carrying the insignia of the South Korean Air Force, regularly flew over the roads, strafing anything they saw moving. They flew so low that there was no question in Pickering’s mind that if he just stood in the middle of one of the roads he would be seen by one of the F-51 pilots, who would then stand the airplane on its wing, do a quick one-eighty, and then come back and let him have a burst from the eight .50-caliber Brownings in its wings.
The F-51 pilot would logically presume that anyone on these roads was a North Korean. The South Koreans were holed up someplace out of sight. He’d also come across, making his way over the mountains, a dozen or more rock formations that by stretching the term could be called caves. They didn’t go deep into the mountains, but far enough so that a family of five or six could go into one of them and not be visible from either the ground or the air.
When one of the South Korean F-51s, or a section of them, caught a platoon, or a company, of North Koreans in the open and strafed them, the dead and wounded were left where they had been hit. There were very few North Korean vehicles of any kind, and the few trucks he had seen— some of them captured 6 × 6s and weapons carriers—were jammed with the walking wounded. They had kept their arms and used them to guarantee their positions on the trucks.
There was therefore the smell of rotting bodies that seemed to be getting worse, not better, even though it was getting chilly all the time, and freezing cold at night.
There was no question that the tide of war had changed. The North Koreans were not only retreating but bore little resemblance to an organized military force.
So obviously all he had to do was . . .
Make himself invisible to the F-51 pilots, so they wouldn’t blow him away. To that end, he had plastered his face and hands with mud, so they would not be a bright spot on the ground to be investigated and strafed. Or maybe just strafed, skipping the investigation, and . . .
Make himself invisible to the retreating North Koreans, who would almost certainly shoot him if they could, not for a military reason but to see if he had anything to eat, and . . .
Wait for friendly troops to come up one of the roads. There were several problems with that. Friendly troops would, like the F-51 pilots, conclude that anybody here in the middle of nowhere was a North Korean. American troops might take such people prisoner. From what he had seen, the South Koreans would not.
The major problem was that he had been on short rations since he’d been shot down, and over the last four or five days the short rations had diminished to zero. And since he had stopped eating, he could feel his strength diminishing with each step—each labored breath—he took.
He didn’t think, in other words, that he was going to make it.
He was not going to give up, but on the other hand there wasn’t much difference between what he was able to do and giving up. Unless, of course, he gave up by taking a dive off the nearby cliff or putting the .45 to his temple, and even being hungry, dirty, tired, and sick seemed better than those options. With his luck, he thought, he wouldn’t get killed taking a dive off the cliff, he would break both legs and arms and lie in agony for Christ only knew how long.
There was another option to checking out, if that’s what was going to happen, and that was to lie on one of the boulders and let the sun warm him while he thought of Jeanette.
At first, when he thought of Jeanette, the thoughts were erotic. Now when he thought of her, there was little lust in the fantasy. He remembered how she smelled and the soft touch of her fingers on his face.
It would be very nice, he thought, if he wasn’t going to make it, if he went to sleep in the sun thinking of Jeanette and then just never woke up.
He thought about asking God to give him at least that, but decided against it. He asked God to make it as easy on Jeanette and his mother and father, and Ernie, and even Killer McCoy. It wasn’t right, he thought, to