"Then, since he had it, why didn't he give the damned assessment to MacArthur?"
"The way General Pickering put it, Mr. President, is that General MacArthur's loyalty to those officers who served with him in the Philippines and throughout World War Two is legendary."
"The `Bataan Gang,'" the President said. "I've heard about that, about them." He paused and looked at Hil-lenkoetter. "Where is the captain now?"
"I have no idea, sir. In the States, someplace. Maybe at Camp Pendleton, that's a separation center."
"What about General Pickering?"
"He lives in San Francisco."
The President looked at his watch.
"It's half past ten here," he said. "What'll it be in San Francisco?"
Hillenkoetter did the arithmetic.
"Half past seven, Mr. President."
Truman turned to the sideboard behind him and picked up the telephone.
"This is the President," he said. "In this order, get me General Fleming Pickering, in San Francisco, California."
He looked at Hillenkoetter.
"Have you got a number?"
"No, sir. And I should have one. I'm sorry, Mr. Presi-dent."
Truman waved a hand to show that it didn't matter, and turned his attention back to the telephone.
"Start looking for him at Pacific and Far East Shipping. When I'm through talking to him, get me Senator Fowler. I don't know where he is."
He put the telephone back in its cradle.
"If you have the time, Admiral, stick around until I make these calls."
"Of course, Mr. President."
"Do I have to tell you the fewer people who know about this, the better?"
"No, sir."
"You said you sent Dave Jacobs to the Far East. How much does he know?"
"Under the circumstances, Mr. President, I told David that I had reason to question the most recent data I was get-ting, and wanted it thoroughly checked. I didn't tell him why."
"Don't," the President said.
He pushed a button on a pad on the conference table.
A white-jacketed Navy steward appeared.
"I'm about to have a drink," the President said. "You?"
"Thank you, Mr. President."
[THREE]
THE PENTHOUSE
THE FOSTER SAN FRANCISCAN HOTEL NOB HILL,
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
1935 25 JUNE 1950
The chairman of the board of the Foster Hotel Corporation was about to dine with the chairman of the board of the Pa-cific & Far East Shipping Corporation in what was known as the Foster Hotel Corporation Executive Conference Center. When dealing with the Internal Revenue Service the center was treated as a reasonable and necessary busi-ness expense. It consisted of seven rooms atop the Foster San Franciscan, including a large conference room, three bedrooms, a lounge, a sauna, and a kitchen.
When the telephone rang, the chairman of the board of P&FE, attired in a bathrobe, swim trunks, and rubber san-dals, was sitting on a stool in the kitchen, watching the chairman of the board of the Foster Hotel Corporation, who was attired in a swimsuit and sandals, and standing at the kitchen stove.
Both executives had just come from the hotel's swim-ming pool, and on the elevator ride, the Foster Chairman had inquired of the P&FE Chairman what he wanted to do about dinner.
"You know what I really would like is a crab omelet," he replied.
"Good idea. And I think there's a bottle of champagne in the fridge."
"May I interpret that to mean you would not be averse to a little fooling around?"
"Flem, you're supposed to be too old for that sort of thing."
"I'm not."
"Thank God."
A telephone call had quickly produced a one-pound tub of lump crabmeat and a loaf of freshly baked French bread from the hotel kitchen. By the time it arrived, the champagne had been opened, and the P&FE chairman-who re-ally didn't like champagne-had brought a bottle of Fa-mous Grouse from the lounge to the kitchen.
When the telephone rang, the Foster chairman had in-quired, "I wonder who the hell that is."
Very few people had the number of the penthouse.
"If you picked it up, you could probably find our," Flem-ing Pickering suggested.
Patricia Fleming turned from her skillet and looked at her husband with what could be described as wifely loving contempt/affection and reached for the wall-mounted phone.
"Hello," she said, then: "Hold on a minute."
She extended the phone, which had a long cord, to her husband.
"Who is it?"
"Another of your legion of pals with a sophomoric sense of humor," Patricia said.
He walked across the kitchen, holding his whiskey glass, and took the telephone from his wife.
"Hello?"
"Brigadier General Fleming Pickering?" a female voice inquired.
"Who wants to know?"
"Brigadier General Fleming Pickering?" the woman asked again.
"This is Fleming Pickering."
"Hold one, please, General, for the President."
Fleming Pickering looked at his wife, who was shaking her head in disbelief at the childish humor of some of her husband's cronies.
"Sure," Pickering said, smiling as he wondered what was to come next.
"General Pickering?" a male voice inquired. "You got him. Come to attention when you speak with me."
"This is President Truman, General."
I'll be goddamned. "Yes, sir?"
"General, at four in the morning yesterday, North Korea launched an invasion of South Korea."
"I'm very sorry to hear that, sir."
Patricia Fleming's facial expression changed to one of concern. She pushed the skillet off the fire and went to her husband, putting her head next to his so that she could hear the conversation. She heard:
"There are very few details at this time, but enough to know that it's more than a border incident."
"Yes, sir."
"Admiral Hillenkoetter has told me of your visit to him," Truman said.
"Yes, sir?"
"Who?" Patricia asked. "Admiral who? What visit?"
"I would very much like to see you and Senator Fowler as soon as possible," Truman said. "Would you be willing to come to Washington?"
"Yes, Mr. President. Of course."
"And Captain McCoy. No one seems to know where he is. Do you?"
Well, Christ, Hillenkoetter didn't have to be a nuclear scientist to figure out the only place I could have gotten that assessment was from the Killer.
`To the best of my knowledge, Mr. President, he and his wife are driving from Charleston to Camp Pendleton, probably stopping off in St. Louis on the way."
"You don't know how to get in touch with him?"
"No, sir. I don't. He's due in Camp Pendleton on June twenty-ninth."
"What about in St. Louis? Have you got a number there?"
"Not here, sir, I'm sorry. I'm at home. If they stop off at St. Louis, it will be to see Captain George Hart, who's a policeman, head of the Homicide Bureau."
"They can deal with that," Truman said, as if to himself. "General, if you're willing to come, I'll have someone in the Air Force contact you very shortly about getting you on a plane."
"Yes, sir."
"I would be grateful, General, if this conversation, and anything about your meeting with Admiral Hillenkoetter, did not become public knowledge."
"Of course, sir. I understand, Mr. President."
"Thank you. I look forward to seeing you shortly, Gen-eral."
"Yes, sir."
"Thank you, again," Truman said, and the line went dead.
Pickering, deep in thought, put the telephone back in the wall rack.
"What the hell was that all about?" Patricia Fleming asked.
"It would appear, sweetheart, that we have just gone to war in Korea," he began.
They had just finished the crab omelet, and Pickering a sec-ond, stiff drink of Famous Gr
ouse, when the phone rang again.
Pickering walked to it and answered it.
"Hello?"
"General Pickering?"
"Yes, speaking."
Goddamn it, you're not General Pickering.
"General, this is Brigadier General Jason Gruber, U.S. Air Force."
"Yes?"
"My orders, General, are to get you to Andrews Air Force Base as quickly as possible. How would you feel about making the trip in an F-94? It would mean getting into a pressure suit...."
"I don't even know what an F-94 is," Pickering said.
"We just started taking delivery 1 June," General Gruber said. "It's a follow-on to the Lockheed Shooting Star, the F-80...."
"That's a fighter," Pickering said. "Is there room for a passenger in a fighter?"
"There's room for a radar operator in the rear cockpit. You give the word, I can be at Alameda Naval Air Station in about an hour."
"Where are you now?" Pickering asked, and before Gen-eral Gruber could answer, asked, "You'll be flying me?"
"I'm at Nellis Air Force Base, and yes, I'll be driving."
"I thought Nellis Air Force Base was in Las Vegas."
"It is," General Gruber said.
"And you can fly here in an hour?"
"If I kick in the afterburners, and I probably will, I can make it in thirty-five, forty minutes."
"My God!"
"The alternative is some kind of transport, General. That, of course, will take a lot longer to get you to Wash-ington. It's up to you."
"I'll need more than an hour," Pickering said. "There's something I have to do before I leave here."
"In two hours, it'll be twenty-two hundred. By then, I'll be refueled and ready to go. How big a man are you, General?"
"Six-one, a hundred ninety."
"And all we'll have to do is squeeze you into a pressure suit, and we can take off."
"How do I get into the Navy base?"
"Alameda will be waiting for you. You're traveling DP, General. Everything is greased. Believe me."
"What's DP?"
"Direction of the President. You didn't know?"
"No, I didn't."
"I'll see you at Alameda, General," General Gruber said, and hung up without saying anything else.
Pickering hung up the telephone and turned to Patricia.
"What was that all about?"
"I'm to be flown to Washington by an Air Force brigadier in a fighter I never heard of. We leave in two hours frem the Alameda Naval Air Station."
Patricia Fleming considered that.
"I'll drive you," she said. "It won't take us two hours to get to Alameda, Flem."
"The Air Force guy's coming from Las Vegas. He says he can do that in forty minutes. But I told him two hours," Pickering said.
"Why?"
"I have something-something important-I want to do here first."
"What could possibly be more important than-?" She stopped in midsentence, having taken his meaning.
"The same thing I had in mind when we got on the ele-vator thirty, forty minutes ago," he replied.
She looked at him for a moment, then smiled.
"Oh, Flem, I hope you never grow up."
[FOUR]
THE PRESS CLUB
TOKYO, JAPAN
1130 26 JUNE 1950
It has been said that while there just might be honor among thieves, there is absolutely none among journalists, at least insofar as beating a fellow member of the fourth estate out of a story-"getting it first"-is concerned.
But there is a little "scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" cooperative activity among journalists, and so it came to pass that when one distinguished member of the Tokyo press corps got it reliably that an Air Force C-54 was about to leave for Seoul to evacuate American depend-ents, he told one of his peers.
"That makes us even, right?" he asked, so that things were understood between them.
"Right," the second journalist said, then retired to the pri-vacy of his room to pick up his typewriter and his camera and a change of linen. While there, he remembered he owed a big one to a third journalist, and went to his room on the third floor of the Press Club Building, made sure he was alone, and then brought him in on the C-54 about to leave Haneda for Seoul.
It never entered the mind of any of the three journalists to inform Miss Jeanette Priestly, of the Chicago Tribune, of the Seoul-bound C-54. Whatever special courtesies her gender and all-around good looks might otherwise have seen coming her way were more than neutralized by their shared belief that she was one of the more skilled practi-tioners of their profession, and thus to be treated as they treated any other of their peers. Screw her, in a metaphori-cal sense, not to be confused with the physical.
The three-who had left the Press Club at different times, one of them by the kitchen door-were therefore disappointed but not really surprised when they met at Haneda Air Base base operations and found Miss Priestly there.
They were disappointed because there would now be four dashing and courageous journalists on the first plane to the war in Korea, not just three, and one of the four was of the gentle sex, which unquestionably diluted the Richard Harding Davis aura of their journey.
Davis was a hero to all three men, who all very privately hoped to emulate him. He had covered every war from the Greco-Turkish through World War I, managing along the way to charge up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War, and nearly get himself shot by the Germans as a spy in World War I. He then went on to be a highly successful novelist and playwright.
But there was nothing they could do about the comely Miss Priestly. She was duly accredited to the headquarters of the Supreme Commander, and thus just as entitled as they were to space-available accommodations on USAF transports.
And there was plenty of space. There was no one on the C-54 when it took off from Haneda but the five members of the crew and the four members of the press corps.
As they approached Seoul's Kimpo airfield, the pilot came back into the fuselage to tell them that, since North Korean Yak fighters had strafed the field and were likely to come back, and that since there was a strong possibility that the field had already been captured by the North Kore-ans, his just-received orders were to make a low pass over the field to see if there were any Americans waiting for them, and if not, to go back to Japan.
No, he could not land just to let the correspondents off.
There were Americans on the field, some of them franti-cally waving jackets to attract the attention of the C-54.
It landed, and the correspondents found Air Force Lieu-tenant Colonel Peter Scott busily burning documents in Base Operations.
Scott told them things were not as bad as they could be. Seoul had not been abandoned, as reported, and in fact, on direct orders from General Douglas MacArthur, the sixty-odd officers of the Korean Military Advisory Group, and the hundred or so enlisted men attached to KMAG who had evacuated the city, were now in the process of moving back into it.
The journalists asked Colonel Scott how they could get into Seoul, which was seven miles away. He pointed to the parking lot, which was jammed with Jeeps, trucks, and civilian automobiles, including nine recent-model Buicks.
"Most of them have keys in their ignitions," Colonel Scott said.
The male journalists then chivalrously suggested to Miss Priestly that under the circumstances, it behooved her to return to Tokyo aboard the C-54 with the dependents be-ing evacuated, while they went into Seoul. This was really no place for a woman.
Miss Priestly replied with a short pungent sentence that certainly was not very ladylike, but made it clear that she considered herself one of the boys, and had no intention of running away from the story.
The journalists watched the C-54 take off for Tokyo and then climbed into a nearly new Buick and drove into Seoul, where they had little trouble finding the large gray building housing KMAG.
There, Colonel Sterling Wright-who told them he w
as acting KMAG commander; Brigadier General William Roberts, the former commanding general, having left for a new assignment in the States and no replacement for him having arrived-repeated what they had heard from Lieutenant Colonel Scott at Kimpo: Things weren't as black as they had at first appeared.
W E B Griffin - Corp 09 - Under Fire Page 16
