I’m at home. If they stop off at St. Louis, it will be to see Captain George Hart, who’s a policeman, head of the Homicide Bureau.”
“They can deal with that,” Truman said, as if to himself. “General, if you’re willing to come, I’ll have someone in the Air Force contact you very shortly about getting you on a plane.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I would be grateful, General, if this conversation, and anything about your meeting with Admiral Hillenkoetter, did not become public knowledge.”
“Of course, sir. I understand, Mr. President.”
“Thank you. I look forward to seeing you shortly, General. ”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you, again,” Truman said, and the line went dead.
Pickering, deep in thought, put the telephone back in the wall rack.
“What the hell was that all about?” Patricia Fleming asked.
“It would appear, sweetheart, that we have just gone to war in Korea,” he began.
They had just finished the crab omelet, and Pickering a second, stiff drink of Famous Grouse, when the phone rang again.
Pickering walked to it and answered it.
“Hello?”
“General Pickering?”
“Yes, speaking.”
Goddamn it, you’re not General Pickering.
“General, this is Brigadier General Jason Gruber, U.S. Air Force.”
“Yes?”
“My orders, General, are to get you to Andrews Air Force Base as quickly as possible. How would you feel about making the trip in an F-94? It would mean getting into a pressure suit. . . .”
“I don’t even know what an F-94 is,” Pickering said.
“We just started taking delivery 1 June,” General Gruber said. “It’s a follow-on to the Lockheed Shooting Star, the F-80. . . .”
“That’s a fighter,” Pickering said. “Is there room for a passenger in a fighter?”
“There’s room for a radar operator in the rear cockpit. You give the word, I can be at Alameda Naval Air Station in about an hour.”
“Where are you now?” Pickering asked, and before General Gruber could answer, asked, “You’ll be flying me?”
“I’m at Nellis Air Force Base, and yes, I’ll be driving.”
“I thought Nellis Air Force Base was in Las Vegas.”
“It is,” General Gruber said.
“And you can fly here in an hour?”
“If I kick in the afterburners, and I probably will, I can make it in thirty-five, forty minutes.”
“My God!”
“The alternative is some kind of transport, General. That, of course, will take a lot longer to get you to Washington. It’s up to you.”
“I’ll need more than an hour,” Pickering said. “There’s something I have to do before I leave here.”
“In two hours, it’ll be twenty-two hundred. By then, I’ll be refueled and ready to go. How big a man are you, General?”
“Six-one, a hundred ninety.”
“And all we’ll have to do is squeeze you into a pressure suit, and we can take off.”
“How do I get into the Navy base?”
“Alameda will be waiting for you. You’re traveling DP, General. Everything is greased. Believe me.”
“What’s DP?”
“Direction of the President. You didn’t know?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I’ll see you at Alameda, General,” General Gruber said, and hung up without saying anything else.
Pickering hung up the telephone and turned to Patricia.
“What was that all about?”
“I’m to be flown to Washington by an Air Force brigadier in a fighter I never heard of. We leave in two hours from the Alameda Naval Air Station.”
Patricia Fleming considered that.
“I’ll drive you,” she said. “It won’t take us two hours to get to Alameda, Flem.”
“The Air Force guy’s coming from Las Vegas. He says he can do that in forty minutes. But I told him two hours,” Pickering said.
“Why?”
“I have something—something important—I want to do here first.”
“What could possibly be more important than—?” She stopped in midsentence, having taken his meaning.
“The same thing I had in mind when we got on the elevator thirty, forty minutes ago,” he replied.
She looked at him for a moment, then smiled.
“Oh, Flem, I hope you never grow up.”
[FOUR]
THE PRESS CLUB TOKYO, JAPAN 1130 26 JUNE 1950
It has been said that while there just might be honor among thieves, there is absolutely none among journalists, at least insofar as beating a fellow member of the fourth estate out of a story—“getting it first”—is concerned.
But there is a little “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” cooperative activity among journalists, and so it came to pass that when one distinguished member of the Tokyo press corps got it reliably that an Air Force C-54 was about to leave for Seoul to evacuate American dependents, he told one of his peers.
“That makes us even, right?” he asked, so that things were understood between them.
“Right,” the second journalist said, then retired to the privacy of his room to pick up his typewriter and his camera