with the woman in his lap—and ordered, “Go, Ernie! Go!”
Zimmerman let the clutch out and the Jeep took off.
“If you keep struggling, we’re both going to fall out,” McCoy said to the woman.
“You’re not going to get away with this, you bastard!” the woman said.
“When you get around the next bend, Ernie, stop,” McCoy ordered.
“You’re going to wind up in the stockade!” the woman said.
Zimmerman made the turn in the road, then pulled to the side and stopped.
“What are you going to do, dump her here?” Zimmerman asked.
“Only if Miss Priestly can’t see the mutual benefit in the pooling of our assets,” McCoy said.
“You know who I am!” Jeanette Priestly said. She was now standing by the side of the road, her hands on her hips, glowering at McCoy.
“Jeanette Priestly of the Chicago Tribune,” McCoy said.
Slight recognition dawned.
“Do I know you?” she asked.
“We had dinner a couple of weeks ago in Tokyo,” McCoy said.
“McCoy,” she said. “The Marine.”
“Right,” McCoy said.
“Just what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” she said. “You just can’t steal my Jeep.”
“Let me explain your options,” McCoy said. “If we leave you here by the side of the road, you can run back to the MPs and tell them you just saw your Jeep driving off down the road—”
“My stolen Jeep!”
“—they will tell you they will do what they can, and you will go to the motor pool where—as I suspect you already know—that fat slob of a major will tell you he doesn’t even have enough Jeeps for full colonels—”
“You son of a bitch!”
“Which will leave you where we found each other, you walking,” McCoy continued. “I can’t imagine how they would do it, but let’s say they radio ahead of us, and we are stopped by some other MPs....”
“That’s exactly what’s going to happen to you,” she said. “And it’s off to the stockade you go.”
“First of all, I don’t think they’ve had time to set up a stockade, but let’s say we get stopped. At that point, we show them our orders, and say all we know . . .” He reached into his pocket and handed her the orders he had shown to the motor pool officer; she snatched them out of his hand and read them. “. . . is that we went to the motor officer, showed him our orders, and he said we sure had a high priority and gave us the Jeep.” He paused. “Who do you think will be believed?”
“You miserable son of a bitch!” Jeanette said after a moment.
“If you’re going to be traveling with us, Miss Priestly, you’re going to have to watch your mouth. Gunner Zimmerman is a very sensitive man. Say ‘hello’ to Miss Priestly, Ernie, and tell her you will forgive her for swearing like a Parris Island DI if she promises not to do that no more.”
Zimmerman smiled but didn’t say anything.
Although she really didn’t want to, Jeanette Priestly was aware that she was smiling, too.
“Traveling with you?” she said. “Traveling where with you?”
“We’re here to see how the war is going. According to the map in the G-2, that’s up around Taejon.”
“What’s in it for you, if I go along?” she asked.
“You’ve been here before; we haven’t. I think we can be very useful to each other.”
She thought that over a minute.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll go.”
“You have one more option,” McCoy said. “You can ride along and wait until we get to the next MP checkpoint, and then scream that we’ve stolen your Jeep and kidnapped you. What would happen then, I think, is that we would all be held until a senior officer could be found to straighten things out. Which would mean that none of us would get to the war.”
“You son of a bitch!” she said. There was an admiring tone in her voice.
“Are you coming, or not?”
She climbed into the backseat.
“Okay, Ernie,” McCoy ordered. “Let’s go.”
Five minutes later, Miss Jeanette Priestly, accredited war correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, leaned forward and asked, “What happened to the other fellow? The Trans-Global captain? Who set the speed record?”
“I expect about right now Major Malcolm S. Pickering, USMC Reserve, is trying to come up with a good excuse to get out of being mobilized,” McCoy said.
Zimmerman laughed.
[TWO]
HEADQUARTERS, 34TH INFANTRY REGIMENT 24TH U.S. INFANTRY DIVISION NONSAN, SOUTH KOREA 1530 15 JULY 1950
It had not proved hard to find the headquarters of the 34th Infantry Regiment, although the best location of it Captain McCoy had been able to extract from an