thing wrong with it was that it was terraced, which would seem to indicate that it had once been a rice paddy, or paddies.
It was dry now, and obviously hadn’t been a rice paddy for some years. That left the question in his mind: How long would human shit contaminate a rice paddy?
He had no idea. But it didn’t matter. He had seen enough of the area to know that the terrain was either rocky hills or flat areas that either were or once had been a rice paddy. He thought the one he had chosen didn’t smell all that rotten, but on the other hand, he had smelled so many rotten things since arriving in the Land of the Morning Calm that he suspected his sniffer had been overwhelmed.
He consoled himself with the thought that it was now getting chilly—it had been as cold as a witch’s teat in the jeep overnight—and one of the prerogatives of being a Transportation Depot commander was being able to tell your noncom in charge of the Radiator Repair Section to rig a heater for your jeep, and that would keep the smell down.
He set up a temporary headquarters in one of the mobile service vans he had thoughtfully included in the convoy. Nature called, and he didn’t think it would wait until the men dug a quick latrine, so he went up the hill a little and dropped his trousers behind a large boulder.
The wind coming off the hill was surprisingly unpleasant on the cheeks of his ass, and he thought that about the first thing the men were going to do when they finished laying the perimeter barbed wire was build another latrine like the one he had just finished building in Wonsan.
Jesus! If I can get through to Wonsan on a landline, I can tell Lieutenant Wright to just put the sonofabitch on the back of a tank retriever. I’ll have to tell Wright to cover it with a tarpaulin so people won’t know what it is. But that would save a lot of work.
As soon as I finish my dump, I’m going to see if I can find a phone. There’s no telling how long it’ll take to get the X Corps Signal Company to lay a couple of lines in here.
He heard a sound he hadn’t heard since those CIA guys dropped in on the 8023d in Inchon. Fluckata-fluckata-fluckata.
He looked up and around and, as the fluckata-fluckata-fluckata fluckata-fluckata-fluckata sound grew louder, located it in the sky.
It was flying over the road in the direction of Hungnam.
It was painted black. He wondered if it was one of the two he had seen at Inchon. He wondered what the hell it was doing.
Jesus, if I could get my hands on one of those, I’d have that goddamn latrine up here tonight!
[THREE]
OFFICE OF THE COMMANDING GENERAL HEADQUARTERS X UNITED STATES CORPS (FORWARD) WONSAN, NORTH KOREA 1245 2 NOVEMBER 1950
The black H-19A fluttered to the ground fifty yards from a collection of vehicles of all descriptions parked in a somewhat random pattern outside a two-story brick building that had, before the war, housed a regional secondary school. The downwash from the rotor blades blew leaves all over the area as the helicopter touched down.
There was much activity as Engineers, Signal Corps personnel, and other technicians set up the X Corps headquarters. As Major Alex Donald, USA—very carefully, to make sure he didn’t run into cables strung between telephone poles—set the H-19A down, Major K. R. McCoy, USMCR, saw two flags, their poles set in what looked like artillery shell casings, in front of a van, a 6 × 6 truck onto which was mounted a square boxlike structure.
Such vehicles usually housed either communications gear or the machines required for some sort of maintenance function, but were sometimes used as mobile offices. That was obviously the case here. The flags hung limply on their staffs, but McCoy could see that one of them was the blue and white X Corps flag, and the other was solid red with white stars. That meant the van was occupied for the moment by the X Corps Commander, until the support troops working frantically in and around the school building could get his office and command post set up there.
The moment the H-19A touched down, McCoy unstrapped himself and climbed down from the cockpit. The Big Black Bird had attracted the attention of a lot of people in the area, more than a few of whom noticed