wouldn’t let her go back up there.”
“I don’t think she put it that diplomatically, did she?” Pickering asked.
“The words ‘betrayed’ and ‘broken promises’ did enter our conversation,” Dunston said. He hesitated, then went on: “One of the reasons I wasn’t here at eight-thirty, as you requested in your message, was that I was hoping to have word of Major Pickering. I had some agents come back across the line at nightfall. . .”
“And?”
“The good news is that there’s no intel that the NKs have a Marine pilot in their POW lockups,” Dunston said. “The bad news is that’s all the intel. I’m sorry, sir. I think everything that can be done is being done.”
“I’m sure it is,” Pickering said. “Thank you.”
“How good are your sources?” Hart asked.
“I own an NK field police major,” Dunston said. “If there was a Marine pilot POW, he’d know.”
“And he’d tell you?” Hart pursued, more than a little sarcastically.
“Hey, George,” Pickering cautioned.
“It’s all right, sir,” Dunston said. “Yeah, he’d tell me. I have his father.”
“Captain McCoy said you were very good at what you do,” Pickering said.
“I seem to be laying one egg after another about Major Pickering, sir.”
“Well, keep working on it, please,” Pickering said.
“General, how much can I tell Miss Priestly about Major Pickering?”
“How much have you told her so far?”
“Only that we’re looking for him.”
“Tell her what you find out,” Pickering ordered.
“In all circumstances, sir?”
“If we’re both thinking the same thing, tell me before you tell her. If at all possible, I’d like to . . . break the news of that circumstance to her personally.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Am I allowed to ask what’s going on in the Flying Fish Channel?”
“That’s why I’m here,” Pickering said. “There’s a very good chance that the operation is blown. We haven’t heard from Zimmerman in seven days. McCoy and Taylor were put off a British destroyer at 0430 on the twentieth and should have reached Tokchok-kundo an hour later. There has been no word of them, either.”
“The storm may have knocked out their radio,” Dunston said. “Or it simply failed again.”
“We’re working on that slim possibility. I wanted to . . .”
There was a flash of light as the hotel door opened.
Jeanette Priestly, in Army fatigues, was standing in the door, holding a carbine in one hand.
“Well, look who’s here,” she said.
“Hello, Jeanette,” Pickering said.
“I’d ask what’s going on, except I know that I couldn’t believe a goddamn word any of you said.”
“I really like a woman who can hold a grudge,” Hart said.
“Shut up, George,” Pickering said. “I’ll tell you what’s going on, Jeanette, and you can make up your mind whether to believe me or not.”
She turned and went inside the hotel. The men followed her inside.
“Oh, Jesus,” Jeanette said. “Everything is really fucked up, isn’t it?”
“We don’t know that,” Dunston said. “I keep getting back to the idea that their radio is out.”
“Again, admitting that slim possibility,” Pickering said, “then the solution is to get them another radio. There are problems with that. I am unable to get my hands on a radio right now that is (a) suitable to be dropped onto Tokchok-kundo from a Marine aircraft, and is (b) powerful enough to communicate with either Pusan or Japan. All that’s available that can be dropped with a reasonable chance of it landing intact are the standard emergency ground-to-air radios carried in airplanes. They have the power to communicate only with another airplane operating in the area. If we have aircraft orbiting over Tokchok-kundo, the NKs are going to know it and wonder why. So that’s out.
“The Army has some experimental radios that may work, operative words, ‘may work,’ and they’re being air-shipped to Tokyo. But the shortest time in which it is reasonable to expect them is six days from yesterday. Sometime tonight— it may already be here—the Yokohama signal depot is shipping another SCR-300 and a gasoline generator to power it to K-1. Our thought was that if we could get that loaded aboard the junk tonight, and the junk could sail in the morning, it could make Tokchok-kundo in thirty-odd hours.”
“If the Wind of Good Fortune goes, I go,” Jeanette announced.
“No, you don’t,” Pickering said. “The last thing we want to do is give the NKs the war correspondent of the Chicago Tribune.”
“I’m willing to take my chances on that,” Jeanette said.
“I’m not,” Pickering said. “The NKs would wonder what was so important about Tokchok-kundo that a war correspondent had ridden a junk up there. That’s not open for discussion,