“Jesus,” McCoy said, softly, to Taylor and Zimmerman, “do you think he’s going to drop us a radio?”
“He’s going to drop something,” Zimmerman said.
McCoy stared intently at the approaching airplane, but could see nothing but ordnance hanging from the hard-points under its wings.
And then something did come off the aircraft, something small, at the end of what looked like a ribbon.
The moment the object started to fall, the landing gear of the Corsair started to retract into the wings, and the aircraft banked to the left to avoid the hill and began to pick up altitude.
The object dropped from the Corsair lost its forward velocity and then dropped straight down, landing ten yards from the wharf and twenty yards from the shore. The ribbon, or whatever it was, now lay on the surface of the mud left by the receding tide. Whatever it was attached to was buried in the mud.
McCoy turned to look at Zimmerman. He was sitting on the ground, pulling his boondockers and socks off. Then he stripped out of the black pajama shirt and trousers and then his underpants.
Zimmerman started wading out through the mud toward the ribbon. He sank over his ankles in the mud, and once, for a moment, it looked as if he was stuck in the mud and about to fall. But he regained his balance, and finally had his hand on the white ribbon. He started to pull on it, and then met more resistance than he thought he would. So he waded farther out, to where the ribbon’s end entered the mud. He carefully began to haul upward on the ribbon. Thirty seconds later, he was holding something in his hand.
“It’s a fucking flashlight!” he called in disgust.
“Bring it ashore,” McCoy called, and Zimmerman started to wade back toward the shore, winding the ribbon around the “flashlight” as he moved.
He finally came ashore, puffing from the exertion.
“How’m I going to get this stinking fucking muck off my legs?” he asked, and tossed the “flashlight” and the muddy ribbon around it to McCoy.
The ribbon, McCoy immediately saw, was parachute silk. He unwound it from around the “flashlight,” and saw that it was indeed a flashlight, a big four battery-size one from some mechanic’s tool kit. The twenty-foot-long strip of parachute silk had been attached to the flashlight’s cylinder with heavy tape.
He moved the switch. There was no light.
He unscrewed the head and saw that one of the batteries had been removed, and that there was a piece of folded paper where it had been. He carefully removed it and unfolded it. It was a message written in grease pencil:
From Pickering
“Radio on the way.”
Hang In There.
Semper Fi
Dunn
Lieutenant Taylor, Major Kim, and Master Gunner Zimmerman—who was still naked, and had both hands covered with the mud he had tried unsuccessfully to wipe from his legs—walked up to McCoy.
“What the hell is it?” Taylor asked.
McCoy handed the note to him. Taylor read it and started to hand it to Zimmerman, changed his mind, and held it in front of Zimmerman’s face so that he could read it.
“Mr. Zimmerman, if you don’t mind my saying so,” McCoy said. “You smell of dead fish and other rotten things I don’t even want to think about.”
“Fuck you, Killer,” Zimmerman said, but he had to smile.
Taylor handed the note to Major Kim.
“ ‘On the way’ doesn’t tell us when,” Taylor said. “Or how.”
“If General Pickering says a radio is on the way, a radio is on the way,” McCoy said. “That’s good news.”
“And what do we do until the good news arrives?” Zimmerman asked.
“You, Mr. Zimmerman, will make every effort to make yourself presentable,” McCoy said. “The rest of us will try to fix the boat, meanwhile hoping that nobody goes sailing by and wonders what the hell the natives here have concealed under that camouflage net by the wharf.”
“With the tide out like this,” Taylor thought aloud, “we can’t get it ashore, either.”
“Let’s get started on the boat,” McCoy said. “Major Kim, would you put a couple of people out on the wharf to give us warning if we’re going to have visitors?”
[SEVEN]
ABOARD WIND OF GOOD FORTUNE 37 DEGREES 38 MINUTES NORTH LATITUDE, 126 DEGREES 57 MINUTES EAST LONGITUDE THE YELLOW SEA 1500 25 AUGUST 1950
Captain George F. Hart, USMCR, now attired in black cotton pajamas, with a band of the same material around his forehead, nodded when Captain Kim pointed at a landmass on the horizon.
Then he mimed making his radio report by holding an imaginary