Pick had noticed aerial activity all through the day, from contrails laid almost certainly by Air Force B-29 bombers, to formations of twin-engine aircraft, either Air Force A-20s or B-26s flying at what was probably eight or ten thousand feet, to low-flying Air Force P-5 Is and even some Marine and Navy Corsairs flying to his west, right down on the deck, probably on interdiction missions.
None had been close enough for them to see him, and certainly not close enough for him to try to signal them with the mirror, even if he knew how to work that goddamn thing, and anyway, the flash of light from the goddamn mirror would almost certainly have been lost in the far brighter flashes of light coming from the sun bouncing off the water in the rice paddies.
He had filled both canteens and the bottle he'd bought from the rice farmers with water from what was probably the Han River, and felt marginally safer in drinking some of that now.
The decision he had before him now was when to have supper, before or after going to work.
He had not found a conveniently drained rice paddy, which meant that he was going to have to drain one himself. In two months, he had become rather expert in draining rice paddies, so that he would have a muddy surface into which he could stamp out his arrow and the letters PP.
It wasn't as simple a task as one might assume, not simply a matter of kicking a hole in the dirt dams and letting the water flow out.
There was a hell of a lot of water in each rice paddy, he had learned, and if you kicked too large an opening, the water would run out too quickly, taking with it more dirt, so that what had begun as a small trickle of water turned with astonishing speed into a raging torrent.
The torrent would soon overwhelm the capacity of the dirt path between adjacent paddies to carry it away, and flow into the rice paddy below it on the hill, where it would overwhelm that paddy's earth dam, and produce something like a chain reaction.
A line of drained paddies running down a hill was visible for miles, and would attract the kind of attention that would see him captured. He had caused one major chain-reaction draining and two not quite so spectacular—all three of which had seen excited farmers rushing to see what had happened—before he'd given the subject of paddy drainage a great deal of thought and come up with a technique that worked.
The trick was to go to one end of the paddy and scrape a very shallow trench at the top of the dam. The water would flow until it had fallen to the level of the trench and then stop. Then you moved five feet away and dug another very shallow trench, and repeated the process until the paddy was dry.
Major Pickering decided he would work and eat. He would dig the first very shallow trench with his boot, eat one of his nine rice balls as the water drained, then, when it had stopped flowing, dig another very shallow trench, eat a second ball of rice, and so on.
He pushed himself off the earth dam, walked to the end of the paddy, and scraped the first trench.
It was long after dark before the paddy was drained.
He looked down at the valley and saw some lights, but they were dim and not moving along the highway.
He moved uphill from the drained trench, sat down on the dirt path, popped dessert—the last of the nine rice balls—into his mouth, and then lay down.
He had a busy day tomorrow. He had to find food again, and move, and then find another suitable rice paddy.
[TWO]
The House
Seoul, South Korea
1715 29 September 195O
When Colonel Scott, the X Corps G-2, had quietly passed on the location of the CIA station to Lieutenant Colonel Raymond, he of course had not simply given him the address. Neither officer spoke, much less read and wrote, Korean. Instead, he had prepared a rather detailed map, and provided a verbal description of how to get there, and of the building itself.
Still, what street signs remained were in Korean, and it took Raymond about two hours to make it to the house from Kimpo. And even when he blew his jeep's horn in front of the massive steel gates, he wasn't sure he was in the right place.
A moment later, an enormous Korean in U.S. Army fatigues came through a door in the gate, holding the butt of a Thompson submachine gun against his hip.
"Do you speak English?" Raymond asked.
There was no sign, verbal or otherwise, that the Korean had understood him.
"I'm here to see the station chief," Raymond said.
Again there was no response that Raymond could detect.
"I have orders from General Almond," Raymond said.
That triggered a response. The Korean gestured, and the right half of the gate swung inward. The Korean motioned Raymond to drive through it.
Inside, he saw a large stone European-looking house. There was a jeep and a Russian jeep parked to the left of the porte cochere in the center of the building. He remembered seeing a Russian jeep earlier at both the Capitol Building and Kimpo, and wondered if it was the same one. On the roof of the porte cochere an air-cooled .30-caliber machine gun had been set up behind sandbags. It was manned, and trained on the gate and the road from the gate. Raymond wondered if it was manned all the time, or whether his horn-blowing had been the trigger.
He stopped in front of the porte cochere and looked over his shoulder for the enormous Korean. The Korean, who was right behind him, pulled his finger across his throat, a signal to cut the engine, then pointed at the door of the house.
Then the Korean, the Thompson still resting on his hip, beat him to the door and motioned him through it.
Inside was a large marble-floored foyer. Another Korean, much smaller than the one who had been at the gate, sat at the foot of a wide staircase with an automatic carbine on his lap. The large Korean led Raymond to a door off the foyer, rapped on it with his knuckles, and then pushed it open.
Lieutenant Colonel Raymond was interested—perhaps even excited—to see what was in the room behind the door. The only previous contact he had had with the CIA was on paper. He had seen a number of their intelligence assessments, and he had met a number of CIA bureaucrats, some of whom had lectured at the Command & General Staff College when he had been a student there. But he had never before been in a CIA station and met actual CIA field officers.
He walked into the room.
There was a large dining table. On it sat two silver champagne coolers, each holding a liter bottle of Japanese Asahi beer. Two men in clean white T-shirts were sitting at the table, drinking beer, munching on Planters peanuts, and reading Stars and Stripes.
They hurriedly rose to their feet. Those are enlisted men!
"Can I help you, Colonel?" the taller of them asked courteously. "My name is Raymond," he said. "I have a message for the station chief from General Almond."
The taller of them jerked his thumb at the other one, which was apparently a signal for him to get the station chief.
"It'll be a minute, Colonel," the taller one said. "Can I offer you a beer?"
"I'd kill for a cold beer, thank you," Colonel Raymond blurted.
It was not, he instantly realized, what he would have said if he had considered his reply carefully—or, for that matter, at all. He was on duty as the personal messenger of the Corps commander, for one thing, and for another, field-grade officers do not drink with enlisted men.