He thought about CAG's words. Your uncle.
There was no way he could back out now, not just before a combat op, not with every man in the air wing thinking him a coward. Tombstone remembered his own acid reaction a moment earlier, when Snowball admitted he was scared. No. Not like that.
But it was time to admit that he was no leader of men. Maybe it was even a time to find a sane career, one where he didn't have to keep proving himself.
He rolled a fresh sheet of paper into the Selectric and began pecking away.
1030 hours
Vulture's Row, U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
Snowball leaned against the railing and looked down at the flight deck from the railed walkway atop the island. Damn them! he thought. Damn them all!
Among the ranks of Naval flight officers there was a sharply defined sense of us and them, a camaraderie of mutual respect and fellowship which crossed the lines of rank. Somehow, though, Dwight Newcombe had never quite fit in. He stood out from the others, different, as he'd been different from the other kids in school, a loner, always on the outside. His pale and sunburn-prone skin and ash-blond hair had won him the handle Snowball at Pensacola, a hated running name which nonetheless had traveled with him to the North Island Naval Air Base at Coronado, then to his first posting at sea on board the Jefferson only five months earlier. Attempts to join the band-of-brothers fellowship had only made him stand out more, had made him feel more of an outsider than ever.
In keeping with Naval policy of assigning experienced pilots to inexperienced NFOs ― and experienced NFOs with newbie aviators ― Newcombe had been paired with Tombstone Magruder, a Top Gun graduate who'd seemed quieter than the others… and more sympathetic.
He'd gotten along well with the guy so far. In the late-night bull sessions in flight officers' quarters, Tombstone had never sounded as though he had something to prove, never rambled on about improbable sexual escapades during some past liberty, never worn the mask of the fearless and invulnerable warrior. For the past several months, Snowball had felt closer to Tombstone than to anyone else on board the Jefferson.
But now…
His ears caught the faint beat of rotors across the water. He strained his eyes and caught sight of one of Jefferson's helos patrolling off to port. Aft, he could see deck personnel and officers checking the arrestor cables and gathering in front of the Fresnel lens system. A recovery operation then. Somebody was coming in.
Tombstone was carrying a load, Snowball knew. Coyote's loss had been a bad blow to the commander. He'd watched Tombstone change in those long minutes of the flight back to Jefferson after that first, terror-laced dogfight two days earlier. But blow or not, change or not, it wasn't right that Tombstone should lash out at him like that.
Pucker-factor. It was an old flyer's term, referring to the fear that every aviator felt at one time or another… in combat, in a night trap on a rain-swept deck, in the swirl of smoke and flame and noise as the ejection seat kicked you clear of the cockpit. Belonging to the pilots' fraternity, Snowball knew, depended not on the absence of fear, but on the way a man controlled it.
He thought about the confrontation in Tombstone's office. If he quit now, every man in the wing would think he was a coward. Worse, they would feel sorry for him… or agree with one another that since he never belonged in the first place, it was obvious that he simply didn't have the right stuff.
What else could he do? Go to CAG and ask for reassignment? Who else besides Tombstone would he rather fly with?
His hands closed on the Vulture Row railing, squeezing with his building anger. He would not let this beat him! He would belong!
"Now hear this, now hear this," a voice grated over the 5-MC loudspeakers over the flight deck. "Stand by flight deck for recovery operations, COD. That is, stand by flight deck for recovery operations, COD.
Snowball looked aft. It took him several minutes to locate the inbound plane, a speck low above the horizon growing slowly into a recognizable aircraft.
The C-2A Greyhound was designed as a COD aircraft, the acronym standing for Carrier On-board Delivery. Its high wings and two turboprop engines, its odd-looking boom tail with four vertical stabilizers made it a close twin of the E-2 Hawkeye, though a thicker body gave it a heavy-built, stubby appearance, and it lacked the saucer-shaped radar housing above the fuselage. With a range of over fifteen hundred miles, Greyhounds were the principal means of delivering cargo, mail, and personnel to carriers at sea. This flight, Snowball knew, was an unscheduled one. He wondered what it was carrying.
The Greyhound swelled rapidly during the final seconds of its approach, flaps at full and nose high as it roared over the roundoff and dropped to the deck for a perfect trap on the number three wire. A good landing, Snowball thought with the detached interest of a professional. Landing one of those chunky turboprops on a carrier had always seemed more unlikely to him than landing a nimble Tomcat.
Curiously, he watched as the plane backed slightly to spit out the wire, then taxied cautiously past a row of Hornets parked shoulder to shoulder abaft of the island. The Greyhound made a final turn to face away from Snowball. Optical illusion made the spinning propellers seem to reverse themselves as they slowed to a stop.
With a whine, a rear hatch opened in the Greyhound's tail, and a ramp slowly lowered itself to the deck. Before the ramp touched steel, a line of men were filing out of the aircraft. Snowball counted fifteen of them. At first he thought they were Marines, for each wore camouflage-patterned trousers and shirts and had floppy-brimmed boonie hats on their heads. The Navy seabags each man held balanced across his shoulder made him think again. They could be Marines, but…
Snowball had seen men like that before, during his tour at Coronado: SEALS.
He found himself wondering if those men had ever been in combat. It was likely; SEALs had played an important part in the oil rig raids and recon missions off Kuwait. They might even have participated in anti-terrorist ops, the successful anti-terrorist ops that never made the evening news.
Snowball felt a sudden and unexpected lift at the thought, and a new determination. He'd been in combat only two days before, been in combat and come back to tell about it. Training and experience aside, what did those SEALs have that he didn't?
Maybe belonging had more to do with his attitude than theirs. He'd show them, show them all. He wouldn't quit. Snowball Newcombe was a flight officer!
CHAPTER 12
1030 hours
Nyongch'on-kiji
Coyote's situation had improved, but not by much. They'd taken him from the hole the afternoon before, questioned him one more time, then marched him across the compound to a long, narrow building guarded by flint-eyed soldiers armed with AKMs. Inside he'd found the surviving crewmen of the Chimera.
He wasn't sure why the North Koreans had herded him into the low, single-storied building with the others. Classes he'd attended during his training on how to survive as a prisoner of war suggested that POWs were nearly always segregated early on, the officers separated from the enlisted men. For some reason, their captors weren't following the usual routine, and Chimera's entire complement was present in the building which the inmates had already named the Wonsan Waldorf.
Of the American spy ship's original complement of 193, 170 were still alive ― 163 sailors, 7 officers. Coyote learned that 23 men had died, killed outright during the attack or succumbing to wounds during the three days since their capture; 61 were wounded, 18 seriously. Their captivity thus far had been little short of a nightmare, officers and men crammed together into what might have once been a storeroom or warehouse of some kind, with little food, no blankets, no sanitary facilities, and no medical treatment for the injured beyond the most rudimentary attempts at first aid.
Captain Gerald K. Gilmore was one of the wounded. HM/I Herb Bailey, a hospital corpsman, had sewn up the knee-to-thigh gash in his right leg and stopped the bleeding, but the captain was desperately weak from shock and loss of blood. Infection wou
ld kill him and a dozen others in days if they weren't given proper treatment soon.
"The big-bucks question is," one chief petty officer said in a low voice, "whether we'd be better off out there… or here."
Fifteen of them were gathered in a circle around the ragged mattress on the floor which served as Gilmore's bed. They were the officers and NCOs who had appointed themselves as the group's escape committee. As soon as he'd been able to prove he was American ― an intimate knowledge of Navy slang terms like "slider" and "pogie bait" had quickly established his credentials ― Coyote had been invited to join because his pilot training had included such useful tidbits as survival and E&E, escape and evasion.
Coyote glanced away from the circle and down the dimly lit length of the building. The rest of the men were gathered in small groups, talking, sleeping, tending the wounded, or just sitting. At intervals along both of the longer walls, several sailors were positioned as lookouts. They stood on overturned honey buckets, peering out the narrow windows set into the wall high up just under the building's eaves. Their warning that someone was approaching would turn the escape committee's whispered conversation into an animated discussion about girls and improbable sexual experiences. "Getting out won't be easy," Coyote said. "There are several hundred troops here, a battalion at least. The camp is surrounded by a twelve-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire."
"Yeah, well, if we don't get out," Bailey said grimly, "some of these men aren't going to make it." His hands clenched in front of him, the gesture revealing the man's anger and frustration. "The antibiotics are gone and we're down to dirty T-shirts for dressings. And those bastards won't give me anything better to work with."
A first class radarman named Zabelsky shook his head. "Look, even if we could get out, what would we do? Where would we go? God… a hundred an seventy men, a third of them wounded. Wanderin' around in slope city. What're we s'posed to do?"
"How far is it to the DMZ?" Lieutenant Commander Coleridge asked.
"Maybe sixty miles," Commander Wilkinson replied. "That's straight south, which means climbing the Taebaek Mountains. Follow the coast southeast and it's more like seventy-five miles. Either way, we'd have to walk past half the damned NK Army."
"Shit," someone said. "I read once they've got the fifth largest army in the world."
"Sixth," Wilkinson muttered. "But who's counting?"
"If we could get a radio," Coyote suggested, "we could call for a rescue. Jefferson must still be offshore somewhere. If they've moved in closer in the last couple of days, they could pick us up off the beach."
"Fine," a lieutenant said. He had a savage bruise across his forehead, and his eyes were puffy and blackened. "All we need is a radio, the right frequency, a lot of luck, and some way to break out of this hole."
The chief, a machinist's mate named Bronkowicz, looked across the room to where one of Chimera's officers, another lieutenant, sat alone in a far corner. "Hell, I vote we send ol' Grape 'n' Guts over there out to get a radio. I'll bet his slant buddies-"
"Belay that, Chief." Gilmore's voice was weak but held an edge to it which still carried the authority of command. "Lieutenant Novak did what he thought was right."
None of Chimera's people had been willing to talk much about the capture of their ship, but Coyote had gathered that at some point Gilmore had been wounded badly enough that he'd passed command to the only available line officer, a young lieutenant on his first tour of sea duty. Apparently, Novak had surrendered the ship, even ordered the crew not to resist, as North Korean troops had poured aboard.
It seemed the others had already judged him, finding him guilty of cowardice.
Coyote looked away from the solitary figure. He could imagine what it was like, alone on a shattered bridge, the noise, the agony as shipmates died. He remembered his own loneliness when he'd been adrift in the ocean, his horror at Mardi Gras's death.
He tried to imagine what he would have done in Novak's place. Probably pretty much the same thing.
"The way I see it," Commander Wilkinson said, "we're a lot better off here."
Bronkowicz nodded. "That's what I was wondering', sir. We don't stand a virgin's chance in a Marine barracks out there. They'd run us down before we got two miles."
"It's more than that, Chief," Wilkinson said. "The way I see it, we have two good chances to get out of here. Either Washington'll negotiate for our release, or they'll send in Delta Force and rescue us. Either way, we'll do a lot better if we stay put."
"Shee-it!" Zabelsky said with some passion. "We're supposed to wait for Washington to move its ass for us?"
"They'll probably disavow all knowledge of our actions," someone said.
"Hell, they forgot all about us already," another said.
"I don't think so," Coyote said. "Someone in Washington had us deploy to look for you guys, and it's hard to disavow a dogfight."
"So where's that leave us?" Bailey asked. His eyes were bleak. "Sit around and watch our people kick off, one by one?"
"Y'know, they negotiated with the gooks for almost a year for the Pueblo crew," Bronkowicz said. He rubbed his chin, making a sandpapery sound. None of them had shaved for three days.
"You mean we could be stuck in this hole for a year?"
"Easy, men," Gilmore said. His breath rasped. "You idiots start panicking and we'll do the Koreans' work for them!"
"The Captain's right," Coleridge said. "We've got to be patient, watch for our chance."
"And don't sign their damned confessions," Gilmore said.
"Yeah. Article Five of the Code," Bronkowicz added. He was referring to the U.S. Fighting Man's Code, a list of six articles learned by every American serviceman since the Korean War. Article Five included the statement "I will make no oral or written statements disloyal to my country and its allies or harmful to their cause." Many of the men in the Wonsan Waldorf had already, like Coyote, been threatened or beaten and ordered to sign unspecified papers or confessions for their captors.
So far, no one had given in, but Coyote had the distinct impression that the North Koreans were going to bear down hard on them. The gomers were impatient, even frantic to win their prisoners cooperation within the shortest time possible.
Coyote wondered why that was so.
"We still oughta start working on weapons for ourselves," Chief Bronkowicz said. "Just in case. I mean, if we see an opportunity-"
"sssst!" one of the lookouts warned, dropping down off his bucket and righting it. "Company!"
"… an' there I was, see?" Bronkowicz bellowed, slapping his ample belly. "Right there in the room with both these chicks stark naked, see? An' me with my-"
Keys rattled at the lock across the room, and the door banged open. Two soldiers in mustard-colored uniforms stepped inside, threatening the prisoners with their AK rifles. An officer, a squat, stocky little man, strode between the guards and stopped, hands on hips, surveying the room.
"I Major Po, Nyongch'on-kiji." The voice was flat, nasal, and so heavily accented Coyote had to concentrate hard to follow the words. "You sonabichi spies! Imperialist provocateurs! You admit! Tell world, sign paper! Now!" He gestured, pointing at a sailor near the wall. One of the guards strode forward, jabbing the seaman with his AK barrel and motioning the man toward the door. The major pointed to another. "An' that sonabichi." He strode down the length of the room, his boots clumping hollowly on the wooden floor. "An' that! An' that!" He reached the escape committee's circle, reached out, and grabbed Zabelsky by the collar of his dungaree shirt. "You, sonabichi! You too!"
"Don't start any good escapes without me, fellas," Zabelsky muttered as the major yanked him out of the circle. Coyote counted eight of Chimera's enlisted men being lined up.
Then they were gone, marched away at gunpoint. The door slammed shut behind them.
1148 hours (2148 hours EST)
Situation Room, the White House
The latest set of photographs from the KH-12 were on display on the rear projecti
on screen at one end of the room.
These were taken where?" the Chief of Naval Operations asked.
"Shithole called Nyongch'on," Marlowe replied. "Five miles south of Wonsan." He looked up from the brief prepared by the analysts at the NPIC minutes before. "There's a pass through the mountains there and the main road south to Anbyon. There's a village, Nyongch'on-ni, and a military base, or kiji. It's one of several in the area. Barracks, motor pool, a small airstrip."
"Damn," the President said. The poster-sized photograph showed part of a quonset-hut-type building of sheet tin, and another which looked like a concrete block warehouse, photographed from an oblique angle as though from an aircraft passing overhead. A line of eight men stood halfway between the two buildings, shepherded by other men holding weapons. While the features of individual faces hovered just beyond the tantalizing edge of visibility, there was no mistaking the uniforms: blue dungarees on the POWs, mustard brown NKPA uniforms on the guards. "Damn," the President said again. "The advances in the intelligence field, just in the last few years…"
"The boys over at NPIC say they'll be able to bring up more detail with computer enhancement," the DCI added. "Maybe even manage an ID on the faces. But I think what we have here is conclusive."
The President looked away from the photo. "Just what the hell do you mean by conclusive, Victor? Do they have all our people here, or just these? We have to know!"
"No way to tell, Mr. President," the CIA chief said. "We can see those eight. We can suppose they have more in one or more of those buildings. But…" He shrugged.
"Well, I don't know how we can even consider a military option, Mr. President," the Secretary of State said. "Especially when we Could hear from the Chinese at any time now."
Schellenberg had met with the Chinese ambassador that afternoon and again during the evening. An hour earlier he'd left Deputy Secretary of State Frank Rogers at the Chinese embassy and returned to the White House, there to wait as electronic messages bounced from Earth to satellite and back to Earth again, bridging the distances between Washington, Beijing, and P'yongyang.
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