“As a matter of fact, I don’t even have to tell El Supremo what I’m doing,” Pickering said. “Or have done.”
“How annoyed do you suppose he’d be if—when—he found out later?” Howe asked.
“If we can take those bottleneck islands quietly, with McCoy and a dozen or so Marines in the next couple of weeks, MacArthur will thereafter refer to it as ‘my clandestine operation.’ If this blows up in our faces—which would, obviously, signal the North Koreans that we plan to land at Inchon—Whitney and Willoughby would recommend public castration, prior to my being hung by the neck until dead, and he’d probably go along.”
“You don’t sound particularly worried.”
“I have the gut feeling that Taylor knows what he’s talking about, and I know McCoy is just the man who could organize and execute an operation like this.”
Howe met Pickering’s eyes for a moment, then nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “How about this? ‘Have just learned Pickering is conducting a clandestine operation, which, if successful, will remove my primary objection to an invasion at Inchon. I believe the operation will be successful. More follows.’ ”
“That’s what you’re going to send?”
“I’m afraid if I call again, he’ll take my call,” Howe said.
“And if President Truman calls you?”
“By then, I suspect, Captain McCoy and Lieutenant Taylor and Mr. Zimmerman . . . is Zimmerman going?”
“They’re a team,” Pickering said.
“. . . will be en route to the Flying Fish Channel islands, and, since we have no means of communicating with them, until they reach the islands—and maybe not then—it will be too late to call the operation off.”
XIII
[ONE]
HEADQUARTERS, 1ST MARINE BRIGADE (PROVISIONAL) NEAR CHINDONG-NI, SOUTH KOREA 1505 4 AUGUST 1950
The helicopter pad at Brigade Headquarters consisted of a flat area more or less paved with bricks, brick-size stones and gravel, and a windsock mounted on what looked like two tent poles lashed together.
Ten Marines, five enlisted men—a sergeant major and four Jeep drivers, ranging from private to buck sergeant— and five officers—a lieutenant colonel, a major, two captains, and one master gunner—stood to one side and watched as the HO3S-1 helicopter made its approach and fluttered to the ground.
U.S. Marine Corps HO3S-1, tail number 142, was one of four Sikorsky helicopters that had been quickly detached from HMX-16at Quantico, Virginia, and assigned to the lst Marine Brigade’s observation squadron, VMO-6, when the brigade was ordered to Korea. VMO-6 had four other aircraft, Piper Cub-type fixed-wing aircraft called OY-2 by the Marine Corps, and L-4 by the Army.
The HO3S-1 was manufactured by the Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation, and had in fact been designed by Igor Sikorsky, a Russian refugee from communism himself. Sikorsky had also earlier designed the—then huge—Sikorsky Flying Boats, which had permitted the first intercontinental passenger travel.
The HO3S-1 was powered by a nine-cylinder, 450-horsepower radial Pratt & Whitney engine. It had a three-blade main rotor, which turned in a 48-foot arc. It could lift just over 1,500 pounds (fuel, cargo, and up to three passengers, plus pilot, in any combination) and fly that much weight at up to 102 miles per hour in ideal conditions for about 250 miles.
For the first time, commanders had a means to move literally anywhere on the battlefield at 100 miles per hour. Brigadier General Edward A. Craig, who had begun to use the helicopters the moment they had arrived in Korea, later said that without the helicopters he doubted they “would have had the success we did” in Korea.
Three of the five officers awaiting the helicopter were members of General Edward A. Craig’s staff. The lieutenant colonel was his G-3, the major his G-2, and one of the captains his aide-de-camp. The second captain and the master gunner were not.
Aside from the briefing Captain McCoy had given the assembled officers on the attack transport the day they arrived in Pusan, the S-3 had never seen him before, and frankly doubted the sergeant major’s belief that the clean-cut young officer was the legendary “Killer” McCoy who had single-handedly stabbed twenty Japanese to death inShanghai, or some such bullshit. For one thing, he didn’t look old enough, and for another, he didn’t believe the story about twenty stabbed-to-death Japanese.
What he thought was that McCoy was an intelligence officer with an exaggerated opinion of his own importance and his role in the Marine Corps scheme of things.
Marine captains customarily answer any question lieutenant colonels put to them. When he had asked Captain McCoy why he wished to see the general, McCoy had—politely, to be sure—told him that he was