Never thought to tell me, huh, you airhead! Captain Jernigan thought rather unkindly. He had been known to comment that if he had his choice between flying B-17s over Berlin, which he had done, or flying Connies with six stewardesses aboard, as he was doing now, he would take Berlin anytime.
"Thank you," Pickering said, and found his seat.
"You want the window, George?" he asked.
"Up to you, Boss. I don't care either way."
Pickering slid into the window seat.
"Once we're in the air, please feel free to come to the cockpit, Commodore," Captain Jernigan said. He had picked up on the title, and heard it was what they called the senior of a group of ship captains.
"Thank you," Pickering said.
"Commodore," the senior stewardess asked, "can I get you anything? Coffee? Something stronger? While we're waiting for our clearance?"
"No. Thank you very much," Pickering said, and then, a moment later: "Hold on. Bring me a Bloody Mary, please. Better make it a double."
George Hart looked at him in surprise. Pickering rarely drank at this time of day. Then he saw the silvered cast-aluminum plaque attached to the bulkhead before them, where they would see it all the way across the Pacific.
THIS TRANS-GLOBAL LOCKHEED CONSTELLATION "THE CITY OF LOS ANGELES"
ON JUNE 1, 1950
SET THE CURRENT SPEED RECORD FOR COMMERCIAL AIR TRAVEL BETWEEN SAN FRANCISCO AND TOKYO
CAPTAIN MALCOLM S. PICKERING
CHIEF PILOT OF TRANS-GLOBAL AIRWAYS WAS IN COMMAND
Pickering saw Hart looking at him. Hart turned to the stewardess. "Make it two of those, please," he said.
Chapter Six
[ONE]
8O23 Transportation Company (Depot, Forward)
Inchon, South Korea
0935 3O September 195O
Captain Francis P. MacNamara, Transportation Corps, his attention caught by the fluckata-fluckata-fluckata sound of rotor blades, stepped outside his office— a canvas fly—and looked skyward.
MacNamara, a stocky, redheaded thirty-five-year-old Irishman from South Boston, had earned a commission in World War II, risen to captain, decided he liked the Army, and elected to remain in service when the war was over. In 1946, while assigned to the Army of Occupation in Germany, he had been told that he was about to be RIF'd.
RIF'd was an unofficial but universally understood and used acronym. The Army didn't need as many Transportation Corps officers as it had during the war, and there was consequently a Reduction In Force program involuntarily releasing from active duty those officers it no longer needed. Those selected to be released were said to be RIF'd.
He had also been told that he could enlist as a master sergeant. He had been a PFC when he had gone to OCS. There was a lot to be said for being a master sergeant, and he had also learned that he could retire from the service after twenty years of service at fifty percent of his basic pay, and further that he could retire at the highest grade held in wartime—in other words, as a captain. He reenlisted.
First Sergeant Francis P. MacNamara, Headquarters and Headquarters Company, the Transportation Corps School, Fort Eustis, Virginia (Captain, TC, Reserve), had been recalled to active duty five days after the North Koreans crossed the 38th Parallel.
His first assignment had been at the Anniston, Alabama, Ordnance Depot, where he had been responsible for the acceptance by the Transportation Corps of wheeled vehicles stored by the Ordnance Corps, and then seeing them moved to the port of Mobile, Alabama, for shipment to the Far East. During this period, the 9th Transportation Company (Provisional) was activated, and he was given command.
The five officers and 145 enlisted men of the 9th Transportation Company, and 608 wheeled vehicles ranging from jeeps to tank transporters, sailed from Mobile to Yokohama, Japan, aboard the Captain J. C. Buffett, a Waterman Steamship Line freighter pressed into service. On arrival in Yokohama, the 9th Transportation Company (Provisional) was redesignated the 8023d Transportation Company (Depot, Forward) and Captain MacNamara was told that it would shortly sail aboard the Captain J. C Buffett for Pusan for service with the Eighth U.S. Army.
That didn't happen. The Captain J.C Buffett lay anchored in Yokohama Harbor until 10 September, when it weighed anchor and joined the fleet of vessels bound for the Inchon Invasion.
On 14 September, the Captain J. C. Buffett dropped anchor just outside the Flying Fish Channel leading to Inchon, from which position the next morning they could see the warships and attack transports sail into the channel for the invasion.
Commencing 20 September—once Inchon was secure—the 8023d and its 608 vehicles began to debark. This took some time, because of the tides at Inchon, which saw the Captain J. C. Buffett forced to hoist anchor, sail into Inchon, and off-load as many vehicles as possible before the receding tides made it necessary for her to go back down the Flying Fish Channel, drop anchor again, and wait for the next high tide. The off-loading procedure was further hampered by the shortage of equipment in Inchon capable of lifting the tank transporters, heavy wreckers, and other outsized wheeled vehicles.
But finally everything and everybody was off-loaded, and Captain MacNamara set about setting up the company. Its purpose was to exchange new vehicles for vehicles that had either been damaged in combat or had otherwise failed, and then to make an effort to repair the damaged vehicles that had been turned in, so they could be reissued.
MacNamara had done much the same sort of thing in France during World War II, and most of his men were skilled in performing "third-echelon maintenance" on wheeled vehicles. All he had had to do was get everything running. He felt that he was ahead of schedule. He had found a building in which, once the Engineers got him some decent electrical power, he could perform the duty assigned to the 8023d.
The first thing to do was get what he thought of as "the pool"—the vehicles he had shepherded all the way from Anniston, Alabama—up and running. Actually, that was the second thing he had to do. The first was to lay barbed wire around the pool and set up guard shacks.
There were two things Captain MacNamara had learned in France. One was that an unguarded pool of vehicles would disappear overnight, and the other was that if you listened to some bullshit pull-at-your-heartstrings story of why some guy really needed a vehicle, and why he didn't have a vehicle to exchange for one from the pool, the pool would disappear almost as quickly.
MacNamara believed—after some painful experiences in France—that the Army knew what it was doing when it set the policy, the very simple policy, of "something happens to the vehicle you've been issued, take it to an Ordnance or Transportation Depot, turn it in, and they'll issue you a serviceable one."
Unspoken was: "No vehicle to turn in, no new vehicle."
The reason for that was pretty obvious. If you didn't have to turn a vehicle in, every sonofabitch and his brother would show up and take a vehicle. And the problem with that was that some colonel would show up with a half-dozen wrecked or shot-up jeeps and expect to get half a dozen replacements, and when you didn't have half a dozen jeeps to give him—you'd given every vehicle to every sonofabitch who'd shown up with a hard-luck story—he would ask, "What the hell happened to your pool?"
That had happened to MacNamara in France. They'd as much as accused him of selling vehicles on the black market, and he'd had the MPs' Criminal Investigation Division following him around for months, and he'd gotten a letter of reprimand.
He often thought that letter of reprimand was the reason he had been RIF'd. Now that he was a captain again, because they needed him, he was determined not to fuck up again. Being a captain was better than being a master sergeant, and maybe, if he didn't fuck up again by passing out the Army's vehicles to people who weren't supposed to have them, they'd let him stay on as a captain when this war was over. He might even make major if he didn't fuck up.