me now.”
The President had hung up and then turned to General Pickering.
“So far as this Captain McCoy is concerned, I’ve ordered that he be brought here as soon as he can be located. I want to see him myself.”
Within days, Brigadier General Pickering, Captain McCoy, and Master Gunner Zimmerman were on a plane for Tokyo. The President had told Admiral Hillencoetter it was pretty obvious to him that a very good way to find out what had gone wrong with CIA intelligence-gathering procedures in the Far East—and to make sure the situation was corrected—was to send the man who’d run Far Eastern Operations for the OSS during World War II back over there.
General Pickering was named Assistant Director of the CIA for Asia.
This time Ernie had not sat dutifully and docilely at home while her husband went to war. They had been in Tokyo only a few days when there was a message saying Mrs. Kenneth McCoy would arrive in Tokyo aboard Trans-Global Airways Flight 4344 at ten the next morning.
She was now residing at No. 7 Saku-Tun, in the Denenchofu section of Tokyo, Japan. And she had told her husband that she had not only deceived him when they had been stationed in Tokyo—she had told him that she had found a very nice house at a rent they could afford that would keep them out of the small quarters they would have been given by the Navy, when the facts were she had bought the house—but also that, since the Marine Corps had already let him know what they really thought of him, she had no intention of pretending any longer that they had only his pay to live on.
“Don’t give me any trouble about this, Ken,” she’d said firmly. “You’re not supposed to upset a pregnant woman.”
Ernie was in the sixth month of her pregnancy. Twice before, she had failed to carry to full term.
Major Ken McCoy had thought, as Ernie had stood before him, hands on her hips, her stomach just starting to show, making her declaration, that he loved her even more now than when he had first seen her on the patio of the penthouse, when it had really been Love at First Sight.
McCoy walked away from the base operations tents, and Jeanette Priestly had to trot to catch up with him.
“Where are they going?” she asked, indicating the car with Generals Howe and Almond in it.
“I thought you wanted to hear about Pick,” McCoy replied.
She didn’t reply, but caught his arm and stopped him.
He looked back at the tent, decided they were out of earshot, and stopped and told her everything he knew.
“So you think he’s alive?” she asked when he had finished.
He nodded.
“He was yesterday, I’m sure of it.”
“So when are you going to look again?”
“You mean instead of standing around here waiting for El Supremo?”
She nodded.
“Well, for one thing, I was ordered to be here,” he said. “And for another, I have no idea where he is. There’s no sense going back south until I do.”
“And when will that be?”
“Whenever there’s another sighting of his arrows,” McCoy said. “Billy Dunn was here early this morning, and he said he’s going to photograph the hell out of the area where we just missed him. He’ll almost certainly come up with something, and when he does, we’ll go out again.”
“When you go, can I go with you?”
“No, of course not. And if you try something clever, I’ll have you on the next plane to Tokyo.”
“You’d do that, too, wouldn’t you, you sonofabitch?”
“You know I would, and stop calling me a sonofabitch.”
She met his eyes.
“It’s a term of endearment,” she said. “I love you almost as much as I love that stupid bastard who got himself shot down.”
She stood on her toes and kissed his cheek.
For a moment—just a moment—McCoy put his arms around her and hugged her.
[FOUR]
The Bataan made its landing approach from the direction of Seoul, passed low over the people gathered around the base operations tents, and touched down.
The military police had permitted a dozen still and motion picture photographers to detach themselves from the press area so that they would be able to photograph the Bataan taxiing up to base operations and the Supreme Commander himself getting off the airplane.
When the Bataan, instead of taxiing toward them, turned off the runway and taxied to a hangar on the far side of the field, a chorus of questions and protests rose from the Fourth Estate.
The phrase “Now, what the fuck is