“I’ll send Kon San and the others shopping,” Ernie said. “And get a pad and pencil. If you’re going to drink in there, you bring the bottle and glasses.”
[THREE]
“Let’s start from scratch,” Taylor said, pointing with a pencil at a map laid out on the dining room table. “Here’s Taemuui-do Island and here’s Yonghung-do Island, both of which have to be taken before the invasion fleet can make it into Inchon.
“If they’re taken on D Minus One, as the brass wants to do, that means the North Koreans will know about the invasion twenty-four hours before it happens, and damned sure will be waiting for the invasion. So the thing to do, it seems to me, is take them just as soon as we can.”
“Wouldn’t that give the North Koreans even more notice of the invasion?” Ernie McCoy asked.
It was evident on Taylor’s face that he was not accustomed to having a woman—even an officer’s wife—just join in a discussion of a military operation.
“It would, Mrs. McCoy—”
“Please call me ’Ernie,’ ” she interrupted.
“Okay. It would, Ernie, if the Army did it. Or the Marines. But if they thought it was a South Korean operation, they might—probably would—think it was just that. And if their intelligence didn’t come up with any unusual Naval activity in the next week, ten days, they’d probably relax again.”
“I see a couple of problems with that,” McCoy said, “starting with the fact that the South Koreans don’t have any forces to spare, and if they did, they wouldn’t know to attack an island.”
“I’m not thinking of the South Korean Army, McCoy,” Taylor said. “I want to do this with irregulars, guerrillas, militia, whatever the right word is.”
“Where are they going to come from?” McCoy said.
“We recruit them, train them . . .”
“Who’s we?” McCoy asked. “You and me?”
“Give me a chance with this, will you, McCoy?” Taylor said.
“Go ahead,” McCoy said. “Convince me.”
“There are hardly any troops on these islands. Maybe a platoon, maybe a reinforced platoon on Taemuui-do, and even fewer men on Yonghung-do. And they’re not first-class troops, either. Some of them are North Korean national police.”
“How do you know that?”
“I know,” Taylor said.
“As of when?”
“As of ten days ago,” Taylor said.
“That’s what’s known as old intelligence,” McCoy said. “A lot can happen in ten days.”
“Mr. Taylor, he’s always doing that,” Zimmerman said. “Looking for the worst thing. Trust me, he’s good at this sort of sh—operation.”
“But keep in mind, Taylor,” Hart said, “that his bite is really worse than his bark.”
There were chuckles.
“On the Tokchok-kundo islands . . . ,” Taylor said, pointing at the map again, “here, in addition to the natives, there’re a lot of refugees from the mainland. And fishermen from Inchon, and up and down the coast, are always going there. Going off at a tangent, the fishermen should be put to work keeping us aware of what’s going on in the area; they’re always going in and out of Inchon, and the North Koreans leave them alone, by and large.”
“Are you talking about recruiting the natives and the refugees?” McCoy asked.
“Something wrong with that? Those people don’t want the North Koreans to win. They know what will happen to them.”
“I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it,” McCoy said.
“Ken, you and I could go have a look,” Zimmerman said.
“Yeah,” McCoy said, thoughtfully.
“If we could recruit these people, quietly,” Taylor urged, “arm them, train them, and maybe get a destroyer to provide some naval gunfire—it wouldn’t take much—we could—they could—take both Taemuui-do and Yonghung-do, and the North Koreans would think the South Koreans were doing it because they thought they could get away with it.”
“And not as step one in an amphibious invasion of Inchon, ” Ernie McCoy said, agreeing with him. “Ken?”
“I could probably talk General Craig out of enough Marines to train these people. . . . You’re talking about training them right on those islands, right?”
“Right.”
“Killer, there’re South Korean marines,” Zimmerman said.
“Yeah, we saw them on the pier in Pusan, right?” McCoy replied. His tone made it clear that he didn’t want to employ South Korean marines in this operation.
“They wouldn’t need anything heavy,” Taylor said. “Carbines and .30-caliber air-cooled machine guns. Maybe a couple of mortars.”
“The problem is going to be getting this past Whitney and the other clowns on the SCAP staff. From painful personal experience, I know they don’t think much of operations like this.”
“But you think it would work?” Taylor asked.
“Well, hell, it’s worth a shot. But Ernie—the Ernie with the beard—is right. We’ll have to take a look at these islands ourselves.”
“The question, Killer, is what are you going to say when the boss asks you what you think of the idea?” Zimmerman said.
“It makes sense,” McCoy said. “It’s worth a shot. Anything that will change the odds at Inchon in our favor is worth a shot.”
“How are you going to get to those islands?” Ernie McCoy asked.
“I don’t know yet. We must have some Navy vessels operating in that area that could sneak us in at night.”
“They don’t have PT boats anymore, do they?” Zimmerman asked.
“No. They’d be ideal, too,” McCoy said. “There must be something.”
“There’s some junks around with diesel engines in them,” Taylor said.
“That would do it,” McCoy said. “How do we get one?”
“Have the South Korean Navy commandeer one,” Hart suggested.
“No. That would attract too much attention. Maybe we could buy one.”
“Buy one?” Taylor asked.
“Now, that opens a whole new line of interesting thoughts,” McCoy said. “If the boss would go along, we could run this as a CIA operation, and we wouldn’t have to ask SCAP’s permission. Just, when the time is right, hand them the islands.”
“I’m new to all this,” Taylor said. “Would there be money for something like this?”
“Oh, yeah. The one thing the CIA doesn’t have to worry about is money. I’m going to go to the boss and see if he can’t give me some money to buy information about Pick. Money is not a problem.”
“He won’t want special treatment for Pick, honey,” Ernie said.
“I’m going to tell him he doesn’t have any choice,” McCoy said. “I’d like to get Pick back before the North Koreans find out his father is the Assistant Director for Asia of the CIA.”
“I didn’t think about that,” Ernie said.
“You sound as if you’re pretty sure he’s alive,” Taylor said.
“Yeah. Probably because I do,” McCoy said. “Okay. If we have to show this to the boss and General Howe by seventeen hundred, we’re going to have to get off the dime. There’s a typewriter here, honey, right?”
“Yes,” Ernie said, simply.
“You make coffee, and I’ll type, okay?”
“You think Pick’s alive?” she asked.
He met her eyes and nodded.
“George,” she said, “I’m a delicate woman. You can carry the typewriter.”
[FOUR]
THE DEWEY SUITE THE IMPERIAL HOTEL TOKYO, JAPAN 1905 3 AUGUST 1950
“I’d like a word with General Pickering,” Howe said.
Captains McCoy and Hart, Master Gunner Zimmerman, Lieutenant Taylor and Mrs. Kenneth McCoy started to get up from their chairs at the table of the dining room.
“Keep your seats,” General Howe said. “This won’t take long. Can we use your bedroom, General?”
“Of course,” Pickering said, got up, and led the way out of the din
ing room.
Howe closed the door of Pickering’s bedroom behind them, walked to the desk against the wall, and leaned on it.
“There wasn’t much—damned near nothing—in the CIA reports I read in Washington about these islands,” he said. “Is there any more that you know of?”
Pickering shook his head, “no.”
“I’ve been going damned near blind since I got here, reading the files,” he said. “I didn’t see anything. It looks like all we know about them is what Taylor is telling us.”
“We can’t go on that alone, Fleming,” Howe said.
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘go,’ Ralph,” Pickering said.
“Earlier today, I messaged the President that I thought the Inchon invasion was idiotic,” Howe said. “The phrase I used was ‘from my understanding of its feasibility, the risks involved would seem to make the invasion inadvisable. ’ If I had had him on the phone, I would have said, ‘It looks like a dumb idea to me, Harry.’ ”
Pickering didn’t reply.
“And then we had our afternoon with General MacArthur,” Howe said. “After which I tried to call the President. He was not available. So I left a message with his secretary. ‘Last judgment Inchon premature. Sorry. More follows soonest.’”
"MacArthur changed your mind?” Pickering said.
“He should have been a door-to-door salesman,” Howe said. “He could have made a fortune selling Bibles to atheists. ”
Pickering chuckled.
“When he’s in good form, he’s really something.”
“If you don’t want to answer this, don’t,” Howe said. “What did you message the President?”
“ ‘I have concluded that despite the obvious problems, the Inchon invasion is possible, and the benefits therefrom outweigh the risks,’ ” Pickering said. It was obvious he was quoting himself verbatim.
“You think he can carry it off?”
“I’ve seen him in action, Ralph. That military genius business is not hyperbole.”
“What do you think of Taylor’s idea?”
“I think the bunch around MacArthur—and maybe MacArthur himself, if it ever got that high—would reject it out of hand—”
“Maybe not ‘out of hand,’ ” Howe interrupted.
Pickering looked at him a moment.
“You’re right,” he said. “They would ‘carefully consider’ the proposal, such careful consideration lasting until it would be too late to put it into execution.”
“As I understand the role of the CIA, Fleming,” Howe said, “it is an intelligence-gathering operation.”
“So I understand.”
“Taylor suggested that the people on the islands are possessed of knowledge of intelligence value . . .”
“He did say that, didn’t he?”
“And unless I’m mistaken, the Assistant Director of the CIA for Asia doesn’t need MacArthur’s approval to conduct what could be considered a routine intelligence-gathering operation. . . .”
“As a matter of fact, I don’t even have to tell El Supremo what I’m doing,” Pickering said. “Or have done.”
“How annoyed do you suppose he’d be if—when—he found out later?” Howe asked.
“If we can take those bottleneck islands quietly, with McCoy and a dozen or so Marines in the next couple of weeks, MacArthur will thereafter refer to it as ‘my clandestine operation.’ If this blows up in our faces—which would, obviously, signal the North Koreans that we plan to land at Inchon—Whitney and Willoughby would recommend public castration, prior to my being hung by the neck until dead, and he’d probably go along.”
“You don’t sound particularly worried.”
“I have the gut feeling that Taylor knows what he’s talking about, and I know McCoy is just the man who could organize and execute an operation like this.”
Howe met Pickering’s eyes for a moment, then nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “How about this? ‘Have just learned Pickering is conducting a clandestine operation, which, if successful, will remove my primary objection to an invasion at Inchon. I believe the operation will be successful. More follows.’ ”
“That’s what you’re going to send?”
“I’m afraid if I call again, he’ll take my call,” Howe said.
“And if President Truman calls you?”
“By then, I suspect, Captain McCoy and Lieutenant Taylor and Mr. Zimmerman . . . is Zimmerman going?”
“They’re a team,” Pickering said.
“. . . will be en route to the Flying Fish Channel islands, and, since we have no means of communicating with them, until they reach the islands—and maybe not then—it will be too late to call the operation off.”
XIII
[ONE]
HEADQUARTERS, 1ST MARINE BRIGADE (PROVISIONAL) NEAR CHINDONG-NI, SOUTH KOREA 1505 4 AUGUST 1950
The helicopter pad at Brigade Headquarters consisted of a flat area more or less paved with bricks, brick-size stones and gravel, and a windsock mounted on what looked like two tent poles lashed together.
Ten Marines, five enlisted men—a sergeant major and four Jeep drivers, ranging from private to buck sergeant— and five officers—a lieutenant colonel, a major, two captains, and one master gunner—stood to one side and watched as the HO3S-1 helicopter made its approach and fluttered to the ground.
U.S. Marine Corps HO3S-1, tail number 142, was one of four Sikorsky helicopters that had been quickly detached from HMX-16at Quantico, Virginia, and assigned to the lst Marine Brigade’s observation squadron, VMO-6, when the brigade was ordered to Korea. VMO-6 had four other aircraft, Piper Cub-type fixed-wing aircraft called OY-2 by the Marine Corps, and L-4 by the Army.
The HO3S-1 was manufactured by the Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation, and had in fact been designed by Igor Sikorsky, a Russian refugee from communism himself. Sikorsky had also earlier designed the—then huge—Sikorsky Flying Boats, which had permitted the first intercontinental passenger travel.
The HO3S-1 was powered by a nine-cylinder, 450-horsepower radial Pratt & Whitney engine. It had a three-blade main rotor, which turned in a 48-foot arc. It could lift just over 1,500 pounds (fuel, cargo, and up to three passengers, plus pilot, in any combination) and fly that much weight at up to 102 miles per hour in ideal conditions for about 250 miles.
For the first time, commanders had a means to move literally anywhere on the battlefield at 100 miles per hour. Brigadier General Edward A. Craig, who had begun to use the helicopters the moment they had arrived in Korea, later said that without the helicopters he doubted they “would have had the success we did” in Korea.
Three of the five officers awaiting the helicopter were members of General Edward A. Craig’s staff. The lieutenant colonel was his G-3, the major his G-2, and one of the captains his aide-de-camp. The second captain and the master gunner were not.
Aside from the briefing Captain McCoy had given the assembled officers on the attack transport the day they arrived in Pusan, the S-3 had never seen him before, and frankly doubted the sergeant major’s belief that the clean-cut young officer was the legendary “Killer” McCoy who had single-handedly stabbed twenty Japanese to death inShanghai, or some such bullshit. For one thing, he didn’t look old enough, and for another, he didn’t believe the story about twenty stabbed-to-death Japanese.
What he thought was that McCoy was an intelligence officer with an exaggerated opinion of his own importance and his role in the Marine Corps scheme of things.
Marine captains customarily answer any question lieutenant colonels put to them. When he had asked Captain McCoy why he wished to see the general, McCoy had—politely, to be sure—told him that he was not at liberty to discuss that.
The S-3, the aide-de-camp, and the sergeant major, all of whom considered it part of their duties to protect the general from wasting his time dealing with people who could have their problems solved by somebody else, were all privately hoping that General Craig would emerge from his helicopter, lea
rn that Captain McCoy had demanded to know when he would return to the CP, and eat him a new asshole.
Everyone more or less came to attention when the door of the helicopter opened and General Craig got out. The G-3 and Captain McCoy saluted.
“Reporting for duty, McCoy?” Craig asked, as he returned the salute.
“No, sir. I need a few minutes of your time.”
“I have very little of that,” Craig said. “What do you need?”
“Sir, I have to speak to you privately.”
“Okay, let’s go to the CP,” he said.
“Sir,” the S-3 said, “there’re several things. . .”
“First, McCoy gets three minutes, Okay?”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The Jeeps made a little convoy as they drove to the command post, a rather spartan sandbag-reinforced collection of tents set up against a steep incline. Bringing up the rear was a Jeep whose bumper markings identified it as belonging to the signal company of the Army’s 24th Division. It held Captain McCoy and Master Gunner Zimmerman, who was driving.
General Craig’s “office” was a chair and a desk, on which sat two field telephones in the interior of one of the tents. With his sergeant major, the G-3, the G-2, his aide, his sergeant major and McCoy and Zimmerman on his heels, he walked to it.
General Craig mimed wanting coffee to one of the clerks, who said, “Aye, aye, sir,” and went to the stainless-steel pitcher sitting on an electric burner on the dirt floor.
“Okay, McCoy,” General Craig said. “I interpret ‘a few minutes’ to mean no more than three. Then you can get yourself a cup of coffee.”
“Sir, I must speak to you privately.”
“Captain, Colonel Fuster is my G-3. He has all the security clearances he needs.”
“With respect, sir, he doesn’t,” McCoy said.
Craig looked at him coldly for a moment.
“This had better be important, Captain,” Craig said, then, to the G-3, “Give us three minutes, please, Colonel.”
Lieutenant Colonel Fuster said, “Aye, aye, sir,” and gestured to the G-2, the aide, and the sergeant major to leave the general’s “office.”
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