Taylor nodded his understanding.
"Are you planning on staying?"
"I'm going to leave Zimmerman there, and Major Kim. If Kim's there, he can't tell Dunston what we have in mind."
"Did the Marines come through with aerial photo-graphs?" Taylor asked.
"Lots of them," McCoy said. "But until I can compare them against maps, I don't know what I'm looking at."
"Charts, Captain McCoy, charts."
"I beg the captain's pardon," McCoy said, smiling.
"You'll have thirty-four hours to do that," Taylor said. "We can shove off in about an hour. That soon enough?"
"We have to wait for a passenger," McCoy said.
"Am I allowed to ask who?"
McCoy reached into his pocket for Jeanette Priestly's note, and handed it to Taylor.
"Jesus!" Taylor said when he read it. "This is that female war correspondent who wrote that piece about you and Zimmerman?"
"Yeah."
"What's her connection with Pickering's son?"
"She knows him. The guy at K-l thinks she has the hots for him. I don't know how she found out what the general does for a living."
"Do I understand this? You want to take her along?"
McCoy nodded.
"Can I ask why?"
"Because I can't think of anything else to do with her," McCoy said. "I can't let her write a story saying who Pick-ering's father is."
"What makes you think she'll be willing to go?"
"She'll be on board when we sail, Captain."
Taylor looked at him a long moment, but said nothing.
"Captain," Major Kim called, and both Taylor and Mc-Coy walked to the railing and looked down at him.
"Captain, my sergeant reports the fuel tanks are full."
`Tell him thank you, please," Taylor called back, and then looked at McCoy.
McCoy turned from the railing and spoke softly, in En-glish.
"He was talking to you. He picked up on me making it clear you're the captain."
"Good man, I think," Taylor said.
"The trouble with good men is that they tend to be pissed when they find out you've been lying to them," Mc-Coy said.
"Your orders, Captain?" Major Kim called.
`Tell him to wait a minute," McCoy said.
"Stand by, please, Major," Taylor called, in Korean.
"We'll be taking Major Kim, and a dozen of his people, and their equipment," McCoy said. "Plus eight of the Marines and Zimmerman. And their equipment."
"Plus the lady war correspondent," Taylor interjected.
"Where do we put them all?"
"There's three cabins below," Taylor said. "One is the mess and kitchen for the officers. There's a captain's cabin, more or less-we can put the lady in there-and another cabin for you, me, Zimmerman, and Major Kim. The weather's nice. If it stays that way, we can sleep on deck. The officers up here, the men on the main deck."
"And if the weather is foul?"
"As soon as it starts to turn nasty, the men are going to have to go in the holds, with the hatch covers battened."
"That's not going to be much fun."
"It'll be more fun than capsizing," Taylor said.
"What are you going to do for a crew?" McCoy asked.
"Three of Kim's men were sailors. They can show the others what to do. There's not much to know about the rig-ging on a junk. The sails are square-Okay, oblong-and they're stiffened with bamboo. They're like Venetian blinds, you open-raise-them by pulling on a rope. There's no wheel, just this thing..."
He pointed to a six-inch-square handle, lashed to the stern.
"... the rudder. The rudder is huge; it also serves as the centerboard when you're under sail. Sometimes-to turn sharply-you need more than one man on it. Same thing when you're under way with the engine. There's one pro-peller, mounted forward of the rudder. All the power of the engine is directed at the rudder. If you can hold the rudder, you can make really sharp turns."
"I don't see any engine controls, or a compass," McCoy said.
Taylor walked to the forward rail and pulled backward on what McCoy had thought was a sturdy support for the railing. Inside was a control panel for the Caterpillar diesel engine, and a compass. They were chrome-plated, and completely out of place on the junk.
"Like I said, McCoy, Macao shipbuilders know what they're doing," Taylor said.
He reached down into the small compartment and threw several switches. The compass and the engine instrument dials lit up and became active. There was a red light-ob-viously a warning light of some kind.
McCoy was about to ask what it was when it went out. Taylor reached into the compartment again and pressed a button. There was a rumble, and then the diesel engine started.
"I'll be damned," McCoy said. "Very nice."
Taylor shut the engine off again.
"You're confident we can use this to make the land-ings?" he asked.
"Hell no, I'm not," Taylor replied, shaking his head. "I don't know much about the waters off Yonghung-do and Taemuui-do, but I've never seen a junk tied up at a pier ei-ther place. That makes me think the adjacent waters are too shallow, even at high tide, to take a junk's rudder. We're going to have to get boats somewhere."
"Jesus!"
"I was thinking we could get some from the Navy," Tay-lor said. "A couple of shore leave boats would be perfect."
"And asking for them would make the Navy very curi-ous about what we planned to do with them...."
"And we'd have to tow them from Kobe or Yokohama or someplace."
"We have to think about that," McCoy said. "Goddamn it!"
Taylor shrugged.
"I'm going ashore to see if I can find out where Zim-merman and that goddamned woman are," McCoy said. "And we better start loading everything we're taking with us. You tell Kim."
Taylor gave a thumbs-up sign, and McCoy started down the ladder to the main deck.
[SIX]
EVENING STAR HOTEL
TONGNAE, SOUTH KOREA
1625 5 AUGUST 1950
Master Gunner Zimmerman drove right to the pier, fol-lowed by a Jeep with a war correspondent sign mounted below the glass of its windshield. Zimmerman got out of his Jeep, and collected his Thompson and a can-vas musette bag from the Jeep.
Miss Jeanette Priestly of the Chicago Tribune, who was dressed in U.S. Army fatigues much too large for her and had her hair tucked up inside her fatigue cap, got out of her Jeep, then leaned over the rear seat and took a notebook and a Leica camera from a canvas bag and walked toward McCoy, who was leaning on a pier piling.
"What's going on, McCoy?" she greeted him, stopped, opened the Leica's leather case, and raised the camera to take a picture of him with the Wind of Good Fortune in the background.
McCoy put one hand, fingers extended, in front of his face, then extended the fingers of the other hand in an ob-scene gesture.
"You sonofabitch!" she said. There was a tone of admi-ration in her voice, then, smiling, she asked: "How long are you going to stand there with your hand in front of your face?"
"Until you put the camera away," he said.
After a moment, she closed the Leica's case and he took his hand from his face.
`Tell me about Pick Pickering," she said.
"If you take that camera out of the case again without permission, I'll take it away from you," he said.