"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 un-til this afternoon, so they released us to the Army."
"What happens this afternoon?"
"The 3rd Battalion of the brigade's going to attack up to-ward Chindong-Ni. They'll need us then."
"For my part, I can look forward to another exciting flight, dodging Air Force transports at K-l," 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-l, I am."
Dunn pulled the zipper of his flight suit down and indi-cated 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 be-ing 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.
He just hadn't had time to think about it then-the loud-speakers had blared "Pilots, man your aircraft" while he was still looking at the aerials-but that didn't justify his subsequent behavior. Which, on sober analysis, had been both unprofessional and devious.
On that first mission, right after seeing the aerials, he had diverted from the mission plan, dropped down to the ground, and flown over the wreckage of Pick's Corsair. He knew where that was, but he didn't know where the muddy rice paddy was. The only thing McGrory had said was that it was "near" where Pickering had gone down, and he hadn't asked "how near?" or "in which direction?"
He thought that he could possibly find it because it was a muddy-as opposed to water-filled-rice paddy, and there probably wouldn't be too many of those.
There were. The bombing, and probably artillery as well, had ruptured the dirt walls of more than a dozen pad-dies near the wreckage of Pick's Corsair and let the water escape. And during his one pass at 200 knots-he could not fly over the area more than once-it had been impossi-ble to look for "PP" and an arrow in all of them.
He hadn't found the one he was looking for, but he had seen Korean fanners hard at work restoring the mud walls of several of the paddies.
When he overflew the location the next day, now armed by Chief Young with a more precise location of what he had come to think of as "Pick's rice paddy," he found proof of the industry of Korean paddy rice farmers, even in the middle of war: there was water in all the paddy fields. The bastards must have worked all night!
The only proof that someone had stamped out "PP" and an arrow was in the aerial photos.
The Marines have a long-standing tradition of not leav-ing their dead and wounded on a battlefield. It is almost holy writ.
There were several problems with that near-sacred tradi-tion in this circumstance.
The first was that Dunn didn't know that Major Malcolm S. Pickering, USMCR, had done the stamping.
And even if he had, the odds were that he had done so immediately after getting shot down. In the opinion of an expert in the field of operations behind the enemy's lines-Captain Kenneth R. McCoy-the odds were that Pick was now either a prisoner, or the North Koreans had shot him. It was unlikely that he was hiding out in the area, waiting to be rescued. For one thing, there didn't seem to be any place for him to hide.
If he took the photographs to General Cushman, he was sure that Cushman-probably after asking some very pointed questions about why Dunn hadn't brought the pho-tographs to him immediately, and not taken two days to do it, obviously lowering the chances of a successful rescue- would order an immediate rescue attempt.
Dunn doubted that Cushman would risk sending one of the four Sikorsky helicopters to look for Major Malcolm S. Pickering. There were only four of them-not enough- and when they weren't flying General Craig around the battlefield, they were transporting wounded Marines to medical facilities.