As soon as one of the jerry cans was full, one of the South Korean national policemen carried it onto the pier, to the side of the junk, and hoisted it high enough so that another Korean on the junk could reach it and haul it aboard. Then an obviously empty jerry can was lowered over the side to the man on the pier, who carried it back to the “water trailer” and took up his position in line.
There were four men engaged in filling the jerry cans and carrying them to the junk, and they wasted little effort. Still, the trailer held five hundred gallons, which meant the procedure would have to be repeated one hundred times. McCoy wondered how long they had been at it.
“They brought the diesel about twenty minutes ago,” Lieutenant Taylor called out, as if he had been reading Mc-Coy’s mind.
McCoy looked up and saw Taylor leaning on the rail of the high stern.
“This is going to take a little time,” Taylor added, and pointed to a wood-stepped rope ladder on the side of the junk forward of the stern.
McCoy got out of the Jeep and went to the ladder. He was hoping Major Kim would wait for an invitation to join him—he needed to talk to Taylor privately—but Kim followed him to the ladder.
What the hell, he’s just trying to make himself useful.
McCoy climbed the ladder to the deck. There were three hatches, and all were open. He walked down the deck and looked into each. The farthest aft hold was just about empty. The center hold held a Caterpillar diesel engine and its fuel tanks, one on each side. They each looked larger than the water trailer on shore, which translated to mean the fuel capacity was over one thousand gallons, information that was useless unless one knew how much fuel the Cat diesel burned in an hour, and how far the junk would travel in that hour.
The forward hold was half full. There were a dozen wooden crates with rope handles, all marked as property of the Japanese Imperial Army. Three of them had legends saying they held ten Arisaka rifles; the others held ammunition for them.
McCoy pushed open a door in the forecastle and saw that it was combination bunking space and a “kitchen.” There were crude bunks, eight in all, mounted on the bulkheads. Against the forward bulkhead was a table. In the center of the space was a square brick stove, on which sat three large, round-bottomed cooking pans.
Woks, McCoy thought. I wonder who invented that pan? The Chinese? The Japs? The Koreans? They’re all over the Orient.
Under one of the bunks he saw a wicker basket full of charcoal.
He walked aft, and pushed open a hatch leading to space under the high stern. There were three doors off a center corridor, and crude sets of stairs leading down and up to the open area where he had seen Taylor. He started up those, aware that Major Kim was still on his heels.
Taylor, who was still leaning on the rail, looked over his shoulder as McCoy came onto the deck.
McCoy saluted him.
“Permission to come aboard, sir?” he said.
“Granted,” Taylor said, returned the salute, and then asked, “Is that what they call McCoy humor?”
“No,” McCoy said. “I wanted to make the point that knowing a hell of a lot less than a Marine officer should know about things that float, you’re in charge, Captain.”
“This your first time on a junk?” Taylor asked, smiling.
“No, but this is the first time I didn’t pretend that I knew all about junks and wasn’t particularly impressed with what I was seeing.”
Taylor chuckled and smiled.
“You want a quick familiarization lecture?”
“Please.”
“Okay. This one, according to her stern board, was christened—maybe Confucius-ed?—the Wind of Good Fortune. She’s about ten years old, I would guess, and I suspect she was made somewhere in China. Good craftsmanship, good wood. You don’t often find that in Korean junks. The Caterpillar, I’ll bet, was installed in Macao. I found some papers in Portuguese, and the Macao shipbuilders have been catering to the smuggler trade since Christ was a corporal. Nice installation. It cost the former owners a fortune. I suspect she’ll make maybe thirteen, fourteen knots.”
“And we have enough fuel to go how far?”
“I’ll guess that Cat will burn ten, twelve gallons an hour. Say twelve. Hell, say fifteen—her hull may be six inches deep in barnacles. I figure we have twelve hundred gallons in those two tanks. Twelve hundred gallons