stopped before the open doors and shut down the engine. Lieutenant Colonel D. J. Vandenburg and Major Alex Donald climbed down from the cockpit. The Marines and all the officers pushed it into the hangar. Before they were finished, an L-19 taxied up, shut down its engine, and was pushed into the hangar by the two officers in it. The doors were closed with a loud screeching noise.
“The good news,” Lieutenant Colonel Vandenburg said to Majors McCoy and Dunston, “is that—obviously—I was able to make good on my promise to try to get us a Beaver and an L-19. The bad news is that that particular Beaver was supposed to go to the Eighth Army commander, and I think we have to count on General Walker making a serious—one might even say furious—effort to get it back.”
“Ouch,” McCoy said.
“If we can keep General Walker, or his people, from getting their hands on it—or us—for three, four days, a week, I think they’ll probably be able to get him another one, and the furor will die down. But until then . . .”
“You have any ideas how we can do that?” McCoy asked.
“As a matter of fact, Major Donald and I did discuss the problem on the way up here,” Vandenburg said, smiling.
“Since we can’t hide the Beaver, I suggest we camouflage it,” Vandenburg said, a little smugly.
“I don’t follow you, sir.”
“We change the tail number,” Vandenburg said. “They will be looking for . . .” He looked up at the Beaver. “. . . 507179. We change that to, say, 507167. General Walker’s Beaver is now invisible.”
“Very clever,” McCoy said.
“We landed here as Army five zero mumble mumble mumble,” Donald said. “When they asked me to ‘say again,’ I blew into the microphone. I figured that might buy us a little time.”
“Only a little,” Vandenburg said. “I think General Walker’s pilot was on the horn to him before we took off from Pusan. It won’t take them long to figure out we’re the airplane Walker is looking for.”
“And there are problems with painting new tail numbers,” Donald said. “It can’t be done in fifteen minutes, even if we had somebody to do it, and the paint to do it with. There’s paint in the mechanics’ tool kits, but they’re at Socho-Ri.”
“Then we’ll have to change them at Socho-Ri,” McCoy said. “Why can’t we just take off now and tell the tower we’re headed for the Race Track?”
“And never land there, you mean?” Donald asked.
McCoy nodded.
“If the Race Track tower asks questions, I’ll think of something to mumble,” Donald said. “But we don’t have enough fuel to make it to Socho-Ri. We’re going to have to refuel the airplanes.”
“Sergeant,” McCoy said to Staff Sergeant Klegger, “isn’t there a trailer of AvGas here?”
“Yes, sir. Two, each with five hundred gallons.”
“Drag one of them in here, and get started refueling these airplanes,” McCoy ordered.
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“And then get ready to move out,” McCoy went on. “Mr. Zimmerman left you maps so that you can drive to Socho-Ri, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“As soon after the airplanes take off as you can, you get going.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Bill, can you stay with them until they’re out of Seoul?” McCoy asked Dunston. “Get them through roadblocks?”
“Sure. You’re going with them?”
“Yeah. I want to show Colonel Vandenburg what we have at Socho-Ri, and the sooner we can put the L-19 to work conducting our own search for Pickering, the better. ”
The hangar door screeched open wide enough to admit a tanker trailer.
[SIX]
8023D TRANSPORTATION COMPANY (DEPOT, FORWARD) INCHON, SOUTH KOREA 1425 8 OCTOBER 1950
Captain Francis P. MacNamara, Transportation Corps, was not at all surprised when he got a “heads-up” call that the X Corps Transportation Officer, Colonel T. Howard Kennedy, would be in the Inchon area and would pay the Eighty-Twenty-Three a visit.
MacNamara had been expecting such a “visit.” He would not have been surprised if he had gotten an official call announcing a formal inspection of the unit. Certainly, the status of readiness of the Eighty-Twenty-Three would be of interest to the staff officers of X Corps, and so far there had been no contact of any sort.
He was, of course, a little nervous. He knew that the purpose of an inspection—by whatever name—was to find fault with whatever was being inspected.
But he was ready. There had been very little “business” for the Eighty-Twenty-Three since he’d started to set up shop. There had been that interesting business of issuing vehicles to the CIA