Retreat, Hell! tc-10

by W. E. B Griffin

  From San Francisco, the Independence flew across the Pacific to the Barber's Point Naval Air Station, which is about fifteen miles from Honolulu.

  As they were making their approach to the airfield, Pickering idly wondered if they would wake the President—there were beds in all three compartments— for the landing. The question was answered immediately after the airplane stopped moving when Truman, obviously freshly shaved, appeared in the rear compartment and went around making small talk with everyone there from Army Secretary Pace through Brigadier General Pickering to a young man in civilian clothes whom Hart had identified to Pickering as an Army Warrant Of­ficer Cryptographer.

  Truman went down the stairway to both greet Admiral Arthur W. Radford, Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, and to stretch his legs a little while the aircraft was being fueled and fresh food brought aboard. His walk was cut short when another batch of messages requiring his immediate attention was brought to the aircraft.

  They were on the ground less than an hour.

  Pickering had just about made himself as comfortable as possible in his seat for the Hawaii-Wake Island leg of the flight when one of the Air Force stew­ards touched his shoulder.

  "The President would like to see you, General," he said. Truman, now in his shirtsleeves, was alone in his compartment when Pick­ering entered it. The Presidential bed had been returned to its couch function, and Truman was sitting on it before a table covered with documents. "You wanted to see me, Mr. President?" Truman held out two sheets of message paper.

  "Have a look at this, please, and tell me what you think, please," the Pres­ident said.

  TOP SECRET/PRESIDENTIAL

  OPERATIONAL IMMEDIATE

  DUPLICATION FORBIDDEN

  FROM SECRETARY OF DEFENSE

  VIA WHITE HOUSE COMMUNICATIONS CENTER

  0905 WASHINGTON TIME 14OCTOBER1950

  TO COMMANDER IN CHIEF PACIFIC

  EYES ONLY ADMIRAL RADFORD

  PLEASE INSURE FOLLOWING MESSAGE FROM CHIEF PRESIDENTIAL MISSION TO FAR EAST TO THE

  COMMANDER IN CHIEF CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET/PRESIDENTIAL IS DELIVERED TO THE PRESIDENT ONLY

  REPEAT TO THE PRESIDENT ONLY ON ARRIVAL AT BARBERS POINT

  BEST PERSONAL REGARDS

  GEORGE C MARSHALL

  BEGIN PERSONAL MESSAGE FROM MAJOR GENERAL HOWE

  1235 TOKYO TIME 13OCTOBER1950

  DEAR HARRY

  WONSAN ON EAST COAST OF KOREA FELL TO CAPITAL ROK DIVISION SEVERAL HOURS AGO

  MACARTHUR NEVERTHELESS INTENDS TO CONTINUE WITH PLAN TO MOVE X CORPS BY SEA TO WONSAN AND TOLD ME THAT DESPITE QUOTE BRILLIANT PERFORMANCE ENDQUOTE OF ROKS THEY DO NOT HAVE THE NECESSARY TRANSPORT AND HEAVY ARTILLERY HE FEELS IS NECESSARY TO SUPPORT RAPID MOVEMENT TOWARD CHINESE BORDER AT YALU RIVER

  IN MY OPINION HE IS CORRECT AS ROK FORCES ARE STILL EQUIPPED MOSTLY WITH HAND-ME-DOWNS

  I ALSO HAVE THE FEELING THAT HE WANTS A STRONG AMERICAN PRESENCE THERE TO INSURE (A) THE CAPTURE OF PYONGYANG AS SOON AS POSSIBLE (B) THE ROKS DO NOT GO ANY FARTHER THAN THE YALU AND (C) THE ROKS PAY MORE ATTENTION TO THE GENEVA CONVENTION THAN THEY PROBABLY WOULD IF AMERICANS WERE NOT AROUND

  WHAT THE NORTH KOREANS DID TO THE SOUTH KOREANS DEFIES DESCRIPTION AND THEY WILL CERTAINLY SEEK VENGEANCE UNLESS HE SITS ON THEM

  MACARTHUR ALSO SAID HE IS QUOTE THINKING ABOUT ENDQUOTE TRYING TO FORM AN ARMORED COLUMN TO TAKE PYONGYANG EVEN SOONER THAN X CORPS COULD GET THERE

  HE SAYS HE IS REASONABLY CONFIDENT ORGANIZED RESISTANCE WILL END BY THANKSGIVING AND THAT HE HAS QUOTE REASONABLE HOPES ENDQUOTE OF BEING ABLE TO WITHDRAW EIGHTH ARMY TO KOREA BY CHRISTMAS

  THE REPORTS OF AGENTS INSERTED BY CIA (MAJOR MCCOY)IN THE EAST AND LTCOL VANDENBURG IN THE WEST IN WHICH I PLACE MORE FAITH THAN INTEL MACARTHUR IS GETTING FROM HIS SOURCES ALL REPORT (A) BREAKDOWN OF NORTH KOREAN EFFECTIVENESS (B) THAT NORTH KOREANS MADE STRONG EFFORT TO TAKE OUR POWS WITH THEM

  VANDENBURG TELLS ME HE THINKS RESCUE OF GENERAL DEAN BECOMES MORE UNLIKELY BY THE DAY ALTHOUGH HE AND MCCOY ARE PREPARED TO STAGE RAID USING HELICOPTERS IF HE CAN BE LOCATED

  MCCOY INSISTS NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS ABOUT PICKERING'S SON I CAN ONLY HOPE HE'S RIGHT

  MCCOY SAYS HE IS GETTING QUOTE UNCONFIRMED AND THUS UNRELIABLE ENDQUOTE REPORTS OF EXTENSIVE MOVEMENT OF CHINESE TROOPS TOWARD YALU

  REMEMBERING HOW RIGHT MCCOY WAS THE LAST TIME I CAN ONLY HOPE HE WILL BE WRONG NOW

  GENERAL WILLOUGHBY AND MACARTHUR FEEL INTERVENTION IS NOT EVEN A REMOTE POSSIBILITY

  I STILL THINK PICKERING WOULD HAVE BEEN BEST CHOICE TO STRAIGHTEN OUT THE CIA BUT I UNDERSTAND YOUR CHOICE OF BEDELL SMITH WHO VERY MUCH IMPRESSED ME THE FEW TIMES I MET HIM

  RESPECTFULLY

  RALPH

  END PERSONAL MESSAGE FROM GENERAL HOWE

  TOP SECRET/PRESIDENTIAL

  Pickering read it and handed it back to the President.

  "Anything in there you don't agree with?" the President asked.

  "I don't think General Howe is right about me and the CIA, Mr. President."

  Truman smiled.

  "Anything else?"

  "No, sir."

  "I'm sorry there's no better news about your son, General," the President said. "But I'm one of those people who believe that the opera isn't over until the fat lady sings."

  "I've heard that, Mr. President," Pickering said.

  "That'll be all, General," the President said. "Would you ask one of the sergeants to ask General Bradley to come up here?" "Yes, sir."

  Chapter Ten

  [ONE]

  No. 7 Saku-Tun Denenchofu,

  Tokyo, Japan

  O915 14 October 195O

  Clad only in underpants and brassiere, Miss Jeanette Priestly, of the Chicago Tri­bune, bent over a bed while stuffing an Army-issue rucksack. She looked up as Mrs. Ernestine Sage McCoy—whose exquisitely embroidered kimono almost but not quite concealed the evidence of her advanced pregnancy—came into the bedroom.

  Jeanette smiled as Ernie carefully lowered herself onto the foot of the mattress.

  "I used to have one of those," Ernie said.

  "A rucksack?" Jeanette replied, surprised. "You were a Girl Scout?"

  "I meant a flat belly, with a cute little navel that used to drive the boys wild when I wore a bikini," Ernie said. "Now look at me!" She patted her stomach. "I look like a boa constrictor that just swallowed a whole pig."

  Jeanette laughed. "Not quite that bad," she said.

  "Bad enough," Ernie said.

  Jeanette's tone turned serious. "Can I offer a word of advice?"

  "No," Ernie replied sharply, then softened the edge. "Thank you, but no. I know what you're going to say: Go home and have the baby."

  "I feel like a shit leaving you alone in your condition," Jeanette said.

  "I'm not due until the middle of December," Ernie said. "You'll be back be­fore then, right?"

  "I'll be back in a week," Jeanette said. "But I don't want to walk in here a week from now and . . . hear something unpleasant."

  "You want to be here when something unpleasant happens, right?"

  "That's not what I meant, and you know it," Jeanette said. "But yeah, if something does go wrong—and so far you have a lousy record of going all the way through the childbearing process—I'd like to be here."

  "What'll happen will happen," Ernie said. "I'm doing everything the doc­tor told me to do, which really means not doing anything on a long list of things I'm not supposed to do. I'll be all right."

  "If I say, reassuringly, 'Certainly, you'll be all right,' you'll use that as an ex­cuse not to go home. If I say—"

  "Jeanette, this is home. This is the first house Ken and I have ever owned."

  "A fact—you told me—you carefully concealed from him until very re­cently."

  "I thought of it as my house, our house," Ernie said. "You know why I couldn't tell him. He was trying to be a good Marine officer."

  "And for being a very good Marine officer, they started to kick him out of the Marine Corps. There's a m
oral in there somewhere."

  Ernie exhaled audibly.

  "So what happens to him when this war is over?" Jeanette asked. "Which it may be by the time I get to Korea, from what they're saying at the Dai Ichi Building."

  "I wish I knew," Ernie said. "He doesn't say anything—good Marine offi­cers don't criticize the sacred Marine Corps—but he has to be bitter about what they did to him."

  "What would you like to happen?"

  "What almost did," Ernie said. "When we thought he was being 'involun­tarily released,' which is the euphemism for getting kicked out, we went to see Colonel Ed Banning and his wife, and the Zimmermans, in Charleston. . . ."

  "Who's Banning?"

  "He and Ken and Ernie go all the way back to the 4th Marines in Shang­hai. He's the one who sent Ken to Officer Candidate School. They were together all through World War Two. Anyway, before this goddamn war came along, Banning—who was about to retire—and Zimmerman were going to develop an island. . . ."

  "Develop an island?" Jeanette parroted.

  "You know, build houses on it and sell them. Their idea was to sell them to retired Marines. But I saw the island, and I think they could sell them to just about anybody. The island is just off the coast, and it's just beautiful. Anyway—"

  "Where are they going to get the money to do something like that?" Jeanette interrupted.

  "Banning owns the island; he has money," Ernie replied. "A lot of money. He was Ken's role model for living on Marine pay, but he doesn't have to play poor when he retires. And Ernie's wife has the King Midas touch. They own a half-dozen businesses outside Parris Island. Anyway, they asked Ken to go in with them. He seemed to think it was a good idea. But that was when his choices were going back to being a sergeant or the island. Now . . . now they gave him his golden major's oak leaf back. I don't know what he'll do."

  "You want to do this island-building thing?"

  "Oh, yeah, I want to do the island-building thing."

  "Then tell him, 'I've been chasing you around for all this time, now it's your turn to do what I want for a while.' "

  "He would, but it's not that easy. As you're about to find out."

  "Meaning what?"

  "You got the brass ring," Ernie said. "You will have succeeded—or will, as soon as Ken gets Pick back—in getting Don Juan Pickering to the altar, suc­ceeding where God only knows how many women have tried and failed. But its not going to be easy. You better win the Pulitzer prize now, because when you march down the aisle to the strains of 'Here Comes the Bride,' you'll have taken yourself out of the competition."

  "Two questions, and no bullshit, please. Do you think Pick's coming back?"

  "Yeah, I do. No bullshit. I think I would know if he wasn't. I really love the sonofabitch; he really is like my brother. Next question?"

  "You don't think Pick would like it if I kept working? Maybe get a job on a newspaper in San Francisco?"

  "You never thought about this, huh? Your girlish mind was full of visions of the Sugar Plum Fairy? Moonlight? Violins playing 'I Love You, Truly' to the exclusion of everything else?"

  "Don't be a bitch, Ernie," Jeanette said, and added, thoughtfully, "No, I guess I never did."

  "Looking into my crystal ball, I see you, seven months after you march down the aisle, in this condition," Ernie said, and patted her swollen belly.

  "I like the notion," Jeanette said. "I don't know how I'm going to like ac­tually going through what you're going through."

  "I think you'll like it," Ernie said. "There's something really satisfying about being pregnant. Anyway, shortly after that, you'll have a baby. When that hap­pens, I don't think you'll really mind being a wife and mother, instead of a dash­ing war correspondent. To answer the question: No, I don't think Pick would like it at all if you kept on working. Knowing him as I do—and I know him, I think, better than anybody—what he will expect of you, when he comes home from setting a speed record between San Francisco and Timbuktu or wherever, will be to find you at the door wearing something very sexy, with the bed already turned down, champagne on ice, and the baby asleep in clean diapers."

  "I just can't stop working, for Christ's sake!"

  "It'll be your choice," Ernie said. "Like I say, I know him. He's really a great guy. But he's not a saint. What he is is a man, and all of them are selfish. They want what they want, and all we can do is learn to live with it. If we can't do that, we lose the man."

  "Jesus Christ! And here I was feeling sorry for you."

  "Don't feel sorry for me. I like my life—I love my life—with Ken."

  "Yeah, that shows," Jeanette said. "Jesus Christ, Jeanette Priestly, wife, mother, and diaper changer!"

  "Jeanette Pickering," Ernie corrected her.

  "That does have a nice ring to it, doesn't it?" Jeanette asked.

  She closed the rucksack and pulled the straps tight.

  "You noticed, I'm sure, that amongst my delicate feminine apparel were two sets of GI long Johns?"

  "I noticed."

  "They itch," Jeanette said. "But Korea is cold at night. It is better to itch and scratch than to freeze your ass. Write that down."

  Ernie laughed.

  "You don't have to go with me to Haneda," Jeanette said.

  "Yeah, I do," Ernie said.

  Jeanette reached down to the bed and picked up and put on an olive-drab undershirt and a pair of olive-drab men's shorts. Over this, she put on a set of fatigues, then slipped her feet first into Army-issue woolen cushion sole socks and then into combat boots.

  She looked at Ernie.

  "How do I look?' she asked.

  "Oddly enough," Ernie said, "very feminine."

  "Bullshit, but thanks anyway."

  She picked up the rucksack and walked out of the bedroom.

  [TWO]

  Near Jaeun-Ri, South Korea

  1145 14 October 195O

  Major Malcolm S. Pickering, USMCR, who had at first known to the minute how many days and hours and minutes it had been since he had had to set his Corsair down—how long he had been on the run—now didn't have any idea at all.

  He wasn't even sure if he had eaten his last rice ball yesterday or the day be­fore yesterday.

  All he was sure about was that deciding to move northeastward was prob­ably the worst fucking mistake he had made in his life. And might well be the last major mistake of his life.

  There was nothing in this part of Korea but steep hills and more steep hills. No rice paddies. Damned few roads, and from what he'd seen of the traffic on them, it was mostly long lines of retreating North Korean soldiers, most of them on foot.

  North American P-51 fighters, carrying the insignia of the South Korean Air Force, regularly flew over the roads, strafing anything they saw moving. They flew so low that there was no question in Pickering's mind that if he just stood in the middle of one of the roads he would be seen by one of the P-51 pilots, who would then stand the airplane on its wing, do a quick one-eighty, and then come back and let him have a burst from the eight .50-caliber Brown­ings in its wings.

  The P-51 pilot would logically presume that anyone on these roads was a North Korean. The South Koreans were holed up someplace out of sight. He'd also come across, making his way over the mountains, a dozen or more rock formations that by stretching the term could be called caves. They didn't go deep into the mountains, but far enough so that a family of five or six could go into one of them and not be visible from either the ground or the air.

  When one of the South Korean P-51s, or a section of them, caught a pla­toon, or a company, of North Koreans in the open and strafed them, the dead and wounded were left where they had been hit. There were very few North Ko­rean vehicles of any kind, and the few trucks he had seen—some of them cap­tured 6 X 6s and weapons carriers—were jammed with the walking wounded. They had kept their arms and used them to guarantee their positions on the trucks.

  There was therefore the smell of rotting bodies that seemed to be getting worse, not bette
r, even though it was getting chilly all the time, and freezing cold at night.

  There was no question that the tide of war had changed. The North Kore­ans were not only retreating but bore little resemblance to an organized mili­tary force.

  So obviously all he had to do was . . .

  Make himself invisible to the P-51 pilots, so they wouldn't blow him away. To that end, he had plastered his face and hands with mud, so they would not be a bright spot on the ground to be investigated and strafed. Or maybe just strafed, skipping the investigation, and . . .

  Make himself invisible to the retreating North Koreans, who would almost certainly shoot him if they could, not for a military reason but to see if he had anything to eat, and . . .

  Wait for friendly troops to come up one of the roads. There were several problems with that. Friendly troops would, like the P-51 pilots, conclude that anybody here in the middle of nowhere was a North Korean. American troops might take such people prisoner. From what he had seen, the South Koreans would not.

  The major problem was that he had been on short rations since he'd been shot down, and over the last four or five days the short rations had diminished to zero. And since he had stopped eating, he could feel his strength diminish­ing with each step—each labored breath—he took.

  He didn't think, in other words, that he was going to make it.

  He was not going to give up, but on the other hand there wasn't much dif­ference between what he was able to do and giving up. Unless, of course, he gave up by taking a dive off the nearby cliff or putting the .45 to his temple, and even being hungry, dirty, tired, and sick seemed better than those options. With his luck, he thought, he wouldn't get killed taking a dive off the cliff, he would break both legs and arms and lie in agony for Christ only knew how long.

  There was another option to checking out, if that's what was going to hap­pen, and that was to lie on one of the boulders and let the sun warm him while he thought of Jeanette.

  At first, when he thought of Jeanette, the thoughts were erotic. Now when he thought of her, there was little lust in the fantasy. He remembered how she smelled and the soft touch of her fingers on his face.

  It would be very nice, he thought, if he wasn't going to make it, if he went to sleep in the sun thinking of Jeanette and then just never woke up.