of the Russian jeep and walked into the house.
The library was the first door on the right off the foyer. McCoy pushed open the door and walked in.
The first time McCoy had been in the room, the bookshelves lining three walls had been full. Now they were bare. The Inmun Gun had stripped the house of everything reasonably portable as soon as they had taken over the building.
“It’s not amazing how little is left,” Dunston had philosophized, “but how much.”
Dunston, a plump, comfortable-appearing thirty-year-old whose Army identification card said that William R. Dunston was a major of the Army’s Transportation Corps, sat at a heavy carved wooden table. A Coleman gasoline lantern on the table glowed white, and Dunston was using it to read Stars and Stripes, the Army newspaper.
Dunston was not actually a major, or even in the Army, despite his uniform and identity card. He was in fact a civilian employed by the Central Intelligence Agency, and before having been run out of Seoul by the advancing North Korean Army had been the Seoul CIA station chief. After the landings at Inchon, Dunston had flown back into the city as soon as enough of the runway at Kimpo Airfield had been cleared to take an Army observation aircraft.
McCoy and Zimmerman pulled chairs—one heavy and of carved wood matching the table, the other a GI folding metal chair—to the table and sat down.
“What’s with the Coleman lantern?” McCoy asked by way of greeting. “I heard the generator. . . . The perimeter floodlights are working.”
“No lightbulbs,” Dunston replied. “I’m working on it. Probably tomorrow.” He paused, then went on: “I was getting a little worried about you, Ken.”
“We’re all right,” McCoy said. “But I’m hungry and thirsty.”
“Hard or soft? There is also a case of Asahi cooling in the fridge.”
“I think one medicinal belt, and then beer,” McCoy said. “Food?”
“There’s steaks and potatoes, no vegetables.”
“Hot water?” Zimmerman asked.
Dunston nodded. “And your laundry awaits,” he said.
“I’m going to have a beer, a shower, a drink, and a steak, in that order,” Zimmerman said.
A door opened, and a middle-aged Korean woman stood in it waiting for orders.
Dunston, in Korean, told her to bring beer and whiskey and to prepare steaks.
“I think if you had found him, you’d have said something, ” Dunston said.
“Close, goddamn close, but no brass ring,” McCoy said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he saw us looking for him.”
“But you think he’s alive?”
“I’m pretty sure he was alive six, eight, maybe twelve hours before we found his arrow.”
“Did you tell the general?”
McCoy nodded.
“I sent a message through the 25th Division G-2,” he said, “and sometime tonight, I want to get a message out to the Badoeng Strait.”
The USS Badoeng Strait (CVE-116) was the aircraft carrier—a small one, dubbed a “Jeep Carrier”—from which Major Malcolm Pickering had taken off on his last flight. His wing commander, Lieutenant Colonel William “Billy” Dunn, USMC, was doing all he could to locate and rescue Pickering; McCoy wanted him to know what had happened on this last ground search mission.
“No problem,” Dunston said.
“What’s going on here?” McCoy asked.
“It says in here,” Dunston said, dryly, tapping Stars and Stripes, “that Seoul has been liberated. I guess nobody told the artillery.”
“I wondered what all that noise is,” McCoy said. “But that’s not what I meant. I got a message from Hart saying to be at Kimpo at 0900. What’s that all about?”
“El Supremo’s flying in. He’s going to turn Seoul over to Syngman Rhee. I guess the general’s coming with him.”
El Supremo was General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander, Allied Powers, and, since shortly after the Korean War began, Commander, United Nations Forces in Korea.
“They sent you a message?”
Dunston shook his head no.
“I’m a spy, Ken. I thought I told you. I’ve got a guy at Haneda. The Bataan’s being readied as we speak.”
McCoy chuckled. Haneda was the airbase outside Tokyo where the Bataan, MacArthur’s personal Douglas C-54 transport, was kept.
“I wish I had better news for the boss.”
“That he’s alive is good news.”
“Yeah, and six hours after I tell him that, we’ll find his body.”
“The bastard walks through raindrops, Killer,” Zimmerman said. “You know that.”
“Where’s General Howe? And did you tell him that MacArthur and the boss are coming?” McCoy asked.
Major General Ralph Howe, a World War I crony of then-Captain Harry S Truman, was in the Far East as the personal representative of the President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief of its Armed Forces.
“I got a message from him about