prayer—the only girl sharing a seaside cottage with four handsome and virile Marines.”
“What are you doing?” she asked, annoyed.
“These are aerial pictures of Taemuui-do and Yonghung-do, ” he said. “The islands we’re going to have to take.”
As she bent over them for a look, Zimmerman, Taylor, and Staff Sergeant Worley, the radio operator, a small, slim man in his late thirties, came into the house. All three were sweating.
They ran up the hill, McCoy decided. But they look more disgusted than angry or alarmed. Now what?
“Look at this goddamn thing,” Zimmerman said, pointing to a nearly square—about five inches on a side—olive-drab tin can in Worley’s hand.
“What is it?”
“It’s from the SCR-300. . . .”
“It’s a transformer, sir,” Sergeant Worley said.
“Without which the SCR-300 won’t work?”
Oh, shit!
“When we took it out of the crate, sir, I noticed oil,” Worley said. “It came from here, I found out.”
He pointed to a corner of the transformer, where the soldered joint had separated.
“The question was, the radio won’t work without it?”
“No, sir.”
“You can’t fix it? Replace the oil, whatever?”
“I could maybe have done something,” Worley said, embarrassed. “But I burned the sonofabitch up when I fired up the transformer.” He met McCoy’s eyes. “Captain, I never had one of these fail on me before. But it’s my fault, I should have checked.”
Yeah, you should have. But there’s no point in eating you out now. What’s done is done.
“I told you getting that thing up was the first priority,” McCoy said. “So you hurried. It’s as much my fault as yours.”
“No, sir, it’s not,” Worley said.
“So what do we do now?”
“I’ll try to rig something, Captain, but I can’t promise. . .”
“How long will that take?” McCoy asked.
“Longer than we have,” Taylor said. “Unless you want to spend another twelve—maybe twenty-four—hours here.”
“I told you,” Taylor said. “The data in the tide book is wrong.”
“Is that the same tide book they’re using in the Dai-Ichi Building?”
“That’s where I got this one.”
“And it’s wrong?”
“I told you, this place has mixed tides. And this must be, for here, the worst part of the monthly cycle. This area was not supposed to be as low as it is. Or going out as fast as it is.”
“And what about an invasion fleet?”
“We better have that radio up and running by the time they decide to try to come down the Flying Fish,” Taylor said. “Or there’s liable to be ships stuck in the mud from here to Inchon.”
“How soon do we have to leave?”
“Now,” Taylor said. “The sooner the better.”
“Okay,” McCoy said. “Worley, I’ll get a transformer to you as quick as I can. How delicate are they?”
“They’re usually built . . . hell, sir, look at it. What happened to this one probably won’t happen again for years.”
“If we wrapped one up well, cushioned it good, could it be dropped from an airplane?”
“Yeah, but dropping it with a chute would probably be better, sir.”
“Zimmerman, I’m going to take Jennings back with me. He’s a world-class scrounger. And we have to do some fast and fancy scrounging.”
Zimmerman nodded his understanding.
“I suggest you set up in these houses. Make firing positions in case you need them. When you put out panels, put them between the houses. Start training the natives,” McCoy said. “And make sure the bad guys don’t learn you’re on the island.”
Zimmerman touched his forehead in a gesture only vaguely resembling a salute. But that’s what it was.
“You’re going to drop supplies on here from an airplane? ” Jeanette asked.
“If I can,” he said.
“And you’re going to Tokyo?”
“Right.”
“I need to talk to you a minute,” she said.
“You heard what Taylor said. We have to get out of here now.”
“It’s important to me,” she said.
“Okay,” he said, gesturing to one of the small rooms opening off the center of the house.
He followed her into the room.
“Make it quick,” he said when she didn’t immediately start to talk.
“I don’t know why the hell I’m so embarrassed,” she said. “You’re a married man, right? And you had those ‘personal hygiene’ classes in high school, right?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Would you please ask your wife to go to the PX and get me sanitary napkins and tampons? And then drop them in here with that transformer for the radio?”
He didn’t reply for a moment.
“Don’t be clever about this, McCoy,” she said. “I hadn’t planned to make this trip.”