Under Fire

by Griffin, W. E. B.

  “Don’t I?”

  “No,” she said, and put the Leica up and took his picture.

  “I told you the next time you took my picture without asking, I’d throw your camera over the side.”

  “You didn’t mean that either,” she said. “And anyway, you can’t do that now. Anyone on shore would see it.”

  He shook his head.

  “You looked very thoughtful, just now, before you saw me,” Jeanette said. “Penny for your thoughts, Captain McCoy. ”

  “Jesus Christ!” he said, but he realized he was smiling.

  “Well?”

  “When I was a kid,” he said, “my grandmother had a big plate—from China, I guess—in her dining room. It was painted with pictures of pagodas, and there was a junk, and trees—”

  “Willows,” she interrupted. “They were willow trees. They call those dishes ‘Blue Willow,’ I think.”

  “If you say so,” he went on. “And I used to look at the damn thing all the time. It fascinated me. Little did that little boy know that one day he would get to ride on a real junk in the Yellow Sea—”

  “Maybe you are human after all,” she said.

  “—with a crazy lady who’s likely to get herself killed, like the cat, from curiosity.”

  “I’m just trying to do my job,” she said.

  “Your job is interfering with me doing mine,” he said. “When I stand up in a couple of minutes, you stay where you are until I tell you you can move. If you stand up, I’m going to knock you down. Got it?”

  “That, I think you mean,” she said. “Okay.”

  A minute later, McCoy gingerly raised his head alongside a stanchion, took a quick look, and dropped quickly back down.

  “Remember the cat,” Jeanette said. “What did you see?”

  “We’re fifty yards, maybe a little more, from the wharf. Aside from a couple of hungry-looking dogs on shore, I didn’t see any sign of life at all.”

  Korean seamen lowered all but one sail.

  McCoy waited for Taylor to start the engine, in case they had to make a quick exit.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  “What?” Jeanette asked.

  “Taylor said he was going to start the engine,” McCoy said.

  He looked down the deck to Major Kim, who met his glance, then shrugged and held both hands, palms up and out. The message was clear: I don’t see anything.

  McCoy stood up, as the Wind of Good Fortune scraped against the stone wharf.

  Aside from the dogs, who had come from the shore out onto the wharf in curiosity, there was still no sign of life.

  “Kim, get your men over the side, get us tied up,” McCoy ordered in Korean, and then switched to English. “Ernie, send four men down the wharf to see what they can see in the village.”

  Zimmerman came out of the passageway under the stern in a crouch, carrying his Thompson. He laid it on the deck and tossed a rope ladder over the side. By the time he had done that, two Marines, one armed with a Browning automatic rifle, the other with a Garand, came out of the passageway and knelt behind the rail, training their weapons on the wharf.

  Zimmerman, his Thompson slung over his back, started down the ladder and passed from sight. Sergeant Jennings, also with a Thompson, came out of the passageway and immediately went down the ladder. The Marine with the M-1 then slung it over his back and went over the side. He was followed by the Marine with the BAR, who chose to toss his weapon over the side to one of the Marines on the wharf before getting on the ladder.

  McCoy was pleased with the way that had gone. Not only did the Marines who had been recruited from the brigade seem to know what they were doing, but they were halfway down the wharf before Kim’s national policemen managed to get the Wind of Good Fortune tied up to the pier.

  “Can I stand up now?” Jeanette asked.

  “In a minute,” McCoy answered.

  An elderly Korean man came out of one of the thatch-roofed stone houses as the Marines reached the shore. Zimmerman motioned for two of the Marines following him to go around him and into the houses nearest to the wharf.

  Moments later, they came out of the houses, one of them making a thumbs-up gesture.

  “Okay, you can stand up,” McCoy said, slung his Garand over his back, and started down the ladder.

  When he was on the wharf, and had turned toward the houses, he saw Major Kim, armed with a carbine, trotting down it, almost at the shore. One of his national policemen was right behind him, and as McCoy trotted toward shore, another ran past him.

  Kim introduced the old man to McCoy as the village chief, and McCoy as the officer commanding. The old man didn’t seem at all surprised that McCoy spoke Korean.

  The old man told them that no North Koreans had been to Tokchok-kundo since Kim had last been there, and that he had seen no indication that the small garrisons on Taemuui-do and Yonghung-do had been reinforced with either men or heavier weapons.

  “Okay, Ernie,” McCoy ordered, “let’s get the stuff off the boat.”

  The old man turned suddenly and walked, or trotted, as fast as he could on his stilted shoes toward the houses, and went inside first one of them, and then two others. Immediately, people, men, women, and children, came out of the house and started down the wharf toward the Wind of Good Fortune, obviously to help carry whatever the Wind of Good Fortune held ashore. Then he came back to McCoy, Kim, and Zimmerman.

  “Do you speak English?” McCoy asked, surprised.

  The old man looked at him without comprehension.

  “You were speaking Korean,” Major Kim said, with a smile.

  McCoy saw Jeanette kneeling on the wharf, taking pictures of the Koreans.

  I didn’t tell her she could come ashore, just that she could stand up. But I should have known what she would do.

  “First priority, Ernie, is to get the SCR-300 on the air.”

  Major Kim asked the old man if the generator was running, and where it was.

  The generator was running, or would be, if there was fuel. And he pointed to a small stone, thatch-roofed building. McCoy saw that there was a small electrical network coming out of it, with one wire leading to several of the houses and another leading out to the wharf.

  McCoy walked to the building and went inside, with Kim following him. There was a small, diesel-powered generator. McCoy saw that it had been made in Germany. And there was room to set up the SCR-300, and he said so.

  “I’ll have them bring it here,” Kim said.

  “And then I think we should see if the mayor can see anything on the aerial photos we may have missed,” McCoy said. “And see about finding someplace my people can stay. I don’t like the idea of them being at the water’s edge—too easy to see if somebody comes calling.”

  “There’s several houses up the hill,” Kim said.

  “Let’s have a look at those. We can have the mayor look at the photos there.”

  The houses on the hill had two advantages. They were within range of the Marines’ weapons should the North Koreans decide to have a look at Tokchok-kundo, but they were far enough away so that Marines wearing Korean clothing could probably pass for Koreans.

  And one disadvantage. They had been placed where they were to facilitate the drying of fish on racks fastened to their thatched roofs.

  What the hell, after a day, they’ll probably not even notice the smell.

  The houses were made of stone, basically round structures, with small rooms with straight walls leading off them. In the center structure were platforms apparently used as beds against the outer wall. There was a place for a fire in the middle, apparently used both for cooking and to heat the floors and the platforms in winter. They were at once simple and sophisticated.

  McCoy had been in similar huts on the mainland during the winter, and had never been able to figure out how the heating system worked.

  A bare lightbulb—one of three strung over the platforms—glowed red for a moment and then shone brigh
tly, signaling that the generator was now up and running. McCoy laid out the aerial photographs on the platform, and told the old man he would be grateful if he would look at them.

  Surprising McCoy not at all, the war correspondent of the Chicago Tribune came into the house as the old man was looking at the aerial photographs.

  “Is this where I get to stay?” she asked.

  “Probably,” McCoy said. “Every maiden’s prayer—the only girl sharing a seaside cottage with four handsome and virile Marines.”

  “What are you doing?” she asked, annoyed.

  “These are aerial pictures of Taemuui-do and Yonghung-do, ” he said. “The islands we’re going to have to take.”

  As she bent over them for a look, Zimmerman, Taylor, and Staff Sergeant Worley, the radio operator, a small, slim man in his late thirties, came into the house. All three were sweating.

  They ran up the hill, McCoy decided. But they look more disgusted than angry or alarmed. Now what?

  “Look at this goddamn thing,” Zimmerman said, pointing to a nearly square—about five inches on a side—olive-drab tin can in Worley’s hand.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s from the SCR-300. . . .”

  “It’s a transformer, sir,” Sergeant Worley said.

  “Without which the SCR-300 won’t work?”

  Oh, shit!

  “When we took it out of the crate, sir, I noticed oil,” Worley said. “It came from here, I found out.”

  He pointed to a corner of the transformer, where the soldered joint had separated.

  “The question was, the radio won’t work without it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You can’t fix it? Replace the oil, whatever?”

  “I could maybe have done something,” Worley said, embarrassed. “But I burned the sonofabitch up when I fired up the transformer.” He met McCoy’s eyes. “Captain, I never had one of these fail on me before. But it’s my fault, I should have checked.”

  Yeah, you should have. But there’s no point in eating you out now. What’s done is done.

  “I told you getting that thing up was the first priority,” McCoy said. “So you hurried. It’s as much my fault as yours.”

  “No, sir, it’s not,” Worley said.

  “So what do we do now?”

  “I’ll try to rig something, Captain, but I can’t promise. . .”

  “How long will that take?” McCoy asked.

  “Longer than we have,” Taylor said. “Unless you want to spend another twelve—maybe twenty-four—hours here.”

  “Those fucking tides?” McCoy asked angrily.

  “Those . . . expletive deleted . . . tides,” Taylor replied.

  “Sorry, Jeanette,” McCoy said. “That slipped out.”

  “I told you,” Taylor said. “The data in the tide book is wrong.”

  “Is that the same tide book they’re using in the Dai-Ichi Building?”

  “That’s where I got this one.”

  “And it’s wrong?”

  “I told you, this place has mixed tides. And this must be, for here, the worst part of the monthly cycle. This area was not supposed to be as low as it is. Or going out as fast as it is.”

  “And what about an invasion fleet?”

  “We better have that radio up and running by the time they decide to try to come down the Flying Fish,” Taylor said. “Or there’s liable to be ships stuck in the mud from here to Inchon.”

  “How soon do we have to leave?”

  “Now,” Taylor said. “The sooner the better.”

  “Okay,” McCoy said. “Worley, I’ll get a transformer to you as quick as I can. How delicate are they?”

  “They’re usually built . . . hell, sir, look at it. What happened to this one probably won’t happen again for years.”

  “If we wrapped one up well, cushioned it good, could it be dropped from an airplane?”

  “Yeah, but dropping it with a chute would probably be better, sir.”

  “Zimmerman, I’m going to take Jennings back with me. He’s a world-class scrounger. And we have to do some fast and fancy scrounging.”

  Zimmerman nodded his understanding.

  “I suggest you set up in these houses. Make firing positions in case you need them. When you put out panels, put them between the houses. Start training the natives,” McCoy said. “And make sure the bad guys don’t learn you’re on the island.”

  Zimmerman touched his forehead in a gesture only vaguely resembling a salute. But that’s what it was.

  “You’re going to drop supplies on here from an airplane? ” Jeanette asked.

  “If I can,” he said.

  “And you’re going to Tokyo?”

  “Right.”

  “I need to talk to you a minute,” she said.

  “You heard what Taylor said. We have to get out of here now.”

  “It’s important to me,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said, gesturing to one of the small rooms opening off the center of the house.

  He followed her into the room.

  “Make it quick,” he said when she didn’t immediately start to talk.

  “I don’t know why the hell I’m so embarrassed,” she said. “You’re a married man, right? And you had those ‘personal hygiene’ classes in high school, right?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Would you please ask your wife to go to the PX and get me sanitary napkins and tampons? And then drop them in here with that transformer for the radio?”

  He didn’t reply for a moment.

  “Don’t be clever about this, McCoy,” she said. “I hadn’t planned to make this trip.”

  “You really thought I was going to leave you here?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “Jeanette, my Marines need all the strength they can conserve,” he said. “I can’t have you doing to them what Delilah did to Sampson. Get your ass on the Wind of Good Fortune.”

  “You sonofabitch!” she said.

  The water level had dropped so far at the wharf that the deck of the Wind of Good Fortune was only four or five feet above it.

  And, McCoy thought, she’s riding high because just about everything we had aboard has been taken off.

  Taylor clambered aboard and immediately started the engine, as Major Kim and two of his men untied the lines. The bottom of the Wind of Good Fortune noisily scraped the bottom twice as Taylor backed away from the wharf, and twice again as he turned her around and as they moved toward and then into the Flying Fish Channel.

  [THREE]

  PILOT’S READY ROOM THE USS BADOENG STRAIT 39 DEGREES 06 MINUTES NORTH LATITUDE, 129 DEGREES 44 MINUTES EAST LONGITUDE THE SEA OF JAPAN 0955 8 AUGUST 1950

  When Lieutenant Colonel William C. Dunn walked up to him in the ready room, Lieutenant Commander Andrew McDavit, USNR, prepared for flight, was sitting in the rearmost of the rows of leather-upholstered chairs with a cigarette in one hand and an ice-cream cone in the other.

  He started to push himself out of the chair, and Dunn gestured, telling him not to bother.

  “Good morning, Colonel,” McDavit said. He wasn’t overly fond of most of the jarhead birdmen aboard Badoeng Strait, but he liked Dunn. “You’re already back?”

  “We took off at oh dark hundred,” Dunn said. “The North Koreans tried to send a division—the Third, I think—across the Naktong starting at 0300.”

  " ’Tried’? Don’t tell me the Army held them?”

  “The 5th Cavalry chewed them up pretty bad,” Dunn said. “They had preregistered artillery, a lot of it. And pretty good fields of fire for their automatic weapons. Part of one NK regiment got across, but the other two took a pretty good licking from the air and went back to their side of the Naktong.”

  “Marine and Navy Air, you mean?”

  Dunn nodded. “The brigade wasn’t going to need us until this afternoon, so they released us to the Army.”

  “What happens this afternoon?” />
  “The 3rd Battalion of the brigade’s going to attack up toward Chindong-Ni. They’ll need us then.”

  “For my part, I can look forward to another exciting flight, dodging Air Force transports at K-1,” McDavit said. “Did I ever tell you that I once was an honest Wildcat pilot?”

  “Flying the Avenger is a dirty job, right, but someone has to do it?” Dunn said, sympathetically. “And you’re wondering why you?”

  “Even the name is obsolete,” McDavit said. “That war’s long over. We already avenged Pearl Harbor.”

  “Actually, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Pearl Harbor?” McDavit joked, then: “What can this old sailor do for you, Colonel?”

  “You’re about ready to go to Pusan?”

  “Just as soon as I get some sort of mysterious envelope for the Marine liaison at K-1, I am.”

  Dunn pulled the zipper of his flight suit down and indicated that he had the mysterious envelope.

  “There’s a fellow I really want to see in Pusan,” he said. “And they’re replacing some hydraulics on my Corsair, which means I have the time to go.”

  “There’s plenty of weight on the way in,” McDavit said, “and you’re sure welcome to it. But I have no idea what I’ll have to haul back. Maybe a couple of mailbags, maybe the Golden Gate Bridge in pieces. You’re liable to get stuck there overnight.”

  “I’m checked out in the Avenger,” Dunn said, simply. “I flew one as recently as last week.”

  McDavit met his eyes.

  “I’d need the skipper’s permission,” he said.

  “I’ve already asked. He said it’s up to you.”

  “You must want to see this guy pretty bad. When the word gets out that you’ve been flying the truck, everyone will wonder how you fucked up.”

  “I do,” Dunn said, simply.

  “Sure, Colonel,” McDavit said. “But please don’t bend my bird. I’m not sure they even make parts for it anymore.”

  Lieutenant Colonel William C. “Billy” Dunn regarded being devious as about as unacceptable—even despicable—a behavior for a Marine officer as bold-faced lying. He was being devious now, and it made him very uncomfortable, but he didn’t know how else he could handle the situation.

  It had started when he told Master Sergeant Mac McGrory to sit on the aerials of the rice field where someone had stamped “PP” and an arrow into the mud.