeping.
“We heard noises up here,” said the lieutenant from the Third Division, “so we came up to see what it was all about. Who are you people?” This lieutenant peered at them closely, as if they looked peculiar.
“Marines,” said Sergeant Ekland. “We’re from the First Marine Division.”
The lieutenant seemed surprised. “Is that so? We didn’t think anything would be coming down this road except gooks. That’s the way I was briefed. That’s what intelligence told us.”
“Well, we’re Marines, and we’re poohed.”
“You’re being evacuated, you know. Your whole division is being evacuated. They’re putting ’em on the ships right now. There’s a rear guard, and a beachmaster, to take care of the stragglers.”
The sergeant straightened. “These are not stragglers,” he said loud and clear. “This is a company. This is Dog Company!”
The lieutenant looked them over. “A company?”
“Yes, bud, a company!”
And the lieutenant looked them over again, and he saw that as individuals they might all be casualties, but together they were still a fighting team. And the lieutenant realized that what this sergeant had said was true. They were a company. “I have transportation around the bend,” the lieutenant said. “If your men can’t make it, I’ll order my vehicles up here to pick them up.”
“My men can make it,” Ekland said. This was the first time, he realized, that he had called them “my men.” With the bottle still under his arm, he led them out.
Since they were the last out, they were the last aboard, which was only proper, and Ekland reported to the lieutenant-colonel commanding Battalion, and was told to get the company records in some sort of shape, if he could, because the Graves Registration people would be wanting to talk to him, and so would the new company commander. It was two days before he mustered them all together on the LST, purring out through the Japan Sea. “Well,” he said, “we’ve still got the captain’s bottle.” And he held it up, so they all could see. “So maybe it’s time to open it.” He ripped open the zipper of the leather guard, and brought out the Scotch. “What’d you say, men?”
Kato said, “I don’t want a drink. I’m so full of rations I could bust. All I want is some more sleep.”
Heinzerling said, “I don’t want a drink, not now, on account of I’m going down and get a shower. They’ve got a bath service on this boat, an honest-to-God bath service, with hot water.”
“Me too,” said Vermillion.
Petrucci sauntered across the deck to where they were passing out free cigarettes.
And they all of them left, for one reason or another, and finally there was no one but Ekland and Beany Smith and Ostergaard. Ostergaard scuffed his boot on the steel deck. “Count me out, sarge. I’m superstitious.”
“Well, Smith,” said Ekland
, “the captain promised it to us, and that leaves nobody but you and me, and I guess that leaves you alone, and you can have a hell of a toot for yourself, because personally, Smith, I don’t feel like drinking it.”
Beany Smith took the bottle, and examined it closely. He rubbed it against his freshly shaven cheek, and looked back at the bleak hills. “Me, I don’t want it either,” he said. “This is our luck. We may need it again. We may need it right here. I wouldn’t drink it for nothin’.” He returned it to Ekland.
A regimental sergeant saw Ekland and said he had been looking for him, because the battalion commander and Colonel Grimm wanted to see him. They were waiting for him in the wardroom. The wardroom table was deep in papers. “All day,” said Grimm, “people have been looking all over this ship for you. Where’ve you been?”
“Between decks, mostly,” said Sergeant Ekland, “working on these papers here.” He asked the question he wanted to ask. “Sir, have you heard anything about Captain Mackenzie?”
“He ought to be just about landing in Hawaii now,” the colonel said. “And tomorrow, if my times are figured right, he ought to be just about in a hospital in San Francisco.”
“But, sir—”
“They don’t lose many wounded, once you get ’em in a sick bay,” said the colonel. “I’m glad they didn’t lose Mackenzie.” The colonel smiled, and it was so unusual for the colonel to smile, that all those in the wardroom, the staff officers and the communicators and the clerks, they all noticed it. “But that isn’t why I’ve been looking for you, Ekland. I’m making you.”
“Sir?”
“There aren’t any officers left in your company, and we want to keep it on the rolls. I’m giving you the brevet rank of first lieutenant, effective when Mackenzie first recommended it. We’ll just skip the second grade. Know what that means?”
“Yes, sir.”
