“That would do it,” McCoy said. “How do we get one?”
“Have the South Korean Navy commandeer one,” Hart suggested.
“No. That would attract too much attention. Maybe we could buy one.”
“Buy one?” Taylor asked.
“Now, that opens a whole new line of interesting thoughts,” McCoy said. “If the boss would go along, we could run this as a CIA operation, and we wouldn’t have to ask SCAP’s permission. Just, when the time is right, hand them the islands.”
“I’m new to all this,” Taylor said. “Would there be money for something like this?”
“Oh, yeah. The one thing the CIA doesn’t have to worry about is money. I’m going to go to the boss and see if he can’t give me some money to buy information about Pick. Money is not a problem.”
“He won’t want special treatment for Pick, honey,” Ernie said.
“I’m going to tell him he doesn’t have any choice,” McCoy said. “I’d like to get Pick back before the North Koreans find out his father is the Assistant Director for Asia of the CIA.”
“I didn’t think about that,” Ernie said.
“You sound as if you’re pretty sure he’s alive,” Taylor said.
“Yeah. Probably because I do,” McCoy said. “Okay. If we have to show this to the boss and General Howe by seventeen hundred, we’re going to have to get off the dime. There’s a typewriter here, honey, right?”
“Yes,” Ernie said, simply.
“You make coffee, and I’ll type, okay?”
“You think Pick’s alive?” she asked.
He met her eyes and nodded.
“George,” she said, “I’m a delicate woman. You can carry the typewriter.”
[FOUR]
THE DEWEY SUITE THE IMPERIAL HOTEL TOKYO, JAPAN 1905 3 AUGUST 1950
“I’d like a word with General Pickering,” Howe said.
Captains McCoy and Hart, Master Gunner Zimmerman, Lieutenant Taylor and Mrs. Kenneth McCoy started to get up from their chairs at the table of the dining room.
“Keep your seats,” General Howe said. “This won’t take long. Can we use your bedroom, General?”
“Of course,” Pickering said, got up, and led the way out of the dining room.
Howe closed the door of Pickering’s bedroom behind them, walked to the desk against the wall, and leaned on it.
“There wasn’t much—damned near nothing—in the CIA reports I read in Washington about these islands,” he said. “Is there any more that you know of?”
Pickering shook his head, “no.”
“I’ve been going damned near blind since I got here, reading the files,” he said. “I didn’t see anything. It looks like all we know about them is what Taylor is telling us.”
“We can’t go on that alone, Fleming,” Howe said.
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘go,’ Ralph,” Pickering said.
“Earlier today, I messaged the President that I thought the Inchon invasion was idiotic,” Howe said. “The phrase I used was ‘from my understanding of its feasibility, the risks involved would seem to make the invasion inadvisable. ’ If I had had him on the phone, I would have said, ‘It looks like a dumb idea to me, Harry.’ ”
Pickering didn’t reply.
“And then we had our afternoon with General MacArthur,” Howe said. “After which I tried to call the President. He was not available. So I left a message with his secretary. ‘Last judgment Inchon premature. Sorry. More follows soonest.’”
"MacArthur changed your mind?” Pickering said.
“He should have been a door-to-door salesman,” Howe said. “He could have made a fortune selling Bibles to atheists. ”
Pickering chuckled.
“When he’s in good form, he’s really something.”
“If you don’t want to answer this, don’t,” Howe said. “What did you message the President?”
“ ‘I have concluded that despite the obvious problems, the Inchon invasion is possible, and the benefits therefrom outweigh the risks,’ ” Pickering said. It was obvious he was quoting himself verbatim.
“You think he can carry it off?”
“I’ve seen him in action, Ralph. That military genius business is not hyperbole.”
“What do you think of Taylor’s idea?”
“I think the bunch around MacArthur—and maybe MacArthur himself, if it ever got that high—would reject it out of hand—”
“Maybe not ‘out of hand,’ ” Howe interrupted.
Pickering looked at him a moment.
“You’re right,” he said. “They would ‘carefully consider’ the proposal, such careful consideration lasting until it would be too late to put it into execution.”
“As I understand the role of the CIA, Fleming,” Howe said, “it is an intelligence-gathering operation.”
“So I understand.”
“Taylor suggested that the people on the islands are possessed of knowledge of intelligence value . . .”
“He did say that, didn’t he?”
“And unless I’m mistaken, the Assistant Director of the CIA for Asia doesn’t need MacArthur’s approval to conduct what could be considered a routine intelligence-gathering