give it a shot anyway, will you? Maybe we’ll get lucky. We really need to know where they are.”
“I’ll go to the X Corps CP after supper,” Dunston said.
[SIX]
THE HOUSE SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA 2105 30 SEPTEMBER 1950
“Dunston’s back from the X Corps CP,” Major Kenneth R. McCoy announced unnecessarily to Major Alex Donald as they pulled up to the front of the house in the Russian jeep.
They found him and Zimmerman sitting at the dining room table. Dunston was bent over a stereoptical viewing device looking at an aerial photograph. Zimmerman was flipping through a three-inch-high stack of ten-by-ten-inch aerials on the table.
Dunston raised his eyes from the device as McCoy and Donald came into the room.
“These are yesterday’s Air Force aerials,” he said. “I got them just before the X Corps G-2 was going to burn them.”
“They wouldn’t give you today’s?” McCoy asked.
“No. And they have no idea what, if any, South Korean troops are in this area. The last word—yesterday—was that ‘lead elements’ of I ROK3Corps—probably the Capital ROK Division—were about ten miles south. They may have moved that far today, but even if they have, I don’t think they went into Socho-Ri.”
“Why not?” McCoy asked.
Dunston got out of his chair and waved McCoy into it.
McCoy sat down and bent over the device, which functioned on the same principle as the disposable glasses given to 3-D motion picture patrons. There were two lenses mounted on a wire frame. They provided a three-dimensional view of a photograph placed under it.
McCoy saw what looked like eighteen or twenty burned-out stone Korean houses, their thatch roofs gone.
“What am I looking at?” he asked, raising his head.
“That’s Socho-Ri,” Dunston said. “It’s obviously been torched. We don’t know when or by whom. My people could have torched it right after the invasion. Or the NKs may have torched it then, or two days ago.”
McCoy got out of the chair and motioned Donald into it.
“Okay,” McCoy said. “Tell me about this place.”
“In the first part of 1949, I realized I needed a base for the Wind of Good Fortune . . .” Dunston began.
Without raising his eyes from the viewing device, Donald asked, “Can I ask what that is?”
“It’s our navy, Major,” Zimmerman said.
McCoy chuckled, then explained: “It looks like your typical, ordinary junk. You know. High prow and stern, one mast, with a square sail that’s raised and lowered like a venetian blind.”
“Okay,” Donald said. “What do you use it for? Can I ask?”
“To insert and extract agents in North Korea,” Dunston said.
“You did that with a junk?” Donald asked incredulously.
“I said the Wind of Good Fortune looks like a typical junk,” McCoy said. “But she was prepared for the smugglingtrade by some very good shipwrights in Macao. You know, near Hong Kong?”
Donald nodded.
“How prepared?” he asked.
“Wind of Good Fortune has a 200-horse Caterpillar diesel, and fuel tanks therefore in her holds,” McCoy said. “And some basic, but pretty reliable, radio direction finder equipment. She’ll make thirteen, fourteen knots, even with her sail acting as a windbreak.”
“Sounds like something out of Terry and the Pirates,” Donald said, referring to Milton Caniff’s popular comic strip.
“Why Socho-Ri?” McCoy asked. “Why there?”
Dunston went to the stack of aerials, searched through them, and slipped one under the viewing device.
“For several reasons,” he said. “For one thing, it’s tiny. For another, it’s about fifteen miles south of the 38th Parallel. Highway Five runs up to the border, but—since it had nowhere to go beyond the border—the closer it got to the border it was less traveled and not maintained. And even better, between the highway and the shoreline”—he took a pencil and used it as a pointer on the aerial—“there’s this line of hills. You can’t tell from the aerial, but they’re (a) too steep-sided to build rice paddies on them and (b) from 100 to 200 feet high, so that you can’t see the village from Highway 5.”
McCoy touched Donald’s shoulder. Donald moved his head out of the way, and McCoy studied the aerial.
“I’m surprised I don’t see much of a road,” he said.
“We didn’t use the road—actually just a path—unless we had to. We supplied the place using the Wind of Good Fortune.”
“Okay,” McCoy said.
“When I found Socho-Ri,” Dunston went on, “there were about a dozen fishermen and their families in the village. They not only hated the North Koreans but were delighted to find someone willing to buy their dried fish from them, and at a better price than they had been able to get