paper in it. He paused thoughtfully for a moment, and then began to type.
SECRET
2125 28SEP50
FOR MOTHERHEN
FROM TROJANHORSE
POSITIVE INDICATIONS HOTSHOT AT COORDINATES CHARLEY SEVEN SEVEN TWO, MIKE ZERO FOUR ZERO TWO TO TWELVE HOURS PRIOR TO 0900 28SEP50. NO CONTACT. TROJANHORSE AT MONACO 0900 29SEP50. END.
He unrolled the sheet of paper from the typewriter and handed it to the Korean woman. She read it, looked at him, then said, “I will encrypt it if you like.”
He nodded.
“I’m going to get something to eat, and then go to bed,” he said in Korean. “If I don’t hear from you, I will presume Badoeng Strait acknowledges.”
She nodded.
“Thank you, Di-San,” he said.
She nodded again.
McCoy left the radio room and walked back down the stairs to the ground floor. There was the glaring white light and hissing of a Coleman lantern coming from the dining room, and he went in there.
“I didn’t wait,” Zimmerman said, unnecessarily, as he mopped the last meat juices from his plate with a piece of bread. “I was starved.”
“I got a message off to Billy Dunn,” McCoy said.
Zimmerman grunted, and then got up.
“Make sure they wake me for breakfast,” he said, and walked out.
McCoy nodded and sat down at the table. The older Korean woman came in almost immediately with a steak and french fried potatoes on a plate. She left and returned in a moment with a bottle of red wine.
The steak was enormous, and he couldn’t eat all of it. He drained the wineglass, stood up, and left. He climbed the stairs to the second floor and walked down a dark corridor to and through a heavy door into a large, sparsely furnished room. There was a double bed, neatly made up with sheets and Army blankets. Beside it was a chair. There was a large wooden desk with a Coleman lantern glowing white on it.
Neatly folded on the bed were freshly washed linen, a freshly washed and starched set of Marine utilities, two towels, a facecloth, and a bar of Pond’s soap. McCoy wondered where Dunston had found that. Next to the bed was a pair of Army combat boots. Shined Army combat boots.
McCoy sat on the bed and took off the Marine boots he was wearing. Then he took off the fatigue jacket, held it for a moment, and dropped it onto the floor. He stood up, took a Model 1911A1 Colt .45 ACP pistol from the small of his back, and put it on the chair beside the bed. Then he stripped off the rest of his clothes, leaving everything in a pile on the floor.
He took the freshly pressed and starched uniform from the bed and laid it over the pistol on the chair. Then he picked up the clean linen and the towels from the bed and walked to the bathroom door, returning in a moment for the Coleman lantern.
It took a long time for the hot water to work its way up from the boiler in the basement, but finally there was a steady, heavy stream of hot water. He stood under it a long time after he was clean.
Then he put on the underwear, carried the Coleman lantern back into the bedroom, sat on the bed, turned the lantern off, and got between the sheets.
In thirty seconds, he was asleep.
III
[ONE]
HANGAR 13 KIMPO AIRFIELD (K-14) SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA 2205 28 SEPTEMBER 1950
As Major McCoy slipped between the clean white sheets of his bed, Captain Howard C. Dunwood, USMCR—who three months before had been named “Salesman of the Month” at Mike O’Brien’s DeSoto-Plymouth Agency in East Orange, New Jersey—sat in his underwear on the edge of his cot in a shrapnel-riddled hangar forking cold ham chunks and baked beans from an olive-drab Army ration can by the light of a small candle.
And like Major McCoy, Dunwood was fresh from his personal toilette: He had just shaved, then washed his face and crotch and his armpits with water held in a steel helmet. He had then used the same water to wash his change of socks and underwear, using a tiny chunk of soap that had come with a package of Chesterfield cigarettes, a small pack of toilet paper, and some other “comforts” with the field rations.
He actually felt a little guilty about the cot, having been taught, and believing, that officers should enjoy no creature comforts not available to their men. There were only ten folding wooden cots available to the men of Baker Company, 5th Marines.
His supply sergeant—Staff Sergeant Al Preston, USMC,